{"id":6538,"date":"2016-11-02T15:03:59","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T15:03:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/?post_type=chapter&p=6538"},"modified":"2016-11-02T15:03:59","modified_gmt":"2016-11-02T15:03:59","slug":"8-8-fur-trade-society-and-the-metis","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/chapter\/8-8-fur-trade-society-and-the-metis\/","title":{"raw":"8.8 Fur Trade Society and the M\u00e9tis","rendered":"8.8 Fur Trade Society and the M\u00e9tis"},"content":{"raw":"

[caption id=\"attachment_2084\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]\"Metis<\/a> Figure 8.16 M\u00e9tis style went beyond a mix of European and Aboriginal to produce something distinctive. [Long Description]<\/a> (Painting by Peter Rindisbacher, ca. 1825-26)[\/caption]The dynamic of the northwestern fur trade was different from what was observed in the south and even around the Great Lakes in several ways. One of these was the contrasting patterns of migration. The wintering partners of the NWC and their Montreal-based competitors struggled across hundreds of miles of river, rapids, and portages\u00a0with their long freight canoes in order to reach Lake Superior every spring to hand over their furs and collect new trade goods. Then, after a relatively brief stay, they'd return to the northwest. This ordeal would take the better part of spring and summer, depending on how far into the region their trade post was located. Similarly, the HBC traders in the field after 1775 raced across the North each spring and summer to reach Hudson\u00a0Bay before the ice arrived. Aboriginal people, for their part, might journey long distances once a year to trade at the post before heading back into their home country to, among other things, capture more fur-bearing animals. In other words, the trading post, depending on its size and importance, might be the focus of concentrated activity for a brief part of the year and more or less abandoned at\u00a0other times.\n\nThe larger forts, however, offered a different scenario. Home guards\u00a0were established on or close to their doorstep, a reliably accessible source of labour, food, and intelligence for the Euro-Canadians. For the Aboriginal community itself, proximity to the fort gave them control over which other Aboriginal traders might gain access.\n\nIt was in the context of these two broad types of interaction that a fur trade society emerged. In cases where there was an established home guard, the Europeans and Canadians had to concede\u00a0that their ability to trade was limited. The HBC could\u00a0claim to have a monopoly but so too might\u00a0the Cree home guard. In the late 18th century, when northwestern peoples began to sour toward the traders, the home guard bands constituted an important line of defence: they were allies whether the HBC wanted it to be so or not. The head office in London, however, wanted to keep Aboriginal partners at arm's length and was\u00a0particularly critical of romantic and\/or sexual relations between the personnel and Aboriginal women.\n<\/p>

Country Marriages<\/h2>\nAt the smaller posts farther\u00a0inland, the situation was a little different. From the viewpoint of the European, marrying an Aboriginal trader's daughter (or wife or sister) meant that the band would return reliably each year with new shipments of furs; from the perspective of Aboriginal people, intermarriage ensured privileged access to European products. Aboriginal women also brought with them skills necessary to succeed in the fur trade and the northern environment. They manufactured snowshoes, moccasins, tents, mitts, and other goods without which the European trader would do badly -- if not perish. Of course, they also provided a sexual partnership and an intimate human relationship -- without which the European trader might despair. The benefits arising for Aboriginal women were considerable. They had direct and generous (though rarely unimpeded) access to trade goods, many of which were designed to ease\u00a0the work of women in particular: cooking tools, sewing needles, and knives figured high on this list.\n\nThis position as a \u201cwoman in between\u201d gave them status in their Aboriginal community and influence in the European establishments as well. That position might be compromised or eliminated, however, if the fur trader spouse returned to Europe or Canada. In many instances the Aboriginal women remarried other traders, which allowed them to continue in their roles. (In the worst case scenarios in the 19th century senior HBC fur traders introduced European\/Canadian women to fur trade society, a move that decreased the status of Aboriginal women in an increasingly race-conscious environment.)\n\nThe children born of these unions did not follow a singular path. In the 18th century the HBC denounced and forbade liaisons between its servants and the Aboriginal peoples, which may have simply\u00a0driven the practice into the shadows. There were substantial numbers of children at the forts around 1750. By 1800 other solutions were being explored, including resettlement of the offspring. Daughters\u00a0whose fathers were important officers in the HBC were married when they reached adulthood to young European traders. They were thus drawn into a complex kin network that stretched to, perhaps, the Orkney Islands on the one side and the Coppermine River on the other. For reasons associated principally with the structure of year-round life at HBC posts and with the HBC management's efforts to limit intermarriage, these relationships developed along lines that favoured British influences\u00a0in important ways. The offspring of intermarriage involving the HBC, in short, developed identities that were more strongly British than not; some, however, were utterly Aboriginal. But there was not much in the middle.\n\nThe contrast with the Canadien-Aboriginal experience is sharp.\u00a0In the more transiently populated forts on the French\/Montreal frontier around the Great Lakes, it was more likely that Canadien traders would return to Canada annually or after a few years in the field. Relationships under these circumstances were more casually structured and a female partner would sometimes be handed on to a retiring trader's successor. As postings in the West lengthened and particularly as succeeding generations of voyageurs\/winterers became more contemptuous of the soft life in Canada, marriages were more likely to be at least confirmed\u00a0\u00e0 <\/em>\u00a0la fa\u00e7on du pays <\/em>(in the custom of the country). As the influence of the clergy in the West increased, clergymen sometimes also formalized them further with conversion rites and the sacrament of marriage.\n\nIn the French and then the post-Conquest Montrealers' posts, intermarriage and miscegnation occurred regularly enough to become a concern for both priests and managers.\u00a0There were so many offspring (and widows and abandoned wives) of traders living in and around forts from Detroit north through Michilimackinac, Fort William, and onto the Plains that the NWC was regularly faced with requests for support when its men\u00a0left the field. The Catholic clergy played an important role in the socialization of the M\u00e9tis <\/strong>(\"mixed-blood\")\u00a0children and by\u00a0the late 1700s there were sufficient numbers -- a cultural critical mass -- to generate\u00a0a distinct group of people.[footnote]Jacqueline Peterson, \u201cMany roads to Red River: M\u00e9tis genesis in the Great Lakes region, 1680-1815,\u201d The New Peoples: Being and becoming M\u00e9tis in North America<\/em>, Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer Brown, eds. (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985), 37-72.[\/footnote]\n

