| Summary: | The published version of this article was translated into French by Rechesrches amérindiennes aux Québec for a special issue they prepared in the fall of 1971 shortly after the announcement of the James Bay Hydro-electric Project in April 1971. In a rare intervention by a scholarly journal they quickly responded to the need for a public debate, assembling articles by ethnographers, natural scientists, administrators, journalists and residents of the region, including reports of responses in Cree villages. My paper was reprinted the following year in a booklet by a citizens group assessing and protesting the hydro-electric project, la Société pour Vaincre la Pollution. The English version of this article which is also included here is from an unpublished English version of the Recherche améindiennes issue that was prepared by the Programme in the Anthropology of Development at McGill University. The article was a summary of parts of my PhD Thesis, then incomplete and in draft form. The thesis benefited from the comments and advice of Richard F. Salisbury, many of which were incorporated into this paper. This paper on the human ecology of a sub-arctic Indian band is written to call attention to the way the Indians themselves use their environment, and to stress the need for Indians to be involved in the planning for new exploitation of the resources of the James Bay region. It is a common assumption that game animal hunters exercise little control over the resources on which they depend or the environments in which they live. But many biological and ethnographic studies show that it is possible to anticipate the consequences of particular hunting or harvesting patterns on a territory. It is therefore possible for hunters to control some of the critical parameters of the harvested populations on their hunting territories through their choice of resource utilization strategies. Hunters can then exercise some control over the distribution and reproduction of the animal populations which they harvest, and they may ...
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