Fort Chipewyan and the Shaping of Canadian History, 1788–1920s: ‘We Like to Be Free in This Country’ by Patricia A. McCormack (review)

Popular and academic narratives about the development of the Canadian nation and state have trumpeted technological, social, moral, and economic progress and the ascendency of a Euro-Canadian modernity. The salience and relentless march of these two ideological constructs in the broad trajectory of a Canadian meta-narrative has crafted a marginal, subordinate space for Indigenous peoples as ‘barbaric,’ unprogressive, and anti-modern. Patricia McCormack, in Fort Chipewyan and the Shaping of Canadian History, sets out ‘to decentre these dual narratives of modernity and progress, to challenge the hegemony of the paradigm of progress, and present interpretive alternatives through the lens of the history of Fort Chipewyan.’ McCormack begins with the establishment of the fur trade post at Fort Chipewyan in 1788, when ‘the fur trade mode of production’ developed, and follows it up to the early 1920s. The last half century of her time frame witnessed increasingly frequent and intrusive encounters with an expanding Canadian state and modernity. The author employs a non-traditional ethnohistorical approach, focusing not on a specific people or culture, but on ‘the plural society centred on Fort Chipewyan, “at the intersection of local interactions and relationships and the larger processes of state and empire making.”’

Fort Chipewyan and the Shaping of Canadian History does not dwell on the first eighty years of the fur trade society. After a relatively brief, but effective, introduction and a primer on the plural society that developed around the fort, she covers the years to 1870 in a single chapter drawing on a Marxian assessment of what she terms the ‘fur trade mode of production.’ While it is not common to see Marx wandering the Canadian wilderness of late, she deftly employs it as a tool to produce a refreshing and satisfying interpretation of the fur trade. Avoiding its sometimes prescriptive shortcomings, McCormack’s ‘fur trade mode of production’ provides a useful window into the surprisingly autonomous, flexible, and diverse way of life around Fort Chipewyan. It reveals the incorporation of the residents and their production into the system of global capitalism. Importantly for most of the fur trade mode’s duration, McCormack separates the economics of the system from its imperialism, which did not reach the region until after 1870, and especially after 1899.

The majority of the book deals with Fort Chipewyan society’s encounters with the developing structures of empire and state. The Canadian acquisition of the Northwest Territories in 1870, missionaries, Treaty 8 and Métis scrip, and the more intrusive hand of state administration by the Great War all profoundly shaped the region, and the peoples of the region responded, in turn shaping the local manifestations of the broader trajectory of modernization. McCormack dials the zoom lens as needed, from the local out to national and back again, interweaving the two stories without losing either. A sensitivity to intersubjectivity in the plural society of the fort provides her theoretical approach to understanding how different components of the society saw themselves, each other, and their place in the world. It also reveals the subjectivities that state agents and frameworks brought, and eventually imposed on, these same groups from 1870 through the 1920s. For instance, Treaty 8 and Métis scrip had a profound impact on the Chipewyan, Cree, and Métis groups, inserting arbitrary boundaries that had previously been more fluid and porous, altering their relationships with each other, the lands they inhabited, and the state.

This sophisticated piece of scholarship is clearly the product of a mature and accomplished scholar, long immersed in both this particular place and the subject matter. McCormack describes her lengthy association with the community and its diverse inhabitants since she arrived there in 1968 as a young undergraduate researcher. The long-standing relationships and resulting familiarity lend an intimacy to her narrative and the places and...