Fur Trade Research Articles

OYO: The Beautiful River by Mark B. Hamilton (review)

Reviewed by: OYO: The Beautiful River by Mark B. Hamilton Jeffery Moser Mark B. Hamilton. OYO: The Beautiful River. Brunswick, ME: Shanti Arts, 2020. 75 p. First presented as a chapbook and a finalist for the Washington Prize in 2015, Mark Hamilton's environmental narrative, OYO: The Beautiful River was recently issued in October 2020 by Shanti Arts. "OYO" and "O-Yo" are variant English names for the Ohio River and have their origins from the Iroquois "O-Y-O," meaning "the great river." When seventeenth-century French fur trader and explorer La Salle came upon the river in 1669, he called it la belle rivière or "the beautiful river." Hamilton's narrative traverses the Ohio's beauty, natural scenic wonders, and its cultural and commercial impact to the nation. The anthology is based on his own solo personal experience navigating the River in a rowboat from its geographical beginning at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers near Pittsburgh, then its northwesterly flow out of Pennsylvania, before heading southwesterly toward the Mississippi River. Its 981-mile course eventually ends at Cairo, Illinois. Congruously, the Ohio's course is steeped in American history and literary lore, for the river first formed the southern border of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, American's first territorial expansion beyond its original thirteen colonies, and later, as the southern border for the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Cairo is the only choice that Twain's two endearing main characters Huck Finn and Jim have in traveling south in order to get to a free state and allow Jim to seek further passage on a steamboat up the Ohio River to the North and freedom. Hamilton's anthology capitalizes on this geographic and literary legacy. As an initial defense of his poetry and the rationale for his singular journey, Hamilton launches his collection with a borrowed translation from Rainer Maria Rilke's Ninth Elegy: "Oh, not because happiness exists. … But because truly here is so much' because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some small way keeps calling to Us, the most fleeting of all." This informal [End Page 228] foreword is inspiring because it puts the reader on par with the poet as a special invitation to join in this rare navigational feat. What follows are over fifty poems, some short and some long, that relate the poet's experience with a River that is "strange" (9), "folds and contorts, pulls down and boils up" (11), and makes the rower "buck and shudder in the chilling spray / exhilarated by a rogue wave whooshing beneath / with its warning: 'Stay relaxed. Stay in rhythm / with the weather" (13). Readers become emotionally attached to the poet and the sights, sounds, and drama of his adventure, divided into two sections called "Spring" and "Summer," and no less engaging than Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. It is as informative and reflective about nature and humans' duty to the environment as any number of books by American naturalist and survivalist Tom Brown, Jr. In his little dory, named Pelican, Hamilton glides between "pillars of crafted stone" (13) and "hidden voice" (15), encountering cities, factories, locks, dams, buoys, sandbars, islands, river towns, beaches, creeks, wooded banks, barges, first-timers and old-timers fishing, swimmers, tourists, trash, tangled branches, hundreds of other natural and unnatural objects, fish, insects, birds, wildlife, diverse weather, conflicts, dangers, pleasantries, and even a floating corpse. "It's too incredible to be real. But the legs, the bulbous heel, / the creases of skin at the arch, my eyes widening into a body / with arms outstretched, feet tapping sadly in the driftwood. / I should report it" (51). Hamilton's poetry moves like the poet-oarsman himself, at times reflective when he is "moving on reflections to an early morning breeze" that makes him feel "good to sweat and row" (53), and another day when he departs and river experts advise "Stay safe" (32). Readers cannot help but be moved and cling to the poet and his words, hoping that he protects himself and his silent passenger, the reader: "Downriver, the up-city of Cincinnati collides into wakes, / builds up and...

Enabling coexistence: Navigating predator‐induced regime shifts in human‐ocean systems

Abstract Rapid system‐wide changes triggered by predators can pose considerable challenges to people. In the Northeast Pacific, the recovery of sea otters Enhydra lutris following their extirpation due to the 18th and 19th century fur trade is driving a social‐ecological regime shift with profound implications. While the ecological consequences of this shift are well documented, very little research has examined the conditions that enable or constrain people's ability to adapt to the social, economic and cultural changes that transpire. Through a collaborative partnership and workshops with Indigenous knowledge holders spanning Alaska to British Columbia, along with quantitative and qualitative interviews in two Indigenous communities among the first to experience sea otter recovery, we examined people's perceptions of the social‐ecological conditions that affect their ability to adapt to these changes. We found that communities differed in their relative rankings of adaptation‐enabling conditions; however, the following four broad strategies were perceived as critical to improving coexistence with sea otters: (a) strengthening Indigenous governance and decision‐making authority; (b) promoting adaptive co‐management; (c) weaving Indigenous knowledge and Western science into management plans and (d) establishing learning platforms. Both communities also identified that increased livelihood options and financial assistance would not compensate for lost food security. Differences in enabling conditions and attitudes towards sea otters within and between communities can be attributed to the social‐ecological and political context in which sea otter recovery occurs. Our study suggests that enhancing Indigenous peoples' ability to adapt to predator‐induced regime shifts will require a transformation in current resource governance systems if we are to navigate towards an ecologically sustainable and socially just operating space. Overall, this work highlights the need for more Indigenous authority, knowledge and leadership in addressing predator‐induced regime shifts in coupled human‐ocean systems. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Canoes in context: An Ojibwa maritime cultural landscape

