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I am not a bear expert. I don’t even play one on TV.

Better yet, I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I make no representations that I can refute anything factual about California Grizzly Bears. 

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But I do know something about narrative building, and this story from the Washington Post is an excellent example of how one does it. 

The story purports to be about the new discoveries that scientists have made in their research on the California Grizzly Bear. It is, in other words, a piece that is supposedly grounded in science, expanding our knowledge about a vaguely interesting subject. 

It isn’t a story about science, Grizzly Bears, or anything similar. It is a thinly veiled essay about White Settler Colonialism and how bad it is. 

Far be it from me to defend everything about how the West was won. The expansion of European settlers into the West was as inevitable as it was occasionally brutal. With only a few million Native Americans inhabiting two continents. The Americas make up about 30% of the Earth’s land surface and a larger percentage of the comfortably habitable zones. 

The Americas were nearly empty when Europeans arrived, as they were settled after the last Ice Age, sometime between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago. There just weren’t many people here, comparatively speaking. 

The settlement of the Americas by the Europeans was often brutal, but not especially so compared to what has happened elsewhere. It stands out not so much because of its brutality, but because of its temporal proximity. Read about the Mongols sometime. 

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In any case, let’s examine how narratives are constructed using a kernel of truth and a lot of slyly used rhetoric.

The grizzly, a subspecies of brown bear, has long held a place in mainstream American myth as a dangerous, even bloodthirsty creature. Its scientific name, Ursus arctos horribilis, means “the horrible bear.” But that image is being challenged by a new set of studies that combine modern biochemical analysis, historical research and Indigenous knowledge to bring the story of the California grizzly from fiction to fact.

In January, a team of experts led by University of California at Santa Barbara ecologist Alexis Mychajliw published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B about the diet of the California grizzly bear and how that influenced its extinction. The results challenge virtually every aspect of the bear’s established story.

Okey dokey. I am about to learn new stuff about bears, right? They weren’t what I thought, science tells us. They even read bones and stuff. 

Cool!

“Pretty much everything that I thought I knew about these animals turned out to be wrong,” said Peter Alagona, an ecologist and historian at UCSB and co-author of the study.

Hmm. Ecologist and historian. That seems a bit weird, but even non-scientists can illuminate scientific knowledge. I am not wedded to credentialism, a prejudice of mine that has been amply confirmed by recent history. 

Much of the grizzly bear’s long-standing narrative comes from stories, artwork and early photographs depicting California grizzlies as huge in size and aggressive in nature. Many of these reports, which found wide readership in newspapers elsewhere in the West and in the cities back East, were written by what Alagona calls the Californian influencers of their time.

“They were trying to get rich and famous by marketing themselves as these icons of the fading frontier,” Alagona said. “A lot of the historical sources that we have about grizzlies are actually not about grizzlies. They’re about this weird Victorian 19th-century celebrity culture.”

The team of ecologists, historians and archivists compared the image of California grizzlies from these frontier reports to harder data in the form of bear bones from museum collections all over the state.

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Suddenly, we have veered off into a critique of Victorian culture. 

All right. There certainly were some storytellers back then, just like today. Although I am pretty sure that ranchers had a thing or two to say about Grizzlies and violence. Clearly, the “myth” of the Grizzlies wasn’t all myth, right? I think they make bear repellant today. 

In an even larger blow to the popular story of the vicious grizzly, the bones showed that before 1542, when the first Europeans arrived, the bears were only getting about 10 percent of their diet from preying on land animals. They were primarily herbivores, surviving on a varied diet of acorns, roots, berries, fish and occasionally larger prey such as deer.

As European-style farming and ranching began to dominate the landscape, grizzlies became more like the stories those frontier influencers were telling about them. The percentage of meat in their diet rose to about 25 percent, probably in large part because of the relative ease of catching a fenced-in cow or sheep compared to a wild elk.

Colonialism forced so many changes on the California landscape so quickly, affecting every species that the bears ate and interacted with, that the exact cause of this change will be difficult to ever fully understand.

Yep. Bears used to be peace-loving herbivores until COLONIALISM changed them into violent killers. 

Pretty much the rest of the story is a dig at colonialism, with bears just providing the excuse to go off on a rant about nasty White people. 

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White people even ruined bears. Who would have guessed?

Although we will never have exact numbers, experts agree that hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people were living in what is now California before White settlers arrived. One frequently cited estimate puts the population at 340,000.

By 1900, that number had been slashed by more than 95 percent to around 16,000 surviving tribal members throughout the state. Eliminating the bear and the vast majority of California’s Indigenous people can be seen as parts of the same concerted effort to replace one landscape — and one set of stories — with another.

“The annihilation of the California grizzly bear was part of a much larger campaign of annihilation,” Alagona said. “I think it’s clear that what happened in California meets the legal definition of a genocide. But in a way, it was even more than that, because these were not just attempts to eliminate groups of people. These were attempts to destroy an entire world.”

We have veered from “bears weren’t vicious carnivores” to “White people ruined the world.” In the space of a few paragraphs the story transmogrified from bears to genocide. And, of course, to replace “one set of stories with another.”

Even the settling of California was really about building a narrative. This is a core principle of critical theory: narratives define reality, not anything concrete. Europeans wiped out a world because they changed the story of what is told. 

“We know the abundance that the southern end of the valley had,” said Octavio Escobedo III, chairman of the Tejon Indian Tribe, which now includes over 1,200 members in the Bakersfield and Kern County area of Southern California. “We know that the bear was revered here, especially by the Tejon people.”

According to Escobedo, the Tejon relationship with bears was far from the fearful and adversarial one taken up by White settlers. He recounts oral histories of bear cubs being given as gifts to neighboring tribal leaders. Though most large animals would be hunted for sustenance, Escobedo said, his people did not eat grizzlies.

“We coexisted in peace together here,” he added. “As long as we respected their space and they respected our space, there was almost a symbiotic relationship there between the Indigenous people and the grizzly.”

Farther north, the Yurok people also had a long history of coexistence with grizzlies. Tiana Williams-Claussen, director of the Yurok Tribe’s wildlife department, says that even their homes were designed with the bears in mind.

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Now we have moved into the wise indigenous view, which coexisted with nature, unlike meanie Europeans who destroy everything they touch. 

If only the White man would chew some peyote and commune with nature, the majestic grizzly bears would commune with them, and even settle with them in their homes. 

Sheesh. 

You get the picture. Science isn’t science; it is a tool in the critical theorist’s hands to create a new story. In this case it is peaceful Indians communing with nature and each other until Whitey came along and ruined everything. 

This is what passes for news reporting these days, and it stinks. Just like, I am told, Grizzly bears do right before they eat you.