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2016 Thoughts on Affect: Reading Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, and Sylvia Van Kirk
Turner, Deanna
Turner, D. (2016). Thoughts on Affect: Reading Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, and Sylvia Van Kirk (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28432 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/3439 master thesis
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Thoughts on Affect: Reading Harold Innis, Donald Creighton, and Sylvia Van Kirk
by
Deanna Yi Turner
A THESIS
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE
DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN HISTORY
CALGARY, ALBERTA
OCTOBER, 2016
© Deanna Yi Turner 2016
Abstract
This thesis focuses on three fur trade history texts: Harold Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada, Donald Creighton’s The Empire of the St. Lawrence, and Sylvia Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties. Using the works and concepts of theorists Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and others, it is argued that each text, through its subject matter, reveals an element of more-than- humanness. The condition of more-than-human calls into question the conception of a human as a stable and singular subject, and the pre-eminent position of the lone human agent within the study of history. This post-humanist analysis allows for a re-reading of these fur trade histories by challenging how the intentional human agent in history is perceived and reproduced in text. In order to initiate a re-reading, each text is re-cast into a different genre in order to prompt the reader into thinking about these history texts in radically different terms. By accentuating the literary nature by which these three historical works operate, the inherent aesthetic and ethical weaknesses imbued in history’s representation and production of the subject and agency are revealed. By putting forth the Deleuzian conception of repetitional thinking as an alternative, this thesis hopes to subvert and ease the grasp of representational thinking on the study of history.
ii
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my supervisor, Dr. George Colpitts, for being the most patient and giving advisor. I am indebted to the guidance and mentorship of Dr. Elizabeth Jameson, Dr. Nancy Janovicek, Dr. R. Douglas Francis, and Dr. Francine Michaud. And I would have been lost without the help of Ms. Lori Somner, Mrs. Diane McInnes, and Mrs. Marion McSheffrey. Lastly, I am grateful to my family, who made all of this possible.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgements...... iii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………iv Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 1: Historiography...... 12 Formulating the Laurentian Thesis ...... 13 The New Fur Trade Historiography ...... 13 The Linguistic Turn ...... 24 The Linguistic Turn in Fur Trade Historiography ...... 31 Conclusion ...... 35 Chapter 2: Companion Species in Harold Innis’s Fur Trade ...... 38 The Narrative of the Fur Trade by Harold Innis ...... 41 Volition in Innis’s fur trade ...... 47 Innis and Companion Species in the Fur Trade ...... 52 Conclusion ...... 55 Chapter 3: The Semantic Relations of Donald Creighton’s Fur Trade ...... 60 A Tragedy in Three Acts...... 61 The Play’s Actors: The St. Lawrence as Metaphor ...... 64 The Empire as Novel ...... 73 Affect in Creighton’s Work ...... 77 Conclusion ...... 79 Chapter 4: Rhizomatic Propagation in Sylvia Van Kirk’s Fur Trade ...... 82 Van Kirk’s Women of the Fur Trade ...... 85 Van Kirk’s Assemblages...... 94 Desire in Van Kirk’s Fur Trade ...... 98 Rhizomes in Van Kirk’s Fur Trade ...... 104 Conclusion ...... 108 Conclusion ...... 111 Bibliography ...... 115
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Introduction
Many historians strive to reflect on the reality of the past as accessed through the evidence marshalled in other histories and the primary sources they draw upon. Their work therefore presumably comes to mimic what actually went on. What supposedly distinguishes historical writing from other literature, especially fiction, is that it is constrained by the author’s attempt to abide by rules of evidence.1 This has been seen, however, as a means of controlling evidence. The connection between the past and history is usually accounted for because history purportedly relates to something in reality and thus outlines the referential nature of history prose. Historian Alun Munslow identified this guiding idealism as demonstrating the belief in mimesis, deriving from the Greek mimesis, meaning imitation. Mimesis defines that state or object of aesthetic representation that, it is believed, resembles what it represents.2 In this sense, then, history is an imitation of past reality; literally history is the representation of the past in another form, but specifically a narrative. According to the realist school, this understanding of history also assumes that the historian serves as essentially a cipher in this re-presentation.
However, it is also paradoxically recognised that the historian is also the author of the history.
Therefore the writer through their narrative-making/literary construction chooses to imitate the empirically attested-to past in a particular way as they create an aesthetic object.3
1 Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric: On Hayden White’s Tropes,” Comparative Criticism vol.3, ed. E.S. Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 261. 2 Alun Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, second edition (London & New York: Routledge, 2006 [2000]), 174. 3 Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, 174. F.R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 11. Ankersmit outlines the “rationality of historical writing” and notes that historical writing presents a substitute for a thing in its absence (in this case, the past). To Ankersmit, this is the same as the artist who creates a statute of a god, or paints a picture of a person or landscape. Therefore, because art belongs to the domain of aesthetics, and history provides the same function, it stands that historical writing is an aesthetic object. 1
However, the twentieth century postmodern critique challenges the theory of mimetic representation and realist understanding. Critics such as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida,
Hayden White, and Frank R. Ankersmit, reject the metanarrative “that art must imitate reality”.
As such, these critics also then reject and cast out the transcendental signifier or the existence of a knowable originary past and “the consequential elevation of the figural.”4 When this is done, history can no longer be viewed as simply the product of mimesis – an aesthetic act that derives from empirical data. Rather, it becomes far more problematic. For instance, the very language used to write history cannot be divorced from its inherited and shifting meanings. History becomes too tied up with personal or cultural, ideological and moral positions to simply tell or purvey the simple, undiluted truth. Most importantly, though, the postmodern critique challenges the assumption that historical representation imitates the past. Its very creation as a representation makes history something else entirely.
The Issue of representation within history is problematic. This sentiment is echoed by
Gilles Deleuze, who believes that representational thinking must be disrupted altogether. To do so, Deluze argues that a fundamental shift in thinking must occur, and representational thinking
(which to Deluze is grounded in generality) must be replaced by repetitional thinking. Deleuze begins Difference and Repetition by bluntly asserting that “repetition is not generality.”5 Deleuze continues to state that repetition is a conduct and a point of view that is most concerned with seeing the non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities of all things, as opposed to generality, which allows for one term to be exchanged or substituted for another.6
4 Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies , 174. 5 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994 [1968]), 1. 6 Ibid, 1. 2
Importantly, Deleuze derived “non-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities” from Leibniz’s concept of monads. Where monads are indivisible and indestructible entities, so too are singularities, both of which can be understood like something fundamental and indivisible as atoms. Therefore like monads, singularities converge to make the universe, and exist on a plane from which all objects and subjects, in their multifarious manners, may emerge.7
Singularities are decisive points, but can be brought together in infinite trajectories (or lines of flight as termed by Deleuze). As such, singularities must be understood in their insularity, but also in the connections among and between them.8
Deleuze continues by warning that repetition is a necessary and justified conduct in instances when generality (exchange and substitution) are untenable. Such instances include, for
Deleuze, “reflections,” “echoes,” “doubles,” and even “souls”. These are instances when “it is no more possible to exchange one’s soul than it is to substitute real twins for one another,”9 whereas generality can equate two people as being the same, as in of the same species, i.e. homo sapiens.
This conception is not wrong, but repetition is about viewing those unique and singular instances when exchange and substitution do not help to illuminate our understanding of them.
As such, generality (and by extension representation) and repetition work in fundamentally different ways, where “exchange is the criterion of generality, theft and gift are those of repetition.”10 Through this somewhat cryptic message Deleuze begins to show that representation and repetition are mathematically or empirically different. Where representation would have us understand that x = x = not y, repetition is an open equation where y + z + a +.., may continue onwards. An open equation such as this does not sum multiples in order to equate
7 Brett Nicholls, “Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Von,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010 [2005]), 145. 8 Tom Conley, “Singularity,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, 255. 9 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1. 10 Ibid, 1. 3 to one identity, but rather “synthesizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging.”11 Therefore, “to repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent.”12 The best example offered up in order to describe repetition would be the rhizomatic propagation of plants, such as mint or crabgrass. The roots of these plants spread out horizontally, but retain the ability to grow upwards in order to create completely new plants. The multiple plants are connected, but are not the same. In the root’s creeping expansion it comes into contact with other roots, worms and rocks and forges a new path and unique existence.13
The concept of ‘repetition’, as it appears throughout Deleuze’s body of work, encompasses a variety of other concepts such as ‘difference’, ‘differentiation’,
‘deterritorialisation’, and ‘becoming’. Despite the concept’s vast breadth, it needs to be fundamentally understood that repetition, to Deleuze, is not about the same thing occurring over and over again. Rather, repetition is connected to the power [puissance]14 of difference in terms of a productive process that produces variation in and through every repetition. To repeat is to begin again; to affirm the power of the new and the unforeseeable. And for Deleuze, repetition is only produced via difference, not mimesis.15
All of this highlights the central place the concept of difference holds in his work. And
Deleuze uses his notion of empirical and non-conceptual ‘difference-in-itself’ in order to disrupt the primacy he sees accorded to identity and representation in western rationality and traditional
11 Brian Massumi, “Notes on Translation and Acknowledgments,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xiii. 12 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 1. 13 Charles J. Stivale, Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 118. 14 Brian Massumi notes that there are two words for power within the French language, puissance and pouvoir. And they are associated with very different concepts in Deleuze’s (and Guattari) work. Here, power refers to puissance, which means ‘a range of potential’. Massumi, “Notes on Translation and Acknowledgments,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, xvii. 15 Cliff Stagoll, “Difference,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, 74. 4 philosophy. To do so, Deleuze must challenge two critical presuppositions: the privilege accorded Being and the representational model of thought. Both of these he considers have important, yet undesirable political, aesthetic, and ethical implications. As Deleuze understands things, difference is usually understood as ‘difference from the same’ or difference of the same over time.16 In both cases, difference only refers to a net variation between two states. As such, this assumes that states of being are comparable, and that there is a base of sameness against which variation can be observed and deduced. Under these conditions, difference merely becomes a relative measure of sameness and only concerned with external relations between things. Through this way of thinking, difference is subordinated to sameness, and becomes just an object of representation in relation to some identity. To Deleuze this is the greatest shame, for difference can therefore only be understood in terms of resemblance, identity, opposition, and analogy, instead of being conceived of difference-in-itself or by the uniqueness implicit in the particularity of things and the moments of their conception and perception. 17
Deleuze’s logic thus proves to have deep implications for the study and writing of history. And it is against this backdrop that I will explore three formative fur trade history texts:
Harold A. Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History,
Donald G. Creighton’s The Empire of the St. Lawrence: A Study in Commerce and Politics and
Sylvia Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670-
187018. I argue that these texts, due to their subject matter, are well positioned to reveal how historians may make (if they so wish) a sustained and meaningful move away from
16 Stagoll, “Difference,” 74. 17 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 117. 18 Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970); Donald Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence: A Study in Commerce and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002 [1937 & 1956]); Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670-1870 (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer Publishing Ltd., 1980). 5 representation. Fur trade historiography is exceptionally placed for this endeavour because the subject field lends itself to categories of difference and repetition. The historical persons displayed in these works not only interact with other people, but with the environment, animals, and technologies and are thus better conceived as difference-in-itself or unique unto themselves.