A birch-bark canoe often conjures up images of French and British fur traders but its most important context comes from an association with the Native communities that invented the craft. This article describes Ojibwa birch-bark canoes’ place in a culture that was influenced by the lakes, ponds, rivers and streams that made up their environment throughout the Great Lakes region and Canada. Just as importantly, Ojibwa canoes offer an excellent device for exploring the multitude of ways that water influenced identity, cosmology and day-to-day life.

Towards a Refined Chronology of Prehistoric Pitfall Hunting in Sweden

Among the most prominent prehistoric features in the boreal forests of northern Sweden are trapping pits or pitfalls used for hunting elk and/or reindeer. Even if often ascribed to the Viking Age and its trade in furs and other animal products, the chronology of these features has long been a matter of debate. In this article, a database of 370 dated radiocarbon samples from excavated pitfalls has been compiled and analysed using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) modelling to create the most elaborate chronology of Swedish trapping pit systems so far. The analysis shows that the most intensive period of construction of trapping pits was in the centuries before the Viking period. This challenges previous interpretations of Viking Age resource exploitation but is in line with several other recently published studies concerned with resource exploitation, non-agrarian production, and trade connecting northern Scandinavia with inter-regional trade networks.

Forged products by Russian craftsmen of the 17th–19th centuries on the basis of materials from the Kikki-Akki burial ground of Upper Taz Selkups: technological characteristics

The article studies the technology of making iron and steel items of Russian origin, discovered in the Kikki-Akki burial ground of Northern Selkups (18th–19th centuries) in the north of Western Siberia in the upper reaches of the Taz River. In the study, we established the origin and chronology of Russian industrial goods in Western Siberia, as well as factors under the influence of which they appeared among the indigenous Siberian population. We examined knives and axes (17th — early 19th centuries) using the methods of metallographic analysis includ-ing macro- and micrographic examination, as well as microhardness testing. They provide an opportunity to de-termine the structure of the metal, which in turn helps determine chemical composition, physical and mechanical properties of the product. The analysis of forged products revealed that they were made according to the techno-logical traditions of Russian metalworking production existing in the 17th — early 19th centuries. Its distinctive features included the development and widespread practice in applying the modifications of two technological schemes for producing items from ferrous metal. The former was based on the welding either of iron and steel or of different grades of steel, whereas the latter involved all-steel structures. The former technological scheme pre-dominated in the production of items found in the Kikki-Akki burial ground. Moreover, the production of welded structures lacked standardisation. The following techniques were used in the production of knives: two-layer wel-ding of iron and steel, three-layer welding, V-joint welding, oblique welding, built-up welding at the ends and wel-ding of the steel blade. The use of soft quenching was noted as an additional operation that improved the opera-tional properties of the household tool. This variety of used technological schemes reflects the complex nature of the formation of the industrial goods market in Western Siberia. The selection of items made using different welded technologies is associated with the intention to use metal products of the highest quality for the fur trade and yasak collection. However, all-metal structures predominated in the main centres for the production of forged goods — cities of European Russia and Western Siberia.

Gichi Bitobig, Grand Marais: Early Accounts of the Anishinaabeg and the North Shore Fur Trade

Gichi Bitobig, Grand Marais: Early Accounts of the Anishinaabeg and the North Shore Fur Trade

Relationships and the Creation of Colonial Landscapes in the Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade

Relationships and the Creation of Colonial Landscapes in the Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade

Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong by Linda LeGarde Grover

Reviewed by: Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong by Linda LeGarde Grover Katrina M. Phillips (bio) Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong by Linda LeGarde Grover University of Minnesota Press, 2021 "To live on the shore of Lake Superior," Linda LeGarde Grover writes, "is to live with orientation to water, sky, and forest" (p. 47). Gichigami Hearts, Grover's latest collection of stories, poems, and histories, is a beautiful homage to what is now known as the city of Duluth, Minnesota. Incorporated in 1857—a mere three years after the second Treaty of La Pointe ceded most Ojibwe lands in what is now northern Minnesota and a year before Minnesota became a state—the city takes its name from the French explorer Daniel Greysolon, the Sieur du Lhut, who had arrived in the region in the 1670s to set up fur trade routes. Nicknamed the Zenith City in 1868 by Thomas Foster, who started the city's first newspaper, its location at the nose of Lake Superior helped it rise to prominence first in industry and now, among other things, through tourism. The region's rich Ojibwe history is often obscured, even as its echoes reverberate through the names that dot the city's landscape. The city itself—along with the state of Minnesota—would not exist without the treaty cessions that forced Ojibwe people from their homelands onto smaller reservations, like the ones set forth in the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe. Duluth's oldest social club, for instance, takes its name from Gichigami, the Ojibwe name for Lake Superior. Known as Misaabekong (the place of the giants) or Onigamiising (the place of the small portage) [End Page 116] in Ojibwe, the area around Duluth is rooted in Ojibwe history and oral traditions (p. ix). Thus, it is interesting, as Grover muses, that Ojibwe place names are often derived from the physical characteristics of the region, while American place names often draw from a person's name (p. 4). Like Grover, I am an Ojibwe woman who grew up in the region. The book and the stories within it feel like a homecoming. I know the street names and neighborhood names, I remembered the names of some of the stores and restaurants she references, and I understand the deep meaning Grover places on the stories she tells here. Gichigami Hearts is unapologetically hyperlocal, but its reach is far beyond what are now the city limits. It is part history, part autobiography, part geography, and part ethnography, sharing stories of places and people that now might only exist in the collective memories of those who were there or who have since shared these stories. The book is comprised of four sections: "Point of Rocks," "Gichigami Hearts," "Rabbits in Wintertime," and "Traveling Song." In the first section, Grover intertwines stories from her childhood, her family history, and neighborhood histories into the history of the city's department stores, family-owned businesses, and gospel missions. The second section, "Gichigami Hearts," moves through more stories of Grover's relatives up in Chippewa City, coupled with her tellings of Ojibwe stories of the mishibizhiig (the underwater spirit beings of the lake). The stories in the end of this section turn toward the role of Ojibwe people in the tourist trade in northern Minnesota, the people whose handcrafts were sold in tourist stands along the highways that hug the North Shore. Grover places these crafters and entrepreneurs in the long history of Native trade and engagement with Europeans (and, later, Americans), seeking not to denigrate those who sold art to tourists but to understand why and how Ojibwe people participated in these industries. What she calls "the entrepreneurship of Indian stands," she contends, was more than "a crass sale of goods, the desperation of a people in need" (p. 75). Grover's careful intertwining in and out of these nuances creates a richly powerful story of Ojibwe resilience. Grover weaves Ojibwe history, the histories of treaties and repressive federal policies that aimed to eradicate and erase Native peoples, like allotment and termination, throughout the book. She unflinchingly shows what may have drawn Ojibwe and non-Native men to the missions in Duluth that...

Fort St. Joseph Revealed: The Historical Archaeology of a Fur Trading Post

Fort St. Joseph Revealed: The Historical Archaeology of a Fur Trading Post

Did Tlingit Ancestors Eat Sea Otters? Addressing Intellectual Property and Cultural Heritage through Zooarchaeology

The maritime fur trade caused the extirpation of sea otters from southeast Alaska. In the 1960s, sea otters were reintroduced, and their numbers have increased. Now, sea otters are competing with people for what have become commercially important invertebrates. After having been absent for more than a century, the reentry of this keystone species has unsettled people. Although some communities perceive sea otters as a threat to their livelihoods, others view their return as restoration of the marine ecosystem. The federal Marine Mammal Protection Act authorizes any Alaska Native to harvest sea otters for subsistence provided that the harvest is not wasteful. Some people are seeking to define “traditional” Tlingit use of sea otters as not only using their pelts but consuming them as food, but some Tlingit maintain they never ate sea otters. This project analyzes the largest precontact archaeological assemblage of sea otter bones in southeast Alaska, with the benefit of insights gained from observing a Tlingit hunter skin a sea otter to infer that Tlingit ancestors hunted sea otters primarily for pelts. The extent to which other Indigenous peoples of the North Pacific consumed sea otters as food deserves investigation, especially as sea otters recolonize their historic range.

Metis Pioneers: Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed by Doris Jeanne Mackinnon

