Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (1978)
Shepard Krech, Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game (1981)
Eleanor Leacock, "The Montaignais 'Hunting Territory' and the Fur Trade," Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association (1954)
Lynn Ceci, Effect of European Contact and Trade on Settlement Patterns of New York Indians (1977)
Arthur Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Roles as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660-1870 (1974)
Carolyn Gilman, Where Two Worlds Meet: The Great Lakes Fur Trade (1988)
Shepard Krech, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (1999)
Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975)
Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (2004)
Susan Sleeper-Smith, Rethinking the Fur Trade: Cultures of Exchange in an Atlantic World (2009)
Eric Jay Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America (2010)
Today, we'll consider one especially intriguing problem in tracing out the cultural consequences of epidemics: what possible links might there be to the coming of the fur trade?
Across the continent, most native hunters became involved in the fur trade, eventually helped destroy the animal populations on which their own well-beings depended: why did this happen?
There's a series of questions we typically ask no matter what area of historical inquiry we're engaging, no matter in what place or time:
Use today's lecture as an occasion for reflecting on the role of historians as storytellers: stories and substories linked together to trace out causal chains.
Here's one classic story of the fur trade, which I sometimes jokingly call the "cool stuff" narrative: Europeans brought "superior" technologies (the gun is usually offered as a self-evident example). Indians recognized this technological "superiority" instantly, hurrying to trade as quickly as possible in order to acquire these cool new goods. In the process, they eventually killed off their own subsistence base, depopulating animal species like beaver and deer.
The implied moral of this story is often taken to be: "primitive" encounters with "advanced" civilizations are doomed.
Trouble is, there are lots of problems with such just-so stories, as ethnohistorians starting in the middle of the 20th century began to point out: European technologies were only superior in limited ways and under particular circumstances.
Remember that many European colonists initially starved when they arrived, surviving in part because they were helped by their new Indian neighbors, and also because they began to adopt Indian crops and technologies like maize agriculture.
Furthermore, Indians adopted such technologies quite easily as their own, as the example of the horse demonstrates, whereupon it's not clear it still makes sense to refer to those technologies as "European."
Plus: the rise of trade networks was by no means instantaneous, as this "cool stuff" just-so story seems to imply.
In this lecture, I want to review several alternative narratives that have been offered over by scholars to explain native involvement in the fur trade and its consequences.
I'll start with Calvin Martin's spiritual argument in his controversial 1978 book Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade. In it, he built an argument based on the ritual gift-giving relationships with spiritual "keepers of the game" that I described in the second lecture of this course. These keepers of the game were the spirits who determined success or failure in hunting, the ones whom native gift-giving rituals often sought to thank and supplicate.
What Martin added to this well-known feature of hunter-gatherer spiritual practices was the argument that in the minds of native peoples, these keepers of the game were linked with disease.
In the ordinary gift-giving cycle, native hunters offered gifts of animal flesh and other ritual objects to thank the keepers of the game for success in the hunt. In return, keepers of the game gave the gift of animal bodies.
Martin asked of this cycle of gift-giving what might happen if either side failed to live up to its side of the ritual bargain: how would each side punish the other if the expected gifts failed to appear. What sanctions operated in the cycle in addition to the gifts?
His answer was that Indians saw the gift relationships as regulated by the sanctions of mass animal death on the one hand, and human disease on the other. If the spiritual keepers of the game were angry at human hunters, they could punish those hunters with disease.
(Martin offers some supporting evidence based on epizootic diseases that animals and humans both shared: e.g., 1803 tularemia epizootic described by trader John Tanner.)
On this foundation, Martin argues that the epidemic diseases brought by Europeans could be perceived by Indans as attacks by keepers of game. Given the severity and scale of the epidemics, they could lead native peoples to conclude that they were in a life-or-death struggle with the game keepers.
On this basis, Martin argues that Indians responded to the epidemics by using the fur trade as a kind of religious holy war against creatures who had broken their sacred compact with humans: the mass hunting beavers and other fur-bearers as a punitive defensive response to the horrific diseases they were experiencing.
It's seemingly an elegant alternative theory to the "cool stuff" fur trade narrative about the desire for "advanced" technologies leading to the self-destruction of "primitive" peoples: longstanding spiritual relationships with game animals and the spirits who guarded them were shattered by the European pandemics, and Indian misunderstanding of the causes of those pandemics then led to a holy war against fur-bearing mammals that led in turn to the destruction of those animals. Native involvement in the fur trade was based not on the materialist desire for trade goods, but rather by the religious imperatives of changing relationships with spirits who had seemingly become unreliable allies in maintaining the hunt.
