is an analysis of marital relationships and status of children in “Indian country” during the 18th and 19th centuries – that is, of the partnerships entered into by Hudson Bay Company and North West Company traders and of the children that often resulted.Brown is actually attempting to accomplish several tasks in this volume: a comparative history of the Hudson Bay- and Montreal-based fur trades, an extension of Louis Hartz’s theory of colonial fragments to fur trade society, and, finally, the titular claim that fur traders’ families occupied a socially and legally uncertain and shifting grey area often referred to in court documents as “strangers in blood.” These processes are then subdivided by trade and period: French (then French-Scottish) and British trade prior to the 1821 merger, and the Victorian and (in fur trade terms) Simpsonian period of the following decades. Brown also divides her analysis between the marital relationships themselves (the first two-thirds of the book) and the fur trade children (the final two chapters). Her work relies solely on written correspondence, which she acknowledges skews the analysis in particular directions (commissioned officers, favoured sons, etc.).
Brown’s approach to the creation of a mixed-blood population through the fur trade fuses two pre-existing theories. First, she argues following Louis Hartz (The Founding of New Societies, 1964) that the fur traders constituted a European colonial “fragment”: they were “not simply mirrors of their European backgrounds” (p. xvi), but partial heirs to the European cultural tradition whose isolation tended to foster a sense of limited autonomy. Second, she notes, traders must be seen not merely as patrons or clients but as middlemen between the selling Natives and the purchasing metropolis; this put them in a middle ground, “interpreting and translating communications... and representing one [community] to the other according to his own lights” (p. xviii). This gave them, according to the model of Fredrick Barth (“Descent and Marriage Reconsidered,” 1973), an unusual degree of power to shape ongoing processes of institutionalization. Barth, she says, notes that in such circumstances individual actions and experiences can have a particularly potent effect on the evolution of new cultural standards.
It is Brown’s contention that native and mixed-blood partners, and mixed-blood children, faced different challenges and opportunities at different times and places in the fur trade. (She uses the terms “allies” and “mates,” among others, to refer to partners not joined in Christian marriage; there is no apparent particular meanings of the different terms used.) Initially, the Hudson Bay and Montreal fur trades created very different contexts. While New France attempted to limit the sexual freedom of the traders, the post-Conquest trade, increasingly dominated by Scots, was something of a free-for-all. The leading traders were connected in transatlantic kinship circles, while the labourers (more often Canadian) were strictly stratified and separated. Familial relations were common but tended to be fluid and easily abandoned by retirees or men moving to new positions. In 1806, to reduce costs, the NWC attempted to ban marrying native women and encouraged marrying mixed-blood daughters of other white traders.
The HBC also attempted to restrict men to what Brown calls a monastic lifestyle during the late 17th century, but was notably unsuccessful in this venture. The HBC posts operated much more autonomously with respect to social life, as corporate policy passed from a tripartite strategy to colonize, navigate, and trade in the Bay down to simple trading. Company posts adopted an English household-style model of social organization, with an aristocratic patriarch at the top (typically the only one with an accepted and permanent sexual mate) and as many as several dozen subordinates permitted, at most, short-term liaisons with the opposite sex. As the Company instituted a formal recruitment process and salary scale, apprentices drawn from rural areas, Scotland, and orphanages tended to begin at the bottom, work their way up, and enjoy both very limited connections to social networks at home and considerable upward mobility in the company – according to Brown, a highly unusual situation. By the early 19th century, officers openly maintained semi-permanent relationships with Native women (in contrast to the HBC) and were beginning to concern themselves not simply with training up sons but also daughters. In established regions, such women were no longer being traded away to secure alliances with the Cree or Assiniboine; instead, astute junior men saw these marriages as a means to cement their promotion prospects. In the early 1800s, the HBC formally abandoned its commitment to pseudo-monasticism and began to found post schools and encourage a settlement for country families, at Red River. To an extent, then, corporate policies were converging.
The most serious disruptions, she argues, occurred after 1821, when under the leadership of the illegitimate-born Scottish Highlander George Simpson a more North West-style policy was permitted to proliferate. Simpson had extremely negative perceptions of Aboriginal people, both male and female, and attempted to quash country marriages, to the point of importing white women to the posts (a scheme which generally failed, including with respect to his own wife, Frances). In general, she argues, this was doubly pressuring for those native women and mixed-blood families already integrated into the trade because they found Victorian models of femininity and domesticity imposed on them; even when they could measure up through considerable effort, their blood still relegated them to secondary status. Traders often went to some effort to promote their sons by placing them as fostered children with relatives in the metropolis, but inheritance claims routinely ended up in litigation. This was exacerbated by the increasing class stratification of the HBC system (into commissioned gentlemen and servants, essentially in the NWC mould), and by the increasingly confining vision of “halfbreeds” (or métis).
On the whole, Brown’s work often ends up being less about fur trade families than about fur trade fathers. Very little is said of mothers, especially – and crucially – when it comes to major decisions such as whether to place children out of Indian country to be educated, and, if so, who would foster them (though usually this task was assigned to the father’s brothers or other close kin). The implication – either due to documentary bias, or actual bias, it is difficult to say – is that attempts to raise native sons as English gentlemen were relatively common, whereas comparatively little was invested in daughters. On the whole, while allowances must be made for the biases inherent in company records, it must be said that women (under any designation) and children certainly play marginal roles in Brown’s work, and presumably in the fur trade families being studied, as well.
Much more could also be said about not just the lived experiences but also the perceptions and intentions of Aboriginal peoples, including but not limited to women. This is principally a history of the traders, rather than their wives or children – but also rather than the Native communities those women came from. Only rarely do we get a sense of how Native communities regarded the taking of short- or long-term perspectives, how the women themselves perceived it (and what motivated them), etc.
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