They also interact with and undergo processes of colonialism, imperialism, and systems of racism and sexism very much revealing changing power relations. Fur trade history, then, shows the diverse set of experiences and situations that a historical subject of difference, as conceived by Deleuze, may embody and encounter over time.
In order to show how the works of Deleuze (and Felix Guattari) can move history away from representational thinking, I will employ a post-humanist reading of these texts in order to locate the webs and relations of affect within and without them. Post-humanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question an anthropocentric belief in the human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life.19 Post-humanism strives for the radical decentring of the traditional sovereign, coherent and autonomous human in order to demonstrate how the human is always already evolving with, constituted by and constitutive of multiple forms of life.20 In other words, post-humanism is concerned with revealing the more-than- humanness of human existence. As an epistemological reframing, this approach has already re- centered literary studies, especially in respect to the animal and natural world.21 By compelling the rethinking of the subject, post-humanism allows for an interrogation into the actual and virtual creation of the human subject. By compelling the rethinking of the subject, post-
19 Gerda Roelvink & Magdalena Zolks, “Posthumanist Perspectives on Affect,” Angelaki 20:3 (2015), 1. 20 Roelvink & Zolks “Posthumanist Perspectives on Affect,” 1. 21 Pamela Banting, “The Ontology and Epistemology of Walking: Animality in Karsten Heuer’s Being Caribou: Five Months on Foot with an Arctic Herd,” in Greening the Maple: Canadian Ecocriticism in Context, ed. Ella Soper and Nicholas Bradley (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2013); Pamela Banting, “Grizzly Country to Grizzly Heart: The Grammar of Bear-Human Interactions in the Work of Andy Russell and Charlie Russell,” in Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature, ed. Donna Coates and George Melnyk (Edmonton: AU Press, 2009); Jeff Wallace, “Literature and Posthumanism: Literature and Posthumanism,” Literature Compass 7:8 (2010), 692-701. 6 humanism allows for an interrogation into the actual and virtual creation of the human subject.
This interrogation would be useful for historians because it would necessitate a reconfiguring of what can constitute the historical human subject. For example, the Deleuzian concepts of
“becoming,” “intensity,” “affect/affection,” and “difference-in-itself” can be used in order redefine and understand an historical person. In so doing, subjects and objects could begin to be understood not through generality and representation, but through Deleuze’s repetitional thought process. A benefit that could be derived from this reconfiguration would be the historian’s greater awareness for the historical people of whom they write. Specifically, the historian could better acknowledge and account for the quandary posed by the ontological separateness of people, and their ultimately fully knowable agency and intentionality.
These three works have been chosen because they are not outliers; each work has contributed to one of the most influential theories developed to explain the economic and national development of Canada: the Laurentian thesis.22 This thesis was given complete expression by Innis and Creighton by the early half of the twentieth century; it was sustained in many respects in J.M.S. Careless’ conception of Metropolitanism; and continues to elicit attention, dissent and agreement.23 Undoubtedly, Van Kirk’s work is considered formative (like
Innis and Creighton’s) in its own right. However, her work continued to build on key concepts evinced within the Laurentian thesis, such as the growing dependency of the hinterland upon the metropole, and the export of European culture, embodied by white women, to the colony. Van
Kirk’s focus on the social history of the fur trade augments the Laurentian thesis significantly, but does not overturn it. So while separated by nearly forty years and far more sensitive to topics
22 The Laurentian thesis, simply defined, is an influential economic explanation describing Canadian national development. It is argued that Canadian economic and national development began with the exploitation of key staple products , such as fur, timber and wheat, by colonial merchants who were mostly located in metropolitan centres along the St. Lawrence river system. 23 J.M.S. Careless, “Metropolis and Region,” Urban History Review 3:78 (1978), 99-118. 7 like class exploitation, race and gender, Van Kirk’s work still holds with, to an extent, older imperialist scholarship. Even though the Laurentian thesis is heavily criticized and under constant attack, it continues to be a fundamental historical analysis of Canada by which other theories must compete. Textbooks still abide by an East-West axis essentially extending from the
St. Lawrence westward, such as R.D. Francis, Richard Jones and Donald B. Smith’s Origins:
Canadian History to Confederation.24 Therefore, these three works share in a dominant conceptual understanding of Canadian history that must be re-read, in order to provoke new ways of meaning and lines of flight, as Deleuze urges. Deleuzian theory holds great potential to facilitate a re-reading of these pivotal fur trade history texts. A re-reading is essential, for these histories may be dated, but they still hold unique insights which may be unlocked or re-seen. As such, Deleuzian theory provides another method to gain a new perspective on these works.
Although historians perpetually grapple with the historian’s position vis-à-vis the past, Deleuzian theory provides a novel method through which to reassess their distance, both in time and space, from one another, the past and past people. Deleuzian theory is novel because it places all subjects (and objects) within a transversal web of affect (as opposed to linear time narratives).
The beginning chapter will explore the long historiography of the fur trade. This chapter relies heavily on Jacqueline Peterson and John Afinson’s 1985 article entitled “The Indian and the Fur Trade”.25 Their article, as well as other references, helps to map the fur trade historiography of the 1970s and 1980s, and lays out the important themes and debates that were most pertinent at the time. I use the Peterson and Afinson article in order to discuss, at length, the early and competing approaches used to analyze Indigenous-new comer relations. This includes
24 R.D. Francis, Richard Jones & Donald B. Smith, Origins: Canadian History to Confederation, Seventh Edition (Toronto: Nelson Education, 2013). 25 Jacqueline Peterson & John Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade: A Review of Recent Literature,” Manitoba History 10, (1985). 8 tracing a move from formalist to substantivist approaches in fur trade historiography. As well as discussing the contributions made by the rise of social history, the chapter then notes the significant effect of post-modernism, as evinced through the emergence of the linguistic turn, on fur trade historians. The chapter ends by accentuating the difference between literary and
Deluzian theory, arguing that understandings of affect are crucial to developing new ways to write about historical actors.26
It should be noted that chapters two through four will each begin with a deliberate re- reading of the text being focused on. This is done to accentuate the fictive and imaginary elements of the work in order to bring to the surface “the full blown” history of philosophy embedded in each text, and will help to summarize the main points of the author’s work.
Chapter two focuses on Harold Innis and begins with a narrative reconstruction of his text
The Fur Trade in Canada. This narrative reconstruction is a deliberate strategy on my part to help highlight the different actors within Innis’s historical account, ultimately identifying the
Canadian beaver as an important more-than-human protagonist. Innis’s 1924 field notes of his journey to the Mackenzie River, as found at the University of Toronto archives, are also utilized in order to understand who Innis saw as important agents within the fur trade and how those agents interacted with technology. The field notes will help to express how Innis conceived of technology as volition. A post-humanist reading of Innis’s text will show that the significance given to the beaver by Innis, and his conception of technology as volition, should be understood as an instance of more-than-humanness in Innis’s work. The thinking of Donna Haraway will be employed in order to argue that the beaver needs to be viewed as a companion species. By so
26 Here, the term affect refers to concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and refers very generally to “bodily capacities to affect and be affected and/or the augmentation of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, and to connect, such that auto affection is linked to the self-feeling of being alive – that is, aliveness or vitality.” Patricia Ticineto Clough, “Introduction,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 2. 9 doing, it will be demonstrated how humans in history cannot be represented as lone, single actors nor as exclusively human, because they are always (intimately) accompanied by other life forms.
In chapter three, the literary characteristics and similarity to fiction of Donald
Creighton’s The Empire of the St. Lawrence will be addressed. In order to facilitate a re- imagining of Creighton’s work, I begin by framing the work as a play in three acts. This is done in order to stress the connection of Creighton’s work to literature, and to help evaluate the impact and power of the use of rhetoric and metaphor within literature and language. Next, the interpretations of Dominik LaCapra (as he draws from Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin) will be used to show how language is a fundamental site in which to witness affect in the
Deleuzian sense. Specifically, the concepts of supplementarity, heteroglossia and dialogization will be used to show how language can be used to identify affect in historical writing. At this point I will engage with a common analysis of Creighton’s work, which likens his stylistic choices and supposition to that of literature and the novel.27 I contend that this analysis is not inaccurate or negative. It is helpful to view Creighton’s work as akin to the novel, a category of writing he clearly admired. While his history would not fall into a formal, literary, categorization as a novel, I suggest that Creighton’s close adherence to literary conventions employed in novel-writing allows us to reveal emotions, feelings, and ultimately affect more easily in his writing, thus upsetting the notions of humans as static, singular beings, impervious to the thoughts and words of others. Transforming his work first as a tragic play and then accentuating his link to novel conventions will allow the reader to envision themselves within a web of affect in Creighton’s larger work in history.
27 Several authors have identified Creighton’s connection with literature, including historian Carl Berger in his book chapter entitled “Donald Creighton and the Artistry of History,” in The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing since 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). 10
The last chapter will engage with Sylvia Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties. The chapter will begin by reconceptualising Van Kirk’s work as a love poem. After providing an overview of her efforts to raise into prominence women in fur trade narratives, I turn to some of the criticisms launched against Van Kirk’s depiction of Indigenous and Métis/métis women. Fundamentally, it will be argued that traditional conceptions of agency and intentionality are inadequate for a comprehensive understanding of what a subject is, and how to write about one in the past. It will be proposed that the Deleuzian concepts of body, assemblage and desire offer a more adequate understanding of what a subject is and capable of, and therefore contributes more to history’s ability to engage in such complex topics as human agency. These three concepts will then be applied to Van Kirk’s work in order to reveal the affective web expressed in her methodology and text. The chapter will conclude by showing how repetition (rather than representation) can work in historical writing and how it creates a more ethical space within historical writing in order to depict past people and subjects.
