Book Review: The Archaeology of the North American Fur Trade

1997

The British Columbia Heritage Trust has prov ided fin ancial assistance to this project to support conservation of our heritage resources, gain further knowledge and increase pub! ic understanding of the complete history of British Columbia. FRONT COVER: The Jrawings by Remi Farvacque on the front cover and on page 4 show interpretive reconstructions of Fort McLoughlin-Oid Bella Bella and illustrate the introductory article starting on page 2: ''Archaeology and the British Columbia Fur Trade'' by David B urley and Philip Hohler. (Drawings courtesy of P. Hohler) Remi Aarvacque. a former SFU student. is nearing completion of an M.Sc. (Earth Sciences) at the U. of Waterloo. He was 1\rchacological Researcher at Parks Canada-Ontario 1995-I 997 ~md is now archaeologist and digital media technician with Terra Archaeological Laboratory. His areas of research interests include the Lake Superior basin. geoarchaeology, digital imaging and reconstruction of (Holocene) paleoenvir...

Bridging National Borders in North America, 2020

The late eighteenth-century fur trade in the Western Great Lakes region offers a particular multi-ethnic context in which social relations between Indigenous peoples and men of European or mixed descent were created and negotiated on a daily basis. With his seminal book “The Middle Ground,” Richard White (1991) challenged prior views, often of a Marxist bend, of the fur trade as a strictly colonial endeavor that led to the inevitable acculturation of Native peoples. While the Montreal merchants and their fur traders may have harbored feelings of superiority over Native peoples, in practice power relations in the interior were not always in favor of Europeans, quite the opposite. In this paper I explore these notions and the potential applicability of the colonialism framework to the interpretation of fur trading endeavors in the Western Great Lakes. Using examples from Réaume’s Leaf River Post, a late eighteenth-century trading post in Central Minnesota, I argue that practices and discourses rather suggest an ambivalent rhetoric that embodied a tension between colonial ideals of social boundaries based on ethnicity and rank, and a desire to belong to the fur trade community, itself a community on the move.

The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 1986

American Anthropologist, 1981

Unpublished, 2021

This paper illustrates how different standpoints affect business matters. The 18th-century fur trade in western Canada brought together two cultural worlds, that of Western Europe and that of American First Nations. The paper describes the contrast between Hudson's Bay Company posts ruled from London, and independent "pedlars" familiar with First Nations customs and wants.

Gathering Places: Aboriginal and Fur Trade Histories, edited by Carolyn Podruchny and Laura Peers, 2010

Material objects have always been central to the fur trade. Felt hats, fur pelts, blankets, and copper kettles were the raisons d'être of centuries of trade between Europeans and indigenous peoples in northern North America. As a sideline to amassing the valuable fur pelts, Europeans also collected vast arrays of objects from the many Aboriginal cultures they encountered, and Canadian antiquarians had a special fetish for fur trade artifacts that enabled many museums to house substantial fur trade collections. All these objects constitute a chorus of voices that recalls the long history and great expanse of this mercantile enterprise. In a 1982 catalogue for the Minnesota Historical Society exhibit "Where Two Worlds Meet," scholar Bruce White observes that "the fur trade ... thrived on communication-not simply through a language of words, but also through a language of objects." 1 More recently, in her study of an 1840s embroidered and beaded bag from central Rupert's Land, Laura Peers has shown that items of clothing had different layers of meaning that derived from the diverse heritages of the people making and wearing them. 2 The fur trade is fi lled with innumerable multivocal objects, and most attention has been focused on those found in archeological digs or preserved in European cabinets of curiosities. This chapter takes a slightly different track by examining an object that was rooted in place, that was not collectable, and that had a relatively short shelf life in archaeological terms: partially denuded trees fashioned into poles called lopsticks. These poles had a variety of meanings and uses among indigenous and European societies, and these meanings and uses collided in the fur trade. All who made and encountered these poles performed rituals with them; consequently, the poles became sites where identities were articulated and negotiated. We argue that those working in the fur trade drew on both indigenous and European traditions to create lopsticks as navigational tools; in doing so, they articulated a creole identity. In his 1848 narrative, Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) clerk Robert Ballantyne recalls that he encountered a cluster of lopsticks as he travelled from York Factory on the western shore of Hudson Bay to Norway House at the northern end of Lake Winnipeg:

In North America, fur traders occupy a central place in the mythology of nation building, yet this image of the voyageur and coureur des bois as an emblem of the fur trade and of something bigger, of nation, does not appear in a vacuum. By deconstructing particular narratives created by members of the fur trade community, this paper will explore some of the writings that set in motion the creation of a new stereotype of the voyageur that still captures the imagination. Very few authors, and even fewer archaeologists, have looked at such documentary sources for what they are: that is a specific form of history writing with its own system of knowledge production and representation, its own materiality, and particularly as a specific way to engage with the past, with memories, and with the Other. This paper will question the historical process and suggest ways in which fur trade journals and narratives have become part of mainstream nationalistic discourses in Canada and even parts of the United States.

This research critically addresses the ecological implications of the 18 th and 19 th Century fur trade and whether primary source material written and maintained by European fur traders can measure resource procurement changes through a diverse geographic area over a 62 year period. The study utilizes Hudson Bay Company post journals from five posts selected from three different ecological zones situated along a primary transportation route in north-central Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The study was divided into four periods reflecting different intensity levels regarding resource use. The research challenges the previously held assumptions that over harvest resulted in resource collapse and resulting hardships.

Historical Archaeology, 2020

It is understandable that archaeologists studying the North American fur trade often do so through the excavation and analysis of terrestrial sites. This article takes an alternative approach, analyzing assemblages that resulted from canoe accidents. Recovered from eddies and rocky bottoms of the French and Winnipeg rivers in Ontario, Canada, these collections offer unique opportunities to consider new dimensions of these histories: acute examples of loss and failure. An exploratory comparison of river assemblages with terrestrial fur-trade collections reveals new information on the magnitude of such losses. We argue that these unique fur-trade assemblages demonstrate the need for less anthropocen-tric approaches in historical archaeology that place more emphasis on material affect and nonhuman energy flows (e.g., rivers). We explore this proposition further through close consideration of two of the most common artifact types in the river assemblages: axes and files. Closer attention to the material properties and affordances of these objects offers fresh perspectives on the ways in which materials infused and framed human social relations and capabilities, past and present.