Reviewed by: Metis Pioneers: Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed by Doris Jeanne Mackinnon Annabel G. LaBrecque Metis Pioneers: Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed. By Doris Jeanne Mackinnon. University of Alberta Press, 2018. ix + 584 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00, paper. In Metis Pioneers, Doris Jeanne Mackinnon details the role two particular Metis women played in western Canada's transitional period from the fur trade economy to sedentary agriculture and industrial capitalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed were both born in 1861 to Metis and Euro-American parents who occupied influential positions in the fur trade. Mackinnon argues that Smith and Lougheed adapted the skills and kinship connections rooted in the fur trade to navigate the transition to new economies. While both women publicly fashioned themselves as Euro-American "pioneers," Mackinnon argues, Smith and Lougheed retained essential components of their experiences and identities as Metis women in order to adapt to new western societies. Underlying Smith and Lougheed's biographies is the Red River Rebellion, which Mackinnon weaves into the text without much contextualization. While Mackinnon discusses how both Metis and settler men in Smith and Lougheed's extensive kinship networks participated in the rebellion, the author does not fully explain the political and economic stakes of these events for the broader Metis community to which Smith and Lougheed were connected. Another pitfall is Mackinnon's contradictory claims about the "social capital" (xxvii) Smith and Lougheed "continued to contribute" (xxvii) to their marriages and, more broadly, post– fur trade societies. Though Mackinnon claims that this social capital was rooted in their Metis identities and connections, her sources indicate an opposite reality: that their socioeconomic authority, at least in the eyes of their (predominantly male) contemporaries, was tied primarily to the influence Smith and Lougheed's fathers enjoyed in the fur trade. To the author's credit, Mackinnon demonstrates throughout that the "social value" (338) of the labor expended by Indigenous and Metis women in fur trade economies has been inadequately documented by contemporary historical actors and historians alike, due largely to the "unidentifiable monetary value" (338) of this labor. Mackinnon makes clear that her purpose in telling the personal histories of these two Metis women is done so not in the service of either Canadian settler nor British imperial history. Rather, Metis Pioneers commemorates the two Metis women whose methods of survival in increasingly settler colonial spaces both reflected and shaped the much longer history of dynamic Metis identities and means of endurance. Metis Pioneers is an analytically sophisticated biography that succeeds in balancing local and family [End Page 325] histories with broader historical processes that both shaped and were shaped by dynamic ideas about Metis and Indigenous identities. Readers interested in Metis women's history as well as the social history of the late Canadian fur trade will find this text as engaging as it is informative. Annabel G. LaBrecque Department of History University of California, Berkeley Copyright © 2021 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Fort St. Joseph Revealed: The Historical Archaeology of a Fur Trading Post by Michael S. Nassaney

Book Reviews 183 of Metis identity merely to “place” would allow. Yet, according to Mackinnon, both women sought to subsume their Metisness in the public sphere, a manner of self-preservation that, she writes, continues today among the Metis. Just as the Fur Trade in the Great Lakes relied heavily on French, Metis, and Indian “kinship networks” to succeed, the same is true of the Metis communities described in this monograph. Mackinnon examines the importance played by the resilient trading families that Delorme Smith and Hardisty Lougheed belonged to. It was these families who provided the skills to perform well the duties necessary for a pioneer in isolated settings, but also skills of “leadership, diplomacy, and social convening.” (126) Those skills, Mackinnon asserts, were learned through both the European and Indigenous ancestries of these Metis women. Mackinnon’s study of the lives of two important Metis women from the late and post-Fur Trade era is also a study of the nature of Metis identity. According to Mackinnon, at times their identities relied on “cultural, adaptive, and situational survival strategies” (348) to cope with their unique Indigenous heritage, but in their public lives they were remembered mostly as Euro-North American women rather than as Metis matriarchs. This volume is a lengthy and in-depth study, well-sourced and footnoted with reliable and respected scholarly support. It benefits from numerous historic photographs of the subjects. While it is not directly related to Michigan history, the experiences of the subjects of this work bear a great deal of similarity to Michigan’s own fur-trade, Metis women such as Magdelaine LaFramboise and Agatha de LaVigne. Mackinnon’s approach that Metis culture predated Red River culture will resonate with many Great Lakes descendants of early French fur traders and their Indigenous wives. James LaForest Editor, Voyageur Heritage Press (Voyageurheritage.com) Independent Researcher Michael S. Nassaney, ed. Fort St. Joseph Revealed: The Historical Archaeology of a Fur Trading Post. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. Pp. 292. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth: $90.00. When most folks think about ongoing archaeological studies dealing with historical fortifications or towns, Plymouth Plantation, Colonial 184 The Michigan Historical Review Williamsburg/Jamestown, and Fort Michilimackinac usually come to mind. Those sites, studied since the 1950s or before, have hitherto represented the best of major, long-term professional archaeological studies of the historic colonial and frontier eras in America. Now, added to that list of uniquely important historic archaeological sites, is Michael Nassaney’s Fort St. Joseph, a predominately French eighteenth-century fur trading outpost in Southwestern Michigan. There are many aspects that make Nassaney’s study both unique and scientifically important, and three in particular stand out: the manner in which Fort St. Joseph was discovered; the cooperation and unification between an academic entity (Western Michigan University) and the city of Niles; and the awesome interplay among the populations involved that make this scientific project the success it has been and will continue to be. For more than a century, theories existed as to the location of Fort St. Joseph. Fortunately, local collectors shared finds gleaned from years of walking riverbanks, but, alas, due to the construction of a dam on the St. Joseph River, river levels heightened the depth of ground water, leading many persons—lay and professional—to conclude the site no longer existed! That is, until Nassaney, a professor of anthropology at WMU, installed a well point dewatering system to lower the ground water table, and, as they say, the rest is history. Rarely has there ever been a scientific archaeological endeavor—save perhaps Stuart Streuver’s former Koster project in Illinois—that involved and, indeed, depended on the cooperation of academics, their students, and the local citizenry to obtain the kind and type of dynamic success Nassaney and his colleagues have been able to achieve. It is truly a lesson for other academics as well as city officials and laypersons. Building on a successful mix of professionals and laypersons alike, tourism, historical interpretation, and successful academic careers have been launched—and perhaps even more importantly, the Fort St. Joseph Archaeological Project has contributed greatly to a better, fuller understanding of European/Native American...

