Papers at the 2024 Colloquium

We thought you might welcome a preview of presenters and papers to be featured at our 2024 Rupert's Land Colloquium in Winnipeg. As you can see, the colloquium will offer a range of topics as wide as Rupert's Land itself, presented by colloquium veterans and relative newcomers. We have just started scheduling, so please check back for updates.

When my husband Dale Gibson died in January, 2022, he was editing the diaries of Red River fur trader/free trader/teacher Peter Garrioch (1811-1888), annotated by Gibson and by Garrioch’s nephew George H. Gunn. In trying to finish the book, I became fascinated by Garrioch, who played a sizable role in the eventful mid-19th century struggles with the Hudson's Bay Company, recording them - and much else - in his unpublished diaries. I will read from some of the diaries’ most charming and insightful passages, especially the stand-alone account he wrote about his trading adventures, entitled “The Pleasures of Smuggling.”

Sandra Anderson has an M.A. and Ph.D. in German studies from Northwestern University. After coming to Alberta in 1968, she taught German (briefly), spent six years as a trustee and chairperson of the Calgary Board of Education, then entered law school as a mature student in 1986. She practiced labour and employment law, privacy law, general litigation before retiring in 2011. She had the unique experience of representing Leilani Muir in her successful case against the Alberta government (1996) for wrongful sterilization and confinement in the 1950s, which led Anderson into the dark historical past of the eugenics movement.  Anderson is grateful to Jennifer Brown and Anne Lindsay for helping her become an amateur Red River historian so she could complete her late husband’s book. Peter of the Prairies will be published on Amazon later this year.

The 1873 signing of Treaty #3 indelibly altered daily life in what became northwestern Ontario and eastern Manitoba. It also became the template for the young Dominion of Canada’s negotiation of subsequent numbered treaties further west. One of the men the government appointed as negotiator was HBC employee Robert Pither, who spent nearly a quarter century working at the Lac la Pluie (Rainy Lake) post near what is now downtown Fort Frances, a border town of nearly eight thousand residents. Pither was considered well suited to the role of negotiator as he knew the territory and communities and was a fluent Anishinaabemowin speaker. This paper demonstrates that the HBC, and the skills and connections that flowed from Pither’s HBC career, were vital to the government’s efforts to undermine Anishinaabe sovereignty in this region. It explores the ways that these connections have been at the centre of layered and even competing narratives about the history of Treaty #3 Territory.
 
Dr. Krista Barclay (she/her) is a settler historian with a background in the cultural heritage sector. Her research focuses on histories of families, colonialism, and public memory in Canadain the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, where her  community-engaged research supports a long-term partnership with Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre, a cultural and curatorial centre operated by Rainy River First Nations in northwestern Ontario, Canada. She is part of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded project “Creating an ethics of care for Great Lakes digital heritage” with the Great Lakes Research Alliance (GRASAC).

This research project grew out of a long collaboration with Fort Whyte’s Tourism and Custom Programs Coordinator Barrett Miller. Barrett and I have worked together on various public outreach and research projects on North American Indigenous material culture, especially hunting weapons. In this context, we often wondered about the capabilities of southern Manitoba wood species for the manufacture of traditional bows and arrows.

While there is a rich ethnographic and anthropological literature on the use of plants for medicinal purposes by Indigenous Peoples in the Plains region, there are hardly any publications on Indigenous Peoples’ plant use for the manufacture of tools and weapons. In contrast, rich documentation exists for Indigenous Peoples' practices of plant management in California to obtain straighter shoots and saplings for basketry and the manufacture of arrows. Fur trade ethnographic records from the late eighteenth century northern Plains region also offer tantalizing clues about Indigenous people have maintained, managed and regularly visited stands of particular plants, such as Saskatoon (June berry), for the purpose of manufacturing arrow shafts.

This project investigates previously undocumented and/or under-researched aspects of Indigenous Peoples’ use and management of plants, for example possible alteration practices employed to secure a steady supply of wood of a higher quality than unaltered wood for the manufacture of tools and weapons. The results of this research project can help to close this gap and possibly lead to a reassessment of the impact of the fur trade on the material culture, land tenure and on subsistence activities of Indigenous communities in the southern Manitoba.

