The Eighteenth-century Fur Trade: A Colonial Endeavor?

Summary

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.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Breaking Boundaries: Exploring Colonialism in the Modern World and Beyond

Keywords

Spatial Coverage