"As Their Natural Resources Fail": Native Peoples and the Economic History of Northern Manitoba, 1870-1930

J.R. Miller is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan,
the author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A History of Indian-White
Relations in Canada, and co-editor of the Canadian Historical Review.

In “As Their Natural Resources Fail,” historical geographer Frank
Tough has mounted a powerful argument for bringing economic history back
into the analysis of Native peoples’ experience. Though his volume
focuses on northern Manitoba between 1870 and 1930, its conclusions and
implications have much wider potential application.

Tough finds that Native groups in northern Manitoba went through an
ingenious series of adjustments to changes introduced by non-Native
outsiders, only to find their communities rendered marginal to the new
economy dominated by non-Natives and vulnerable to the fluctuations of
international economic forces. Both in treaty-making with First Nations
and in the provision of scrip to the Métis, Canada failed to make
effective provision for the interests of the indigenous populations. One
major force in the region, the Hudson’s Bay Company, initially caused
serious dislocations in the regional economy by substituting steam power
for Native muscle in its extensive transportation networks. It later
participated uneasily in an upsurge in the fur trade after 1900, and
finally subsided into a new array of activities that emphasized retail
services to the increasing numbers of non-Natives in the north. The
other disruptive force was the emergence of a the Hudson Bay Railway, a
piece of 20th-century iron infrastructure that made the region more
accessible to non-Native trappers and to prospectors and mining
companies. Throughout the 60-year period under examination, the
Christian missionaries played an equivocal role—sometimes exerting
themselves to ameliorate the more destructive consequences of
Euro-Canadian economic activity, but never summoning the will to stand
up for long to either government or corporate forces.

The foregoing summary fails to do justice to the depth and richness of
Tough’s analysis. His research has ranged widely in Hudson’s Bay
Company, governmental, and religious archives; his analysis is founded
on a rich and diverse theoretical literature; and his persuasive
exposition and argument are buttressed with a large number of maps,
tables, charts, and pictorial illustrations.

While Tough’s hard-hitting conclusions about the poverty of the
existing literature on Native economic and social history since contact
will not convince everyone, his arguments demand attention and respect.
“As Their Natural Resour-ces Fail” is an impressive work that no
postsecondary institution that takes Native history seriously will fail
to include in its library.