5 edeghą k’óíldé íle ajá ú nuhenéné thų́ bek’e náidé

In addition to the permitting system that accompanied the 1926 annex, the extensive suite of game conservation and land management policies governing Indigenous lives across the Park and province grew significantly after 1926. These were upheld through increased surveillance, enforcement and punishment measures overseen through a warden system that also began to expand after 1926. As the oral testimony shared in this chapter suggests, many Dene people perceived the new, and frequently changing, restrictions as infringements of Treaty 8. Furthermore, the hardship people outside the Park experienced after the annex and membership transfer was only amplified by conservation and wildlife management regulations. By the 1930s, parks officials perceived that the bison population in the Park had been sufficiently restored for the Park’s central policy focus to shift from preservation of bison to developing a state-controlled wildlife management structure intent on conserving other game populations, especially fur-bearing animals, and on controlling and restricting Indigenous People’s lives and movements, and ultimately, eroding Indigenous sovereignty and attempting to erase their presence from the land.¹ This shift proved to be especially challenging for those Dënesųłıné people who were excluded from the Park after the annex, who watched as fur-bearing populations dwindled and competition for furs increased significantly, and as their ways of life fell increasingly under the surveillance of administrators and wardens within and outside the boundaries of the Park. Dene people found themselves less free to live, move, and stay on the land, as the Dënesųłıné chapter title indicates: “We ceased being free or in charge of ourselves, and we couldn’t manage to stay on our land (to use it).”

As ACFN Elder Alice Rigney’s oral testimony shared in this chapter relates, the creation of the Park precipitated the development of a colonial regime of wildlife management intent on removing Dene people from the land and waters, separating them from kin and culture, eroding their ways of life and stewardship practices, and restricting their freedom and movements. Alice Rigney explained: “When Parks was created, it became a whole new level of government with their rules and whatnot. No one was allowed—you could not hunt at certain times.” As Alice’s oral history suggests, policies that increased provincial and federal control over the environment went together with attempted erasures of Dene people, ways of life, stewardship laws, and sovereignty.

This is something with which Indigenous Peoples barred from or restricted in parks and nature sanctuaries across Canada were familiar. As Tina Loo writes of Canadian conservation in the twentieth century, these kinds of policies ultimately had the effect of “marginalizing local customary uses of wildlife” as well as Indigenous stewardship laws and ways of relating to the land.² David Neufeld writes of similar experiences for the Southern Tutchone peoples in what became Kluane National Game Sanctuary in the southwest Yukon: colonial governments both denied and dismissed “not only the validity, but even the existence of the long tradition of deep local contextual knowledge” that shaped Indigenous ways of knowing the environment.³ In WBNP, colonial officials increased restrictions and surveillance of Dene lives and relations to the land, based on the assumption that they had the claim to superior knowledge about land, water, and wildlife.⁴ In these ways, Park exclusions and the other conservation laws that provincial and federal governments imposed contributed to processes of colonial elimination through the erosion of Dene connections to homeland and kin and refusals of Dene knowledge and connections to place.⁵

New or evolving regulations included bag limits—restrictions on the total number of animals people could harvest in a season— and closed and limited seasons for fur-bearing animals, birds, and large game.⁶ Bison hunting remained prohibited throughout the twentieth century. Across Canada, the Migratory Birds Convention Act in 1916 had banned egg collecting, imposed game seasons on some migratory birds, and closed hunting of some birds altogether.⁷ Within the Park, big game and non-migratory bird hunting was restricted by seasons (and prohibited altogether for some species).⁸ Laws were particularly stringent when it came to fur-bearing animals, especially muskrat and beaver, whose populations had declined steeply in the 1930s and 1940s. Beaver season was closed for several years during the 1930s and 1940s, and occasionally marten and muskrat season were closed as well. At one point, muskrat season was shortened so much that Dene leader Benjamin Marcel (Elder Pat Marcel’s father) complained to authorities in 1942 that the people could barely survive on what little trapping was permitted.⁹ As Elder Magloire Vermillion told interviewers in 1974, restrictions had serious implications for Dene people: “we were slowly being restricted with game regulations, preventing us from trapping, hunting, and fishing. [Before the Treaty] there were no such people as park wardens. . . . [After] we were not as free to hunt and trap as we were used to because of these regulations that were made.”

