Guy Lanouetalking about the experience and about acquired powers. With the
threats to cultural continuity from the consequences of the flooding
of the southern Sekani homeland in 1968 , the possibilities of learn-
ing this traditional knowledge became more than limited. People no
longer came into contact with “animal doctors,” who, as the Sekani
say, now refuse to speak to the Sekani because of the inequilibrium
that became typical of post-flood life. In simple terms, how could an-
imals be enticed into “infecting” willing hunters after people stopped
hunting? If they no longer acted as hunters, how could men transform
themselves into symbolic prey?
The situation in the north, however, was very different. After spend-
ing nearly eleven months in the south, I went to Fort Ware in 1979 ,
nearly 250 kilometers north of the southern community of McLeod
Lake. People in Fort Ware still hunted and lived a more “traditional”
lifestyle. Some people were still in contact with animal doctors. Un-
fortunately, the old rules were still in effect, and people would not
talk about power (though everyone knows the powers attached to in-
dividuals by their “luck” in particular hunting situations). Ironically,
some older people in McLeod Lake had willingly talked about this
subject precisely because they believed that it no longer mattered as
much, with the animal doctors refusing to communicate with people;
they were too “far in the bush” to hear humans breaking the rules
of silence. I was therefore in a situation of having glimpsed a “tradi-
tional” and somewhat exotic way of thinking in one locale and then
living its effects silently (and ignorantly) in another. For an anthro-
pologist, it seemed ironic.
The Dog Looked at me PatientlyI was not much interested in questions of power at the time, how-
ever. It seemed much more urgent to understand people’s political re-
sponses to the horrific situation into which they had been plunged
by the building of the dam. I struggled to understand the violence
that seemed to rip apart McLeod Lake by contextualizing it against
the “traditional” harmony of Fort Ware. The result was that, for the
next two decades, I struggled to understand the Sekani way of living