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  • The White Man's Gonna Getcha: The Colonial Challenge to the Crees in Quebec
  • Richard J. Preston
Toby Morantz , The White Man's Gonna Getcha: The Colonial Challenge to the Crees in Quebec. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2002, 382 pp.

Dr. Morantz has created something new in the scholarly literature on the Canadian North; tracing regional historical processes in the wider context of political economy, with emphasis on 20th century factors, and blending the records of Cree voices with those of non-Cree writers. This excellent book traces the emergence of internal, primarily bureaucratic, colonialism, Cree resistance and accommodation, and what effects these processes have on traditional values and community. Morantz acknowledges that other regions had other kinds of colonialism, and has depicted the James Bay scene in its multiethnic complexity, including the interpenetration of ecological determinants and external relations.

This kind of ethnohistorical "diagnosis" may easily idealize or pathologize, and is the point where an author's clear cognizance of their intellectual strengths and weaknesses, ideology and psychology, is most crucial to an adequate job. This complete, detailed and coherent synthesis of a huge and unwieldy bibliography and archives relating to the east side of James Bay, in present-day Quebec, is a fine example of what may be done in compiling a regional history — intellectually mature and forthright, and very well grounded in the data.

The goal is to establish the kind of modern colonial history that accurately characterizes the Cree Region, on the Quebec side of James Bay; a region that is not typical of areas to the west, or south. Dr. Morantz aims to show how the academic temptation to generalize the popular categories of colonial expansion of the fur-trade would be a serious misrepresentation of the Quebec Cree case, and would miss the opportunity to fully understand the wide range of colonial experience that could, and did, happen in the Canadian north.

The scholarship is exemplary. Over many years, Dr. Morantz has done the hard work of reading the archival and published materials with detailed thoroughness. She is the recognized prime scholar of this region for the classic fur trade period. She has now extended her work forward another century in time to the 1970 point, with a brief afterword for the 1970s.

Why have social historians and ethnohistorians been so cautious about depicting the Native Peoples of Canada in terms of internal colonialism? Morantz calls the Cree case "bureaucratic colonialism", and demonstrates how the neo-Marxist scenario fails to fit with the data of history. Mercantile colonialism did not create a bush proletariat in the James Bay region during the 1700-1850 period (Francis and Morantz 1983), or during the 1850-1920 period (Chapter 2 of this book). For the latter period she also gives an excellent synthesis and cogent balance of the spiritual-religious factors that accompany and support the techno-ecological factors — showing that there is a consistency in Cree ideology and practice. [End Page 484]

Modernity-globality moved slowly into the James Bay region. It had reached the more southerly Algonquins with the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880's, and the northern Algonquins and southern James Bay Crees with the Canadian National Railway in 1910-1914. It finally reached James Bay forcefully in 1929-1932 — a series of starvation years, combined with the withdrawal of support from the Hudson's Bay Co. Morantz identifies and describes the basic transformative factors: severe suffering from a debilitating combination of disease and starvation, economic instability in the market economy affecting both prices paid for furs and the costs of goods at the trading posts, and the Company's response to hard times, including loss of summer jobs for the Crees and trimming the Co. employees. The cumulative effect of these factors on the Crees, was a shift from hunters (with their subsistence economy with local fluctuations but external stability) to trappers (trying for fox, mink and other animals that are poor food) in response to a boom in the fine fur market, then low populations of food-animals, coupled with the need to buy food, clothes, tools and more.

Then Morantz brings these transformative factors down to the details...

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