It was not only subsistence harvesting that was limited. Dënesųłıné burning practices, which had been essential to the creation and maintenance of bison habitats, were outlawed in 1925 (and discouraged by the pre-Park buffalo rangers before that). Park law dictated that anyone responsible for starting a fire in a National Park would face fines, imprisonment, or hard labour.¹⁰ Harvesting timber within the Park for fuel was also restricted. Such laws criminalized the Dene stewardship practices described in Chapter 1 that had been a critical part of the Dene people’s ways of living and caring for the environment. As Cardinal Christianson et. al. write, this kind of interruption of Indigenous stewardship practices “can be thought of as cultural severance . . . an act, intentional or not, that functionally disrupts relationships between people and the land.”¹¹

Decades-old assumptions that Indigenous land users were dangerous and irresponsible underpinned many of the twentieth century’s conservation and land management policies within and around the Park. Further, as McCormack observes, “Aboriginal People were never allowed to be managers of the programs that were supposed to protect the resources on which they relied.”¹² Conservation proponents often claimed that new harvesting regulations were being imposed “for their own good.”¹³ As one official wrote in 1947, “We can not [sic] . . . allow the Indians to hunt and trap indiscriminately if we expect to provide animals for him to hunt and trap now and in the future.”¹⁴ Furthermore, Park officials often took the position that Indigenous harvesters—especially those who had permits to trap and hunt in the Park—had been granted special “privileges” that white trappers and hunters did not enjoy. For this reason, R.A. Gibson wrote to Secretary of the Indian Affairs Branch, T.R.L. MacInnes, in October 1939 dismissing Indigenous leaders’ concerns about the restrictive laws: “We are at a loss to understand,” he wrote, “why the Indian chiefs consider the regulations unfair.”¹⁵ Changes to policy also usually proceeded with little communication or consultation with the resident Indigenous communities, and was “enforced . . . with inconsistency and whimsy.”¹⁶ Policy was often imposed from a distance, communicated through written notices in English, distributed on paper through Indian Agents or missionaries, and rarely translated to Cree or Dënesųłıné.¹⁷ Considering that breaking regulations could result in the loss of a Park permit and, potentially, one’s source of subsistence, the failure of the administraton to clearly communicate consistent rules to Indigenous residents could have dire consequences.

Regulations were often generated or updated reactively, with little standardized order or unity between the Park and provincial regulations. This caused confusion for harvesters and administrators alike, who sometimes struggled to reconcile disparate game laws between the Park and the province.¹⁸ Indian Agent P.W. Head and Park Warden Dempsey both recognized the potential consequences of such inconsistencies and confusion. Dempsey noted in 1935 that “there are doubts as to what the regulations really are, which may be the cause of so much friction.”¹⁹ Head wrote to Secretary MacInnes in 1938 that harvesting laws were causing harm to people within and outside the Park:

After hearing all the complaints that come from one source and another I would strongly suggest an investigation of the whole trapping situation and a drawing up of a uniform set of laws for both the Park and all of Alberta north of the 27th Base Line. The situation is becoming very acute and I fear that unless something is done in the near future the outlook for the Indians will be very black [sic] and we will have to carry a large number on relief.²⁰

As Head’s remarks suggested, inconsistencies and arbitrary policy changes were often deeply frustrating to harvesters. For example, where beaver season might be limited outside the Park, it was at times closed altogether within. In these instances, Park permit-holders could leave the Park to continue trapping beaver and take advantage of the longer provincial season. ²¹ This loophole created a double standard, as the option was not available for those who lived outside the Park without a Park permit because they could not enter the Park to harvest if they were unsatisfied with provincial game laws.²² At one point, trappers complained that the open beaver season only applied to “heads of families,” leaving out trappers who were single or did not have dependents.²³

