The papers in this book focus on themes which have been near the centre of fur trade scholarship: the identification of Indian motivations; the degree to which Indians were discriminating consumers and creative participants; and the extent of Native dependency on the trade. Spanning the period from the seventeenth century up to and including the twentieth, with distinguished authors such as J. Arthur Ray and Toby Morantz, The Subarctic Fur Trade will help scholars become more fully aware of the issues concerned with Native economic history.

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 He challenges, with a rich variety of historical documents, the frequently articulated view that there is a general cultural continuity from the pre-contact period to the twentieth century.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.

First published in 1974, this best-selling book was lauded by Choice as 'an important, ground-breaking study of the Assiniboine and western Cree Indians who inhabited southern Manitoba and Saskatchewan' and 'essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Canadian west before 1870.' Indians in the Fur Trade makes extensive use of previously unpublished Hudson's Bay Company archival materials and other available data to reconstruct the cultural geography of the West at the time of early contact, illustrating many of the rapid cultural transformations with maps and diagrams. Now with a new introduction and an update on sources, it will continue to be of great use to students and scholars of Native and Canadian history.

In this comprehensive history, David J. Weber draws on Spanish, Mexican, and American sources to describe the development of the Taos trade and the early penetration of the area by French and American trappers. Within this borderlands region, colorful characters such as Ewing Young, Kit Carson, Peg-leg Smith, and the Robidoux brothers pioneered new trails to the Colorado Basin, the Gila River, and the Pacific and contributed to the wealth that flowed east along the Santa Fe Trail.

Commerce by a Frozen Sea is a cross-cultural study of a century of contact between North American native peoples and Europeans. During the eighteenth century, the natives of the Hudson Bay lowlands and their European trading partners were brought together by an increasingly popular trade in furs, destined for the hat and fur markets of Europe. Native Americans were the sole trappers of furs, which they traded to English and French merchants. The trade gave Native Americans access to new European technologies that were integrated into Indian lifeways. What emerges from this detailed exploration is a story of two equal partners involved in a mutually beneficial trade. Drawing on more than seventy years of trade records from the archives of the Hudson's Bay Company, economic historians Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis critique and confront many of the myths commonly held about the nature and impact of commercial trade. Extensively documented are the ways in which natives transformed the trading environment and determined the range of goods offered to them. Natives were effective bargainers who demanded practical items such as firearms, kettles, and blankets as well as luxuries like cloth, jewelry, and tobacco—goods similar to those purchased by Europeans. Surprisingly little alcohol was traded. Indeed, Commerce by a Frozen Sea shows that natives were industrious people who achieved a standard of living above that of most workers in Europe. Although they later fell behind, the eighteenth century was, for Native Americans, a golden age.

This analysis of the fur trade carried on by the Hudson's Bay Company and its competitors in northern Canada from 1870 to 1945 includes material on its relations with Indians, the state of the fur market, activities of the Department of Indian Affairs, and details of othertrading companies such as Lamson and Hubbard, Northern Trading Company and Revillon Freres.

In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics--the politics of ethnocide--played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald's "National Dream." It was a dream that came at great expense: the present disparity in health and economic well-being between First Nations and non-Native populations, and the lingering racism and misunderstanding that permeates the national consciousness to this day. " Clearing the Plains is a tour de force that dismantles and destroys the view that Canada has a special claim to humanity in its treatment of indigenous peoples. Daschuk shows how infectious disease and state-supported starvation combined to create a creeping, relentless catastrophe that persists to the present day. The prose is gripping, the analysis is incisive, and the narrative is so chilling that it leaves its reader stunned and disturbed. For days after reading it, I was unable to shake a profound sense of sorrow. This is fearless, evidence-driven history at its finest." -Elizabeth A. Fenn, author of Pox Americana "Required reading for all Canadians." -Candace Savage, author of A Geography of Blood "Clearly written, deeply researched, and properly contextualized history...Essential reading for everyone interested in the history of indigenous North America." -J.R. McNeill, author of Mosquito Empires