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Paper short abstract

This presentation argues that Dinjii Zhuh and Inuvialuit practices of respectful killing enact forms of sharing between humans, animals and land that unsettle conservation biology’s assumptions and offer an alternative to the entrenched divide between using and protecting environments.

Paper long abstract

This presentation examines how Dinjii Zhuh and Inuvialuit hunters in the Mackenzie Delta enact practices of killing, sharing and care that challenge dominant conservationist framings of life and multispecies relations. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, I show that respecting animals and taking their lives are not construed as oppositional acts but intertwined obligations within a relational universe premised on sharing. In this context, commoning is not limited to human cooperation or resource governance but extends to the animal persons who offer their lives for human thriving, and to a land understood to provide so long as it is approached with respect. Going out to hunt is therefore foremost not an extractive act but a crucial modality of maintaining relations with the land, reaffirming responsibilities that sustain more-than-human communities.

By foregrounding Indigenous practices of respectful killing and multispecies sharing, the paper argues that current conservation biology—often eager to mobilise Indigenous concepts while filtering them through its own assumptions about species, life and ecology—remains poorly equipped to recognise these forms of commoning. In tracing how hunters, animals and land co-produce conditions of subsistence and repair, the presentation offers an alternative to the prevailing polarity between use and protection. It invites a rethinking of conservation beyond the dualisms that dominate Euro-American environmental thought, toward frameworks that take relational ontologies seriously.