Oral histories point to Dene residents’ frustrations about the double standards and inconsistencies embedded in harvesting policies, which tended to disproportionately affect Dene residents and harvesters. For example, Elder Edouard Trippe de Roche explained that people relied on burning wood for energy, and only a small percentage of families used other sources of fuel when he was young. But after the Park was created, Dene people were denied the ability to harvest firewood in the Park. Meanwhile, those who remained in the Park were granted permits to harvest firewood, and some commercial sawmills operated in the Park throughout much of the twentieth century to provide fuel for the residential school, Indian Affairs, and other nearby institutions. Commercial fisheries were permitted to operate in some lakes within the Park, depleting fish stocks, but Dene people saw their own harvesting rights denied and eroded. Warden reports in 1947 and 1948 point to the friction this caused. For example, Dene people living in the Park petitioned against the establishment of a commercial fishery at Lake Claire, one of the important places in Dene homelands in the Birch River area, where some Dene families were allowed to continue to fish and hunt even after most Dene people had been displaced from their settlement there. Wardens and Indian Agents kept records of local opposition and of the sometimes sour relations between Indigenous fishers and the company, but commercial fishing activity continued.²⁴

In addition, although bison hunting was prohibited, Parks administration allowed for a limited number of bison to be hunted each year (usually by wardens) to provide meat for the Fort Chipewyan hospital and residential school, and eventually, as described below, to sell meat in the south of the Province—to the Province’s profit. While Parks officials continued to express the view that “as long as we allow the Indians to hunt in [the Park], it can never fulfill its full purpose,” they did approve of the scheme for a limited number of non-Indigenous hunters to slaughter some bison to distribute meat to the hungry.²⁵ According to oral histories, the bison meat ration program also had inconsistencies that put Dene people at a disadvantage. Edouard Trippe de Roche noted in his oral history that the bison rations distributed through the Indian Agents or residential schools often did not reach Dene children but were given only to Cree children. He recalled that his sister, who was married to Indian Agent Jack Stewart’s son, was able to get bison meat for her family only because of that connection. Such double standards embedded in the management regime within and around the Park demonstrate that colonial policy frameworks were as much about controlling Indigenous People’s lives, movements, and ways of life as they were about maintaining control over resources.

A related example of inconsistencies in the policy governing Dënesųłıné territories took the form of a commercial bison slaughter program after World War Two, that lasted roughly from 1945 to 1967. Sandlos, who describes the program in detail, notes that after the war, Park officials shifted their discourses “from an appeal to save an endangered species to a contention that the buffalo must be exposed only to certain kinds of regulated butchery.”²⁶ They set out to commodify bison meat through agriculturalized herd management, partial bison enclosures and a regulated slaughter program. Officials saw this program as a lucrative economic opportunity with a potentially large consumer base to the south. Wardens, and occasionally hunters from the south who were permitted to enter the Park to hunt bison for this program, slaughtered hundreds of Park bison from 1946 to 1967. Meat was either shipped south for sale or distributed as rations at the hospital and residential school in Fort Chipewyan. Indigenous harvesters were usually excluded from the hunts and from receiving meat, and subsistence bison hunting remained illegal. The controlled slaughter program demonstrates the contradictory and fundamentally racialized logic that drove conservation policy in and around the Park. While Indigenous ways of life were disparaged and prohibited, some harvesting activity, undertaken typically by white settlers, was considered an acceptable form of “efficient and controlled exploitation.”²⁷ Meanwhile, subsistence harvesters were prohibited from hunting bison in the Park to feed their families and communities. As McCormack concludes, “except for the Department of Indian Affairs, all government agencies gave priority to economic activities that involved the exploitation of northern resources by outsiders.”²⁸ These priorities took precedence over the rights and livelihoods of Indigenous residents and placed additional pressure on the Dene families and land users who were excluded from the Park after 1926.

