Living like a wolf: predation and production in the Montana-Alberta borderlands.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that economic and environmental transformations in the Montana-Alberta borderlands hinged on changes in the ways that people understood the nature of predator-prey relationships. The author's research demonstrates how interactions between wolves, Anglo-American settlers, and Blackfoot Indians resulted in new understandings of what it meant to be a predator that guided debates over labor and land use in the borderland regions of the Northern Plains and the Northern Rockies. By revealing predation as an historical idea, rather than a biological category, the dissertation offers a new perspective on the environmental, cultural, and political histories of the North American West and global processes of colonialism more broadly.