It is hoped that the last three chapters will propel the reader into seeing how humans (in the past and present), through a post-humanist and Deleuzian reading, can rarely be seen as solitary. In so doing, the thesis prompts historians to questioning the preeminent position and representation of the lone, human subject that is often privileged in writings of the past. This thesis will demonstrate how historical works connect authors, readers, and depicted subjects in transversal webs of affect, and by drawing attention to three examples of fur trade historiography will offer the Deleuzian conception of repetition as an alternative to representational thinking, as an aesthetic and ethical approach to depicting difference-in-itself of historical subjects.
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Chapter 1: Historiography
The fur trade is one of the oldest topics within Canadian history, and has provided the basis upon which historians have crafted many formative theses about Canada’s national development. The fur trade, as identified by Jennifer Brown, serves as a “critical social- evolutionary stage” in the construction of Canada’s national history.1 Given its distinguished position, it has been used to mythologize the past and is a topic imbued with “highly charged imagery and symbolism.”2 As such, Brown warns that fur trade historians must be cautious so as not to fall into the trap of the progressivist mode of writing history. She urges that historians of the fur trade must attune their ears to the “polyphony of voices” in order to allow histories to be invaded by the heteroglossia of diverse tongues and voices, so as to bring about fundamental advances in understanding.3
Of course fur trade history has undergone many changes in methodology and analysis over the years. One such change has been the introduction of literary theory to the study and understanding of history. As such, it is necessary to acknowledge and assess literary theory and the linguistic turn’s impact on history, and specifically fur trade history. While the post-modern emphasis on language has pushed fur trade historians into confronting how they understand and use ethnographic depictions and records of Indigenous people and societies, it is now undergoing further movement with the emergence of the affective turn. The affective turn builds on literary theory, but goes further to confront the underlying aesthetic, semiotic and rhetorical assumptions
1 Jennifer S.H. Brown, “The Blind Men and the Elephant: Touching the Fur Trade,” in Proceedings of the Fort Chipewyan and Fort Vermilion Bicentennial Conference, ed. Patricia A. McCormack & R. Geoffrey Ironside (Edmonton: Boreal Institute for Northern Studies, 1990), 15. 2 Brown, “The Blind Men and the Elephant” 16. 3 Ibid. 12 of historical thinking.4 This is an essential inquiry for it hopes to disrupt the way historians understand and construct the human subject. The affective turn will help attune the ears of historians to the “polyphony of voices” of the fur trade, by allowing the numerous and multiple voices to propagate within a rhizomatic web of affect with the author and reader, thus inciting an advance in understanding that Jennifer Brown urges us to attain.
Formulating the Laurentian Thesis
The Laurentian theme can be traced to Harold Innis, and his The Fur Trade in Canada: an Introduction to Canadian Economic History. It would be the inspiration for Donald
Creighton’s full articulation of the Laurentian thesis, which W.L. Morton has described as being about the “the metropolitan destiny of the St. Lawrence River, in pythonic struggle with the
Hudson [Bay], to exploit economically and unite politically the northern of the continent.”5
Importantly, however, Innis holds the same formative position in Canadian history as Fredrick
Jackson Turner does in the American context.6 Where the Turner thesis introduces the concept of the frontier into the American lexicon and connects Americans to the development of democracy and nation building, Innis, in conjunction with Donald Creighton in his later work, introduced the dichotomy of the metropole and periphery in the development of the Canadian state. Both of these overarching interpretations were essentially political and narrowly colonial.
The New Fur Trade Historiography
4 The affective turn refers to the growing significance of affect as a focus of analysis across a number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary discourses, at a time that critical theory is facing analytic challenges. Clough, The Affective Turn, 1. 5 W.L. Morton, “Clio in Canada: the Interpretation of Canadian History,” University of Toronto Quarterly 15:3 (1946), 229. 6 R. Douglas Francis, “Turner versus Innis: Bridging the Gap,” American Review of Canadian Studies 33:4 (2003), 473-485. 13
With the broader theme of Laurentianism in the background, Jacqueline Peterson and
John Afinson offer a complete historiographic overview from which key sub-themes can be identified, and thus serve as an essential source into North American fur trade historiography.
Turner and Innis, they claim, started the process by which the North American fur trade was cast as a “first-stage colonial extractive industry forecasting the European settlement and national development.”7 However, as Peterson and Afinson point out, this situation began to change in the 1970s and 80s with the release of a multitude of books and articles that began to engage with fur trade history in radically different terms. This is especially seen in the redefinition of the term
“fur trade” itself. Where once the fur trade was defined as a singular enterprise, in such works as
Partners in Furs by Daniel Francis and Toby Morantz, there were multiple fur trades that differed over time, space and across different cultural and ecological landscapes.8 Furthermore,
Indigenous peoples and nations took on new prominence. No longer was the fur trade as industry seen as a purely European pursuit imparted to Indigenous actors. It reflected a process of “human interaction in which the economic exchange of raw commodities for manufactured goods figured as a vehicle and symbol for a much wider set of contacts between Indian and white.”9
The broadening of fur trade history, its focus and topics, was in part reflecting the growing interdisciplinary nature of academic study. Historians openly looked to geographers, anthropologists, political scientists and economists to recast their analyses and ideas surrounding the fur trade in North America. The maturation of the sub-discipline of ethnohistory in the 1980s is especially important because the general rapprochement between history and anthropology
7 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 10. 8 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 10, referring to Daniel Francis & Toby Morantz, Partners in Furs: A History of the Fur Trade in Eastern James Bay 1600-1870 (Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983). 9 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 10. 14 allowed for the expansion of history’s orientation, methodology and sources.10 Fundamentally, fur trade scholars were opened up to the idea that the study of the fur trade must include the perspective of the Indigenous people who were also participant in it. What became particularly salient was how events were shaped by Indigenous people and nations. Historians began considering Indigenous ways of culturally constructing and understanding in and of the past.11
The earliest debate which emerged from the multiplicity of scholarship of the 1970s and
1980s centred on economic understandings of the role of Indigenous and European people within the fur trade. Traditionally, the fur trade was constructed within a neoclassical, or formalist, framework that presented all human participants as rational decision makers bent on maximizing the utility of limited and scarce means. Peterson and Afinson assert that some scholars, such as
Innis and George T. Hunt, the latter studying in the 1940s the Iroquois Five Nations’ response to the fur trade, were aware of the cultural and economic importance different Indigenous nations ascribed to reciprocity and gift giving. They also recognized the different understandings and prominence of personal and communal ownership within Indigenous societies and the varying degrees of sedentary farming, resource management and subsistence hunting and gathering practices that appeared across Indigenous nations. However, they ultimately argued that with the entrance of the fur trade economy these unique tribal practices were swept away and subordinated to a desire for European goods, and new sources of wealth and capitalism that
Indigenous men and women could not escape.12 Not only was this approach steeped in deeply
10 An example of the synthesis is found in Mary Black-Rogers, “Varieties of ‘Starving’: Semantics and Survival in the Subarctic Fur Trade, 1750-1850,” Ethnohistory 33:4 (1986), 353-383. 11 As achieved in the work of David Meyer & Paul C. Thistle, “Saskatchewan River Rendezvous Centers and Trading Posts: Continuity in a Cree Social Geography,” Ethnohistory 42:3 (1995), 403-445. 12 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” believe that Harold Innis’s, The Fur Trade in Canada and George T. Hunt, The Wars of the Iroquois, A Study in Intertribal Relations (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1940) are representative of these views. 15 troubling colonial understandings, but contributed to the erasure of individual, especially
Indigenous, agency within history texts.
Additionally, the fur trade could be viewed within the context of international trade, which core-periphery scholars identified as a process of unequal exchange. It was theorised that some countries were stronger economically than others and were therefore able to trade on terms that allowed “surplus-value” to flow from the weaker countries to the core. Moreover, dependency theory built on this premise, and recognized that the core-periphery division was the consequence of historical capitalism.13
Beginning in the 1960s, the neoclassical interpretation began to receive criticism and scholars actively tried to modify neoclassical thinking. The alternative was offered in economic anthropology, the substantivist approach. Substantivism posits a more nuanced understanding of human decision-making. For example, not only do humans make choices to maximize limited resources, but their decisions can also economize and/or optimize those limited resources.