Roland Bohr completed his doctoral studies at the University of Manitoba in 2005, with a thesis on continuity and change in Indigenous peoples’ use of European and Indigenous weaponry. He currently teaches in the Department of History at the University of Winnipeg and serves as the Director of the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies. He is the author of Gifts from the Thunder Beings: Indigenous Archery and European Firearms in the northern Plains and in the central Subarctic, 1670 to 1870.

This paper looks back at several decades of working with documents, ranging from a first experience in Peru in 1964 to a book of poetry published this year. I will focus on some of the documentary volumes published by me and others during my CRLS years, pertaining to Indigenous people's relations with fur traders, missionaries, and and other outsiders through the mid-20th century, and will talk about some of the challenges and learning experiences that they have provided.

Jennifer S.H. Brown, FRSC, Professor Emeritus, taught history at the University of Winnipeg for twenty-eight years and held a Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal history from 2004 to 2011. She served as director of the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies, which focuses on Indigenous peoples and the fur trade of the Hudson Bay watershed, from 1996 to 2010. She has published numerous books and articles on these topics, on Aboriginal-missionary relations, on Metis history, and on anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell and the Berens River Ojibwe. Her recent books include: Elizabeth Bingham Young and E. Ryerson Young, Mission Life in Cree-Ojibwe Country: Memories of a Mother and Son (ed. JSHB), Athabasca University Press, 2014; An Ethnohistorian in Rupert’s Land: Unfinished Conversations (Athabasca University Press, 2016); and Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River: A. Irving Hallowell and Adam Bigmouth in Conversation (ed. with introduction by JSHB), University of Nebraska Press, 2018; also, four books documenting aspects of family history (Amazon 2013-2024).

The HBC’s attempt to modernize its workforce in the interwar years exposes its difficult position in highly competitive labour markets, especially in Canada, and the growing tensions between the company’s London directors attempting to apply sometimes very abstract principles of scientific management and the working realities of its personnel in the HBC's northern post system. This paper examines George Binney, hired by the HBC in 1926 and tasked with the responsibility of selectively hiring and giving initial training to the company's new UK apprentice clerks. Between 1927 and 1930, Binney recruited in Scotland and England 186 individuals that he believed were intellectually, emotionally, and temperamentally fit to take on new roles and responsibilities in Canada’s competitive interwar fur trade. He hoped that by reviving UK recruitment and selecting and mentoring men of strong character would redress the company's alarming trend of high turnover in the trader ranks after World War I. His UK recruitment efforts, however, challenged the concurrent Canadian hiring practices of the Winnipeg-based Fur Trade Commissioner and some of the views of the company's newly-independent Canadian Committee more amenable to Canadian recruits. Moreover, Binney's ardent imperialism and his effort to maintain "men of Britain" in Canada's north fell afoul of growing Canadian nationalism in the 1920s and Canada’s gaining autonomy in the British Empire after 1926. By 1930, Binney’s preference for Scot and English clerks was further challenged by the Canadian federal government’s own restrictions on foreign work contracts and protests of such groups as the Native Sons of Canada that wanted to protect Canada’s job market for Canadians in the midst of the devastating economic depression.

