Encountering Moose in a Changing Landscape: Sociality, Intentionality, and Emplaced Relationships

• Published in: Ethnos 2022-10, Vol.87 (5), p.932-962
• Main Authors: Westman, Clinton N., Joly, Tara L., Pospisil, H. Max, Wheatley, Katherine
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cree; Cree people; domusw; human-animal relations; Humans; Hunting; Indigenous peoples; Intention; Intentionality; Moose; Métis; Organizational research; Theory of mind
• ISSN: 0014-1844; 1469-588X
• DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2020.1841262

Drawing on research among Cree and Métis hunters, we consider how moose enter into situated relationships with humans, other beings, and one another. Moose engage in communicative acts exhibiting embodied intentionality and a relational theory of mind. Moose intentionalities and subjectivities are partly knowable to hunters through the co-constructed perceptual lens that develops as moose and humans make homes together in a shared landscape - a 'domus' as David Anderson puts it. Moose reward humans who deeply engage with them, sharing knowledge of moose life/death projects, intraspecies connections, and localised environments - in the hunting context and sometimes in other contexts as well. Moose and those who hunt them attempt to approach, engage, outwit, and beguile one another. In documenting both this contact zone and aspects of moose interiority and perception (umwelt), we contribute more-than-human knowledges from Indigenous people of northern Canada to theories of mutualistic relationships, entanglement, and emplacement.