Frank G. Speck's contributions to the understanding of Mi'kmaq land use, leadership, and land management

In 1914 Frank G. Speck began studying what he perceived to be a Mi'kmaq fam ily hunting territory system involving individual ownership and inheritance in the male line. When combined with more recent investigations into Mi'km aq fishing and sea mammal hunting, his accounts of Mi'kmaq land tenure prov ide an important starting point for any comprehensive analysis of a traditi onal economic system that is both old and ecologically sophisticated. Altho ugh Speck's work examined only late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century territorial systems, ethnohistorical research has revealed evidence for th e operation of a precursor institution in the Atlantic region at least two centuries earlier. Recent land use surveys-so vital to the modern northeast ern comprehensive claims process-adopt the concept of the family hunting te rritory as an invaluable guide in on-the-ground mapping procedures. Yet the use of the concept as an analytical tool, particularly in the applied cont ext, has been criticized by ethnohistorians (among them, Diamond Jenness, E leanor B. Leacock, Edward S. Rogers, and Bruce Bourque). How traditional is a system, these scholars ask, that may have had its origins in the Europea n fur trade? This article begins by investigating the concept's controversi al history in order to gain new insights into its use, as well as its limit ations, as a scientific construct. Was the system a mere epiphenomenon of t he fur trade, as some scholars submit? Or did it, as others argue, constitu te a unit of aboriginal management that has an enduring value in applied st udies? Did allocation of land by chiefs and councils, known to have occurre d in the seventeenth century, later become supplanted by land inheritance? Furthermore, what was the relationship between the changing nature of leade rship's territorial prerogatives and the development of Mi'kmaq political i nstitutions! It has been nearly eighty years since Speck first coined the p hrase family hunting territory system. For both academic and practical reas ons it seems appropriate that the origins, developments, and controversies associated with this concept be traced, and its applicability tested, so th at its significance may be weighed in the historical balance.