December 21, 2010 Hamilton Spectator
You could argue that the December deer hunt under way in a corner of the Dundas Valley Conservation Area brings into focus the rights of nature lovers, or sport hunters who would like a crack at the animals, or even the well-being of the deer themselves.
But you would not argue that if your ancestors worshipped the deer; if deer occupied a central role in your belief system; and your forefathers wore antlers on their head in spiritual tribute to the animal.
Those who couch the deer harvest issue any other way don’t understand the role it plays in the way of life of the people of the Haudenosaunee Six Nations Confederacy, says a cultural anthropologist at McMaster University.
“We’ve practised (deer hunting) for thousands of years, it is an integral part of our ceremonial way of life and the way we construct our world cosmologically,” said Dawn Martin-Hill, who is director of McMaster’s Indigenous Studies Program and a Mohawk from Six Nations. “(Opposition to it) is a total disregard for our spirituality and ceremonial life.”
She said that she is saddened to think there are people for whom the native hunt is an “inconvenience,” and that some are more worried about not being able to walk their dog in the parkland for a few weeks than preserving native traditions.
Natives throughout North America have long cited treaties that give them rights to hunt and fish off their reservation land. In Ontario, two of these agreements were the Robinson-Huron/Superior treaties of 1850 and the Nanfan Treaty of 1701 (named after John Nanfan, the acting colonial governor of New York at the time.)
Treaty language referred to natives having the right to continue hunting “at all usual and accustomed grounds,” and an American court in 1905 commented that hunting and fishing are “not much less necessary to the existence of the Indians than the atmosphere they breathe.”
The portion of the conservation area where the hunt takes place in Ancaster is closed for December. Paul Williams, a lawyer who has acted for the Haudenosaunee, told The Hamilton Spectator he does not believe that the hunt is a public safety issue because the weapon used in the hunt is a crossbow, not firearms, and “bows have limited range.”
(According to one website, the accurate range of a crossbow is about 37 metres. An average crossbow fires an arrow at about 78 metres per second.)
Deer hunted in December will be used by the Haudenosaunee in their mid-winter ceremonies and feast that start in January and stretch into February.
Martin-Hill said it is unfortunate that many Canadians consider it an article of faith to preserve the culture and way of life of, say, a tribe in the Amazon, or the people of the Gulf Coast affected by the BP oil spill, but doing the same for native neighbours does not warrant similar concern.
“Our way of life has been impeded by their pursuit of happiness, and they begrudge us a few days (of the hunt), when we have lost about everything a people could lose and we are trying to sustain what our ancestors gave us.”