It's a Leftist activist's worst nightmare. A traditionally oppressed group (natives) allies with your opponents (the fur industry) and skewers you with your own rhetoric.

Imagine you are an anti-fur activist. It's a sunny day sometime during the mid-1980's, and you're speaking at an outdoor press conference in downtown Toronto. Indignation flows assuredly through your polemic. Sure, grubby businessmen still peddle furs, and the gaudy rich still wear them, but they're an unsympathetic bunch, and the fur industry is in a tailspin. Ambi-guity and self-doubt have sapped other movements of the Left, but you are unscathed.

Unfortunately, you're about to meet Bob Stevenson. Mr. Stevenson, who describes himself as "half Cree, half Irish and half crazy," is executive director of Canada's Aboriginal Trappers Federation. He's decided to erect a tepee in the middle of your gathering, and your movement will never be the same.

When it took place a decade ago, Mr. Stevenson's tepee stunt represented the stirrings of a phenomenon that is transforming the politics of fur: organized attacks by native Canadians on environmental and animal-rights groups. It's a Leftist activist's worst nightmare. A traditionally oppressed group - whose endorsement is vital not only to your external legitimacy but also to your confidence in the justness of your cause - allies with your opponents and skewers you with your own rhetoric. And it is forcing to the surface contradictions lodged deep in the environmental and animal-rights movements.

The native backlash began in 1983, when the emerging animal-rights movement channelled public outrage over the clubbing of baby seals into European Economic Community (EEC) ban on the import of seal pelts. Greenpeace staffers to a meeting of elders in the Far North, and several staffers came back converts. The result was a bitter fight within the organization as advocates of animal welfare collided with defenders of indigenous survival. In the end, Greenpeace convinced the EEC to exempt indigenous peoples from the ban.

But Greenpeace's compromise proved a disaster. The organization's animal-rights wing bolted and formed Lynx, a group that made no exceptions for indigenous peoples. Worse, the Inuit's export market collapsed despite the exception, and between 1980-81 and 1987- 88 the number of seal pelts exported annually from Canada's Northwest Territories fell by 97 per cent. In the words of Susan Watkins, program consultant for the Inuit Tapirisat, which represents the Inuit people, the ban precipitated a "cultural breakdown." Welfare payments to seal-hunting communities rose from 176 per cent of the national average to 445 per cent. And rates of family violence, suicide, drug abuse and alcoholism as much as quadrupled. In 1985, a chastened Greenpeace apologized for having supported the ban at all. "You have every right to be very angry with us," spokesman Alan Pickaver told the Inuit. "We will try to make sure this sort of thing does not happen again."

But it is happening again. In 1991, the European Union passed a ban on the import of fur caught in leg-hold traps. The ban, scheduled to take effect this January, was considered a major victory for the European, animal-rights movement. But native groups, better organized than a decade ago, have launched a blistering attack, arguing that the fur restrictions will do to inland natives what the seal ban did to their coastal cousins. And recently the European Commission caved, delaying the ban for another year.

In a sense, chickens are coming home to roost. Over the years, animal-rights and environmental activists have promoted the romantic belief that indigenous peoples instinctively live in harmony with nature. They have used this vision of noble savagery to highlight the artificial and abusive way in which modern society treats the environment. But now native leaders are using this moral high ground to denounce the activists, painting them, just as the enviros often do big business, as alienated, imperialistic urbanites. Says Peter Williamson, the Inuit Taparisat's special-projects co-ordinator, "Their [environmental groups] membership lives in cities. They don't have the intimate relationship which indigenous people have with animals and the land." And Ms. Watkins vents, "These people are so ignorant, so arrogant, so patronizing, so stupid; they know nothing about aboriginal peoples."

Reluctant to strike back, the environmental groups have laboured to maintain the pretense that they are not actually in conflict with indigenous groups. "Over time we have learned that indigenous people do merit an exception," says Greenpeace spokesperson Deborah Rephan. "It's not up to Greenpeace to disrupt the livelihoods of indigenous people... True subsistence hunting tends not to have a depleting effect on the environment."

Indeed, "subsistence" is now Greenpeace's mantra. Under this rubric, Greenpeace has remained neutral on the leg-hold-trap ban and has opted not to oppose the resumption of whaling by the Makah Indians of the Alaska coast. But the subsistence standard is no panacea. After all, native Canadians are not simply trapping animals for their own consumption; they are also selling them to large auction houses, which in turn sell them to the fashion designers whose wares show up in the show rooms of New York and Milan. The natives in turn use the cash to buy goods produced far away in white, urban society.

Most natives wouldn't have it any other way. Bob Stevenson mocks the more-rustic-than- thou position held by the enviros: "We don't mind your subsistence hunting; maybe we'll let you buy a washing machine, but heaven forbid a car and definitely don't make any money."

In fact, whatever Greenpeace might want to claim, pure subsistence trapping is a thing of the past. When the Inuit, for instance, gave up their nomadic lifestyle and moved into government-established permanent settlements in the 1950s and 1969s, their barter economy died. The Inuit still kill animals for food and clothing, but they now need cash to pay for rent, heat and other necessities. Furthermore, since they cannot move seasonally to remain near the animals, they must travel longer distances during hunting season and are thus dependent on snowmobiles and other modern equipment. This puts them in blatant conflict with the Greens.

And who is the potential winner in all this? You guessed it - the fur industry. Its marriage of convenience with native organizations has damaged its activist tormentors. And this has contributed to a mild comeback for an industry that had been in steady decline. Fur sales increased by roughly 10 per cent in 1992 and again in 1993, and are strong so far this year. Macy's and Nordstrom, which had stopped selling furs, are now back in business. Part of this revival is due to an improved economy and colder weather. But as the EU's proposed ban has mobilized native groups, antifur fervour seems to have quieted. Jack Pearson, vice-president and general manager of Maximilian at Bloomingdale's, notes, "Three years ago there would be some protesters once a month on a Saturday. Lately - in the last two seasons - there has been very little." Even Peter Woods of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals admits, "A lot of people are focusing on issues other than fur. The animal-rights movement has grown, diversified." Perhaps they're looking for an issue where the bad guys don't live in tepees.