George Colpitts teaches environmental history at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on the history of the fur trade to the modern era with special interest in relationships between human and non-human animals in commercial contexts and during periods of resource colonialism. He has published on animal history, the fur trade, conservation and the modern fur industry in Canada’s north. His most recent book, Pemmican Empire: Food, Trade, and the Last Bison Hunts in the North American Plains, 1780 – 1882, was published by Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Early in 2023 there came to light a substantial group of manuscripts written by the North West Company fur trader George Nelson (1786-1859), whose well-known papers are at the Toronto Reference Library. The manuscripts at Toronto include a series of diaries or journals, kept during Nelson’s service at posts in the present Wisconsin, Manitoba, and northern Ontario, most of which have been published. There are also other writings, including parts of a manuscript known as the Reminiscences, in which Nelson, writing late in life, gave an account of much of his fur trade career. The Reminiscences appear to have comprised 292 closely-written pages, of which three parts, totalling 104 pages or 36% of the original manuscript, are at Toronto. The newly-found manuscripts, which are currently in private hands, include the missing two thirds of Nelson’s Reminiscences; a journal of 123 pages that he kept while trading at the NWC Manitounamingan post in northern Ontario in 1814-1816; and a sketch map of part of Lake Winnipeg, signed and dated 1812, which contains a wealth of geographical information. There are also some personal documents, and later correspondence that clarifies the history of all the Nelson manuscripts since his death, and explains how a large portion ended up in Toronto. In this paper, I will outline the significance of the newly-discovered manuscripts, particularly the historical value of the whole Reminiscences document, now complete.

Although Harry Duckworth's professional career was teaching chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Manitoba, he has always had a serious interest in history. Since the late 1970s he has been doing original research into aspects of the Canadian fur trade, particularly during the North West Company period. Apart from studying the trade in Rupert's Land and the Great Lakes region, he has investigated the London end of the trade, documenting the fur auction sales there, the merchants who supplied English manufactured goods, and the end users in Britain, especially the felt hatmakers. He has published editions of fur trade journals kept by Cuthbert Grant sr, (1786), John Steinbruck (1802-3); and George Nelson (1806-1822). He has contributed papers to most of the Rupert's Land Colloquia and some of the Fur Trade Conferences. He wrote three papers presenting new research into the early history of the Feltmakers' Company of London, of which he is a Liveryman. He is currently working on a history of the early years of the North West Company and its guiding genius, Simon McTavish. This is bringing together the results of much of his research over the last forty-odd years.

Indigenous peoples' territorial authority over land continues to be a contentious issue to this day. This presentation critiques existing scholarship on Algonquian land tenure using Nehinuw (Cree) conceptual knowledge and understanding. As a response to the limitations of existing academic research, this presentation re-examines the history of Indigenous land, especially as it pertains to Cree and Algonquian lands. A key emphasis in this research is the use of the Nehinuw (Cree) language and the cultural historical understandings of land and territory as spoken and practiced by the Kaminstigominuhigoskak, (Spruce Island) Cumberland House Cree. Additionally, Cree methodological devices including grammatical analysis are used to examine relevant and meaningful key Nehinuw concepts such as nituskeenan/kituskeenuw our land, and our national territory. Existing research that limits the Cree or Algonquian concepts of land as being based on “family hunting territories” or communal lands will be challenged by a nation-based theoretical framework. New Cree geopolitical territorial concepts that include use, resources, camps, homelands, places of existence, gathering centers, and shared lands are introduced to provide the substantive basis and critical contextual shift from the Euro-centred view on the issue of land to a more balanced perspective where Indigenous language and understandings are given a more thorough and substantive recognition.

Keith Goulet is a Nehinuw (Cree) and a fluent speaker of Nehinuwehin (Cree language) from Kaminstigominuhigoskak (Cumberland House) in northern Saskatchewan. He was raised in a trapping, fishing, hunting, and gathering context. He has a B.Ed., M.Ed., and Ph.D. on the issue of land. He has been a teacher, Cree language consultant, teacher education program developer (NORTEP), executive director of Gabriel Dumont Institute, and a regional community college principal. He co-authored a book with his wife Linda using Nehinuw (Cree) pedagogy titled Teaching Each Other: Nehinuw Concepts and Indigenous Pedagogies, UBC Press, 2014 . His daughters are Kona and Danis and grandchildren Cassius, Riel, and Iskotao (Fire). He was an elected Member of the Legislative Assembly of the province of Saskatchewan for 17 years and served as a cabinet minister from 1992 to 2001.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has issued a clarion call for the settler population of Canada to enter into relationship with Indigenous peoples. The Calls to Action invite us to address the harms experienced by colonialism. The Anisininew peoples that live in and around Island Lake, Manitoba (their territory extends into north western Ontario), have identified the need for their histories as critical repairing the colonial damage. However, the community’s collective stories have been fragmented by the complex interaction of colonization, forced attendance at residential schools and its legacy of inter-generational trauma, along with the current socio-economic crises of housing shortages, food insecurity and public education. This paper will outline a collaborative historical recovery project that has been undertaken between academics and the Anisininew Okimawin through the creation of a community archive designed to provide all community members with information about their shared past.

