John Sandlos asks an interesting question regarding the history of wildlife conservation in Canada's Northwest Territories. He asks if it is the case that megafauna such as caribou, muskox, and wood bison only continue to exist in the Northwest Territories because of a history of careful wildlife management by the emerging Canadian state. He answers that there can be little doubt that the efforts made by Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to manage Arctic and sub-Arctic wildlife are certainly part of the reason why these animals still exist, but that the view that this was the result of a sort of conservationist ethos to protect these iconic species for the sake of preservation is naïve at best. The conservation of these species is directly tied to the internal colonial aspirations of Canada to manage its territory and the native peoples living there. Conservation becomes an excuse and also a tool to reform and reshape the northern parts of Canada into a legal landscape that can be owned in the Lockian understanding of the agricultural revolution. While this argument is not entirely new and is certainly sympathetic to much scholarly attention to wildlife-management regimes in the circumpolar north, Sandlos provides a detailed investigation into the actions, arguments, and motivations of the characters at the front of this movement. As a history of conflict, it is both useful and enlightening.

Admittedly, when I started reading this book and discovered that it was organised into three core sections, each focused on the history of the conservation of one species: muskox, caribou, or wood bison, I was dubious about the value of this writing method. It is an organisation that is reminiscent of the species-by-species scientific management that many of the first nations people I have worked with find highly problematic. However, as a clear history sourced from the very documents that the government created and referenced, this organisation has merit. By taking it one species at a time and maintaining a focus on the ‘charismatic big game species’ that were the prime focus of conservationists, the reader is exposed to the top–down manipulation of conservation by Canada for its own commercial and nation-building interests. Moreover it allows for the dismissal of aboriginal perspectives on these management plans to be exposed for what they were: blatant paternalistic attempts to domesticate the north and its people via programs of agrarian reform and coercive tutelage.

The management of bison forms Sandlos’ point of departure and sets the main driver of the book in motion. With the catastrophic near eradication of the plains bison populations, bison were an early focus of conservationists. The protection of the northern animals against the perceived irrational slaughter of bison by Native communities forms Sandlos’ analytical trajectory that is then worked through the other two cases. Finishing with the caribou crisis, the book demonstrates how an unquestioned conservation complex reached the apex of its hegemonic power in northern Canada in the 1970s. His description of the management of wood bison and caribou are far more detailed than that of muskox. This choice perhaps reflects the attention given to these species at the time; however, the case of muskox reintroduction programmes and the species’ on-going protected status in many parts of Canada's north continues to cause considerable friction between native communities and management officials, and I was left wanting more from this particular case study.

Sandlos is correct to couple conservation to the social evolutionary assumptions that Canada used to form its management policies that were supposed to benefit the native peoples of the north. These peoples were envisioned as living a precarious existence with no forethought, and could not be trusted under these terms to relate to the valuable resources of the north in a rational way. He explains how first agriculture and then industry were understood to be tools to advance people out of savagery to become productive, manageable citizens. Indeed these arguments in other guises are still being forwarded as common-sense solutions to multiple issues in Canada's north. Then, as now, the argument rests upon an image of economic and wider social collapse, which is evidenced by the purported over-kills of wildlife. Sandlos, like other social scientists who have scrutinised this argument, point out that these poorly evidenced and analysed over-kills were central to the policies of conservation. Instead of supporting the trapping and hunting economy, the government chose to support programmes where Native people were forced to accept economic dependency in exchange for a promise of ephemeral wage labour created through various industries. Conflict is the result in situations like these, and this book has done a great service in tracing the archival documentation of the conflicts that followed.

While perhaps beyond the scope of this book, it would have been beneficial to have more of a sense of the various resolutions that have been proposed for these conflicts. Beginning about the same time that this book's history ends, there was considerable action on the part of native people in the Canadian north to reassert their own national interests, and central to these movements was an insistence that they retain jurisdiction over the lands and animals that have supported them from time immemorial. In various hearings, they, along with many social scientists that they employed, dismantled the culture collapse model by demonstrating that is was not only historically and economically inaccurate but also that it was the model and not the people who hunt and trap that was retrograde. However, this book does provide a detailed context for an understanding of the colonial efforts in the north on the part of conservationist and economic interests that is unique and many will find very useful. I intend to use this book in courses that I teach in this manner and would recommend it for anyone interested in the history of this part of the circumpolar north or of Canada.