An Ethnohistorian in Rupert's Land

Jennifer S. H. Brown

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781771991735
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1670, the ancient homeland of the Cree and Ojibwe people of Hudson Bay became known to the English entrepreneurs of the Hudson's Bay Company as Rupert's Land, after the founder and absentee landlord, Prince Rupert. For four decades, Jennifer S. H. Brown has examined the complex relationships that developed among the newcomers and the Algonquian communities—who hosted and tolerated the fur traders—and later, the missionaries, anthropologists, and others who found their way into Indigenous lives and territories. The eighteen essays gathered in this book explore Brown's investigations into the surprising range of interactions among Indigenous people and newcomers as they met or observed one another from a distance, and as they competed, compromised, and rejected or adapted to change.

While diverse in their subject matter, the essays have thematic unity in their focus on the old HBC territory and its peoples from the 1600s to the present. More than an anthology, the chapters of An Ethnohistorian in Rupert's Land provide examples of Brown's exceptional skill in the close study of texts, including oral documents, images, artifacts, and other cultural expressions. The volume as a whole represents the scholarly evolution of one of the leading ethnohistorians in Canada and the United States.

PART I

Finding Words and Remembering

The three essays in part 1 have to do with matters of language, translation, and terms and names and their meanings. Chapter 1, “Rupert’s Land, Nituskeenan, Our Land: Cree and European Naming and Claiming Around the Dirty Sea,” looks at first encounters between Cree people and English and French visitors in Hudson and James Bay during the 1600s. Europeans, through their writing and publishing, have long dominated discourse about their explorations. Captain Thomas James, for one, penned a vivid account of searching for the Northwest Passage to the “South Sea” and Japan, getting thoroughly lost, and wintering in “James his Baye,” as he named it on his map. European sailors and mapmakers created their own universe of place names, surrounding what they called Hudson Bay with names that memorialized themselves or their homelands or that honoured royal patrons and other memorable individuals—names that have endured for four hundred years. Yet unbeknownst to the intruders, Cree people maintained a far older parallel universe of names that echoed a very different world view; their sense of place was grounded in stories and descriptions of geographical features that carried memories and told travellers what they needed to know. The juxtaposition of European documents and Cree names and stories reveals the roots of centuries of misunderstanding on several fronts—the use and ownership of land, notions about trade protocol, means of surviving in the subarctic environment, and, not least, the contrasting linguistic structures that set Algonquian and European languages so far apart that accurate translations could not be achieved for a great many years.1

Chapter 2, “Linguistic Solitudes and Changing Social Categories,” is broader in scope, looking at words and labels in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rupert’s Land from the Hudson Bay Lowlands to the Red River region. By the late 1700s, a good many fur traders had formed unions with Indigenous women, and the numbers of their children were growing. The written records of the times reveal shifts and variability in terminology as traders and others looked for ways to describe these new relationships and the emerging groups of people of mixed descent, whom they labelled and categorized with borrowed and invented terms. This essay began life as a paper for the third North American Fur Trade Conference in Winnipeg in 1978. Like chapter 1, it reflects my long-term interest in the broader subject of ethnonyms—the evolving and revealing words that groups, whether Indigenous or European, have used to describe both themselves and others.

“The Blind Men and the Elephant: Touching the Fur Trade” (chapter 3) reflects on the varied angles from which scholars and others have approached the fur trade. The questions we ask and the answers we seek are directed by our preconceptions, our different disciplinary backgrounds, and the particular research resources that come our way, just as the blind men “read” the elephant differently if they first grab the trunk, tail, tusks, or other parts. No single person can objectively encompass the whole. This old Asian story teaches us that we do well to recognize and acknowledge our limitations; we always approach our subjects from particular angles. Focusing on one part, we may miss others and fail to grasp the whole beast. The text first took form as a plenary session talk for the Fort Chipewyan and Fort Vermilion Bicentennial Conference held in Edmonton in September 1988.

CHAPTER 1

Rupert’s Land, Nituskeenan, Our Land

Cree and European Naming and Claiming Around the Dirty Sea

Rupert’s Land—or the Hudson’s Bay Company Territory, as it was sometimes called—is not widely known even in its Canadian homeland. Most Americans have never heard of it, even though it reached into what are now four US states and six Canadian provinces and territories and was much larger than any of the thirteen British American colonies. In Great Britain, it is even less known. Prince Rupert (1619–82), Hudson’s Bay Company founder and nephew of King Charles I, remains famous in the United Kingdom as leader of the royalist forces in Cromwell’s time and as a naval commander against the Dutch after the Restoration. But historians whom I met at the University of Oxford while visiting in 2002 were unfamiliar with his namesake territory in North America and his role in founding the HBC.

