The Subarctic Indians and the Fur Trade

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.

J.C. Yerbury, Director of Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Distance Education, has made a notable contribution to ethnohistory and cultural anthropology. He has canvassed vast quantities of archival material, most notably the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg, in search of historical data that throw light on the timing and pace of the social evolution of the eastern, on Canadian, Athapaskan Indians from the earliest time that the fur trade began to affect their region. His investigations have produced a revisionist view of Indian-European relations and culture change among the Athapaskans.

Yerbury insists that the traditional view that Athapaskan nations such as the Sekani, Beaver, or Chipewyan were relatively stable until the twentieth-century impact of commerce and government undermined their society is erroneous. The historical evidence that he has used leads him to argue that an indirect commercial influence from the fur trade to the east of their lands began to alter Athapaskans as early as the first part of the eighteenth century. Commerce induced European and Cree interlopers to penetrate Athapaskan lands, bringing about shifts in location that affected the Indians adversely. Migrations to new, and less abundant, hunting territories made starvation a more common problem, at the same time that European disease weakened them. Finally, a growing dependence on Europeans and their goods was visible from the early part of the nineteenth century.

Subarctic Indians and the Fur Trade is a valuable addition to the controversial literature on Native peoples and cultural change. Its conclusions should provoke considerable debate, and its methodology ought to be emulated.

If criticism is justified, it is best directed at Yerbury’s tendency to be too ready to spot the imposition of culture change. For example, in the fifth chapter he insists that the Indians had entered “complete dependency upon the trading post” (p.126) by the 1820s. But his own evidence (pp.118-119, 125-126) shows that the Indians were able in the 1830s to persuade the traders to deviate from a novel Hudson’s Bay Company policy on advancing goods in favor of an older, debt-oriented practice. Surely this shows that the Indians also helped to determine the terms and methodologies of the trade, and that “mutual interdependence of trader and Indian” (p.121) was a more accurate characterization of their relationship. Such slips notwithstanding, Yerbury’s revisionist interpretation of this important phase of Indian-European interaction is a fine piece of scholarly work.