How destructive was Canada's fur trade for Indigenous people?

by BookLover54321

I came across a review of James Daschuk's Clearing the Plains by historian Andrew Woolford, a genocide scholar. In it he briefly describes the destructive effects of the fur trade on First Nations:

"A more evocative term might be the one used by historical anthropologist and archeologist Robbie Ethridge to describe the dangerous mix of unstable chiefdoms, an emergent capitalist system defined by the slave and fur trades, disease and inter-tribal warfare that was exacerbated by the introduction of deadly new technologies in the late 16th- to early 18th-century American South: the shatter zone. A shatter zone emerges when multiple destructive forces combine to form a toxic admixture, and this is certainly an apt description of the situation on the plains prior to increased European settlement."

I was wondering if anyone familiar with this topic could elaborate on Woolford's comment, regarding the fur trade's consequences on Indigenous people.

Lime_Dragonfly

Over time, the fur trade was devastating for Native American people in the Northeast.

To go back in time . . . Native Americans had extensive trade networks before contact, and when Europeans first arrived, the Indians often sought to trade with them. In Indian cultures, trade served a number of functions: it allowed people to acquire desirable goods, but it also could help to form networks of friendship and alliance.

Even very early sources point to trade. In 1524, for example, Giovanni da Verrazano described sailing up the east coast of North America, briefly meeting and exchanging goods ("such as little bells, mirrors and other trifles") with Indians. At one point as he sailed north, they met a group who wanted to trade, but refused to allow them to land. "They would come to the seashore on some rocks where the breakers were most violent," he wrote, "while we remained in the little boat, and they sent us what they wanted to give on a rope, continually shouting to us not to approach the land . . . and would take in exchange only knives, hooks for fishing, and sharp metal." This encounter is very early -- almost a hundred years before Jamestown (1607) or the Pilgrims (1620).

(One thing that is interesting about studying very early European accounts of North America from the 1500s is that you are always seeing evidence of earlier contacts. Like, Europeans will be sailing along with a general sense of "No European has ever been here before," and a captive will run out of the woods speaking Spanish, or Indians will sail out to meet them in a Basque boat. One wonders if the Indians Verrazano met had had some earlier negative contact with Europeans in a ship.)

Once the English and the French began to build colonies in North America in the 1600s, the fur trade began in earnest. In its early days, both sides participated enthusiastically and both sides generally benefited. There was enormous demand in Europe for American furs. Indians did not mostly seek trinkets like bells or mirrors -- they mostly sought goods like knives, axes, kettles, cloth, scissors, alcohol, guns, and ammunition. The historian Colin Calloway summed it up by saying, "Indian peoples accepted European goods because they made life easier, more comfortable, warmer, and more pleasurable."

As the balance of power in America shifted, however, the trade became destructive in multiple ways.

  1. Indians sometimes reported that the trade was so extensive that traditional skills were being lost. Why should anyone learn to make arrowheads from stone if they could buy metal ones? Why would anyone make pots when European-made kettles were lighter, sturdier, and more durable? (On the other hand, trade might also stimulate traditional crafts -- in the Northeast, for example, Indians sold baskets to European colonists.) At the beginning of contact, Indians could easily live without European trade. But as time passed, they became more dependent on trade for basic goods. Any Indian nation that didn't have access to guns, for example, would find itself at a dangerous disadvantage to both Europeans and rival Native Americans.
  2. The trade was so extensive that it led to overhunting. Europeans could churn out endless numbers of knives or enormous amounts of cloth, but there were a finite number of beavers and other fur-bearing animals in America. With the fur trade, these animal populations collapsed. This led more-powerful Native American people (like the Iroquois) to go to war to ensure their access to the best hunting and trapping grounds, and thus ensure their access to trade. In the middle of the 1600s, for example, they shattered the Huron Confederacy to gain access to their lands, in a series of wars known as "The Beaver Wars.")
  3. Trade could also lead to land loss. Indians wanted European-made goods, and yet (as the population of animals declined) they were less able to get the goods they wanted. One possible solution was to sell land in order to get goods.

The context for all of this makes everything even more devastating. As the English population grew, it pushed further and further westward, provoking war with the Indians and leading to Indian land loss. (The French were more focused on trade, so required much less land.) At the same time, Indians were being hammered by repeated waves of epidemic disease, especially smallpox. So in the northeast, the hazards of the fur trade were only one part of a deadly mixture of disease, land loss, and warfare.

Readings

Two classic works are:

Colin Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (1997)

Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (1991)

I drew the Verazzano story from his 1524 letter to King Francis I of France, at http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text4/verrazzano.pdf