The Nivkh People’s Sustainable Bear Hunting Enterprise, Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Business-led conservation of wildlife based on private property rights and formal governance has often yielded inconsistent results. In pursuit of alternative approaches that prioritize long-term sustainability in wildlife exploitation, this paper studies the novel case of the Nivkh people’s bear hunting enterprise, which functioned in the Lower Amur Basin and Sakhalin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. I demonstrate that the Nivkh ran their bear enterprise sustainably via a conglomeration of traditional ecological knowledge, religious beliefs, and informal social institutions, satisfying their personal demand for the animal while successfully selling bear furs and gallbladders to foreign merchants. Such developments were also supported by the regional political economy in which the Nivkh retained a large degree of autonomy. The paper highlights the productive impact that ideas of sacrality, human–animal kinship, and reciprocity exert on sustainability in wildlife enterprises while also stressing the importance of careful government policy in relation to Indigenous conservation systems. The study validates its claims through field notes, expeditionary journals, state reports, and historical and ethnographic research.