Hi v e r 2012 -
Te r r a i n s
Ice-hearted killers
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The rejection of “tradition” in perceptions of the Newfoundland seal hunt Heather Mcintosh
George Wenzel and Guy Wright. These men have spent significant time with Inuit hunters and Newfoundland sealers respectively, and have attempted to capture the importance of the seal hunt to each of these cultures in their writing. Following this I will analyze problems of “modernization” in creating a definition of tradition, in relation to both Newfoundland and Inuit communities. I will then attempt an explanation of the dichotomous treatment of Newfoundland and Inuit culture through an extension of the “super-whale” phenomena, as introduced by Kalland (1993). This phenomena is characterized by totemic dualisms that allow for groups to be placed into discreet and antagonistic categories. I will analyze the rhetoric and images used by anti-sealing organizations to solidify these dualisms in perceptions of the hunt, especially with reference to the creation of a subhuman “ice-hearted killer” as representative of the Newfoundland sealer.
The greatest immorality in the seal hunting controversy has been the reckless, indiscriminate, deliberate campaign of racial discrimination and hatred which has been deliberately fostered against the people of Newfoundland and of Canada by groups of individuals whose primary aim is to raise funds, particularly in the United States and Europe. Tom Hughes Executive vice president of the Ontario Humane Society, 1978 (Lamson 1979:20) Campaigns leading to a European ban on the import of seal-derived products have confronted the claims of Inuit and Newfoundland sealing communities in very different ways. Whereas attention is paid by anti-sealing campaigns to delegitimize Inuit claims to the hunt’s significance in Inuit tradition and culture, no such attention is paid to similar claims made by Newfoundland sealers. Newfoundlanders’ claims to the traditional importance of the hunt are largely dismissed as being illegitimate in themselves, without need to rationalize this dismissal (Wenzel 1991). I will argue that the challenges facing both Inuit and Newfoundland seal hunters in legitimizing their right to continue the hunt are far more related than suggested by proponents of the anti-sealing movement. By comparing Inuit and Newfoundland experience with the anti-sealing campaign, I hope to determine why and how the perception of the seal hunt has been easily reduced to a simply commercial enterprise in the case of Newfoundland communities, whereas images of “tradition” and “subsistence” persist in perceptions of the Inuit seal hunt. I will do so first by comparing the literature of
Cultural significance of the seal hunt George Wenzel, a geographer at McGill University, and Guy Wright, from Memorial University in Newfoundland, responded to the seal hunt controversy with their own accounts of the hunt from the perspectives of Inuit and Newfoundland communities. Each provide a model for how the hunt is embedded in these cultures, with specific reference to the creation of cultural identity and the preservation of relative economic autonomy. Comparison of these two analyses reveals that the seal hunt provides similar cultural function across both communities. Wenzel (1991) defines “subsistence” as “a culturally embedded system of shared
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