Bears

Thanks to Irving Hallowell’s classic 1926 comparative ethnography on the special mythic status of bears in Subarctic cultures, anthropologists are generally aware that peoples throughout the northern hemisphere have treated bears as far more than a subsistence resource, something more akin to another kind of human or, to use Hallowell’s famous phrase, “other-than-human persons.” While Hallowell provided ample evidence of bear ceremonialism in northern latitudes, he found little evidence for the special treatment of bears elsewhere in Native North America. Archaeological and historical research over the last nine decades, however, has produced vast unsynthesized information about the roles of bears in Native American beliefs, rituals, and subsistence. This book is the first collective effort since Hallowell’s formative publication to consider how Native peoples viewed, treated, and used black bears (Ursus americanus) through time across Eastern North America. Contributors draw on zooarchaeological, ethnohistorical, ethnographic, and other evidence of bear hunting, consumption, and use, while contemplating the range of relationships that existed between bears and humans. They have reviewed thousands of pages of ethnohistorical and ethnographic documents and summarized and interpreted data on bear remains from nearly 300 archaeological sites from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico. Native peoples perceived and related to bears in remarkably diverse ways. Our authors explore the religious and economic significance of bears and bear products (meat, fat, oil, pelts, etc.), bear imagery in Native art and artifacts, and bears in Native worldviews, kinship systems, and cosmologies, along with their role as exported commodities in trans-Atlantic trade.