Indian-European Trade Relations in the Lower Saskatchewan River Region to 1840

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

Paul Thistle’s scholarly volume is a case study of relations between Woods Cree and European fur traders in the region of The Pas and Cumberland House in northern Manitoba from the early seventeenth century to 1840. Thistle, the Curator of the Sam Waller Little Northern Museum in The Pas, examines other scholars’ contentions that the fur trade made Indians dependent on European technology and on Europeans themselves. His method is that of ethnohistory: documents about indigenous peoples that were made by literate Europeans are interpreted according to the assumptions and values of the non-Europeans in order to analyze the effects of relations between the two on the native peoples.

Indian-European Trade Relations, an elaboration of Thistle’s 1983 M.A. thesis for the University of Manitoba, is a model of revisionist research. Carefully reinterpreting the Hudson’s Bay Company records from the standpoint of the Cree, Thistle disproves many of the traditional arguments for Indian dependency on Europeans. He traces the relationship across three distinct periods, from early contact (1611-1773) through the era of fur-trade competition between The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and the Nor’westers (1774-1820) to the first two decades of HBC monopoly that was established in 1821. He argues convincingly that in none of these periods were the local Indians dependent on the newcomers or their tools or weapons. He paints a portrait of an indigenous community that preserved its freedom of action and its belief in non-market-oriented behaviour.

Indian-European Trade Relations is a valuable addition to a small but growing shelf of case studies on specific aspects of the aboriginal-European relationship that is enriching our understanding of early Canadian history. Scholars like Paul C. Thistle are modifying or contradicting many of the generalizations about the effects of those relations on the native peoples. Thistle’s work is a model of how such revisionist case studies should be done.