'His Rightful Heritage of Something to Eat': the contested history of indigenous and settler duck hunting in the photographs of Lorene Squire

• In Event: Photographing Environmental Histories: capturing, presenting, and circulating environmental change in the past and present

Abstract

Born in the small town of Harper, Kansas in 1908, American wildfowl photographer Lorene Squire began taking pictures in the mid-1920s, a period when economic and environmental hardship ravaged the Great Plains. Squire wrote of her journey to photography in her book, "Wildfowling With a Camera," published by J.B. Lippincott Company in 1938. In this publication, Squire describes her longing to see the northern Canadian breeding grounds of her wildfowl subjects where, she believed, "hunted birds [...] would lose their suspicious caution in the secluded northern waters where they built their nests." Squire was to fulfill that wish and successfully publish many photographs taken on her travels in the north of Canada.
Lorene Squire's photographs stand as testaments to a period, not unlike today, when animal activism and indigenous rights were treated as contested and uneven terrain. While photographing around Fort Chipewyan, a government and HBC settlement in the Dene territory of northern Alberta, Squire writes about the importance of duck hunting to the peoples of that region as an essential source of food. Yet not two years later, the Dene and Cree of Fort Chipewyan would be told by the Canadian government that they could no longer hunt ducks because their numbers were declining—and because of the public pressure from both hunters and conservationists. In this paper, I argue that Squire's photographs act as documentary and artistic responses to changing public attitudes to wildfowl hunting during the inter-war period in North America, which saw the rights of settlers and indigenous peoples placed in direct conflict. By considering her photobook in relation to the policies of sustainable and scientific management of wildfowl, I argue that Squire was exploring the borders of settler and indigenous environmental, artistic, and economic experience.

Author

• Karla Kit McManus, Queen's University