Dr. Harms is an Associate Professor of History at Brandon University. She is a Latin American Historian but teaches courses throughout the global south, including revolutions, imperialism and decolonization as well as women and gender histories. This current project reflects a collaboration between scholars at Brandon University and the Anisininew Okimawin Tribal Council. It is supported by a SSHRC grant.

Jean Wedderburn Douglas, Lady Selkirk’s interventions in the “fur trade wars” of the early nineteenth century went well beyond the role that the current historiography has assigned her. This paper will examine her participation in the history of the Red River Settlement - and the violence that surrounded its inception. Lady Selkirk’s participation in her family’s business interests in the northern North American fur trade could be literal; while in Montreal, Wedderburn Douglas engaged 47 recently demobbed Meurons soldiers, “and I plume myself much on them, as they are my throw entirely,” she wrote to her brother, Andrew Colvile.   But it could also be, at times, more subtle, as her creation of social networks during her time in Montreal reveals.  Intelligent, independent, and as keenly aware as anyone of the strategic importance of operating within existing social structures, Lady Selkirk was, this paper will argue, an important and skilled member of a co-ordinated business/family, and an integral part of their interventions in the fur trade and the creation of the Red River Settlement.

Anne Lindsay is a settler historian who has worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, and for the Office of the Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools.  Trained in both archival studies and history, she has been doing research in the areas of missing Indigenous children and Indian Residential School cemeteries in Manitoba and Northwestern Ontario for over ten years, and has been working with Indigenous individuals, families, and communities to locate records for over twenty.  Her work with the Manitoba Indigenous Tuberculosis History Project has contributed to the creation of a research guide and related video modules designed to support families and communities searching for loved ones who were sent to Indigenous Hospitals and Sanatoria in Manitoba – including Indian Residential School students - in the period from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Maps attributed to La Verendrye's exploration of the prairie region in the mid-1700s show a mixed cartographic style and interpretation of the south west portion of Rupert's Land and prairie adjacent to the Missouri River. The exploration was weakly sponsored by France and terminated by political considerations prior to the Seven Years War. Denis Combet in 2001 through Great Plains Publications brought out a review of La Verendrye's work titled In Search of the Western Sea which includes seven maps attributed to La Verendrye. David Malaher will present a technical analysis of the seven maps and, in spite of geographical errors, he will discuss how these maps provided information to cartographers in Paris, London and the English colonies.

David Malaher is an independent researcher in the history of the US/Canada boundary, particularly the influence of the fur trade. Malaher's documentary research includes visits to libraries, universities and museums in Canada, France, the US, the UK and Russia.   Along with exploring selected boundary sites related to the fur trade, Malaher brings practical surveying experience to the subject as a (retired) professional engineer.  He has served as Chair of the Board of Governors of the University of Manitoba and is a member of the Manitoba Historical Society, the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies, and the Jedediah Smith Society (US).

In 1996, the Anishinaabe Elder Omishoosh, Charlie George Owen, came to the University of Winnipeg to give an address about the collection at the university much of which had formerly belonged to members of Omishoosh’s family and had come from his community, Pauingassi. During the visit he asked Dr. Jennifer Brown and me to take pictures and make a book of the collection so that it could be used to help the children of the community learn about their amazing historical legacy. Nearly 30 years later the book he envisioned has finally been published by the Manitoba Museum. It is the last of 6 books that were part of the Nametwaawin project undertaken four years ago as an outreach support project for the schools of the Pimachiowin Aki World Heritage site. It is designed around the needs of the young people Omishoosh cared about and can be read for meaning entirely in Anishinaabemowin, the language Omishoosh spoke so eloquently.

