Samuel Hearne, The Denesuline, and The Beaver: Zoology and Its Effect in an Early Canadian Natural-Cultural Contact Zone

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Samuel Hearne's A Journey to the Northern Ocean (1795) has highlighted how Hearne's journey of exploration functioned to demonstrate the Hudson's Bay Company's strategic geopolitical worth, obscure the violence of its colonialist enterprise, and generate images of an empty North conducive to colonial settlement. Drawing on such scholarship, this essay attempts to nuance statements regarding Hearne's complicity in “emptying” the North by showing how the Journey establishes images of the Canadian North as neither completely barren nor fertile enough for settlement. Applying a natural-cultural contact zone perspective on Hearne's old text, I argue that the anthropocentric bias of the Journey's reception has impeded the realization that Hearne's zoological descriptions and sometimes sophisticated ecological contemplations owe much to the Denesuline who guide his travels. In part through his “beaver science”, Hearne deliberately opposes prospects of further colonization based on ideas of systemic expansion of the fur trade detached from the realities of local environmental conditions. His concern regarding the anthropomorphism and uncritical use of cultural metaphors in the emerging science of zoology nevertheless causes Hearne's “beaver science” to consolidate the distinctly anthropocentric and objectifying qualities of natural science that ultimately facilitate the exploitative activities of the Hudson's Bay Company.