When the HBC was chartered in 1670, Rupert’s Land became the English term for the entire region, approximately the northern third of North America. It existed as a colonial oddity, largely uncolonized, for two centuries, until 1870, considerably longer than Canada (founded in 1867) has existed as a country. But it is almost invisible in most North American histories and even in histories of European colonization.1 Its obscurity is doubtless due, in part, to its northern, largely subarctic location; its relatively small, dispersed populations; its distance from major North American settlements and theatres of war; and the fact that its name faded from the scene when it was annexed to Canada in 1870. Another factor may be that much of its history was stored for a long time in relatively closed archives and in scholarly boxes packed away in certain rather specialized fields of study. The Canadian fur trade box, built by Harold A. Innis (1930) and his followers, traced the expansion of the trade westward from the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes and beyond, offering a novel view of Canadian history at the time. Its contemporary was the HBC history box, framed by such writers as William Schooling (1920) and Douglas MacKay (1936) and fitted out in great detail by E. E. Rich (1958), along with thirty-three Hudson’s Bay Record Society documentary volumes and much other work.2 Somehow, the rich contents of these boxes did not get displayed on the larger historical stage; their interest and scope remained limited, and Rupert’s Land remained in the shadows.

In 1974, however, Arthur J. Ray published a book that opened those boxes and explored their contents in new ways. Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660–1870 was a seminal work for the history of Rupert’s Land and its peoples. The work of Ray and others in the 1970s laid out new paths for fur trade history.3 These writings still relied on the documents conventionally used by older authors but mined them by asking new questions, directing attention towards the dynamic interactions of Aboriginal people with the fur trade. They provided interpretive frames in which researchers began to inquire about and take seriously, at long last, the multiple and evolving perspectives of the Native people whom the European traders and explorers met. Ever since the 1970s, these and many other studies have generated new ways to look at Rupert’s Land and at the terrain beneath that label, bringing fresh approaches to an old subject.

This essay explores early English (and some French) constructions of the Hudson Bay region before Rupert’s Land was invented and compares them to Cree perspectives on its geography and places and on the newcomers themselves, as expressed through naming. It then looks at Cree concepts of lands and watersheds, as contrasted to those held and asserted by the founders of the HBC and its rivals from 1670 through the two decades immediately following. As the HBC struggled to become established in the midst of intense English-French conflicts over Rupert’s Land, its various gestures of possession and naming (along with those of the rival French) met Aboriginal ways of thinking and naming that reveal fundamentally different frames of reference still enduring in language and thought.

WHAT’S IN A NAME? PEOPLE AND PLACES IN CREE AND ENGLISH

The lands and waters of Hudson Bay were “discovered” many times before the HBC received its royal charter in 1670. After the Ice Age glaciers retreated, Aboriginal people spread northward as the landscape, vegetation, and animal populations recovered. The earliest occupants of the Hudson Bay Lowlands have been dated to about four thousand years ago. 4 Judging by the later predominance of the Cree language across the region, they were probably ancestral to the Cree, and their lifestyles would have been similar. They were river and shore people, never far from fresh water and its resources. For countless generations, they harvested the fish, furred animals, migratory birds in spring and fall, and larger game—notably, the woodland caribou herds that migrated across their lands and rivers in the spring and fall.5

The Hudson Bay Lowland Cree whose ancestors met the first Europeans on the bay shores describe themselves as Omushkegowuk, “people of the muskeg” (sing. Omushkego). Such descriptors evoking home area and environment are typical of Aboriginal people’s ways of naming themselves in their own languages, as expressed, for example, in the local Native names that HBC men recorded in the 1700s. “Cree” is an outsiders’ label that came into general use in the nineteenth century, as observers became aware of the linguistic unity of the region.6

The Omushkegowuk travelled principally on inland waterways and along the old beach ridges along the Hudson Bay coast—and on the muskeg when it was frozen. From their perspective, the bay itself was unattractive and dangerous. The Cree name for Hudson Bay is Winni-pek, “the sea of dirty (salt) water.” This distinguishing characteristic is explained by an old legend. Omushkego (Cree) storyteller Louis Bird of Peawanuk, Ontario, relates how, long ago, the Giant Skunk, Mishi Shiikaak, was threatening...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Finding Words and Remembering
• PART II We Married the Fur Trade”: Close Encounters and Their Consequences
• PART III Families and Kinship, the Old and the Young
• PART IV Recollecting: Women’s Stories of the Fur Trade and Beyond
• PART V Cree and Ojibwe Prophets and Preachers: Braided Streams
• PART VI Chiefs, Medicine Men, and Newcomers on the Berens River: Unfinished Conversations
• Index