This book describes how a long generation of founding French Canadians shaped the Pacific Northwest.

Jean Barman was the recipient of the 2014 George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. In French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest, Jean Barman rewrites the history of the Pacific Northwest from the perspective of French Canadians attracted by the fur economy, the indigenous women whose presence in their lives encouraged them to stay, and their descendants. Joined in this distant setting by Quebec paternal origins, the French language, and Catholicism, French Canadians comprised Canadiens from Quebec, Iroquois from the Montreal area, and métis combining Canadien and indigenous descent. For half a century, French Canadians were the largest group of newcomers to this region extending from Oregon and Washington east into Montana and north through British Columbia. Here, they facilitated the early overland crossings, drove the fur economy, initiated non-wholly-indigenous agricultural settlement, eased relations with indigenous peoples, and ensured that, when the region was divided in 1846, the northern half would go to Britain, giving today’s Canada its Pacific shoreline.

Through a detailed analysis of their unique occupational culture, Making the Voyageur World reexamines the French Canadian workers who dominated the fur trade industry and became iconic images of North American lore.

The Pacific Northwest Metis paved the way for Oregon-bound settlers by linking the vastly different cultures of the natives and the whites. Children of the Fur Trade recalls the history of this unique people.

The French and Indian War opened up the fur trade for Scots. They developed their own "model" of country marriage that evolved into a horizontal "clan" system stretching across the continent. Scots "married-in" to Native communities and encouraged other employees, including the French Canadians and Hawaiian kanaka laborers and their own Scots-Indian sons to do likewise. They married their daughters to newcomers, thereby bringing them into the network as well. This pattern can be identified by researching fur trade genealogies. Over time dowries replaced bride prices and marriage became a formal affair, written contract, before a justice of the peace or in a church rather than an oral agreement.European fathers began to employ ideological institutions like schools and church which taught their daughter to act according to social standards such as the "Cult of Domesticity." Native women had had a long history of adapting European trade goods into Native fashion and altering their traditional clothing styles to accommodate new lifeways, but now the daughters were expected to dress according to their European social status. The daughters of the country were now seen as assimilated and to have "married-out" of their Indian cultures and into the Euro American culture. In order to move Indian lands into the trade network and thereby the public sphere these mixed-blood women were considered assimilated and these European-Indian marriages were deemed legal and binding Americans traveled across the North American continent expecting to find an empty wilderness in which to plant their own version of the Puritans "city on the hill." They took with them ideologies about the frontier, wilderness, and Indians, especially the "Indian Princess." Captivity narratives had been used by the Puritans to establish social conformity and their morality code continued to permeate American lives 200 years later as thousands left the United States for the Pacific Northwest. Rather than a barren wilderness they found an already established agricultural community operated by the London based Hudson's Bay Company. This "imagined community" had schools, churches, a cemetery, a lumber mill, produced grain and had a mill, as well as orchards, gardens, and livestock.

Intimacy and family have been pillars of the North American fur trade since its conception. This is especially true for fur trading companies centered in Canada, specifically the Hudson0́9s Bay Company and the Northwest Company. Kinship ties formed through intimate relations between European fur traders and indigenous women allowed the fur trade to flourish and created an environment for stable, mixed heritage family units to emerge. As mixed heritage children grew into adulthood, they learned to identify with both sides of their parental cultures. However, the connections they formed with each other proved the most valuable and a separate, distinct culture emerged. In Canada this group of people are known as the M©♭tis, a French word meaning mixed. The fur trade continued its move west and eventually reached the Pacific Ocean. This region known as the Pacific Northwest was the farthest removed from fur trade headquarters in Montreal and was home to many different Indigenous Nations. These nations, in combination with fur traders many of whom where M©♭tis, also created families and a new culture once again came into being. It shared aspects of M©♭tis, European, and indigenous cultures, but was something distinctly new. Through the examination of education, kinship ties, language and borders, this groups understanding of self and community came into focus.

Two centuries ago, many hundreds of Iroquois – principally from what is now Kahnawà:ke – left home without leaving behind their ways of life. Recruited to man the large canoes that transported trade goods and animal pelts from and to Montreal, some Iroquois soon returned, while others were enticed ever further west by the rapidly expanding fur trade. Recounting stories of Indigenous self-determination and self-sufficiency, Iroquois in the West tracks four clusters of travellers across time, place, and generations: a band that settled in Montana, another ranging across the American West, others opting for British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, and a group in Alberta who were evicted when their longtime home became Jasper National Park. Reclaiming slivers of Iroquois knowledge, anecdotes, and memories from the shadows of the past, Jean Barman draws on sources that range from descendants' recollections to fur-trade and government records to travellers' accounts. What becomes clear is that, no matter the places or the circumstances, the Iroquois never abandoned their senses of self. Opening up new ways of thinking about Indigenous peoples through time, Iroquois in the West shares the fascinating adventures of a people who have waited over two hundred years to be heard.