Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains

J.R. (Jim) Miller is Canada Research Chair of History at the University
of Saskatchewan. His latest works are Reflections on Native-Newcomer
Relations: Selected Essays and Lethal Legacy: Current Native
Controversies in Canada.

Common and Contested Ground provides an imaginative and valuable
rereading of inter-ethnic and Native–newcomer relations on the
northwestern plains until around 1806. By paying close attention to
environmental factors such as topography, climate, flora, and fauna,
historian Theodore Binnema of the University of Northern British
Columbia enhances our understanding of First Nations behaviour and
relations during the fur trade. For example, the fact that the flora of
the northerly and easterly portions of the study area did not support
the horse very well meant that groups like the Cree and Assiniboine
found it difficult to overwinter many horses, with the result that they
frequently engaged in horse-trading forays in the summers. This sort of
analysis provides another layer of explanation for students of Plains
First Nations behaviour. The volume, which is a revised dissertation, is
very well researched and heavily documented.

Binnema makes an emphatic argument in the introduction that previous
histories of the fur trade that emphasized culture change among First
Nations have distorted what actually happened. He also contends in the
introduction and the conclusion that, though historians and
anthropologists maintain this “culturist” approach to the era and
area, the history does not bear them out. Since Binnema neglects the
issue of culture change in the body of the book, however, the volume is
not completely satisfactory in proving its author’s case by a
sustained and consistent exposition and analysis.

Common and Contested Ground is nonetheless a significant contribution
to western and Native–newcomer history. It gives us a more complex and
richer interpretation of the western fur trade, and of the relationships
between indigenous and immigrant peoples who played roles in it, than
has previously been available to students of the field.