Canine metaphors dog our language. From puppy love to the provocative bith, from the runt of the litter to the dog days of summer, the qualities of passion, temperament, size and the seasons come from - or go to - the dogs.
While canine expressions litter our conversation, dogs themselves are largely reduced to the role of pets. This is not so, however, in some of the worlds' traditional societies, where canines, as work animals, continue to play a significant part in the human economy. Northern Canada, for example, contains several Native American communities where sled dogs continue to be a significant part of people's livelihood right down to the late twentieth century.
One such settlement is the Ka-so-gotine or Hare Indian village of Colville Lake. Approximately seventy people in fourteen families make their home there, supporting themselves by snaring snowshoe hare and grouse, hunting caribou and moose, netting trout, whitefish, and pike, and trapping furbearers such as fox, marten, beaver and muskrat. During a large part of each year, they nomadically exploit some 45,000 square miles, using mainly canoes in the summer and snowshoes and dogsleds in the winter.
The Hare
The Hare are one of some twenty-five Athabascan-speaking Indian groups whose ancestors have inhabited the forested areas of northwestern Canada and Alaska for centuries. When first encountered by Europeans in the late eighteenth century, the Hare totaled about seven hundred people and were divided into several bands that lived off the fish and game in the areas bordering the lower stretches of the Mackenzie River. It was a homeland cut through the heart by the Arctic Circle - a fact that is reflected in the vast environmental extremes that the Hare have had to surmount. These include temperatures that can range from -60° F in January to 90° F in July and a month-long period of midwinter darkness that slowly gives way to weeks of summertime midnight sun.
Death from starvation has been as much of a threat to these people as death from the cold; both tragedies happened among the Hare well into the twentieth century. In earlier times, the rigors of survival sometimes compelled the hare to take dramatic steps to limit the size of their families or eliminate their marginal members; the people referred to by present-day Indians as "the old timers" occasionally resorted to female infanticide or abandoning the elderly.
But the Hare also turn to the spiritual and the social world to enhance their well-being. Taboos are observed in the handling of weapons and dead animals so as not to offend the spirits of fish and game; and ehtsenegontine - medicine men - will call on their special powers to fool enemies, cure the sick, or help find food. On another plane, the Hare rely on their values and their kin to sustain them. Great stress is laid on individual resourcefulness, independence, skill, and strength. Survival also largely depends on one's connections by blood and marriage. Help and hospitality can be expected from in-laws and from family on both the mother's and the father's side. These relatives, and the other members of a person's band, comprise a network that the Hare call sagotine. "My people," a grouping that is the source of an individual's true social
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