Despite the apparent elegance of Martin's argument, and the respect it seemed to pay to the spiritual beliefs of native peoples, it faced severe problems in its lack of primary source evidence. Martin could muster very few documents to support his claim that native peoples understood epidemic disease as an attack by spiritual keepers of the game, and the ones he could cite dated mainly from the 19th & 20th centuries, not the 16th century when the fur trade began...3-4 centuries earlier.
Probably his best source is from the Canadian fur trader David Thompson writing in the early 19th century: "Previous to the discovery of Canada...this Continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, may be said to have been in the possession of two distinct races of Beings, Man and Beaver." Thompson quoted a Cree informant as saying "I have told you that we believed in years long passed away, the Great Spirit was angry with the beaver, and ordered Weesaukejauk (the Flatterer) to drive them all from the dry land into the waater; and they became and continued very numerous, but the Great Spirit has been, and now is, very angry with them and they are now all to be destroyed." But quoting this source to explain events in the seventeenth century is similar to your quoting something tells you today about the causes of the American Revolution.
Martin also ignored the abundant evidence that Indians eagerly participated in the fur trade because of the access to European goods and alliances it made possible--evidence that the "cool stuff" just-so story with which I began the lecture undoubtedly overvalues, but that nonetheless has considerably more evidence to support it than Martin's keepers of the game hypothesis.
It's also clear that Indians were sometimes aware that new diseases were in fact coming to them from European sources, and that too doesn't fit well with this narrative.
An alternate story is Eleanor Leacock's Marxist portrayal of the Montagnais of eastern Canada in her 1954 dissertation. In her telling, these natives were originally primitive communists (as Marx and many of his contemporaries often portrayed them), with no participation in market economies and no private property.
By her telling, Indian motivations for becoming involved with the fur trade were essentially materialistic, brought about by their desire for access to superior technologies, sometimes increased by violent conflicts with their neighbors, leading them to seek European firearms.
A classic case in point here would be the well-known Iroquois wars of the 17th century, which clearly involved competition over hunting areas and efforts to control access to European traders.
Leacock's chief intent in offering this narrative was to explain emergence of hunting territories as earlier described by the anthropologist Frank Speck. Such hunting territories involved dividing collective tribal space into fixed tracts so that individual families would own and be guaranteed access to animal resources within the boundaries of those territories.
The goal was to partition communal space into market territories controlled by individual families; the associated hunting practices may or may not have conserved resources.
Leacock's thesis now appears too simplistic: property divisions and trade certainly predated the arrival of Europeans in North America, though fur trade surely extended and amplified earlier trade patterns in complex, proliferating ways all across the continent.
Here it's useful to compare Leacock's depiction of "primitive communists" becoming market-driven actors seeking access to capitalist markets with Adrian Tanner's depiction of the Mistassini Cree in Bringing Home Animals here (the book I used in second lecture to discuss seasonality and partitioning of domestic and exterior space among the Mistassini Cree of James Bay). Tanner, doing field work among the Cree in the early 1960s, found an intricate integration of Cree market labor, with Cree individuals residing and working near the Hudson's Bay Company post during summer, cycling seasonally with a much more spiritualized subsistence hunt in winter (which nonetheless also yielded furs later sold at the Hudson's Bay Co. trading post).
Contrary to what Leacock's thesis seemed to imply, market exchange and wage work seemed able to coexist with traditional spiritual relationships with animals even as late as the 1960s. For the Cree natives Tanner describes, it wasn't a choice of either engaging in market exchange or honoring the ritual practices of the hunt. The two could co-exist without apparent contradiction.
This is much more common among human beings than academic theories are often willing to recognize. (You may be able to think of comparable examples in your own life.) People are complicated....
Speaking of the book's author in the third person, the dilemma Cronon faced in Changes in the Land was how to assess and balance all the possible phenomena that might help explain the decisions New England natives made to participate in the fur trade. New epidemic diseases unquestionably seemed like relevant factors that should be taken into account, and must certainly have affected interactions of New England Indians with environments of the region--but probably not so directly as Calvin Martin suggested. European trade goods certainly did exercise attractions, but probably not so directly as Leacock thought. Expansion of trade networks and growth of market exchange were somehow connected to this, but Indians were not primitive communists.