Maureen Matthews is an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba and former Curator of Cultural Anthropology at the Manitoba Museum. Before joining the museum, Dr. Matthews was a CBC radio journalist and winner of five Canadian Association of Journalism awards for Investigative Journalism. She also won three major awards for her work at the Manitoba Museum including a Governor General’s History award for the Spirit Lines project. Her current research remains focussed on the relevance of the Anishinaabeg, Anishininiwak, and Ininiwak languages.

Despite widespread acknowledgment of the importance Indigenous peoples’ use of fire as a landscape management tool within North American ecosystems, very little literature exists exploring the use of fire by Indigenous peoples of the prairie grasslands. This short paper offers a literature review and preliminary interviews on traditional use of fire by Plains Cree and Saulteaux Elders in the prairie parkland region of Treaty Four Saskatchewan. These traditions have the potential to contribute to fire management on rural reserves and to the revival of cultural values and language. 

Dr. Miller has taught for First Nations University of Canada in the Department of Indigenous Studies since 2013.  His research involves ethnoecology and cultural landscapes of the Plains Cree and Saulteaux people of Treaty Four. 

Sarah McLeod Ballenden and Hudson’s Bay Company Chief Factor John Ballenden are best known in fur trade and Red River history for their involvement in the Foss-Pelly Scandal, in which Mrs. Ballenden was accused of infidelity. The trial that followed, brought by Mrs. Ballenden’s supposed lover, Captain Christopher Vaughan Foss against one of his accusers, A. E. Pelly, brought together fur trade families at Red River and across Rupert’s Land in defense of racialized fur trade wives and mothers. Fur trade and Red River history tend to note that, within a few years of the 1849 trial, Sarah and John Ballenden both relocated to Edinburgh and died shortly thereafter. This moment of Red River history, however, is only a small part of a much broader trans-Atlantic family history that ties the Ballendens, Bannatynes, McMurray, McDermott, and Inkster families together in ways that highlight the mobility of these families and the ways that their Indigenous ancestries were obscured in archival records that span across Canada, Scotland, England, and the United States. Digitization of archival records have allowed Erin Millions and Krista Barclay to locate the ‘missing’ trans-Atlantic histories of two generations of Ballenden children.

Dr. Erin Millions (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Millions is a settler historian whose research centers on Indigenous children and families to explore histories of Indigenous education and health in 19th- and 20th- century Canada and the larger British Empire. Her work includes translating these histories to public audiences through community-engaged projects including the Manitoba Indigenous Tuberculosis History Project, Indigenous Afternoons in the Archive, the Welcoming Winnipeg Initiative, and the Canadian Geographic Paths to Reconciliation website. Dr. Millions has worked as a public historian and historical consultant for Parks Canada, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and the BBC.

This paper will examine the representation of colonial sovereignty in correspondence between the Hudsons Bay Company [HBC] and the British Colonial Office and related offices, including the Admiralty and Foreign Office, between 1813 to 1870. I will examine how the character, scope, and meaning of the HBC and Britain’s claims to Indigenous lands, waters, and resources represented in this particular colonial archive, and ask what this representation tells us about the particular kind of colonial rule associated with the fur-trade, and its relationship to the Canadian nation and its claims to the northwest. By reading the records of conversation between the HBC and the metropolitan government both against and along the grain and employing the insights of Indigenous Studies scholarship on the fur-trade and sovereignty, this paper will suggest some of the new scholarship that we might draw out of the colonial archive.

Adele Perry is from a settler family in British Columbia, and has taught at the University of Manitoba since 2000.  She is currently Distinguished Professor in History and Women's and Gender Studies, and Director of the Centre for Human Rights Research.  She is a historian of colonialism in North America, including of the fur-trade.

