On today’s episode, I chat with Caleb Musgrave, a Mississauga Anishinaabe man from Rice Lake Ontario, who has been training in wilderness survival, bushcraft and traditional woodcraft since he was a child. Caleb is the owner and director of Canadian Bushcraft, a wilderness skills and training company in Ontario that teaches courses ranging from blacksmithing and homesteading, to weeklong survival training courses, to guiding long trips into the backcountry. Caleb is also the host of the Canadian Bushcraft Podcast and the Aboriginal People's Television Network's Wilderness and Cultural Survival series "Merchants of the Wild." Caleb and I chat about how he brings Western and Indigenous understandings of hunting and conservation into his pedagogy and practice. We talk about the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, some of its strengths and weaknesses, and the need for efforts to decolonize the model. In the conservation segment, I review some recent Indigenous-led conservation efforts around boreal songbird monitoring (35:33) and provide some updates on recent hunting policy and legislative initiatives across the U.S., from Virginia to Mississippi to California, including what should be the final update on the black bear hunting petition in California (39:58).

On today’s episode, we discuss:

• The Canadian Bushcraft Podcast: https://anchor.fm/canadianbushcraft
• Canadian Bushcraft on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/canadian.bushcraft/
• Article: “Boreal birds are vanishing, and with them, their songs. How can we conserve Canada’s soundscape?”: https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/vanishing-birdsong
• Seal River Watershed Alliance: https://sealriverwatershed.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Seal-Brochure-8.0-Sept-2021-3-min.pdf
• Bill SB 8: Hunting on Sundays; permits hunting on public or private land, etc.: https://openstates.org/va/bills/2022/SB8/
• Article: “Younger: Effort to make Black Prairie WMA private ‘dead issue’”: https://cdispatch.com/news/2022-03-01/younger-effort-to-make-black-prairie-wma-private-dead-issue/
• HOWL updates on BPWMA: https://www.howlforwildlife.org/bpwma
• Article: “California Fish and Game Commission Firmly Rejects Petition to Suspend Bear Hunting”: https://www.fieldandstream.com/conservation/california-rejects-bear-hunting-ban-petition/
• Article: "Bear Hunt Ban: Science Wins, but Values Matter": https://tothebone.substack.com/p/bear-hunt-ban-science-wins-but-values?r=13nlk5&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web