Trapline

Trappers traditionally move habitually along the route to set and check the traps, in so doing become skilled at traversing remote terrain, and become experts in the geography of the local area.

The assignment of particular trapline territories to individuals in band societies was traditionally handled by group consensus, and occasionally violence and warfare.

Before European colonisation, determining where a particular family or band could hunt, fish, and gather without encroaching on others to the point of over-harvesting was the main preoccupation of indigenous governance in the subarctic and other non-farming regions.

When European traders began exporting bulk amounts of fur to Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the trapping territories of the subarctic became much more commercially valuable and disputes intensified.

Furthermore, having to apply to provincial authorities to distribute traplines removes control of the process from local Indigenous forms of governance, and institutionalizes a non-Indigenous presence on traditional lands.