Before the Roads, Before the Mines: Denesulin? Memories, Narratives, and the Legacy of a Northern Hunting Society

Before the Roads, Before the Mines is a narrative-based ethnohistory of a Denesulin? community, also known as the Chipewyan, Kesyehot'ine, or Poplar House People. The discovery of high-grade uranium deposits in northern Saskatchewan, Canada, in the mid- to late 1970s ushered in an era of mining and roadbuilding that largely replaced the traditional livelihoods of these subarctic hunter-fishers with wage labor in mining, construction, and related industries. The advent of new communications technologies and consumer goods, and a road to the outside world, created ruptures in the social fabric of the community.

Robert Jarvenpa highlights the historical experiences of middle-aged and older individuals who vividly recall a time before the roads and mines existed--when young and old alike spoke the Denesulin? language and when entire families lived in a seasonally nomadic fashion in the bush. They continually invoke the past in the problematic present, a ritualized form of communication integral to resisting or adapting to the erosive changes of a rapidly industrializing resource-extraction frontier.

Jarvenpa showcases the spoken words of the Denesulin? informants as a means of documenting and interpreting their historical past in the face of contemporary peril as the subarctic permafrost recedes and multinational corporations eye Indigenous lands for their minerals.


Author: Robert Jarvenpa
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 10/01/2024
Pages: 294
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.33lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.81d
ISBN: 9781496239747

About the Author
Robert Jarvenpa is a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Circumpolar Lives and Livelihood: A Comparative Ethnoarchaeology of Gender and Subsistence (with Hetty Jo Brumbach) (Nebraska, 2006) and Declared Defective: Native Americans, Eugenics, and the Myth of Nam Hollow (Nebraska, 2018).