In the oral histories shared in this chapter, Dënesųłıné Elders explained that reactive, poorly informed, and inconsistent regulations contributed to the attempted erosions of the sovereignty and a disconnection from knowledge for Dene land users, who intimately understood the patterns and ecology of the area. As such, regulations played a critical part in the colonial elimination that guided policy in Alberta’s north in the mid-twentieth century. Elder Pat Marcel said that through most of the twentieth century, Dene knowledge was never considered when designing conservation policies. The ban on controlled burning and regular Park-sponsored wolf culls, which some Dene people strongly opposed,²⁹ are examples of this disconnect. Wardens and parks officials frequently wrote about how they struggled to convince local Indigenous hunters to kill wolves—some of the oral testimony in this chapter explains why. Some harvesters were also concerned with the use of poison to cull the wolves. As Ed Trippe de Roche explained, the way that wolves were culled often had devastating impacts for many other species; introducing poison into the environment put smaller, fur-bearing animals at risk of poisoning as well. Furthermore, according to McCormack, wolf culling in the 1930s and 1940s may have increased the rates of tuberculosis and brucellosis infections in the bison as the diseased portions of the bison population grew without wolf predation.

In the 1940s, officials dismissively argued that “every Indian who is not entitled to trap in this area is always ready to give advise [sic] and criticize Wood Buffalo Park management.”³⁰ Indigenous experiences, concerns, and knowledge about the environment were treated as suspect rather than taken seriously.³¹ Not all conservation policies regulating Dene land use were directly imposed by the Park, but the full suite of federal and provincial conservation and land-management policies from Park’s Canada and provincial regulations exacerbated the existing impacts of the 1926 Park annex and permitting system. Chief Jonas Laviolette’s 1927 statement clearly articulated the impacts: “If this country had been left to us here there would still be fur today and we would not be so poor and miserable today. Thirty years ago, it was a fine country because just the Indians lived in it.”³²

Registered traplines

Alongside the imposition of harvesting laws governing land use in the Park and province, the province’s Registered Fur Management Areas (RFMA) program, colloquially known as the trapline system, emerged in the 1940s. The program fundamentally altered how and where many Dënesųłıné harvesters could interact with the land and water. In an effort to more systematically control the trapping economy throughout the province, Alberta established a system (not applicable in the Park) in 1942 under which fur trappers paid for annual permits to trap in designated areas. Proponents of the trapline system felt it could protect Indigenous trappers from the growing encroachment of southern white trappers in their territories. “Having regard to the welfare of these people we are anxious for a solution of the difficulties with which they must contend,” wrote one official in 1938.³³

Yet Dënesųłıné trappers outside the Park struggled to obtain a trapline under this system and had to compete with white harvesters who often applied for and received the best trapping areas.³⁴ After travelling through northern Alberta to assess the new trapline system, provincial Fur Supervisor J.L. Grew wrote that white trappers probably had the advantage over Indigenous trappers in identifying their trapping areas:

A great deal of work remains to be done in Alberta before the Indians become firmly established on registered lines that are extensive enough to provide them with a sufficient amount of fur with which to support themselves and their families. . . . As previously stated many of the lines now registered should be reviewed in order to ascertain whether the Indian trapper has been provided with his traditional hunting ground or whether this ground has been pre-empted by white trappers.³⁵

Some trappers and Indian Agents also complained that officials favoured the applications of white trappers, who were more interested in profits, over Dene applicants, who were trapping to feed their families. As Fortna finds in historical studies of traplines in Alberta, “the provincial government refused to provide any special consideration to Indigenous trappers, who continued to treat trapping as a vocation.”³⁶ The province also had the power to revoke trapping certificates and redistribute them.³⁷ Sometimes, lapsed, cancelled, or revoked certificates held by Dene trappers were redistributed to non-Indigenous trappers.³⁸

