The Northwest is our Mother: Fur Trade Archaeology and the Erasure of Métis History in the West

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Métis are a post-contact Indigenous people who emerged from early encouters between Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous fur traders in what would become the Canadian west. The imagining of the Canadian West by historians and archaeologists, however, has perpetuated myths around early explorers "opening" the West to settlement by Europeans, erasing Métis history and presence. In this paper, I use fur trade history and archaeology as an example of how whiteness is centered in the creation of frontier myths in Canada. I re-read the archaeological work of several fur trading posts along the North Saskatchewan River with a Métis lens, shifting the focus from the small number of European to the large number of Métis families who lived, worked, and made a home at thes locations. This recentering of Indigenous narratives in a predominantly white-focused archaeology serves to critique the ways in which frontier myths of the West are perpetuated.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• What We Make of the West: Historical Archaeologists Versus Frontier Mythologies

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow