From Rupert's Land to Canada

Danial Duda is an information services librarian in the Queen Elizabeth
II Library, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

John E. Foster was a historian of Western Canada whose main interests
were the fur trade and the Métis community in the West. The 12 essays
in this book deal with variations on these themes. All the contributors
are colleagues, students, or friends of Dr. Foster.

The editors’ introductory essay, an overview of Foster’s career and
his contribution to Western Canadian historiography, points out that
Foster’s approach to fur trade history took into account the documents
not just of the fur traders, but others as well, including the
missionaries in the field. This approach, commonplace today but unique
30 years ago, showed how complex the sociocultural relationship was
between the Indians, mixed bloods, and whites.

The historiography of the fur trade, the role of the Montreal Iroquois
in the fur trade, and marriage are the main themes of the first four
essays. The next four essays look at various aspects of the Métis
community in the West. The last four contributions discuss different
ideas about the West: the imagined West, Native cartography, Paul Kane
and his book Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America,
Native newspapers and crime rates. Each paper is followed by a notes
section. In addition to brief contributor biographies, there is a list
of John Foster’s writings and an appendix titled “Updating The
Collected Writings of Louis Riel.”

From Rupert’s Land to Canada is a useful resource not only for
historians but also for archeologists, anthropologists, and
sociologists. Recommended for libraries with Western Canadian history
collections.