Although suggested as early as 1939, it took until 1942 for officials to recommended the establishment of larger group trapping areas that protected more land from encroaching non-Indigenous trappers and could stay within families long-term.³⁹ This approach eventually became the primary trapping management system within the Park, and Parks officials opted to establish group trapping areas within the Park as well.⁴⁰ During talks leading up to the establishment of traplines in the Park, Indian Agents and park wardens reported that harvesters residing within the Park generally wanted their traplines within the Delta area, where harvesting was better. As one warden wrote in 1947, “very few would consider other regions in the Park.”⁴¹ Group trapping areas were officially established in 1949; under this new system, Indigenous harvesters within the Park found themselves with even less freedom to move and harvest across the area.⁴²

Dënesųłıné people were gravely disappointed with the trapline arrangement. As Indian Agent Head wrote in 1940, “the commencement of a Registered Trapline System in Alberta has led to a lot of controversy and complaints from the Indians in the Delta.”⁴³ The provincial trapline system created unique problems for harvesters who had originally harvested in the Park but were later evicted or otherwise lost their permits to harvest there. As Indian Agent Melling wrote to Indian Affairs in June 1942, “before the registered trap-line area and trap-line system was in force in Alberta, these expelled Indians had little difficulty in finding new trapping grounds. . . . But since the institution of the registered traplines it has become impossible for these newly expelled Indians to find lands or lines upon which they might make anything that approaches a living,” and the area where they might move has “all the hunters and trappers that it can now support.” As a result, “these families are destitute or near destitute and it is essential to provide them with relief.”⁴⁴ Melling’s remarks suggest that the RFMA system led to hardship and hunger for some and exacerbated growing tensions between residents and harvesters within and outside the Park, creating significant difficulties for people on both sides of the Park boundaries.⁴⁵ Restrictions on access, previously produced through the permitting system and now enhanced with the new trapping areas, placed further restrictions on the capacity of some Dene people within and outside the Park to access the places that had always been part of their homelands. This resulted in greater competition between harvesters within and outside the Park, and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous harvesters over the environment and resources.

Traplines remain important spaces where people stay connected to Dene ways of life, land and waters, and language and identity, despite a wider environment of colonial policies that have dispossessed and sought to erase Dënesųłıné lives and cultural traditions. Much of the oral testimony and history shared in Chapter 1 discusses the ways of life and connections to land that Dene families have maintained on their families’ traplines. Yet the RFMA system has also continued to present serious challenges, adding to the harvesting restrictions and limitations on movement and access that were already eroding Dene Treaty Rights. Over time, as Treaty and Aboriginal Rights researcher Bill Russell writes, “the Indian trapper and hunter was forced . . . to comply with the provincial registered trapline system, which in its early years did not even fend off the itinerant trappers [trappers who travelled temporarily into the region to trap for profit] . . . the majority were left to scramble for placement in a Provincial registration system imposed without their understanding or consent, and indeed without even the full co-operation of the DIA [Department of Indian Affairs].”⁴⁶ Combined with other wildlife management policies, Park restrictions, and the growth of the warden system, the fur management system became a means of shoring up state control over wildlife resources while eroding Dene sovereignty and connections to the land.

Wardens: “It was like living very, very stressfully under a nasty regime”

The Park’s warden program, first established in 1911, expanded over time alongside the growth of the wider wildlife management system, with wardens in Wood Buffalo Park granted significantly more power over surveillance and enforcement by the early 1930s. At the time of the Park annex, supporters of expanding the warden system felt it was necessary for keeping a close watch on Indigenous Peoples. As Supervising Park Warden J.A. McDougal wrote in 1926, “the present warden system [should] be increased to such an extent that every Indian in the Park could be closely watched, no matter what place in the Park he might be.”⁴⁷ In a similar way, another supervising warden’s letter to the Superintendent of Forests and Wildlife twenty years later suggested that a key impetus for the operations of the warden system in Wood Buffalo National Park was the surveillance and control of Indigenous lives. “Unless we have many more wardens to keep a constant check on every Indian,” Warden I.F. Kirkby wrote, “it is impossible to know whether game birds and animals are taken out of season, so long as the Indian can roam the entire park at will.”⁴⁸ McCormack explains that, shortly after the annex, wardens became “the immediate agents of supervision” over Indigenous land use and harvesting within and around the Park.⁴⁹

