New Histories for Old: Changing Perspectives on Canada’s Native Pasts (review)

One fruitful way to chart the remarkable changes in the writing of Native history over the last few decades is through an examination of the career of one of its leading practitioners. New Histories for Old does just this by offering a collection of essays written in honour of the historical geographer Arthur J. ‘Skip’ Ray that explore the contributions of his scholarship from his entry into the field in the 1970s and some of the new directions being taken by scholars today.

This collection contains nine original essays by new and well-established scholars, all of them colleagues or former students of Ray. Their diversity attests to Ray’s wide-ranging interdisciplinary interests and influence in encouraging current lines of research. There is a clear focus in these essays on Western Canadian topics and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jennifer S.H. Brown, who like Ray began her career by engaging with the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives after they became accessible to the public in the 1970s, provides an illuminating comparison of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal conceptions of the Hudson Bay region before and in the two decades following the creation of ‘Rupert’s Land.’ Two essays by Victor Lytwyn and J.R. Miller look at evolving treaty relationships. Next Jody Decker offers an essay on disease that demonstrates how early-twentieth-century outbreaks of smallpox led to the emergence of what she calls the prairie borderlands’ scare zone, where Native and non-Native peoples were affected differently. This is followed by five chapters that examine the challenges bc First Nations experienced as a result of the influx of settlers into their traditional lands.

These samples of the current state of the field are bracketed by two stimulating essays that contemplate Ray’s influence on the writing of Native history in Canada. Binnema and Neylan in their introductory chapter offer an overview of Ray’s prolific research career that began with his seminal dissertation, published as Indians in the Fur Trade in 1974. Their chapter is particularly insightful for the way it places Ray’s research interests within the context of contemporary changes in societal perceptions of First Nations in Canada. The dialogue between scholar and society is lucidly sketched here. Cole Harris, a long-time colleague of Ray and distinguished historical geographer in his own right, concludes the volume by offering an assessment of the achievements of Ray’s writing to date. Astutely Harris recognizes that, like all writing about the past, his is a somewhat provisional task, as future scholarship will see the ‘grounded ideas’ produced by Ray’s empirical-quantitative approach differently from the way we do. Nonetheless, readers present and future will be well served by Harris’s reminder of just how new many of Ray’s findings were when he first presented them, however much they have become common knowledge today (surely a testament to his influence).

There is much to commend in this Festschrift. Even for those already familiar with Arthur Ray’s scholarship, the reflective presentation given here of the breadth and fertility of his intellectual pursuits over the last several decades, which have included notable excursions outside academia, leaves the reader with much to ponder about the relationship between scholars and the larger world they wish to change. Indeed, Ray’s own work has recently turned in earnest to this very question, as he is now researching how academics have historically negotiated the relationship between their participation in legal and political struggles and their scholarly lives. Many of the contributors can be regarded as being at the forefront of scholarship on First Nations history in Canada, and thus this collection offers a snapshot of the present state of the field. The chapters by Jodi Decker, Paige Raibmon, and Susan Neylan examine to great effect Aboriginal practices of mobility and the meanings that were assigned to them. Keith Carlson’s...