Moreover, instead of perceiving human choice within a strict logic of rational action, substantivist approaches may reject fundamental assumptions of rational decision-making and conditions of scarcity altogether. Substantivist critics of the formalist approach believed that the rational model was presumptuous and ethnocentric. Substantivists pointed out that the cultural differences between capitalists, peasants and tribal societies were so crucial that any theory that generalized so much must be too simplistic, if not completely wrong. Therefore, the formalist approach could only be applied to and find meaning in capitalist societies.14 Arthur Ray and
Donald Freeman, confirming this view, believed that the substantivist approach raised significant questions, such as to what degree Indigenous economic motivations differed from those of
13 Immanuel Wallerstein, Word-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 12. 14 Stuart Plattner, Economic Anthropology, ed. Stuart Plattner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 13. 16
Europeans.15 However, they cautioned that both market and non-market institutions were present during Indigenous-European relations, and therefore both must be taken into account.16
Scholars such as E. E. Rich, utilizing an early variant of a substantivist approach, argued that Subarctic people operated from a place of “limited consumer demands” and did not maximize, accumulate or make profit as neo-classical theory predicted.17 He also asserted that
Indigenous people did not act as economic men in the sense of trading to maximize economic return. Instead, Indigenous people bartered solely to “satisfy immediate needs, to maintain political alliances and to gain access to reliable sources of European arms.”18Along with others such as Alan W. Trelease, or more thoroughly, Bruce G. Trigger, substantivist approaches deny that Indigenous behaviour was purely motivated by economic opportunities offered and controlled by Europeans.19 Rather they argue that the intricate webs of Indigenous social and cultural institutions were present in relation to economic motivations, and played important roles in determining and understanding Indigenous trade behaviour.20 Others have rejected outright the neo-classical approach to understanding Indigenous involvement with the fur trade. Abraham
Rotstein, who ascribed Indigenous trading interests to their traditional political institutions and alliances, and Bruce M. White, who looked to culturally meaningful understandings of trade, both argued that Indigenous peoples did not think or behave like their European counterparts.21
15 Arthur J. Ray & Donald Freeman, ‘Give Us Good Measure’: An Economic Analysis of Relations Between the Indians and The Hudson Bay Company before 1763 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 5. 16 Ray & Freeman, ‘Give Us Good Measure,’ 6. 17Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 10, referring to E. E. Rich, “Trade Habits and Economic Motivation Among the Indians of North America,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 26 (1960), 35-53. 18 Ray & Freeman, ‘Give Us Good Measure,’ 5. 19 Peterson and Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 10, referring to Alan W. Trelease, “The Iroquois and the Western Fur Trade: A Problem of Interpretation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (1962), 32-51; Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 2 vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976). 20 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 11. 21 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 11, referring to Abraham Rotstein, “Trade and Politics: An Institutional Approach,” Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology 3:1 (1972), 1-28; Bruce M. White, “‘Give Us a Little Milk’: The Social and Cultural Significance of Gift Giving in the Lake Superior Fur Trade,” in Rendezous: 17
As such, Indigenous actions and behaviours could not be viewed only through an economic lens, but had to be explained through other causes and meanings, such as security, politics, gift giving, and kinship.22
The substantivist approach has not gone unassailed. A substantivist work that gained immediate interest before being rejected was Calvin Martin’s Keepers of the Game: Indian-
Animal Relationships in the Fur Trade. Through this 1978 work Martin suggested that northern
Indigenous hunters believed animals to be close spiritual relatives and did not consider them as economic commodities. Indigenous hunters treated each animal they killed with reverence with the knowledge that the animals were the material manifestations of “game bosses” that had allowed themselves to be captured. Martin thus contends that Indigenous hunters could not have participated in the fur trade economy if they had these beliefs. Therefore, to Martin, Indigenous spirituality or religion must have experienced a catastrophic blow in the seventeenth century from devastating epidemic diseases. Their traditional world view disintegrating in the face of demographic collapse, Indigenous hunters were capable of participating in the fur trade economy and making “war” against animals to kill for profit.23
As Peterson and Afinson have pointed out, Martin’s analysis is based on the anthropology of Adrian Tanner in Bringing Home Animals, which came to a contrary conclusion, along with scholar Harvey Feit. Both Tanner and Feit demonstrated the persistence and vitality of the Indigenous spiritual view of animals that Martin pronounced dead even while participating
Selected Papers of the Fourth North American Fur Trade Conference, 1981, ed. Thomas C. Buckley (St. Paul: North American Fur Trade Conference, 1983), 185-198. 22 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 12; Ray & Freeman, ‘Give Us Good Measure,’ 6. 23 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 11, referring to Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978); Martin, “Subarctic Indians and Wildlife,” in Old Trails and New Directions: Papers of the Third North American Fur Trade Conference, ed. Carol M. Judd and A.J. Ray (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 73-81. 18 in the fur trade.24 Others criticized Martin’s thesis since it cannot be applied to all Indigenous groups, and fundamentally denies the importance of the material world in decision making. Of course, scholars still using a neo-classical basis have offered their own response to the substantivist approach. Scholar Arthur J. Ray, emphasizing changing economic motivations in the fur trade, released several works that depicted Indigenous actors as reacting to and adopting, with Europeans, particular interests in the trade. They were then able to be “shrewd buyers, fully the equals of their European trading partners, who knew how to take advantage of Anglo-French competition in order to obtain the highest quality at the best price possible, and whose precise demands stimulated technological innovation among European manufacturers of Indian trade foods.”25
In the 1980s, the formalist and substantivist approaches were joined by the emergence of neo-Marxist thought on fur trade studies. As Peterson and Afinson suggested, works like Harold
Hickerson’s “Fur Trade Colonialism and the North American Indian” recast Indigenous peoples in the role of a wilderness proletariat.26 Another change occurring around this time was the notable shift in focus of some studies – where older historiography tended to focus on exchange behaviour, the scholarship in the 1980s focused on the production aspect of the trade. This approach is especially clear in Patricia A. McCormack’s “The Transformation to a Fur Trade
Mode of Production at Fort Chipewyan”.27 In her study, McCormack explains the transition from an Indigenous mode of production (in which Indigenous peoples controlled the means and
24 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 11; Adrian Tanner, Bringing Home Animals: Religious Ideology and Mode of Production of the Misfassini Cree Hunters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979). 25 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 16; Arthur J. Ray, “Indians as Consumers in the Eighteenth Century,” in Old Trails and New Directions: Papers of the Third North American Fur Trade Conference, ed. Carol M. Judd and Arthur J. Ray, (Toronto, Buffalo & London: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 255-271. 26 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 12, referring to Harold Hickerson, “Fur Trade Colonialism and the North American Indian,” Journal of Ethnic Studies, 1:2 (1973), 15-44. 27 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 12, referring to Patricia A. McCormack, “The Transformation to a Fur Trade Mode of Production at Fort Chipewyan,” in Rendezvous, ed. Thomas C. Buckley, 155-176. 19 produced food and domestic manufactures for their use-value only) to a capitalist mode (in which Europeans controlled the means of production and Indigenous peoples were forced to produce goods for their market value).28 McCormack and other scholars, in their focus on the production aspects of the fur trade, highlighted the importance and necessity of gender and group specific approaches. During this time several articles and studies were released that looked at particular groups ranging from the Mistassini Cree, the Ottawa, the Sauk, to the Métis. Some studies highlighted the change and continuity experienced by Indigenous men and women.
Gerhard Ens’s study of the changing modes of subsistence of the Red River Métis is such an example.29
The specificity of the different articles and studies shows how historians began to see the fur trade as highly varied, made up of many different groups and experienced differently by persons and Indigenous nations. The inescapable conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the North American fur trade is not one single entity but many, and that differences can be located both within the same tribal and linguistic groups, and within the same ecological zone.
Indigenous involvement cannot be understood in absolute terms as there exists no analysis that fully captures the experiences and outcomes of all Indigenous people and nations. Furthermore, to this day no single economic approach has come to dominate fur trade historiography. At the same time, there exists no argument that can definitively undermine the theoretical basis of the neo-classical, substantivist or neo-marxist approaches.
Tangentially implicit within much fur trade scholarship from the 1970s, 80s and beyond has been the question: what were the effects of the Indigenous/European partnership?30 This
28 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 12. 29 Gerhard J. Ens, Homeland to Hinterland: The Changing Worlds of the Red River Metis in the Nineteenth Century (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 30 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 13. 20 question, while obvious, has helped to expand fur trade scholarship beyond traditional economic perspectives towards cultural and social areas. One discipline that has contributed greatly to historians’ inquiries into this question has been the discipline of archaeology.31 Through the growing interdisciplinary trend, archaeology made a significant impact on fur trade scholarship.
There is little doubt that societies were not modified by their involvement in the trade, or that the trade itself did not spawn a new complex of behaviours and materials adopted by both
Indigenous and European actors. Many archaeological studies helped to shed light on the changing material culture of many groups in a variety of regional, temporal and company contexts. Peterson and Afinson have noted Lyle M. Stone’s Fort Michilimackinac, 1715-1781,
C.S. Reid’s edited Northern Ontario Fur Trade Archaeology, and Alice Kehoe’s “Ethnicity at a
Pedlar’s Post in Saskatchewan” as just some archaeological studies that have helped to enrich historical research and understandings.32
A significant debate emerging from this new concentration on the cultural and social has been the concept of dependency. While change within Indigenous and European societies due to partnership could not be avoided, how, where, when and at what rate change occurred still remain important topics of inquiry. Emanating from the debate surrounding dependency have been multiple interpretations and analyses. Some scholars posit that change was immediate and completely detrimental to Indigenous societies.33 Others have taken a more nuanced stance, believing that change and dependency happened gradually, and that both persistence and change
31 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 13. 32 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 13, referring to Lyle M. Stone, Fort Michilimackinac, 1715- 1781: An Archaeological Perspective on the Revolutionary Frontier (East Lansing: Michigan State University Anthropological Series, 1974); C.S. Reid et. al. Northern Ontarian Fur Trade Archaeology: Recent Research (Toronto: Historical Planning and Research Branch, Ontarion Ministry of Culture and Recreation, 1980); Alice B. Kehoe, “Ethnicity at a Pedlar’s Post in Saskatchewan,” Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology 6:1 (1976), 52- 60. 33 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 15, referring to Rich, “Trade Habits and Economic Motivation Among the Indians of North America.” 21 can be found in Indigenous societies.34 Still others argue that change happened cumulatively, and through other institutions such as missionary organizations, white settlement, law and land use and the creation of the national government.35 On the other hand, some scholars highlight newcomer dependency on Indigenous society. These scholars point to the early years of the fur trade, the Subarctic and Arctic regions where Indigenous societies and people were heavily depended upon, and the problem of supply in the case of the Russian fur trade economy.36 Others argue that interdependence or mutual dependence was far more characteristic of fur trade partnerships.37 It has also been argued that some Indigenous groups remained virtually independent or completely rejected the fur trade in favour of economies and practices surrounding the bison hunt.38 Additionally, more scholars have begun to look at change within individual tribal societies. These scholars have taken note of the change in political organization and show that experiences within the fur trade vary depending on the person and rank.39 Not only do these divergent theories showcase the wide degree of debate inherent in fur trade historiography, but they remind us that dependency, loss of autonomy and even participation in
34 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 13, referring to Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic, 2 vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976). 35 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 13-14, referring to Charles A. Bishop, The Northern Ojibway and the Fur Trade: An Historical and Ecological Study (Toronto & Montreal: Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Ltd., 1974); Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774- 1890 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1977). 36 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 14, referring to Howard R. Lamar, The Trader on the American Frontier: Myth’s Victim (College Station & London: Texas A & M University Press, 1977); James R. Gibson, “European Dependence Upon American Natives: The Case of Russian America,” Ethnohistory 25 (1978), 359-385. 37 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 14, referring to Donald A. Harris and George C. Ingram, “New Caledonia and the Fur Trade: A Status Report,” Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology 3:1 (1972), 179- 194. 38 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 14, 39 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 14, referring to Natalie B. Stoddard, “Some Ethnological Aspects of the Russian Fur Trade,” in People and Pelts: Selected Papers of the Second North American Fur Trade Conference, ed. Malvina Bolus (Winnipeg: Peguis Publishers, 1972), 39-58; Daniel Francis & Toby Morantz, Partners in Furs: A History of the Fur Trade in Eastern James Bay 1600-1870 (Kingston & Montreal: McGill- Queen’s University Press, 1983); Shepard Krech, “The Eastern Kutchin and the Fur Trade, 1800-1860,” Ethnohistory, 23 (1976), 212-235; Carol Judd, “Mixed Bloods of Moose Factory, 1730-1981: A Socio-Economic Study,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 6:2 (1982), 65-88. 22 the fur trade itself, are not foregone conclusions – the fur trade must not be seen and studied as monolithic.
