Fort Chipewyan and the Shaping of Canadian History, 1788–1920s: “We like to be free in this country” by Patricia A. McCormack (review)

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should begin by noting that I am mentioned in passing in the acknowledgements of this book – not because of any deep involvement in the research or writing of this study, but because the author and I share a long-standing interest in the history of northern communities shaped by their fur trade pasts. As a result, I was pleased that this study had been published, especially as it is a much more ambitious undertaking than most previous studies of such communities. Somewhat audaciously, it does not treat Fort Chipewyan simply as a case study, nor does it approach its subject as just a local or community history. Instead McCormack has set herself the task of considering how the history of Fort Chipewyan and its residents fits into – and often challenges – larger Canadian historical narratives of modernization, progress, and the expansion of the nation state.

McCormack explores five broad themes throughout the book. These include the plural nature of Fort Chipewyan society and how the community was brought into the developing systems of Canadian law, economy, resource management, education, and other such “national” concerns. She also places considerable importance on the ongoing agency of Aboriginal peoples in the face of these nation-building efforts, and the way concepts of progress and modernity affected those who were supposed to modernize and those trying to force the modernizing. Finally she proposes that together these issues point the way towards a “New Northern” history, similar in ambition and scope but distinct in content from other “new” regional approaches, such as the influential “New Western” history of Patricia Limerick, Richard White, and Donald Worster.

The last point may be optimistic and it is hard to see many scholars undertaking the kind of research McCormack has on small, northern communities. Her work at Fort Chipewyan began in 1968 when she was a student and has continued throughout her career as a museum curator and academic. As a result, the book is shaped by over 40 years of contact with the community and a broad range of research from oral history and material culture to more traditional archival and library research. The period covered by the study is also impressive – well over a century – and a planned second volume will complete the study of Fort Chipewyan into the present. This gives the book a tendency to focus on the “longue durée” and broad historical patterns or structures that change slowly, if at all, but McCormack does weave key events such as the signing of Treaty Eight and the creation of Wood Buffalo National Park into her story effectively and shows how such events often had quite unintended consequences.

The early history of Fort Chipewyan is rooted in the fur trade and McCormack begins by noting the many distinct Aboriginal groups who came to trade at Fort Chipewyan and the differences among the traders themselves who might be Canadien, Métis, Orkney, Hebridean and Highland Scots, English, and colonial American in background. McCormack likens fur trade society to “rababou,” a stew of pemmican and any other available ingredients popular at posts such as Fort Chipewyan. The point is well taken and leads directly into her contention that understanding the economic basis of the fur trade requires more careful analysis of how Aboriginal peoples integrated the trade into their larger survival based, or subsistence, economies. She suggests that thinking about the trade solely in terms of domestic and capitalist modes of production is misleading, and she outlines a hybrid “fur trade mode of production” as an alternative way of conceptualizing this distinctive variety of cross-cultural trade. As an economic system, the fur trade mode of production was very stable. It lasted largely unchanged at Fort Chipewyan from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, in large part because local people controlled...