Fur Trade Dialects<\/h2>\nA sure sign of the emergence of a self-sustaining culture was the appearance around 1800 of a M\u00e9tis language,\u00a0Michif<\/strong>, which mainly combined French nouns with Cree verb phrases. (This was an almost unique phenomenon in North America which, outside of the Russian-Aleut communities in Alaska, constitutes the only true \"mixed language,\" as opposed to a trading dialect or a pidgin. By contrast,\u00a0Bungee\u00a0<\/strong>arose around the English-speaking settlements of Red River, layering elements of Anishinaabe\/Ojibwa atop a substantial foundation of English and Gaelic to create what linguists call a \"creole.\")\u00a0 Michif, along with a distinctive style of dress, manner of living, and awareness of shared interests, set the M\u00e9tis apart from their Aboriginal and European cousins and sent them down a path toward nationhood in their own right. Between 1800 and 1820, the M\u00e9tis advanced their own economic interests as carters, voyageurs, farmers, bison hunters, trappers, and manufacturers of pemmican. Their great technological contribution to Western life -- the Red River cart<\/strong> -- enabled the M\u00e9tis to freight large quantities of pemmican and trade goods across the open prairie and even across rivers, something that was beyond the means of Aboriginal and European traders alike.\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_2086\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]\"""\"<\/a> Figure 8.17 Red River carts were amphibious craft consisting of a flatbed attached to two large, convex spoked wheels. No metal was used in their construction and the wheels could be removed and strapped to the bottom so that the vehicle became a raft. They were invariably pulled by oxen. (Painting by William Hind, ca. 1862)[\/caption]\n\nIt was the pemmican trade that became the M\u00e9tis niche, especially in what is now southeastern Manitoba and North Dakota. It was to define their relationship with newcomers on the northern Plains and it would become an important part of the \"New Nation's\" identity.\n
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M\u00e9tissage<\/h3>\nThe terminology used to describe liaisons between European men and Aboriginal women has evolved a great deal since the contact era. In 17th century New France, there was enthusiasm at official levels for building a colony of people drawn from both societies (so long as they were Catholic) and there was, as a consequence, little opprobrium attached to children who were the product of\u00a0miscegenation. In Spanish colonies the term for the children of native and European parents was (and is)\u00a0mestizo.<\/em><\/em>\u00a0In French colonies the term most often used today is\u00a0m\u00e9tis. <\/em>Note that it is not capitalized in this instance,\u00a0because it describes a heritage, not a culture. When m\u00e9tis\u00a0<\/em>people in North America achieved a consciousness of a separate identity, they became M\u00e9tis. So, it is possible to speak of someone who is\u00a0m\u00e9tis\u00a0<\/em>but not M\u00e9tis.\n\nMost, but not all M\u00e9tis (and m\u00e9tis <\/em>too) were the descendants of French and French-Canadian traders and Aboriginal women (mostly Anishinaabeg or Cree). By contrast, the children of British men and Aboriginal women were described in a number of ways. Historians, looking at that population retrospectively, use the term\u00a0country born<\/em>.<\/strong>\u00a0There was a time when\u00a0<\/em>half-breed<\/em> was not necessarily a derogative term, but by the middle of the\u00a019th\u00a0century it very commonly was.\u00a0As notions of race and immutable race differences became more widespread, the terminology became more derisive and was hurled as an insult.\u00a0 Other terms such as\u00a0bois-br\u00fbl\u00e9s<\/em><\/em> (which means \"burnt wood\") was used by francophones and still occasionally makes an appearance.\u00a0M\u00e9tissage<\/i> is an attractive word sometimes used to describe the mixing of European and Aboriginal cultures in these populations. It is certainly a better choice than mixed-race marriages<\/em>,\" which perpetuates obsolete and discredited notions of racial categories.\n\n<\/div>\n
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Key Points<\/h2>\n