So...how to locate a middle ground that might do justice to all these motivations without overweighting any one of them?
One possible solution was to start with epidemics and reflect on the massive disruptions of native life they entailed, especially social hierarchies.
It's important to recognize that natives were attracted to European goods only partly because of the inherent technological virtues of those goods (e.g., the ability of a metal pot to boil water over a fire without shattering, or the ease with which woven textiles could dyed or washed); European materials were quick absorbed into the symbolic systems that gave them meanings in native societies that no Europeans would have recognized. In a very real sense, such goods cased to be "European" in the process.
European goods weren't just attractive for their material attributes or technological uses, but also as status goods. Here an especially striking example is the role played by wampum the fur trade: an Indian good that also functioned as status item. Its use significantly expanded with the coming of the fur trade, and was often as highly sought by Indians as any good of European manufacture.
From this point of view, we can interpret European merchants at least in part as marketers of status goods, shuttling between wampum makers on Long Island Sound and fur hunters in the northern interior.
So: trade goods had their own attractions, but disease amplified the search for status, helping proliferate and expand market exchange along existing trade networks. Accurate or not, this argument tried to identify a middle-of-the-road position between material and spiritual explanations.
But it's important to note the problems here: the arguments of Changes in the Land are pretty deeply materialist, obscuring the spiritual beliefs of Indians and colonists alike. The book relies on relatively few sources to make its case about trade goods as status objects, and it portrays New England Indians primarily in economic terms. Contemporary documents are relatively weak on wampum, social hierarchies. The book's arguments are consistent with the available evidence, but that evidence is not as abundant as one might like.
Notice too how Cronon's narrative in Changes in the Land tends to pay less attention to the role of military conflict and violence in its account of interactions between the native peoples of New England and the colonists who were invading their lands. (It shares this relative inattention to violence, interestingly, with Martin's Keepers of the Game, perhaps in part because both books were written in the immediate wake of Francis Jennings's very powerful indictment of such violence in his The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975); the authors of both books were probably trying to say something new that Jennings hadn't already covered...a tendency in academic writing that is always worth remembering.)
Another group of stories narrates the consequences of the fur trade. The most obvious of these consequences was the death of fur-bearing mammals. In southern New England, beavers, otters, foxes, martens, minks, muskrats, and turkeys were essentially gone by the end of the 18th century.
Jeremy Belknap offered a striking description of the environmental consequences resulting from reductions of beaver populations. Beaver ponds had had the effect of killing trees and clearing land along the streams they flooded and accumulating fertile sediments beneath those ponds. With the killing of the beavers eventually came the breaching of their dams, opening large new grazing grounds for colonial livestock.
Another consequence was a kind of cycle of Indian dependency: as dependence on trade goods grew, animals populations needed to buy those trade goods declined.
Here is the famous lament of the Mohegans in 1789: "The times are Exceedingly Alter'd, Yea the times have turn'd everything upside down, or rather we have Chang'd the good Times, Chiefly by the help of the White People, for in Times past, our Fore-Fathers lived in Peace, Love, and great harmony, and had everything in Great Plenty... But alas, it is not so no, all our Fishing, Hunting and Fowling is entirely gone."
In the far north of the Canadian Subarctic around Hudson's Bay, the fur trade persisted across the environmental edge boundaries of the boreal forest and interior grasslands between Cree, Assiniboin, Plains tribes: goods (including weapons) were traded far in advance of Europeans; Indians adapted well, integrated this trading system with many other cultural practices.
It's important to notice that when given the chance, native peoples often made very creative choices about which European technologies and goods they integrated into their ways of lives--while retaining practices, rituals, and core values that were central to their own sense of identity. There was rarely an either/or choice between "Indian" and "non-Indian," and hybrid cultural systems and beliefs were common.
Close with the strange story of the Pilgrims robbing a grave on Cape Cod where they found what was probably one of the earliest recorded instances of the many "white Indians" that became surprisingly common in North America: in all likelihood a shipwrecked sailor who had joined and been honored by the tribe that buried him. We can think of the man in that grave (with a child buried beside him) as a very different model from more familiar stories of conflict between these groups.