Using the accounts of fur traders, explorers, officials, and missionaries, Colin Yerbury documents the profound changes that swept over the Athapaskan-speaking people of the Canadian subarctic following European contact. He challenges, with a rich variety of historical documents, the frequently articulated view that there is a general cultural continuity from the pre-contact period to the twentieth century. Leaving to the domain of the archaeologists the pre-historic period when all the people of the vast area from approximately 52N to the edge of the tundra and from Hudson Bay to Alaska were hunters, fishers, and gatherers subsisting entirely on native resources, Yerbury focuses on the Protohistoric and Historic Periods. The ecological and sociocultural adaptations of the Athapaskans are explored through the two centuries when they moved from indirect contact to dependency on the Hudson Bay trading posts. For nearly one hundred years prior to 1769 when North West Company traders began to establish trading relationships in the heart of Athapaskan territory, contacts with Europeans were almost entirely indirect, conducted through Chipewyan middlement who jealously guarded their privileged access to the posts. The boundaries of the indirect trade areas fluctuated owing to intertribal rivalries, but generally, the hardships of travel over great distances prevented the Athapaskans from establishing direct contact with the posts. The pattern was only broken by the gradual expansion of the traders themselves into new regions. But, as Yerbury shows, it is a mistake to believe significant sociocultural change only began when posts were established. In fact, technological changes and economic adjustments to facilitate trade had already transformed Athapaskan groups and integrated them into the European commercial system by the opening of the Historic Era. The Early Fur Trade Period (1770-1800) was characterized by local trade centered on a few posts where Indians were simultaneously post hunters, trappers, and traders as well as middlemen. But the following Competitive Trade Period before the amalgamation of the fur companies in 1821 saw ruinous and violent feuding which had devastating effects on traders and natives alike. During these years there were great qualitative changes in the native way of life and the debt system was introduced. Finally, in the Trading Post Dependency Period, monopoly control brought peace and stability to the native population through the formation of trading post bands and trapping parties in the Athapaskan and Mackenzie Districts. This regularization of the trade and proliferation of new commodities represented a further basic transformation in native productive relations, making trade a necessity rather than a supplement to furnishing native livelihoods. By detailing this series of changes, The Subarctic Indians and the Fur Trade, 1680-1860 furthers understanding of how the Hudson's Bay Company and then government officials came to play an increasing role that the Dene themselves now wish to modify drastically.

The twelve essays that make up Reflections on Native-Newcomer Relations illustrate the development in thought by one of Canada's leading scholars in the field of Native history - J.R. Miller. The collection, comprising pieces that were written over a period spanning nearly two decades, deals with the evolution of historical writing on First Nations and M?tis, methodological issues in the writing of Native-newcomer history, policy matters including residential schools, and linkages between the study of Native-newcomer relations and academic governance and curricular matters. Half of the essays appear here in print for the first time, and all use archival, published, and oral history evidence to throw light on Native-Newcomer relations. Miller argues that the nature of the relationship between Native peoples and newcomers in Canada has varied over time, based on the reasons the two parties have had for interacting. The relationship deteriorates into attempts to control and coerce Natives during periods in which newcomers do not perceive them as directly useful, and it improves when the two parties have positive reasons for cooperation. Reflections on Native-Newcomer Relations opens up for discussion a series of issues in Native-newcomer history. It addresses all the trends in the discipline of the past two decades and never shies from showing their contradictions, as well as those in the author's own thinking as he matured as a scholar.

"An important work of scholarship, with powerful, concise, and objective insights into the complicated history of alcohol use among Native American peoples. Impeccably researched, cogently argued and clearly written, Peter Mancall's book is both an eye-opener for the lay reader and an invaluable resource for the expert."— Michael Dorris, author of The Broken Cord: A Family's Ongoing Struggle with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Alcohol abuse has killed and impoverished American Indians since the seventeenth century, when European settlers began trading rum for furs. In the first book to probe the origins of this ongoing social crisis, Peter C. Mancall explores the liquor trade's devastating impact on the Indian communities of colonial America. Mancall recounts how English settlers quickly found a market for alcohol among the Indians, and traffic in rum became a prominent source of revenue for the British Empire. In spite of the colonists' growing awareness that some Indians abused alcohol and that drinking threatened the stability of countless Indian villages already decimated by European diseases, they expanded the liquor trade into virtually every Indian community from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. In response, Indians created one of the most important temperance movements in American history, a movement that was nevertheless unable to halt the lucrative commerce. The author follows the trail of rum from the West Indian producers to the colonial distributors and on to the Indian consumers in the eastern woodlands. To discover why Indians participated in the trade and why they experienced such a powerful desire for alcohol, he addresses current medical views on alcoholism and reexamines the colonial era as a time when Indians were forming new strategies for survival in a world that had been radically changed. Finally, Mancall compares Indian drinking in New France and New Spain with that in the British colonies. Forever shattering the stereotype of the drunken Indian, Mancall offers a powerful indictment of English participation in the liquor trade and a new awareness or the trade's tragic cost for the American Indians.

Barely a hundred and fifty years have passed since the first white people arrived at the upper Yukon River basin. During this time many non-Natives have come and gone and some have stayed. Ken Coates examines the interaction between Native people and whit

First Peoples in Canada provides an overview of all the Aboriginal groups in Canada. Incorporating the latest research in anthropology, archaeology, ethnography and history, this new edition describes traditional ways of life, traces cultural changes that resulted from contacts with the Europeans, and examines the controversial issues of land claims and self-government that now affect Aboriginal societies. Most importantly, this generously illustrated edition incorporates a Nativist perspective in the analysis of Aboriginal cultures.

Companion volume to earlier work: Skyscrapers hide the heavens. Previously published articles are concerned with developments in the various regions of Canada from the days of New France to the present. They deal with the early military alliances, relations at the time of the fur trade, civil Indian policy, treaties and reserves, the Northwest Rebellion, the impact of religion and agricultural and educational policies, the emergence of native political organization, differing attitudes towards the environment, and the struggle for aboriginal rights and contemporary land claims disputes. Introduction provides an overview of the history of Indian-white relations over five centuries.