Since 1970 in Quebec, there has been immense change for the Cree, who now live with the consequences of Quebec’s massive development of the North. Home Is the Hunter presents the historical, environmental, and cultural context from which this recent story grows. Hans Carlson shows how the Cree view their lands as their home, their garden, and their memory of themselves as a people. By investigating the Cree’s three hundred years of contact with outsiders, he illuminates the process of cultural negotiation at the foundation of ongoing political and environmental debates. This book offers a way of thinking about indigenous peoples’ struggles for rights and environmental justice in Canada and elsewhere.

Hans M. Carlson has travelled extensively in northern Quebec and Labrador by canoe and snowshoe. He is currently teaching in the American Indian Studies program at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Hans M. Carlson's profile page

• Short-listed, Harold Adams Innis Prize, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences

It is the question and power of narratives on which Carlson’s book turns. His study is thick with a multitude of them, and he seamlessly blends different narratives within each chapter, usually setting up his own interpretation against the dominant ones. He is particularly concerned with the interplay of culture and environment that often gets downplayed or ignored entirely in other studies. […] Carlson does more than write the Cree into our narrative; he pens a Cree-centered narrative that writes newcomers into it, and it is this aspect of Carlson’s book that is the most compelling. […] Home Is the Hunter is an excellent study of human and environmental relationships. […] Anyone with a minimal understanding of this place and these people should read this book, if only to see where their narratives fit in with others and to gain a greater appreciation for the history of the Cree and for the potential dangers to which we all contribute by pulling resources from the periphery while at the same time imposing our outsider understandings over local ones.

H-Canada