- When Worlds Collide: Hunter-Gatherer World-System Change in the 19th-Century Canadian Arctic by T. Max Friesen
As I write this review, the Pan Inuit Trails Atlas has just been released online (paninuittrails.org). The Atlas, which draws on documentary evidence from across the Canadian Arctic, visualizes the historical Inuit presence along the Northwest Passage and the interconnections between Inuit groups in that region. It offers a rich geographical representation of just some of the ideas and evidence that Max Friesen has brought to the fore in When Worlds Collide. Both of these projects [End Page 632] highlight a critical topic in Canadian Arctic history: the importance of regional and long-distance relationships to the historical experiences of northern peoples. Friesen’s work, in particular, presents invaluable archaeological evidence, within a sophisticated application of worldsystems theory, to significantly advance our understanding of the networks connecting Indigenous groups in the North (Inuvialuit, Inuit, Iñupiat, and Gwich’in), and Inuvialuit and Europeans, Americans, and Canadians from c. 1500 to 1910 ce.
When Worlds Collide is, foremost, a work of archaeology and a contribution to world-systems theory. While it draws on the most important historiography from the region, makes significant use of “ethnohistoric” texts (published accounts of explorers such as John Franklin [1828] and whalers such as Frank Russell [1898]), and examines change over time, in structure and style especially, it is not a conventional work of history. Friesen is exceptionally methodical in laying out his theoretical framework and establishing the model that he is testing: to understand “how hunter-gatherer world-systems (intersocietal networks) are structured and why they change” (2). The first five chapters address the value of a world-systems approach, particularly to small-scale societies such as hunter-gatherers, and the context and expectations of what research on the Qikiqtaryungmiut (a regional group of Inuvialuit centred on Herschel Island) might reveal. As a historian, I would have welcomed a higher level of synthesis in the writing of these chapters. However, the structured approach and attention to theoretical detail displayed here is necessary to establish Friesen’s experimental effort and the potentially wider significance of his findings.
Chapter 6 is a detailed report on the Qikiqtaruk Archaeology Project on Herschel Island, an important site for Inuvialuit and a centre of whaling activity from the mid-nineteenth into the early twentieth century. This chapter presents five archaeological features, each of which shows occupation from one or more of the late precontact (c. 1400–1800 ce), protocontact (c. 1800–1889 ce), and early contact (c. 1889–1907 ce) periods. Faunal remains, men’s and women’s tools, ornamental and social artifacts are detailed here in text, tables, and photographs, alongside highly effective illustrations of the features themselves. This chapter alone makes the book worth reading. The examination of the features gives a remarkable window into the material life of the Inuvialuit and how it changed over the past five hundred years. Friesen reports, for instance, on the appearance of “botanical remains representing imported food products” (126) in the 1890s, including walnuts, cherries, hazelnuts, and plums. For environmental historians and others who value material evidence in their [End Page 633] own analyses, this book stands as a powerful reminder of the importance of archaeological research to the study of northern history.
The archaeological findings are used, in chapters seven through nine, in combination with “additional data from the regional archaeological and ethnohistoric records” (137) to test the expectations detailed previously. Friesen devotes a chapter each to considering the Qikiqtaryungmiut world-system in the autonomous zone, the contact periphery, and the marginal periphery (i.e., the three types of periphery used to evaluate the process of incorporation of previously external areas into the world-economy). Designating the autonomous zone as a distinct periphery is one of Friesen’s contributions to world-systems theory; he uses it to refer “to regions that engage in small-scale, indirect interaction with the world-economy but for which the effects of the...