The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen

Reviewed by: The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen Jonathan Good valerie hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World – and Globalization Began. New York: Scribner, 2020. Pp. x, 300; 16 plates. isbn: 978–1501194108. $30. Valerie Hansen is the co-author of Voyages in World History, one of the most popular world history textbooks on the US college market today, and The Year 1000 grows out of that expertise. Its immediate inspiration was Hansen’s realization that the central Asian Turkic Karakhanids took Kashgar (now in Xinjiang, China) in 1006, a year after the Liao and Song dynasties ratified the treaty of Chanyuan—both of which occurred right around the time that a party of Norse visited the island of Newfoundland. Hansen, a Professor of History at Yale University, wondered if the three events were related—and eventually realized that regional expansion lay behind all of them. The year 1000 thus represents the dawning of the first great age of globalization, a time when preexisting trade networks both strengthened and came into contact with each other, and an object could, theoretically, traverse the entire globe by being passed from one set of human hands to another. This situation prevailed for roughly the next 500 years, before being displaced by a new set of patterns inaugurated by state-sponsored Early Modern European expansion. Hansen opens with the Norse voyage to Vinland c. 1000, recorded in certain Viking sagas and archaeologically confirmed in 1960. In that year, Helge and Anne Ingstad excavated L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland and discovered objects of unmistakable Viking provenance, including evidence of iron smelting, technology unknown to the native inhabitants of North America. Native Americans certainly had their own trading networks, however, such as those of the Mayans, the Mississippians, the Ancestral Puebloans of New Mexico, or the Wari of Peru which, when they were not exchanging goods, certainly shared knowledge. Returning to Europe, Hansen details the Vikings’ expansion eastwards and their founding of the Rus, centered on Kiev, and its trade in furs and slaves—occasionally with the Volga Bulgars and Khazar Khanate further east, more often with the Abbasid Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire to the south. The latter of these successfully converted the Rus to Orthodox Christianity, making trade between the two polities much easier, and indeed, Islam and Roman Christianity also made significant conversions around the year 1000, with the concomitant expansion of political alliances and trading networks. One of these extended over the Sahara Desert to Mali (whose goldfields eventually made its Muslim ruler Mansa Musa ‘the world’s richest man’ [p. 113]), another down the east coast of Africa to the Great Zimbabwe. Islam only went so far in Central Asia, however, before it ran into Buddhism, the religion of the Liao Dynasty (of Mongolia and Manchuria), Korea, and Japan, and a major influence on Song Dynasty China—and [End Page 70] the basis for another major trading bloc. The sea lanes of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, which connected places as far apart as Madagascar, Chola Kingdom India, Angkor in Indochina, Srivijaya on the island of Sumatra, and the islands of Polynesia allowed for the exchange of all kinds of goods, especially spices and aromatics. But it was China that was ‘the most globalized place on Earth’ (p. 199). Its large population happily consumed all sorts of goods from overseas, while its own products (especially pottery) and superior technology were in heavy demand elsewhere. Hansen never really explains why the first great era of globalization should have arisen around the year 1000. The Medieval Warm Period (leading to the ‘cerealization’ of northern Europe) may have played a role, although she notes that such climatological good fortune was not shared by all regions (thus the collapse of the Classic Maya due to drought). Perhaps it is simply a coincidence that such a nice, round number as ‘1000’ witnessed what was probably bound to happen at some point anyway. A strength of the book is Hansen’s insistence that globalization, then as now, produces definite winners and losers; the creation of what Amy Chua called ‘market-dominant minorities’ (World on Fire: How...

Relationships and the Creation of Colonial Landscapes in the Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade

In this article, I draw inspiration from La Donna Harris and Jaqueline Wasilewski's notions of relationships and dynamic inclusivity, as laid out in their 2004 article, to interpret the late eighteenth-century fur trade landscape of the western Great Lakes region. Using documentary sources and archaeological investigations conducted at a 1790s trade post known as Réaume's Leaf River Post, I first consider the role of foodways in the creation of ambivalent relationships between Ojibwe people and fur traders. I further argue that these relationships extended to the broader landscape (and waterscape), emerging out of contested sharing of knowledge, practices, and geographic imaginaries. I contend that Harris and Wasilewski's notions of relationships and dynamic inclusivity are useful to decentering colonial narratives in the archaeology of the fur trade.

The Upholders of Anthropocentrism and Biocentrism in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins

As the bedrocks of the French imperialism in North America, the fur trade and the logging industry led to a drastic depletion in the populations of fur-bearing animals, particularly that of the beaver, and massive deforestation on the continent. Examining Annie Proulx’s Barkskins from an ecocritical point of view, this article seeks to investigate the novel’s representations of the detrimental impact of anthropocentrism. We will show that the prevalence of anthropocentrism in New France resulted in the over-harvesting of beavers to procure precious pelts for European markets, where fur clothes were in vogue during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this scenario, French merchants went from rags to riches at the cost of losing myriads of beavers. On the other hand, our study will also address the indirect endorsement of biocentrism by the indigenous North Americans, who refrained from inflicting irreparable damage on nature in a vast territory in which the European settlers relentlessly cut ancient trees to make their fortunes. Hence, the focus of this article is the distinction between the perspectives on the natural world held by French settlers and Native Americans in Barkskins.