One of the most important works on the subject of dependency and power relations in pays d’en haut has been Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815.40 White’s work changed the way historians viewed power in relations between Europeans and Indigenous people. White’s main focus is studying the practice of new cultural production in cross-social and cross-political contexts. He pointed out how initial encounters between two groups were often characterized by persuasion, perception, misperception and misinterpretation in order to create new ways of meaning and practice. To
White, the middle ground is “the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages.” And this place in between was contingent on the fact that “whites could neither dictate to Indians nor ignore them.” 41 At the same time,
Indigenous groups in this space were not able to use power to attain their wants, since they themselves had been severely impacted by disease and displacement. White’s conception provided new nuance and flexibility to studies of power in colonial settings.
The growing complexity of fur trade studies has also benefited from the emergence of social history within the discipline at large. It is now acceptable and necessary to view fur trade history as being inhabited by complex and large networks of social interactions, relations and contracts. Much of the study concerning fur trade social history began with the examination of fur trade families, marriages and the creation of the Métis/métis groups and communities.
Historians such as Sylvia Van Kirk, Jennifer Brown and Jacqueline Peterson have looked at the marriages between Indigenous women and European men, the roles and motivations of the
40 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815, 20th anniversary edition, (New York: Cambridge University Press, [1991] 2011) 41 White, The Middle Ground, xxvi. 23
Indigenous women who entered into these unions and the families and communities these marriages produced.42 These authors argue that through the institution of marriage à la façon du pays an emergent and unique fur trade society began to establish itself throughout a vast territorial region. Through social history methodology, fur trade history has begun to be peopled.
No longer is fur trade history mainly about economic forces, but it is about the unique stories of men and women, kinship and the particular lives of particular people.43
Intrinsically tied to this dimension of fur trade history is the creation and construction of the new group of people labelled the Métis/métis. Not only do histories try to trace the roots of
Métis/métis identity and nationality, but fur trade historians also study the cultural and political importance of this group within the nations of America and Canada. Unfolding from this, fur trade history has begun to grapple with the concepts and debates surrounding the topics of colonialism and settler colonialism. This has added an ethical dimension to the study of the fur trade. Scholars like Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini have begun to propel fur trade historians into seeing the economy of the fur trades as processes of Indigenous dispossession and elimination and as a way to establish settler political, cultural, and economic hegemony.44
The Linguistic Turn
Fur trade historiography has also undergone other changes. With the heightened importance of post-modern thought throughout the academic communities, historians have begun
42 Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670-1870 (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer Publishing Ltd., 1980); Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980); Jacqueline Peterson, “Prelude to Red River: A Social Portrait of the Great Lakes Métis,” Ethnohistory 25 (1978), 41-67. 43 Nicole St-Onge and Carolyn Podruchny, “Scuttling along a Spider’s Web: Mobility and Kinship in Metis Ethnogenesis,” in Contours of a People: Metis Family, Mobility, and History, ed. Nicole St-Onge, Carolyn Podruchny and Brenda Macdougall (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 59-92. 44 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassel, 1999); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 24 to question the language and bias of primary sources and themselves, and the overarching meta- narratives that historical works have created and perpetuated. The linguistic turn in history has issued from a diverse range of disciplines and studies, which include, but are not limited to
“philosophical investigations of language, anthropological explorations of culture, psychoanalytic interrogations of subject formation, and radical questionings of the possibilities and limits of knowledge formation.”45 The linguistic Turn and the larger heading of cultural history that it has been subsumed into has been derived and benefited from feminist thought about gender and sexuality, French thinkers, Marxist theory, and beyond. The varied scope of participants in the discourse surrounding the linguistic turn makes it difficult to assign to it any simple coherence. Therefore, historian Judith Surkis suggests that the Linguistic turn has no single definable moment or school of thought. The Linguistic turn can include the time period right after the Second World War, the 1960s and 1970s; it can include a range of French thinkers, and the likes of Martin Heidegger, Clifford Gertz, Jürgen Habermas, Quentin Skinner, and William Sewell. There is no single point of immanence, no one turn or conversion.
Closely linked to the linguistic turn, has been the emergence of post-colonial studies.
Emanating from Edward Said’s Orientalism, post-colonialism disputes the representation of the
East or the orient as it is defined by western imperialism.46 In his text, Said argues that the historian rather than the past constitute history and its objects of study. Within the linguistic turn, historians began to call into question the definition of difference and cultural identity, and how concepts of race and gender are constituted. Historians and cultural theorists including Homi
Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Dipesh Chakrabarty have stressed the linguistic and cultural
45 Judith Surkis, “When was the Linguistic Turn? A Genealogy,” American Historical Review 117:2 (2012), 703. 46 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978). 25 avenues through which historians can attempt to escape from their Eurocentric conceptions of history in both its theory and practice.47
The spatio-temporal point, at which I enter into the linguistic turn, is that of literary criticism. Indeed, literary criticism has taught historians to recognize the active role of language, texts, and narrative structures in the creation and description of the past. To be sure, literary criticism in the discipline of history is most ardently defended and advocated by two historians:
Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra. It should be understood that White and LaCapra have many important differences in their theories, concepts and interests. However, within the diverse territory of historiography, both evince broad similarities, one of which is their attempts to expand the breadth of historical methodology and critically analyze the inherited definitions of history.
White’s review of modern history and historiography remains a useful critique. He suggests that most historians seek to limit or impede the inclusion of alternative ways of understanding. It is not that historians are malicious tyrants, but that they are constrained by the archaic Enlightenment notions of fact, and science, which have come to make up a historians’ methodology, understanding about the nature of and their attempts to obtain objectivity. White states that “Every discipline… is, as Nietzsche saw most clearly, constituted by what it forbids its practitioners to do. Every discipline is made up of a set of restrictions on thought and imagination, and none is more hedged about with taboos than professional historiography.”48 As such, historians are unable to de-categorize themselves as objective scientists, they are perhaps afraid or ill-equipped to face a discussion about fact and fiction, and they rarely admit history’s link to art and literature.
47 Munslow, “Postcolonial History,” in The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, 200. 48 Hayden White, “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 126 26
White fundamentally believes that historians are blind to the actual processes of their work. “In point of fact, history… is made sense of in the same way that the poet or novelist tries to make sense of it, i.e., by endowing what originally appears to be problematic and mysterious with the aspect of a recognizable, because it is a familiar, form.”49 White wishes to move away from older, and unhelpful, distinctions between fiction and history. Historians generally do not consider themselves imaginative writers, and by doing so, they ignore the fictive elements contained within their works and methods.50 White puts little faith in the historians’ belief that they have transcended the poetic and imaginary through a rigorous adherence to disciplinary guidelines. In White’s estimation, by doing so historians have undergone “a disciplining of the imagination, in this case the historical imagination, and they set limits on what constitutes a specifically historical event.”51 Despite all of this, historians fail to “recognize that every historical discourse contains within it a full-blown, if only implicit, philosophy of history.” In all attempts to describe historical events, a historian’s philosophy of history will display a reliance on that of narrative which presents a “coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary.”52
To be sure, White does not deny that historical events and people actually happened or existed, but rather that the historian’s attempt to describe them employs various forms of imagination. These various forms draw the historian’s discipline and activities into the seemingly different orbits of literature and philosophy. In doing so, the historian can no longer simply affirm the disciplinary distinctions that lie between the fields of philosophy, history, and
49 Hayden White, “Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 98. 50 To specify, the fictive elements to which White refers is the historian’s figural ordering of a beginning, middle, and end to historical events. White, “Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” 98. 51 Hayden White, The Content of the From: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 66. 52 White, The Content of the From, 24. 27 literature. White identifies the principal difference between history and philosophy of history:
“the latter brings the conceptual apparatus by which the facts are ordered in the discourse to the surface of the text, while history proper (as it is called) buries it in the interior of the narrative, where it serves as a hidden or implicit shaping device.”53 This principal difference seems relatively minute. And thus, White calls for history’s rigid disciplinary lines to be slackened in order to allow historians to openly acknowledge the philosophical components and the imaginary elements of their work. White hopes to initiate a challenge to the antiquated definitions and division between fact and fiction that have come to rule for too long the historical discipline.54
White fully trusts that historians can reshape the definition and scope of their discipline, so as to make it more creative, self-conscious, and critical. The first step is to recognize “the literary or fictive element in every historical account.”55
Along these same lines, LaCapra also calls for a broadening of the historical discipline.
Specifically, he wishes for historians to defamiliarize the texts and contexts of the past. This goes beyond White because he does not think it is enough for historians to just recognize the fictive and philosophical elements of their work. Rather, LaCapra believes that the historical narratives and philosophical structures inherent in historical methods and works need to be challenged.56 To him, these structural characteristics of history writing order the past and ascribe a coherency and unity to the past that is in itself fictitious (if not unethical). LaCapra points out that all texts and contexts have conflicting tensions that resist and defy any attempts of ordering. There are many realities to and “subject-positions” contained within the past that cannot be simply narrated into
53 White, “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” 127. 54 I think it is important to mention that White is referring to nineteenth-century scientific theory, which he feels still influence modern history and its own standards of scientific method and objectivity. This is a major point of White’s Metahistory, which is more comprehensively explored in that text. 55 White, “Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” 99. 56 White also recognizes the historian’s common tendency to seek unified closures in historical narratives, and he attributes this to the historian’s desire for “moral meaning.” This is similar to, but is not as radical as, LaCapra’s theorizing. White, The Content of the From, 21. 28 any one definitive accounting of it.57 LaCapra is thus most critical of history and historiography that does not question its obsession with coherency and narrative ordering. LaCapra demands a wider conception of historical scholarship and process. He suggests that one such “process is precisely the interaction between the desire for unity, identity, or purity, and the forces that contest it. The investigation of this process does not imply a simple rejection of conceptions of unity or order in a mindlessly antinomian celebration of chaos and dismemberment. What it calls for is a rethinking of the concept of unity and its analogues in more workable and critical terms.”58 From this, it can be understood that LaCapra does not wish to wholly discard the concepts of unity brought about by narrative structures – he does see their value, but questions their unexamined superior positioning within historiography and history. LaCapra believes that if historians would willingly embrace this process, they would undoubtedly find many submerged and hidden voices that would contest the history being written – ultimately breaking the unity and unproblematic narrative that they are trying to create.