With few exceptions, fur trade scholarship has largely relied on written historical sources. Although strides have been made to include Indigenous oral histories, objects within museum collections, and results from archaeological reports, few historians have begun to actively engage the ways collaborations with archaeologists could help answer their research questions. One place in which archaeology can be particularly helpful is reconstructing past food use. Fur trade sources which discuss foods focus almost exclusively on protein sources, and when plant foods are mentioned, they largely reference those imported from Europe (“sugar” being the exception). This leaves gaps in our understanding of fur trader diets, as well as the diets of Indigenous people who lived at these posts (or in the northwest in general) and collaborated with the fur trade. My work to establish past plant foods utilized by a Rocky Cree community, directly before contact, is an example of how archaeological methods can be used to answer research questions shared between archaeologists and fur trade historians. When cooking in pottery over a fire, foodstuffs will burn onto the sides of the vessel, preserving over archaeological time. These “residues” can then be analysed to identify the last meal (or meals) cooked in those vessels before they entered the archaeological record. These methods have previously identified foods such as wild rice, maize, sweet potato, and other plants in parts of the northwest where these foods are obscured within written historical sources. This project will establish what foods were used by people living on the Churchill River drainage, providing new perspectives on the dietary sources likely utilized by those Indigenous people who collaborated with the fur trade, and therefore the foods which may have been available while fur traders traveled away from the posts.

Steph Skelton is a Masters in Archaeological Sciences Student at Lakehead University. Her research focus is on reconstructing the past diet of people who lived on South Indian Lake in northern Manitoba, from their pottery.

The English trading posts on the shores of James Bay faced a turning point in the early 1740s. The previous decade had seen the Hudson’s Bay Company’s governing Committee growing increasingly dissatisfied with the management of those posts, at a time when competition from French traders inland was on the rise. Not unusually for the period, the many challenges which beset their trading establishments were perceived as moral hazards and not just commercial ones. The Committee’s ability to address these issues was severely hampered by the fact that they were in London and had only a yearly letter to issue orders, provide encouragement, and levy punishment. They relied very heavily on their managers in the field, who they felt had too often proven to be frail reeds on which to lean.

Between 1741 and 1744, the Committee’s ‘point men’ in James Bay were two of their former sloopmasters: Joseph Isbister, in charge of Albany, and James Duffield, in charge of Moose. Together, they worked diligently – even fiercely – to instill order and discipline, curtail vices such as drunkenness and illicit trade, and exert their authority over both their own personnel and their Indigenous trading partners. The 41 surviving letters which the two men exchanged over these three years make for fascinating theatre. They served as mutual expressions of support and encouragement between two puritan crusaders who felt themselves beset on all sides by the wicked and the profane; they served as demonstrations of diligence and loyalty to their employers, who received copies of all their correspondence; and they served as a running commentary on a multi-faceted power struggle as old as the company itself. Isbister and Duffield’s compliments and complaints – their dreams and their nightmares – spoke to the complex interplay of relationships among chief factors, servants, supply ship captains, Indigenous hunters and traders, and the board of directors.

Scott Stephen has spent more than thirty years working in museums, archives, universities, heritage organizations, and anywhere else that a History degree might come in handy. Between 2000 and 2014, he taught history at the University of Winnipeg and at the University of Manitoba. Since 2007, his 'day job' has been with Parks Canada, where he has worked on a variety of projects for national historic sites and national parks from York Factory to the Yellowhead Pass and beyond. He is particularly interested in the Hudson’s Bay Company and the trading post communities which it helped create: within this larger context, his current research interests include a history of work (overlapping with, but distinct from, labour history) and a history of space, landscape, and soundscape. He lives in Winnipeg with his son, their cat, and an alarming number of books.

This paper looks at three distinct, but synchronous music periods of French song in Rupert’s Land, based on their physical roots (“habitats”) outdoors, indoors and electronic. This long-range study is inspired by Métis Réal Boucher (1929-2019) who sent me 55 of his songs and identified their origins as France, Quebec, and Northwest Territories. The evidence for music periods will be heard in Réal’s rendition of five songs from Normandy, Quebec/Red River, Saskatchewan, and CKDM Dauphin, Manitoba.

Lynn Whidden is a musicologist who has studied Indigenous music around the world from traditional songs, rooted in outdoor sounds, to the marvels of new electronic music genres. More recently, she is focussing on the importance of acoustics for shaping human music both outdoors and indoors.