The Merchant John Askin: Furs and Empire at British Michilimackinac by Justin M. Carroll

Reviewed by: The Merchant John Askin: Furs and Empire at British Michilimackinac by Justin M. Carroll Matthew Lawrence Daley The Merchant John Askin: Furs and Empire at British Michilimackinac. By Justin M. Carroll. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017. 262 pp. Paper $39.95, ISBN 978-1-61186-261-4.) The work of John Askin as deputy commissary and later as a fur trader offers visitors to Colonial Michilimackinac at the tip of Michigan's Lower Peninsula a view into a distant outpost within British North America. Justin Carroll's book notes that his continual presence in the accounts of the region is not new, and that his continual presence offers an opportunity to better examine the region of the eighteenth century. His work builds on a key argument from Richard White's The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) that within the Native American and French relationship, minor actors could have a tremendous role in shaping colonial policy. Applying this to British colonial authority, Carroll argues that while Askin is a known figure, his ability to influence events has not been fully considered. By [End Page 121] moving Askin from the background to a central role within Britain's struggle to assert authority on the region, the new position allows a greater view of how a relatively minor middleman could influence events beyond his essential position. (xviii–xix) The work's tight focus examines three key areas that Askin utilized to build is operation: a close relationship with the British military; the expansion of colonial infrastructure such as farms, ships, and depots; and the role of family both through marriage and relationships. Though these provided avenues for expansion, they were also perilous ones that mirrored larger colonial instability. Carroll's book consists of five chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue covering the years from 1758 to 1781, the most active years of Askin's involvement at Michilimackinac. The gap between French and British authority from 1758 to 1764 as the British took control of the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley had ramifications in the fur trade as Askin experienced bankruptcy from disruptions caused by colonial policy. This experience would lead him to his deputy commissary position in 1764. He formed relationships with the military and addressed the need for investments in farms to bolster British colonial administration. The third and fourth chapters address Askin's relationships, both within his business and personal life, as they extended his reach after departing the administrative role at Michilimackinac. The importance of his local knowledge and his multiethnic relationships expanded his reach, and as the years 1774 to 1779 demonstrated, the critical relationship Askin fostered with Michilimackinac's new commander, Arent DePeyster. The impact of the American Revolution would undo much of Askin's work, as would further changes within British diplomatic and colonial administrations––much as it did earlier in his career. The Merchant John Askin, despite its situation within the expansive realm of British North America during a turbulent period, remains tightly focused on both a limited time frame and overall scope. Michilimackinac's importance within the Great Lakes region is indeed touched upon, but within such a short work it could do more to ground the reader in the larger context of the trading and political framework of the time. A further critique concerns Native Americans who are repeatedly described as being critical to Askin's operations and British authority yet remain largely out of sight as off-stage influencers. At the same time, Carroll's assertion of Askin's seemingly ever-present role in events of his era is more than borne out by historian Tiya Miles's The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City [End Page 122] of the Straits (New York: The New Press, 2017), which situates his role within the slave trade on both sides of the river. Carroll's book offers valuable insight into the internal workings of the fur trade within the Great Lakes region during a critical period. Due to its length, this is an excellent work to engage students, particularly when...

Diminished Returns

Traplines have come to be regulated by governments which speaks to colonial dispossession and changing values regarding the land, wildlife, and Indigenous peoples. During the fur trade era, Indigenous trappers became decreasingly autonomous economic actors and further declines occurred in the twentieth century as fur trading became marginalized. In the mid-twentieth century, Ontario and other Canadian jurisdictions embarked on a path of increased regulations of game and the assignment of traplines to First Nation harvesters. This article explores the roots and outcomes of the Registered Trapline System in Northern Ontario, and explores how, since the 1940s, a pattern of fluctuating agency is apparent, with shifting degrees of natural resources management that recently has seen some benefits for Indigenous trappers.