LaCapra’s most serious re-imagining of history is the new task that he sets out for historians. He believes that historians must develop a dialogue with the autonomous past in order to allow it to question and subvert our structural ordering. LaCapra states, “It must be actively recognized that the past has its own ‘voices’ that must be respected, especially when they resist or qualify the interpretations we would like to place on them. A text is a network of resistances, and a dialogue is a two-way affair; a good reader is also an attentive and patient listener.”59
Historian Lloyd Kramer points out that LaCapra’s dialogic emphasis constitutes his model for intellectual history, but that it can be relevant for all forms of historical study because all fields
57 Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 12. 58 Dominick LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 60. 59 LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 64. 29 that historians seek to treat within their work will always exceed the “explanatory structures that define them.”60
Indeed, this is a major preoccupation for LaCapra, who recognizes that he has had a
‘long-standing concern’ which is “how cogently to relate text-oriented fields such as intellectual history or literary criticism to research-oriented fields such as general history or the social sciences.”61 Kramer suggests that the distinctiveness of LaCapra (and, I would add White) within contemporary historiography derives in part from the distinctive qualities of the intellectual history that they both practice. As a sub-discipline, intellectual history tends to defy disciplinary lines through its emphasis on the philosophy, literature, and theoretical writings of past cultures.
Unlike their counterparts, Kramer sees intellectual historians as more often interested in abstract and marginal topics. This is apparently different from other historians who study more concrete events and processes such as elections, battles and diplomacy. Importantly, though, “the recurring theme of intellectual history is that structures of thought and symbolic meaning are an integral part of everything we know as history. Those who analyze such structures in the texts of past societies find similar structures in the historical writings of the present – which may help to account for the fact that intellectual historians tend to become the theoreticians and critical analysts of the historical discipline as a whole.”62 To be fair, both White and LaCapra exemplify this tendency. Both scholars turned to theoretical examinations of modern historiography only after writing intellectual histories of influential authors and cultural developments in the
60 Lloyd S. Kramer, “Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra,” in The New Cultural History ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 103. 61 LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 17. 62 Kramer, “Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination,” 98. 30
European tradition, for example, White’s The Emergence of Liberal Humanism (1966) and
LaCapra’s Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher (1972).63
Moreover, echoing White, LaCapra stresses that historians should do away with
“Analytic distinctions such as those drawn between history and literature, fact and fiction, concept and metaphor, the serious and the ironic, and so forth,” because those distinctions “do not define realms of discourse that unproblematically characterize or govern extended uses of language. Instead, what should be taken as a problem for inquiry is the nature of the relationships among various analytically defined distinctions in the actual functioning of language.”64 This is important because LaCapra fundamentally considers that the re-thinking of the boundaries of language will provide the best possible means for re-thinking and expanding the boundaries of history. History cannot be entirely separated from either literature or the humanities and contained by the social sciences, though it can never be identical to those either of these discourses either.65
The Linguistic Turn in Fur Trade Historiography
In this light, fur trade historians (and others) in recent years have begun to critically view the language surrounding fur trade history – the sources, and texts. For example, coming out of the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference in 1991, historians such as Michael Blanar began to interrogate the authors behind trusted sources of the fur trade. In his paper “Long’s
Voyages and Travels: Fact and Fiction”, Blanar seeks to determine the accuracy of John Long’s
63 Kramer, “Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination,” 98. 64 LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 57. 65 Dominick LaCapra, History, Literature, Critical Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 12. 31 descriptions of North America in the eighteenth century.66 Not only that, but Blanar also endeavours to discover the true identity of Long, in order to identify his specific context and personal background. Ultimately, Blanar finds too many interpolations within the travel narrative for it to be considered a completely true and verifiable text. While Blanar can confirm that the man, J. Long, did physically exist, he cautions that the historical document and man must be understood as a delicate balance of “fact and fiction.”67
In this same way other historians have also chosen to analyze the language of historical texts and how it impacts our research and understanding of the past. George Colpitts in his 2002 article “‘Animated Like Us by Commercial Interests’: Commercial Ethnology and Fur Trade
Descriptions in New France, 1660-1760” and 2014 book North America’s Indian Trade in
European Commerce and Imagination, 1580-1850 reveals how the motivations of European merchants and government officials influenced and styled the language they used to describe the
New World, and its Indigenous peoples.68 Colpitts locates and situates the motivations of the authors within their specific imperial, economic and social interests. He sees how European political and economic interests in the New World relate to the language used to describe
Indigenous people. Specifically, how the applied language overtly and implicitly ascribed to
Indigenous peoples a level of social and economic value that was meant to influence policy and be exploited. He also shows how over the course of the centuries changing ideologies came to impact colonial policy. Instead of being useful ethnographic descriptions, European descriptions
66 Michael Blanar, “Long’s Voyages and Travels: Fact and Fiction,” in The Fur Trade Revisited: Selected Papers of the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference, Mackinac Island, Michigan, 1991 ed. Jennifer Brown, W.J. Eccles and Donald Heldman (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994), 447-463. 67 Blanar, “Long’s Voyages and Travels,” 459. 68 George Colpitts, “‘Animated Like Us by Commercial Interests’: Commercial Ethnology and Fur Trade Descriptions in New France, 1660-1760” The Canadian Historical Review 83:3 (2002), 305-337. George Colpitts, North America’s Indian Trade in European Commerce and Imagination, 1580-1850 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2014). 32 of North American Indigenous people overall tell us more about the pre-modern and modern times of Europe than they do of Indigenous people and societies.69
Similar to Colpitts, historian Jeffrey McNairn sees the representations of hunting within travel narratives as central to the economic and cultural construction of empire in the Maritimes.
In his article “Meaning and Markets: Hunting, Economic Development and British Imperialism in Maritime Travel Narratives to 1870”, McNairn is able to see how representations of hunting reveal more about the culture, society, economy and morals of Britain than they do about the
Maritimes.70 McNairn goes further in his analysis and shows how the dichotomies brought up in discussions of hunting, such as nature versus civilization and utility versus idleness, are not absolute dichotomies but are culturally specific.71 By doing this, McNairn subtly brings up the historicist belief that all knowledge, including historical knowledge, is time and place specific.
These three aforementioned authors all utilize literary theory as a starting point in order to interrogate understandings and conceptions of the past as they are understood and read through historical documents. In this way they are all accepting some assumptions of the New
Historicism movement that posits historians and readers alike as participants and writers of the past. The New Historicism movement has helped historians recognize and explore the consequences of the inescapable nature of representational thinking. The movement is explained as a way of “exploring the constructed nature of cultural discourses and practices through literature (factual and fictional can be read as textual practices) and other forms of media.”72
Specifically, this form of literary theory relies on intertextuality, which is the reading of a text against other texts. And when intertextuality is applied to history and the historian, it reveals that
69 Colpitts, “‘Animated Like Us by Commercial Interests,’” 336. 70 Jeffrey McNairn, “Meaning and Markets: Hunting, Economic Development and British Imperialism in Maritime Travel Narratives to 1870,” Acadiensis 34:2 (2005), 3-25. 71 McNairn, “Meaning and Markets,” 25. 72 Alun Munslow, The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, 184. 33 the human based practice and study is no longer a self-contained, authorially independent, ideologically freed, empirically driven, objective and unproblematic truthful insight into the reality of the past.
New Historicism’s methods and practices have begun to influence how historians and others deal with fur trade history topics and themes. Bruce Erickson’s Canoe Nation: Nature,
Race, and the Making of a Canadian Icon actively seeks to tell the story of the canoe in the
Canadian imagination.73 Erickson is straight forward in his assertion that the canoe is not a
“natural symbol of Canada”, but rather derives its iconic status from narratives that legitimize a particular and dominant vision of Canada. To Erickson this has very serious and drastic effects because this vision of Canada “builds on moments in history of the canoe to imagine a nation that can justify a history of colonialism, the industrialization and urbanization of the nation, the ecological crisis, and the place of the nation within a globalizing world.”74 By dissecting a national symbol, Erickson’s book actively tries to ‘read history as a text’, with the intention of direct inclusion of the reader/audience in the process of ‘making sense’ of what the historian intends to tell us about the past. Erikson seeks to include or build off the reader’s own imagination and perception of the canoe. He thus showcases the responsibility we must take for our complicity in creating a meaning for the past. This is similar to Laura J. Murray’s article,
“Fur Traders in Conversation” which tries to show how to use historical figures and texts as more effective ethnographic sources.75 In order to do this, Murray discusses the historical meaning and use of the practice of conversation. By the end of her article she calls on the reader to make space in their “historical imagination” so as to be able to better understand “written
73 Bruce Erickson, Canoe Nation: Nature, Race, and the Making of a Canadian Icon (Vancouver & Toronto: UBC Press, 2013), 1. 74 Erickson, Canoe Nation, xiii. 75 Laura J. Murray, “Fur Traders in Conversation,” Ethnohistory 50:2 (2003), 285-314. 34 silences,” as we do oral omissions in conversations.76 In doing so, she too acknowledges the complicity of all involved in their creation of meaning in and of the past.
Conclusion
Up until the 1970s and 1980s fur trade history was largely focused on understanding
European contact and institutions in North America through a formalist economic approach.