The extensive trail of documents left by wardens and their superiors in patrol reports, warden diaries and the summaries of these forwarded monthly from the chief warden to park administrators, sheds light on the daily activities, attitudes, and motivations of Indigenous Peoples living in the Park. Park wardens often worked alongside the RCMP and provincial game guardians and had a range of responsibilities such as managing permitting for trappers and hunters, monitoring wildlife, managing fires, patrolling assigned areas, monitoring the movements and activities of permittees and Indigenous residents, facilitating the supply of rations and medical assistance for local families, and killing for the bison slaughter relief program.⁵⁰ Wardens enforced the permit system and game laws with varying levels of severity, issuing warnings and fines, confiscating harvesting equipment, arresting people they deemed trespassers, and suspending or permanently revoking permits and expelling people from the Park. Reports across the decades recorded warden patrols with detail. In one day in 1948, for example, warden F.A. McCall reported travelling 225 miles and checking five areas where people had cabins, including the Birch River settlement. McCall made thorough searches of any cabins where people were home or that were unlocked. On another day, he reported flying in a patrol plane over trappers working at Ruis Lake, Birch River, Baril Lake, and Quatre Fourches, “to let them know that we were interested in what they were doing.” ⁵¹ McCall’s reports insinuated that patrols often occurred simply so that Indigenous harvesters knew they were being watched.

Oral histories express Dene people’s frustration with wardens’ behaviours that reflected the administration’s working assumption that Indigenous harvesters were hiding something. Alice Rigney’s oral testimony in this chapter explains that trust was rarely a defining characteristic of this relationship: “Yeah, there was no trust,’ she said. “Parks Canada was able to go into anybody’s home and check and see if you had buffalo meat.” She explained that her mother-in-law used to say she and her family felt taunted by the people in uniforms. Oral histories and archival documents alike suggest that relations between local Dene people and the WBNP wardens have often been strained, with trust lacking on both sides. ACFN member Scott Flett’s oral history shared below summarizes Dene experiences with wardens who, along with police, exercised significant power in the restriction and surveillance of Dene lives: “they had lots of power, like they can do whatever they want, eh? People were kind of scared of them back in the day.” These are experiences that Indigenous oral histories elsewhere in Canada point to as well. For example, Roberta Nakoochee writes that Southern Tutchone Elders she interviewed described aggressive intimidation tactics that wardens in Kluane Game Sanctuary used in their interactions with Tutchone locals, including examples of low-flying helicopters or wardens approaching families with their firearms visible.⁵² In these ways, wardens became part of a system that criminalized treaty-enshrined rights to harvest unimpeded throughout their territories.

As Dene oral histories indicate, restrictions on local ways of life and on Indigenous relations to the land were violations of Treaty 8 and had significant and harmful impacts. Elder Magloire Vermillion, who was born at Birch River and whose oral testimony is shared below, explained in 1974: “Even since the treaty was signed, we were slowly being restricted with game regulations, preventing us from trapping, hunting, and fishing. There was no such thing as Park wardens [before Treaty]. . . . along with these buffaloes [from Wainwright] came the Park wardens.”⁵³ As this Elder’s oral history suggests, restrictive game regulations and the increasingly powerful warden system became a key instrument in the expansion of state control over Indigenous People’s lands and lives—and in attempted colonial erasures, after the Treaty.

