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Designed to be “wilderness” spaces with minimal human impact, the establishment of national parks contributed to dispossessing Indigenous peoples from traditional territories across North America, preventing access to dwindling populations of wildlife essential to cultural and material well-being. With the systematic near extermination of buffalo during the nineteenth century and forcible relocation of Tribes onto reservations, Tribal food systems collapsed. Tribal Nations across the Great Plains are now restoring buffalo to support food sovereignty and political resurgence, while re-asserting a presence in national parks where Indigenous hunting remains prohibited. This article focuses on the Blackfoot-led Iinnii Initiative working to restore free-roaming buffalo (Bison bison) along the Rocky Mountain Front, supported by Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks. Recognizing Tribal rights to hunt buffalo in these parks would enable Tribal hunters to exercise practices that challenge the idea of national parks as wilderness. We coproduce this article as Blackfoot and non-Indigenous scholars and activists, drawing on interviews with restoration practitioners, Blackfoot knowledge holders, and park and other government officials to explore distinct narratives of what it would mean to enable Tribal hunting in national parks, with implications for food sovereignty, political resurgence, and wildlife management. We argue that openness within parks agencies to Indigenous hunting suggests a potential watershed moment for reimagining the role of people in parks. Through this, we examine important links between food sovereignty, political sovereignty, biodiversity conservation, and decolonization.
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The eco-munitionary subject: Conservation with and of firearms
The Pittman-Robertson Act of 1937 was a transformative piece of legislation for wildlife management and conservation in the United States, incentivizing the creation of state wildlife agencies and establishing funding mechanisms for these agencies. The legislation directs an excise tax on firearms, ammunition, and archery equipment to a fund to support wildlife restoration projects by state wildlife agencies. In 2021 alone, this generated more than $1 billion in project funds. Although commonly framed as a user pays model of conservation whereby hunters fund wildlife management, most of the excise taxes collected on firearms and ammunition are now associated with non-hunting uses. Despite this disconnect, many firearms industry groups continue to support and promote their relationship to Pittman-Robertson. Here, we examine the role of Pittman-Robertson in shaping the relationship between firearms and conservation and seek to understand how this relationship is reproduced. We examine this shifting relationship through an analysis of amendments to Pittman-Robertson since its creation and a discourse analysis of contemporary materials from web sites of firearms, hunting, shooting, and conservation organizations. Drawing on the concept of environmentality and diverse ecologies, we argue that Pittman-Robertson has contributed to the production of, and been re-shaped by, a distinct environmental actor: the eco-munitionary subject.
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- PAR ID:
- 10398522
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
- Volume:
- 6
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2514-8486
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 2318-2339
- Size(s):
- p. 2318-2339
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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