With the maturation of ethnohistory and the growing interdisciplinary cooperation between history, anthropology and archaeology, new approaches to fur trade history emerged. The formalist method, that assumed all individuals as rational actors, was challenged by the substantivist approach which posited that there were a wide variety of non-economic factors that influenced trade and behaviour. Substantivists believed that differences in cultures meant that the formalist approach could not be applied to non-capitalist cultures. They claimed that they did not wish to impose a “Western, capitalist set of assumptions on a foreign reality.”77 The substantivist approach can be partially credited for helping to acknowledge the separateness of Indigenous peoples, societies and cultures, and for incorporating them into the fur trade narrative. While this greatly enlarged the purview of fur trade history, the substantivist approach did not revolutionize the study or focus of fur trade history. If anything the substantivist approach simply added more categories through which human action, behaviour and relations could be analyzed. Both the formalist and the substantivist approaches strive to accurately account for and describe the actions and behaviours within Indigenous-European relations, but with different assumptions of economic rationality and culture.
76 Murray, “Fur Traders in Conversation,” 305. 77 Plattner, “Intoduction,” 14. 35
As with the emergence of ethnohistory, fur trade history also greatly benefited from the development of social history. Historians became more sensitive to categories such as class, race and gender. And as such, fur trade history began to feature groups and people traditionally marginalized and little discussed. At first, social histories of the fur trade focused on Indigenous women, their families and the creation of a unique society throughout North America. This movement fundamentally changed the focus of fur trade studies from economic to social.
Literary theory has done much to dislodge history from any privileged position vis-à-vis the past. For fur trade studies, it has provided a means by which to interrogate the language of written sources in order to understand the embedded biases of the historical people who created them. Fur trade historians have thus begun to argue that texts about Indigenous people reveal more about the author’s time and place than they do about the Indigenous subjects. This has also accorded fur trade historians their own modicum of self-reflexivity. Of course, even with the greater reflexivity that comes with literary theory, fur trade historians still position the content of the past over the written form of history. They still believe that the knowledge gained by interrogating the sources will provide objective truth that accords with the past. So while fur trade historians utilize literary theory, they do not engage with the postmodern/linguistic turn’s critique that seeks to dislodge history’s unquestioned reliance on representation overall.
And it is with this in mind that I move on to the recent turn in critical theory to affect, especially the conceptualization of affect that draws on the line of thought from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari back through Baruch Spinoza and Henri Bergson. Much like postmodern literary theory, theories of affect (emanating from Deleuze) challenge representational thinking by also rejecting the transcendental signifier or a knowable originary past. Some have identified the 1995 articles by Eve Sedgwick & Adam Frank (“Shame in the Cybernetic Fold”) and Brian
36
Massumi (“The Autonomy of Affect”) as beginning the recent resurgence of interest and intrigue regarding Deleuzian affect.78 However, as of yet, there is very little coherence within the affective turn. This does not mean that theories of affect have not been widely explored and used; there is a special efflorescence of work on affect in feminist, queer, (post)colonial, and critical race studies.79 Historians too have also started to explore concepts of affect.80 However, studies on fur trade history have not directly engaged with this new approach. Dian Million’s
“felt theory” (which posits that we not only think our history, but also feel it) perhaps comes the closest to exploring affect and providing a method of utilizing theories of affect within fur trade/Indigenous history.81 However, with the growing interest in theories of affect there will undoubtedly be a growing of work on this subject in fur trade history and Canadian history more generally. And it is here that I know turn to my analysis of Innis, Creighton and Van Kirk.
78 Gregory J. Seigworth & Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg & Gregory Seigworth (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2010), 5. 79 For example, Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004); Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York & London: Routledge, 1997); Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 80 For example, LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust; Jeffrey McNairn, “‘The common sympathies of our nature’: Moral Sentiments, Emotional Economies, and Imprisonment for Debt in Upper Canada,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 49:98 (2016), 49-71. 81 Dian Million, “Felt Theory: An Indigenous Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” Wicazo Sa Review 24:2 (2009), 53-76. 37
Chapter 2: Companion Species in Harold Innis’s Fur Trade
The sun began to set over a small company fort built by French Canadian labourers and run by Scots, while several kilometers to the west on a small offshoot of a northern boreal forest river, a beaver would soon begin its nightly routine. Under the cover of night, a beaver (a somewhat blind and slow semi-aquatic land mammal) passed through the den’s underwater entrance and shortly afterwards lifted his head out from the water. It was early fall, and the beaver’s dark chestnut brown coat was beginning to fill out. On this fall evening, the beaver was surrounded by cold flowing water, and ate and worked peacefully under a starlit sky.
Several weeks passed. Snow now had fallen and ice covered the water. The ice was thick and sturdy, and numerous other animals, from deer and moose to red fox, had left their traces of prints crossing it. The frozen river system created distinct corridors and paths throughout the landscape. The beaver and his family members had successfully grown their warm winter coats.
During the winter, the beaver needed only to venture out to gather the food stockpiled underwater. Otherwise, the beaver’s presence was little known.
With everything covered by snow, the beaver’s dam almost blended into the winter horizon, except to the discerning eye of man. The trapping party, composed of members of an
Indigenous winter band, looked out over the small frozen river and began to deliberate its course of action. The most common way of trapping beaver was by breaking up its lodge. This was easily done in the winter, when the ice makes approaching the dam very easy. It was also known that the beaver’s fur would be in its most valuable state during this time.1
1 Donna Naughton, The Natural History of Canadian Mammals (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 85- 91. 38
This constitutes a post-humanist re-reading of the great classic of fur trade literature,
Harold Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada. In this narration, I am entering Innis’s text and drawing on my experience and that of current national history. In effect, I am establishing a relationship with the author, his text and historical subject. My narrative would not, however, be limited to the beaver. European traders and Indigenous fur trappers were hardly there, on the banks of
North American rivers, by simply their own choosing. The two group interaction was predicated on forces much greater than themselves. The economy of the nearby colony whose merchants had invested in the fort and the fur trade was dominated by the discrepancy between centres of metropolitan commercial power and the margins of western civilization.2 The entire energy of the colony, in this case, Quebec, had been directed towards the exploitation and extraction of staple products. The migrant European trader was constantly in search of staple resources that could be transported back to the centres of power in exchange for manufactured goods.3 A staples economy, central to Innis’s story, underpinned the colonial development of northern
North America, and the European trader, and his colonial merchant backer, was deeply aware of this precarious arrangement.
By this point, the 1780s and 1790s fur trade economy, infrastructure and organization constituted an important power, tethering aspects of the colony’s past and future. In Innis’s telling, it was central to colonial success. The company’s fort was a testament to this reality.
Company forts were the physical manifestation of an ever-retreating wild fur trade territory in the face of colonial settlement.4 Little did the European trader know, but the coming Dominion would be built on and inherit the logistical legacy of the fur trade. What the fur trader did know
2 Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 385. 3 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 384. 4 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 386. 39 was that he was taking part in the oldest tradition of the fur trade. The beaver was and had been the essential fur commodity exchanged between the Europeans and Indigenous people.5 The nature of the fur trade was defined as much by the economic realities that compelled it, as it was by the fundamental relationship it was founded upon. Had it not been for the Indigenous peoples, the earlier Europeans would have floundered on the shores of the Atlantic and St. Lawrence. Not only did the Indigenous people provide a reliable source of furs, their know-how and technology were essential to the trade’s functioning. Indigenous agriculture, corn, buffalo, pemmican, the birch bark canoe (later replaced by the York boat), and the extensive tribal ties were intricately implicated in European commerce. At the same time, without European manufactured goods, there would have been little to entice the Indigenous people into such an extensive and complex consanguinity. New wars and diseases brought upon them by the trade’s contact and competition affected their traditional territories, environments and demographics. The latter affected every level of society – individuals, families, and nations.6
For Innis, the one constant throughout this tumultuous process of exchange, trade and encounter was the geographic landscape. The separate drainage basins of the St. Lawrence and the Hudson Bay, the Canadian Shield, the Great Plains, the Pacific coast and the high north were indomitable. They could not be altered in any substantial way. However, in its seemingly sublime design, particularly the configuration of the Canadian shield, the northern part of the continent was carved by watery, branching paths met by overland corridors that ushered humans farther into the depths of Indigenous territory. The routes taken by European trappers seemed pre-determined.7 To Innis, the logic laid down in the geographic blocks, especially the Canadian
Shield, became more pronounced with the depletion of the beaver and other furs, which
5 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 388. 6 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 388-389. 7 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 392-393. 40 necessitated an ever-forward march into a continent little known by the Europeans, but widely traversed by Indigenous nations.
It would be many years later when Donald A. Smith (Lord Strathcona), an important official of the HBC, could reflect on how the company had influenced national organization and directed power. The high overhead costs of industry had created the environment for monopoly and warranted strict central control. It was on these business and government precedents that the important national institutions of a young Dominion – the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Bank of
Montreal, the centralized Federal government – were built upon.8
Back on the banks of the distant river, whether the Missinabi or the Clearwater, the beaver lay nestled in its lodge unaware of the impending assault on its home. The beaver’s fur was too precious to be overlooked by the Indigenous winter band, because its economic value necessitated that the beaver be caught. Its fur would be treated, then transported to Montreal and packed onto a ship destined for England. The beaver, as an animal, was imperative to empire; as an object, the beaver was an economic commodity that constrained human action. As this chapter will argue, Innis’s narrative invites a reader into a relationship with the historian, human and the more-than-human agent. In his combined elements, Innis made the beaver the axis around which all else spun. The beaver’s presence in Innis’s work demonstrates how the human subject for
Innis is never alone, and is always accompanied by the existence of other beings and objects, which confirms the post-humanist position of the more-than-humanness of peoples’ existence and thought.
The Narrative of the Fur Trade by Harold Innis
8 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 397. 41
This attempt to synthesize the major themes from Harold Innis’ The Fur Trade in Canada into a concise narrative and story seems more than reasonable and salient because Innis wrote a sprawling, if not teleological, history of the Canadian fur trade. Written in the late 1920s, after
Innis published his first study of railways in Canada, the book became a capstone achievement in a career devoted to the political economy of technology, economics and communication. After his repeated visits to Northern Canada to study the fur trade in the 1920s, as well as his running of an important honours seminar on the modern fur trade at the University of Toronto, Innis published a short, little-known book on the twentieth century fur industry.9 He followed up with his sweeping history in 1930.
Innis, born in 1894, graduated from McMaster University and received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1920. He was appointed to the political economy department at the
University of Toronto in 1920, and remained there until his death in 1952.10 Before Innis clinched his position in the department, he “laboured assiduously to justify his worthiness to the faculty.”11 As a junior faculty member he pushed for the development of geography courses.
