Spirit and practical knowledge in the person of the bear among Wemindji Cree hunters

The multi-vocality of the black bear as a categoryin Cree hunting entails a melding of practical-empiricalrationality with ethicaland ‘spiritual’ understandings. On one level of attention in the hunter's world, the bear functions as a postulate in indigenous scientific ecology. It does so by assimilating the consequences of both efficiency and restraint in hunting, as hunters strive to maintain good relationships with others in the world (summarized and abstracted in the bear). At the same time, reflection on these issues via the bear as a spiritual ‘alter-’ endows hunters with profound senses of identity, value and personal meaning, so that action in the world is at once practical, social, ethical, and self-motivated. This outcome is a combination of cultural learning and life experience. As the weft of experience entwines the warp of culturally available categories, narrative is the weaver.