The Guga Hunt and the Weaponisation of Indigenous Identity

Guest post by Innogen Duncan.

Proponents of the highly publicised Guga hunt have embedded claims about local food resilience and sovereignty within their defences of the hunt.

Arguments from these angles are often attention grabbing for the general reader. This is in part due to the hotly discussed political nature and importance of the global history of what it means to be indigenous.

Hunting or Harvesting?

Firstly, I would like to address one of the claims made by supporters of the Guga hunt - that it is not in fact a hunt, but a harvest.

I have written about what it means to manufacture consent for animal exploitation before. Essentially, it boils down to a tactical deployment of certain words to create a pseudo-environment.

The ‘pseudo-environment’ meaning the mental images we create in our heads regarding real world events.

In the case of the Guga hunt, proponents have disavowed the word ‘hunt’ in favour of ‘harvest’ to sanitise the real, undiluted impacts on animals, as seen in pro-hunt social media groups and in a recent parliamentary submission by one of the most prominent hunt supporters.

This is despite the Gannet chick hunters of the distant and recent past freely embracing the word hunt to describe the annual event.

In Donald S. Murray’s book on the subject, aptly named ‘The Guga Hunters’, a fair few amount of those who have taken part in the hunt are interviewed.

Murray is a long time community member of Lewis and a vocal and well connected supporter of the hunt. It is extremely odd that his repeated references to those who supposedly ‘harvest’ Gannet chicks as ‘hunters’ did not ring alarm bells for his interviewees.

Of course, in the book, those who hunt Gannet chicks are shown to be totally comfortable with being termed ‘hunters’. The greenwashing tactics taken on by the hunt proponents of today are simply the tried and true methods of spin doctors.

The Weaponisation of Indigenous Identities

Indigenous food sovereignty is a concept derived from the idea that because native peoples have a unique tie to land, water, soil and other species communities, they are best placed to decide what food sources should be prioritised.

It has become clear that the Guga hunters and their proponents have attached the practice of hunting Gannet chicks to this idea of indigeneity as a last-ditch method to avert the license being revoked.

This is a similar public relations tactic to the recent abandonment of the word ‘hunt’ for ‘harvest’.

It is also a convenient way to invoke the rural vs city divide. While there very often are socio-economic differences between urban and rural, those who live on Lewis are also heavily involved in the white collar work that hunt proponents shun:

This is not to say that Highlanders did not experience significant linguistic and cultural persecution in the eighteenth century and beyond.

Lowland Scots and those situated further South were culpable in the racialisation, and systemic persecution of Highland Scots. That is a hard-boiled fact.

However, the marrying of the tradition of hunting Gannet chicks and indigeneity itself is a discussion that has not happened organically.

This is evidenced by the fact that this is an idea being debated and discussed as if it is a novel concept within community groups of today. The word ‘indigenous’ does not appear anywhere in relation to the Guga hunters within Donald Murray’s work either. To be clear, it is a reactionary development.

Moreover, avian flu is a consistent health threat to wild birds and by proxy, humans too. It is reasonably thought that the next global pandemic could arise from avian flu - stoked by the unsustainable interactions between humans and affected farmed animals or wildlife.

But the social unsustainability of animal use/abuse is often overlooked.

Unnecessarily making a 40 mile hazardous trip from Lewis to a remote Island to kill 500 birds to serve as a delicacy is at best, questionably in line with indigenous wisdom.

Given that indigeneity is often not merely about living where you were born and have ancestral ties to, but a constant and careful analysis of the material conditions of the land and how humans are best placed to serve it, these arguments fall flat.

The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was not formulated for those situated in the Global North, who experience remarkable economic privilege and land-based rights over those in the Global South.

It is incredibly unwise to compare the struggles of First Nations peoples with that of Highland Scots. They are distinct from each other.

There is a very stark philosophical poverty underneath the arguments in favour of the Guga hunt. There is also an outright dismissal of how hunting wild birds could impact national public health.

Food Security

Guga is a ‘delicacy’, meaning it’s not a staple on the Isle of Lewis. The birds are not eaten on a regular basis. Therefore, the argument that banning the practice of killing these birds impacts food security is an odd one.

In Donald Murray’s aforementioned work, he even explicitly states this:

The route to the island where they are bludgeoned to death is deeply treacherous, of which only 10 men are currently trusted with making the journey.

Murray even remarks that due to harsh sea conditions in the past, hundreds of dead Gannet bodies have been left on the island to rot while hunters make their way to safety.

I acknowledge that ‘bludgeoned to death’ is phrasing that Guga hunters and supporters would call overtly emotive and political, but really this is just a description that is not imbued with, or filtered by public relations speak.

Rural affairs writer Katherine Hay of The Scotsman outlined: “The hazardous ritual has continued almost unbroken for 500 years. It resumed last year after a three-year hiatus due to avian flu, with the usual quota of 2,000 chicks reduced to 500 to allow Gannet numbers to recover.”

Later on in the same article penned by Hay, there is a quote from Donald Murray which reads: “But also what about rural skills? We can’t have them die out. We might need them again some day.”

In his own work, Murray is outright told by interviewees that the recruiting of those for the annual hunt is an incredibly clandestine process. The wider community explicitly do not gain access to the ‘rural skills’ involved.

Those interested in the hunt must actively seek out the tight-knit group of hunters, and even then, they may be rejected. It is evidently not a free exchange of skills between in-group and community.

Is preserving an incredibly hazardous ‘ritual’ that results in the acquisition of 500 birds a year (some of which are even exported after processing, according to a local from Ness) a food security issue?

How many people will rely on the calories acquired from Guga for even a quarter of the year? Not many. Guga makes up a tiny tiny irrelevant fraction of total calories consumed on the Isle of Lewis.

I will conclude here and reiterate that claims that campaigning against the hunt are anti-Gael and therefore anti indigenous are entirely contrived. Claims that the Guga hunt is rooted in indigenous values systems or food sovereignty miss the mark, and ignore the simple fact that the hunt once existed for necessities sake, but now no longer serves this purpose.

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