"The South Traders Carry All Before them": Colonialism, Waterways and Relationships in Ontario’s Fur Trade

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The so-called "fur trade era" of northern North America was founded on a willful exchange between Indigenous peoples and European or métis-descended merchants. Waterways provided the main means of travel, permitting traders to spread their posts and influence across the landscape of the interior. Yet in its early years the London-based Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) operating in Rupert’s Land made use of water in very different ways from its most direct competitor, the Montreal-based North West Company. In this essay, I examine the ways in which two existing collections from Ontario, one from HBC’s Fort Albany and the other recovered from the French and Winnipeg rivers, inform our understanding of fur-trade era colonial relationships and the diversity of local responses to merchant capitalism. Using a comparative framework, I assess the differences between the two assemblages, in so doing highlighting how the two types of sites provide different glimpses in the ambivalent nature of intercultural relationships as evidenced by the different colonial approaches. I further argue that a perspective that takes into account non-human forces, such as water flows, provide unique opportunities to bring to the fore different facets of human interactions and how they are themselves entangled with non-human things.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24295