The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits by Tiya Miles

Reviewed by: The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits by Tiya Miles Dana Elizabeth Weiner Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits. New York: The New Press, 2017. 352 pp. $18.99 (paper). With The Dawn of Detroit, Tiya Miles eloquently uncovers slavery's hidden traces in the Old Northwest. Miles depicts the Detroit River region from the late colonial era through the early republic as an important international, imperial, and cultural border, as well as a border between slavery and freedom. This book makes essential contributions to the study of slavery and race in the Midwest in lyrical prose. Through tireless research, Miles has located sources about early enslaved people in Detroit. This available documentation facilitates greater understanding about Black slavery there, even though the enslavement of Indigenous people was more common. The introduction sketches continuities between past and current race and class discrimination in Detroit. Miles expands knowledge about unfree people of color in early America as she closely links Indigenous dispossession and slave labor. As she explains, bound African and indigenous workers built Detroit and its economy, resisted slavery, and moved across the porous international water boundary into and out of Canada. Unfree people pushed back against exploitation there, creating lives for themselves. Settlers' labor needs gave bondspeople some ability to negotiate work terms. Miles puts unfree laborers at her story's core, joining an expanding historiography of North American slavery that recognizes how the institution pervaded the continent, including Canada. She claims that historians have [End Page 210] granted insufficient attention to Detroit's enslaved population; she, in contrast, chronicles the city's history with full attention to bondspeople's roles and impacts there. Miles adeptly addresses their struggles to protect their bodies and their freedom, as well as to enhance their citizenship rights. As she also explains, Detroiters' allegiances shift ed over the course of many years from Anishinaabe, to colonial French, and then to British Canada. They eventually assumed American loyalties. Detroit's population soon diversified to include immigrants from the British Isles, enslaved Africans, and migrants from other British colonies—and later from other parts of the U.S. Chapter 1 focuses on the establishment of local slavery for processing furs, as well as on the transition from French to British colonial rule. Miles places chattel slavery at the center of Detroit's economy beginning with the fur trade, arguing that both institutions exploited animal and human bodies. In this chapter and later ones, Miles demonstrates how gender affected bondspeople's lives. Chapter 2 tells of enslaved people under British and then American rule in the Revolutionary War era. The link between peltry and slavery persisted, and a fluid form of slaveholding was common among elite British merchants in the 1760s and 1770s. Indeed, Detroit slaveholders acquired even more slaves during the war. Miles observes extensive sexual abuse of both Native American and African-descended bondswomen, even as some Indigenous women married into Detroit's elite and led privileged lives. Chapter 3 examines slaveholders' struggles to maintain slavery in the nominally free Northwest Territory as well as enslaved people's use of the law to promote freedom. Only through concerted action did Detroit slaveholders keep the institution alive. after the Revolutionary War, Detroiters continued acquiring Indigenous land and enslaving people. Most enslaved people's lives altered little despite postwar changes in government. The 1790s saw a small uptick in the enslavement of African-descended people in the city, but Native American slaves still outnumbered Black ones. Chapter 4 reveals how Detroit began becoming American in the early nineteenth century. This affected enslaved people's ability to access the legal system; they could use new legal resources under the American regime, and—given the Northwest Ordinance—slavery had only tenuous protections there under American law. Enslavement in Detroit and across the river in Canada continued, despite bondspeople's resistance. Geography, however, facilitated fugitives' escapes. Miles carefully studies both the city's devastating [End Page 211] fire in 1805 and the 1807 Michigan Supreme Court case, Denison v. Tucker. That case aimed to secure the...

More Than Just a Missionary: The Jesuits, the Wyandot, and Colonial Crises in French Detroit, 1728-1751

The Michigan Historical Review 46:1 (Spring 2020): 1-28©2020 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved More Than Just a Missionary: The Jesuits, the Wyandot, and Colonial Crises in French Detroit, 1728-1751 By Eric Toups Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit was perhaps the most important French outpost in the pays d’en haut from its establishment in 1701 to the British conquest of New France in 1763. The fort acted as a preeminent staging ground for the western fur trade and an important site for EuroNative alliances and negotiations far beyond immediate oversight by colonial officials at Quebec or Montreal. Hundreds of Odawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot settled along the banks of the Detroit River between Lakes Superior and Erie, near to the fort and the resident French habitants, soldiers, and missionaries. Maintaining indigenous support for, and attachment to, the French required constant diplomacy and an uninterrupted flow of gifts and supplies to grease the wheels of crosscultural alliance. Many of the alliance’s most serious crises, most notably a 1747 plan organized by Wyandot dissidents led by Nicholas Orontony to destroy the fort and expel the French, erupted from the important Native and French joint settlement. Key to Detroit’s operation as a critical nexus of diplomacy and cooperation was the presence of several Jesuit priests, most importantly Armand de la Richardie. These Jesuits played significant roles in the wideranging relationships and events that arose in the interior in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.1 Histories of the Jesuits as pivotal agents of empire are numerous and comprehensive for mid-seventeenth1 For an overview of seventeenth-century Jesuits and their actions among the Huron/Wendat, see Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Montreal and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), especially 226-297. For the importance of Jesuits to alliance in the seventeenth century, see Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64, trans. Jane Brierly (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993), 166168 . See also Kathryn Magee Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed: A History of the SeventeenthCentury Wendat People (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 101-102. 2 The Michigan Historical Review century New France, but relatively unexplored beyond the temporal and geographic scope of Quebec’s “heroic age.” The nature and extent of French North America changed enormously during the eighteenth century, and Jesuit actions and goals changed with it. As French military and commercial endeavors pushed into the pays d’en haut, the colonial project changed dramatically in a geographic, cultural, and political landscape far removed from the St. Lawrence River. The French increasingly committed to their role as mediators in alliances with and among the disparate sovereign tribes of the western Great Lakes. Historians examining the eighteenth-century pays d’en haut acknowledge the Jesuit presence, of course, but the Black Robes’ significance and dayto -day operations as ambassadors has not been closely analyzed. Exceptional studies have typically focused on military officials, secular diplomats, French fur traders, indigenous women, and tribal headmen while neglecting the ever-present missionaries. Jesuits adapted to political realities far removed from the St. Lawrence River as they pushed into the west. The unchallenged Jesuits of the early seventeenth century could monopolize French interactions with the Iroquois and Wendat tribes, but the presence in the eighteenth century of rivals like French military officers and an imperial program that often conflicted with the Jesuits’ priorities changed their interactions with French colonial authorities and sovereign tribes. The Black Robes’ missionary goals frequently interlocked with and often contradicted French imperial and colonial goals (themselves often at variance with one another). Jesuit engagement with indigenous groups and individuals was most important at the intersection of disjointed colonial projects.2 The Jesuits are in no danger of being forgotten or neglected in present-day historical narratives. However, historians of eighteenthcentury New France, Native history, and French colonialism elsewhere tend to narrowly assess the Jesuits as cultural arbiters due to their objections to indigenous practices and attempts to impose their moral vision onto the colonial and indigenous communities.3 The bulk of the 2 Richard White...