Oral histories refer frequently to instances of wardens abusing their power, but official archives are sparse in details about abuse. As ACFN member Garry Flett said, “they’re undocumented for sure. I mean, it would be self-incriminating if they put some of this stuff in there.” There are occasional exceptions with indirect references that align with the memories and histories of Dene people communicated through the oral testimony. A 1947 letter points to Indian Agent Jack Stewart’s view of the discriminatory attitudes of some wardens:

Mr Stewart indicates that he has spoken to Park Wardens and Game Guardians . . . and he divides the opinions into three categores [sic], those who believe the Indians are too lazy to fish for a living; those who believe the Indian as a ward of the Government and not a human being; those who take a broad view of the matter.⁵⁴

Stewart’s description of varying warden attitudes points to some of the motivations for their interactions with Indigenous Peoples. Another 1953 government letter stated that some wardens “acted and conducted themselves in a ruthless and arrogant manner.”⁵⁵ Although the RCMP and Parks officials usually refuted such claims, it is conceivable that warden behaviour and abuses of power, especially toward Indigenous harvesters, were under-reported or even omitted from official records. Yet there is no shortage of examples in the oral histories of these types of actions and behaviours, as demonstrated in the testimonies shared here. Elders stressed that people live in fear under this system. This is a clear opportunity to honour oral histories by challenging erasures in the written archive that privilege mythologies that marginalize and do violence to Indigenous experiences and knowledges.⁵⁶ As historian Winona Wheeler tells us, the best way to understand community histories and experiences often are “found within the community itself.”⁵⁷

Some ACFN members noted that not all Park wardens were “bad guys,” and some were only “doing their job.” They suggested that some wardens were more understanding and lenient than others, and sometimes Dene residents were on friendly terms with wardens and assisted them with their labour. Some ACFN members also have noted that a newer generation of wardens with different views on Indigenous rights and ways of life has been slowly replacing the “old guard” in recent decades.⁵⁸ Archive documents suggest that some wardens acted as intermediaries between Indigenous residents and the Park’s administration, communicating Indigenous People’s frustrations with harvesting laws and decrying the hardships they faced. For example, Dempsey wrote to McDougal in February 1931 that he was deeply discouraged by the hunger and hardship he had witnessed during a recent patrol, arguing that the conditions were a direct result of the Treaty obligations not being adequately fulfilled. He wrote, “the Treaty with the Indians is simply another SCRAP OF PAPER.”⁵⁹ Sometimes wardens facilitated Dene practices of helping people in need. In 1935, for example, Warden Robert Allen reported that Isidore Simpson (a Chipewyan Band Member and Councillor whose family lived at Peace Point and was transferred to the Cree band in 1944), had reported a bison had fallen off a cliff. When Allen went to investigate, he found the bull still alive but unable to move, so he killed it. He determined that the meat could be salvaged. Apart from one hind quarter that he felt would not be fit for human consumption because of shattered bones, Allen gave all the meat to Isidore Simpson, who in turn divided it among the needy in his community, especially the Elders and widows. Such reports suggest that relationships between Dene people and wardens were varied and complex. Although some wardens frequently complained about the conditions Indigenous Peoples faced, their reports did not usually suggest that they saw themselves—or the system that they enforced—as part of the problem.

Ultimately, through the permitting and warden programs, Parks administration had established a system in which abuses of power against Indigenous Peoples and erasures of Indigenous lifeways were tolerated, normalized, and even encouraged. O.S. Finnie wrote in 1925 that a warden’s lack of popularity or trust among the local people should be considered a strength, suggesting that not having a positive relationship with local residents and harvesters would ensure a warden could do their job without prejudice.⁶⁰ Specific instances of warden abuse, even when not fully documented, were written into imposed colonial laws that empowered officials to intimidate residents and harvesters and criminalized Dene people’s rights to move, live, and harvest freely throughout their homelands.

In the oral history section that follows, community members describe the power that wardens wielded in and around the Park throughout the twentieth century. They recount personal stories of interactions with wardens in more recent decades. Much of the oral testimony shared in this chapter relates personal examples of members’ experiences with the restrictive and punitive system within and around WBNP. Speakers emphasized that the system was critical to advancing colonial control over Dene lands and waters and aimed to erase Dene people and ways of life from their homelands. These oral histories situate the Park and the surrounding wildlife management regime as instrumental in the histories of colonial elimination in northern Alberta.