Colonialism, Waterways, and Relationships in the Late Eighteenth-Century Fur Trade

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recent Colonial Archaeological Research in the American Midcontinent" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the late eighteenth century, the Mississippi Headwaters and Great Lakes area bustled with mobile European- and métis-descended traders hoping to make a trade with local Indigenous peoples. Often referred to as “the fur trade,” this willful exchange provided a stage for sets of relationships to be established, negotiated, and contested on a daily basis, including connections to the landscape. Waterways were particularly important in this context, as they provided the main means of travel, permitting traders to spread their posts and influence across the landscape of the interior. As such, waterways played an often-underestimated role in the creation of contested landscapes and social relationships. In this paper, I use documentary sources as well as data from two archaeological collections (Réaume’s Leaf River Post, MN, and underwater collections currently housed at the Royal Ontario Museum) to consider the ambivalent nature of intercultural relationships. The latter arose when colonial ideals and assumptions informed daily practices and the geographic imaginary of traders. I argue that ambivalent relationships also extended to the broader landscape (and waterscape), emerging out of the traders’ mobile lifestyle (and associated labor practices, risks, and anxieties) as well as contested sharing of knowledge, practices, and geographic imaginaries.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recent Colonial Archaeological Research in the American Midcontinent   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38050.0