Chapter 7 ‘They Work for Me, I Work for Them’: Investigatory Attunements and Partnerships between Dogs and Gwich’in in Northern Canada

In: Sentient Entanglements and Ruptures in the Americas: Human-Animal Relations in the Amazon, Andes, and Arctic
Authors:
Jan Peter Laurens Loovers
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Robert P. Wishart
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Abstract

In this chapter we explore the notion of investigatory attunement between Gwich’in dogmushers Abraham Stewart Junior and Joseph Kaye. Following their teachings and lives with dogs, we are careful to consider dogs as ‘production of work’ and instead advocate the notion of partnership to underscore the entanglements between dogs, Gwich’in, fish and other beings like the crow. In similar vein we are hesitant to consider these partnerships as social construction or as conventional understandings of domestication which entail forms of control or domination without any sense of mutual benefit. What the two Gwich’in dog mushers illustrate what living with dogs entails in the North is a more complex form of relationship that includes other beings such as fish within this life-world.

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