More Than Just a Missionary: The Jesuits, the Wyandot, and Colonial Crises in French Detroit, 1728-1751

The Michigan Historical Review 46:1 (Spring 2020): 1-28©2020 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved More Than Just a Missionary: The Jesuits, the Wyandot, and Colonial Crises in French Detroit, 1728-1751 By Eric Toups Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit was perhaps the most important French outpost in the pays d’en haut from its establishment in 1701 to the British conquest of New France in 1763. The fort acted as a preeminent staging ground for the western fur trade and an important site for EuroNative alliances and negotiations far beyond immediate oversight by colonial officials at Quebec or Montreal. Hundreds of Odawa, Ojibwa, Potawatomi, and Wyandot settled along the banks of the Detroit River between Lakes Superior and Erie, near to the fort and the resident French habitants, soldiers, and missionaries. Maintaining indigenous support for, and attachment to, the French required constant diplomacy and an uninterrupted flow of gifts and supplies to grease the wheels of crosscultural alliance. Many of the alliance’s most serious crises, most notably a 1747 plan organized by Wyandot dissidents led by Nicholas Orontony to destroy the fort and expel the French, erupted from the important Native and French joint settlement. Key to Detroit’s operation as a critical nexus of diplomacy and cooperation was the presence of several Jesuit priests, most importantly Armand de la Richardie. These Jesuits played significant roles in the wideranging relationships and events that arose in the interior in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.1 Histories of the Jesuits as pivotal agents of empire are numerous and comprehensive for mid-seventeenth1 For an overview of seventeenth-century Jesuits and their actions among the Huron/Wendat, see Bruce G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Montreal and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), especially 226-297. For the importance of Jesuits to alliance in the seventeenth century, see Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64, trans. Jane Brierly (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1993), 166168 . See also Kathryn Magee Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed: A History of the SeventeenthCentury Wendat People (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), 101-102. 2 The Michigan Historical Review century New France, but relatively unexplored beyond the temporal and geographic scope of Quebec’s “heroic age.” The nature and extent of French North America changed enormously during the eighteenth century, and Jesuit actions and goals changed with it. As French military and commercial endeavors pushed into the pays d’en haut, the colonial project changed dramatically in a geographic, cultural, and political landscape far removed from the St. Lawrence River. The French increasingly committed to their role as mediators in alliances with and among the disparate sovereign tribes of the western Great Lakes. Historians examining the eighteenth-century pays d’en haut acknowledge the Jesuit presence, of course, but the Black Robes’ significance and dayto -day operations as ambassadors has not been closely analyzed. Exceptional studies have typically focused on military officials, secular diplomats, French fur traders, indigenous women, and tribal headmen while neglecting the ever-present missionaries. Jesuits adapted to political realities far removed from the St. Lawrence River as they pushed into the west. The unchallenged Jesuits of the early seventeenth century could monopolize French interactions with the Iroquois and Wendat tribes, but the presence in the eighteenth century of rivals like French military officers and an imperial program that often conflicted with the Jesuits’ priorities changed their interactions with French colonial authorities and sovereign tribes. The Black Robes’ missionary goals frequently interlocked with and often contradicted French imperial and colonial goals (themselves often at variance with one another). Jesuit engagement with indigenous groups and individuals was most important at the intersection of disjointed colonial projects.2 The Jesuits are in no danger of being forgotten or neglected in present-day historical narratives. However, historians of eighteenthcentury New France, Native history, and French colonialism elsewhere tend to narrowly assess the Jesuits as cultural arbiters due to their objections to indigenous practices and attempts to impose their moral vision onto the colonial and indigenous communities.3 The bulk of the 2 Richard White...