The shared use of wild animals has helped to determine social relations between Native peoples and newcomers. In later settlement periods, controversy about subsistence hunting and campaigns of local conservation associations drew lines between groups in communities, particularly Native peoples, immigrants, farmers, and urban dwellers. In addition to examining grassroots conservation activities, Colpitts identifies early slaughter rituals, iconographic traditions, and subsistence strategies that endured well into the interwar years in the twentieth century. Drawing primarily on local and provincial archival sources, he analyzes popular meanings and booster messages discernible in taxidermy work, city nature museums, and promotional photography.

George Colpitts is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Calgary. He has published five books, as well as contributing numerous chapters and journal articles to academic publications. Colpitts is the winner of both the American Society for Ethnohistory's 2012 Robert F. Heizer Prize and the 2010 Frederick C. Luebke Award for outstanding regional scholarship.

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Part of the challenge of conserving biological diversity in the 21st century, Colpitts argues, will be to grapple with old, utilitarian understandings of nature and wildlife. [Game in the Garden] is well and clearly written, a solid attempt at developing those very understandings.

Discovery, Spring 2003