“The Sunday Flag Is Up!”: Western Arctic Aboriginal Cultures and the Sports of the Fur Traders

This paper examines processes of cultural contact and change in the Canadian western Arctic resulting from the dual impacts of the fur trade and of missionary activities between 1850 and 1940. The traditional games and dances of the Teetł’it Gwich’in, a regional band within the larger Aboriginal group of Athapaskan cultures, and the dances and sports of the fur traders, assumed an important role in the mediation of intercultural tensions arising from the realignment of pre-existing interregional Aboriginal relationships. These tensions had the potential to escalate into open conflict during the great fur trade meetings of early summer, when members of different Aboriginal groups gathered at the trading posts. Here, Gwich’in traditional games were for the first time brought within the range of organizational and expressive effects of modern sports, then in their incipient form. The traditional games remained an important element of the trade gatherings well into the twentieth century, when intensifying processes of cultural transformation, accelerated by the decline of the fur trade economy, led to an increasing dominance of modern sports among recreational physical activity practices in the western Arctic.