Innis saw the growing importance of the Hudson Bay region, and called for greater work to be done on the Arctic, and for closer attention to be paid to the Maritimes, Newfoundland and the
West.12 Early in his career, Innis’s interest in geography and economy combined, which helped to propel his career and unique research interests.
A cursory glance at the book’s contents emphasizes the large cohesive vision and theoretical framing Innis brought to the history of the fur trade. The book’s time period begins in
9 Harold Innis, The Fur Trade of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Library, 1927). 10 Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing: 1900-1970 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976), 88. 11 Paul Heyer, Harold Innis (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, INC, 2003), 5. 12 Alexander John Watson, Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 129. 42
1497 and ends in 1929. Thematically, as well as geographically, Innis moves from the French
Régime to the Pacific Ocean; from the waterways of central and western Canada to the Industrial
Revolution. What is most notable is that individual people or groups do not appear in the book’s outline. Instead the reader is greeted by dates, geography and company names. Rather than larger-than-life figures, or even as individual agents, humans in this story are miniscule and appear almost invisibly through their first person accounts. Humans are not important protagonists whose actions propel the narrative, but rather serve as pawns who are pushed and pulled by the forces of economics, geography, and technology. At times, human action is seemingly marginalized in order for Innis to direct the reader’s attention toward the cosmological forces of Canada’s fur trade.
Historian Carl Berger has attested to the fact that Harold Innis, in conjunction with others, infused one of the most fundamental ideas or themes into Canadian historiography, namely “the idea that the exploitation of a succession of staple commodities explained the nature of Canadian development and the singular patterns of its institutions and culture.”13 The staples thesis as it would later be coined spawned a way of understanding Canadian history that dominated the academy for most of the twentieth century. Summarized in his work’s concluding chapter, Innis laid the theoretical premise for approaches that would later follow, such as Donald
Creighton’s Laurentian thesis and J.M.S. Careless’s Metropolitan thesis. The economic analysis that underlay Innis’s approach opposed the approved and prevailing constitutional and political interpretations of Canadian history. Fundamentally, the material basis of Innis’s economic approach planted Canadian history within a physical reality – humans with basic needs of food and shelter who participated in an economy based on the demand and supply of physical resources in exchange for manufactured goods. The concept of cyclonic development that Innis
13 Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 85. 43 later conceived summed up the chaotic and rapid nature of the colonial economy of Canada.14
The stages of growth – the successive exploitation of staple resources – which took much longer in older societies, was telescoped and intensive within the Canadian context. This dynamic highlighted the role and dependence Canada had first on France, then England. Scholars have seen this argument providing Innis the means to confront the American Frontier thesis and provide a countervailing model to explain Canada’s unique national process.15 In doing so, Innis highlighted the innate power relation existing between the centre and margins.
Essentially, for Innis, Canada was not a political union. Rather, the current Dominion of
Canada “emerged not in spite of geography but because of it.”16 The river systems, drainage basins of the St. Lawrence and Hudson Bay, and the Canadian Shield provided a rational basis for the establishment and extension of the fur trade industry. Innis did not deny North-South connections; however, he emphasized how Canadian political union depended on natural geographic and economic considerations. Changes in the technology of transportation and the necessities of changing staples were for Innis the crucial causes of changes in politics and fiscal policy.17 This teleological thinking emphasized the unity, uniqueness, and coherence of northern
North America. By focusing on impersonal forces, Innis was able to sublimate the cultural and linguistic differences that challenged Canadian nationalism and harmony.
It is thus not strange that in a work subtitled as an economic history, Innis begins his fur trade history with a portrait not of man, but of another life entity. The first chapter, entitled “The
Beaver,” does not focus on the animal as a material commodity, but rather its “life and habits.”18
In a work of decidedly cold, analytic and quantified fact, Innis begins with a sincere and detailed
14 Watson, Marginal Man, 161. 15 Francis, “Turner versus Innis.” 16 Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 95; Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 393. 17 Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 99. 18 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 3. 44 approach to a living being. The reader first learns about the animal’s general characteristics.
Beavers are individuals, with each animal having a different coloured fur coat, ranging from blond/blonde to chestnut, to brown and to black. Their fur is soft, and varies in qualities depending upon its geographic location. The beaver’s fur consists of an outer coat of longer guard hairs and an undercoat made up of the softest down fur. The physiological structure of the undercoat fur makes it ideal for hat production, and therefore highly valuable. It is here, by the fourth paragraph, that the readers have a larger picture of the beaver. In detail, Innis describes the physical look, shape and size of this animal.
Next, Innis introduces the reader to the animal’s social world and “habitat”.19 Innis finds it important to reveal that the beaver is monogamist and reproduces in committed pairs.20
Although not using the term “family,” he draws explicit attention to “mothers,” the “young” in their rearing and groups of animals living together over the years to care for and raise the young.
Several beavers, varying in ages, will live in one lodge of complex architectural design and will work together to create an intricate living space, water source and ventilation structure. The beavers’ work is adapted to a deciduous forest environment.
And lastly, Innis describes in sad detail, although through an economic lens, the beavers’ early destruction through over-hunting and the introduction of guns and steel traps. The slow maturation of the animal, its sedentary habit, and its elaborate housing facilities “made destruction certain” in the westward push of trade.21 Innis ends this section by revealing the vulnerability and tragedy of the beavers’ existence in North America.22
19 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 4. 20 Ibid, 4. 21 Ibid, 5. 22 Ibid, 6. 45
At first glance, the content of this chapter seems strange and out of place with the rest of the book. In fact, few other actors in Innis’s work receive the same specificity or duration of attention. Indeed, human characters are never granted such a full treatment. Baron de Lahontan
(Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce), Chrétien Le Clercq, as sources, and Samuel Champlain, and
David Thompson, as historical actors, remain as somewhat unknown agents. Of course, Innis assumes the reader knows who these men are – Champlain as the “father” of New France, and
Thompson as a “pathfinder of the west.” They are not anonymous in that sense. Rather, the readers’ knowing of them is inferred, or an expected precedent. Instead, their first-person accounts are weaved in and out of the narrative to describe a past world, but these written words never fully display their personality or character nor are they intended to.
Indeed, Innis uses them to construct the image of the beaver, not themselves. Le Clercq describes the beaver as a “water-spaniel”, and Champlain explains the animal’s geographic range, while Lahontan describes the composition of the beaver’s fur and Thompson provides figures for a beaver’s average weight. 23 Unlike the beaver, the humans in this narrative remain shrouded, hidden and never fully revealed. For example, the reader does not learn whether
Thompson was a monogamist, despite what other historians have described as his stable long- term marriage with Charlotte Small. Lahontan, an early visitor to New France, is used as a source, but not as an active agent, except in footnotes.24 The reader learns nothing about his favourite foods, or what colour coat men of this era wear. But as mentioned, humans are not what Innis is trying to explain: they are not the intangible forces of economics, or the technological mechanisms that shape and harness the world. On the other hand, the beaver as an
23 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 3-4. 24 Ibid, 58 fn. 64. 46 animal, as an object, is crucial to the interchange between humans and the forces of the fur trade in Canada.
Volition in Innis’s fur trade
From the beaver stems a paradigm, a way of thinking, both historically and in the past.
Through the beaver, Innis is able to discuss technology as volition, which can be seen as an aspect of more-than-humanness within Innis’s work.25 As historian R.D. Francis has explained,
“what Innis meant by technology changed and evolved over time, but central to his thinking at all times was the belief that technology was power: the power to shape human actions and human will by dictating the way people think – in other words, their mindset.”26 It would be many years later when Innis would begin his communication studies, and outline concretely his ideas of
Minerva’s owl and time- and spaced-biased technology (concepts that would later be borrowed by Marshall McLuhan to develop such understandings as the ‘medium is the message’)27.
However, we can see Innis’s concept of technology as volition in its budding form in his field notes that he kept from his trip to the Mackenzie River in 1924. This, and the other northern journeys he made in the 1920s that eventually informed his book, became a formative influence on his understanding of the fur trade and its geography.
Innis’s field notes have been used by both Matthew Evenden and George Colpitts to understand the early genesis of the staples thesis and his northern vision.28 His field notes are
25 R. Douglas Francis, The Technological Imperative in Canada: An Intellectual History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 160. 26 Francis, The Technological Imperative in Canada, 159. 27 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Markham: Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1964). 28 Matthew Evenden, “The Northern Vision of Harold Innis,” and George Colpitts, “Harold Innis’s Overlooked 1924 Memo of Wildlife Conservation in Northern Canada: The State, Staples and the Economics of Conservation,” in 47 generally uneven and the notes from the Mackenzie River are especially disjointed. The notes are mostly in point form, and facts and opinions seem to run and bleed into one another. Innis took notes on the geography, the landscape, the modes of transportation, the layout and buildings of towns, facts and figures of industry, technical machines, prices of food, fur and supplies, moral opinions, and diagrams of pelts – the list is seemingly endless. Despite this ostensibly inclusive and broad list, Innis’s notes have some notable exclusions. For instance, while men are often identified throughout, women are never mentioned specifically by name. Rather, women enter into the text as wives or sexual companions.
Indigenous people fair only slightly better in terms of their representation. While
Indigenous men are seen consistently throughout the field notes, they are rarely identified by name or tribal affiliation. In this way, Indigenous men are cast as a monolithic group. And while
Innis does acknowledge Indigenous peoples’ central role in the 1920s northern fur trade, he does so while ascribing them immutable Indian traits. For example, Innis wrote: “Civilization spoils them for hunting... Indians better in some ways from white. Half-breed fore-runner of white man.
Plenty of good half-breeds.”29 First, this excerpt shows that Innis associated the idea of “Indian” with the opposite of ‘civilization’, which is nature or the primitive. And as historian Paige
Raibmon explains, this type of thinking stems from an “either-or notion of Indian authenticity” that relies on a wide variety of associated binaries.30
Innis ultimately categorized Indigenous people as diametrically opposed to civilized
Europeans, with the accompanying binary that civilized is good, while the primitive is bad. He
Harold Innis and the North: Appraisals and Contestations, ed. William Buxton (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013) 73-99 & 100-121. 29 University of Toronto Archives, Innis Papers, Field Notes (1924 Mackenzie River) B1972-003 Box 6, File 3, pg 16. 30 Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter From the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 7. 48 even goes as far as to provide a gradient by which to transform the “Indian” into the white man.
The Métis, or “half-breeds,” as Innis terms them, are an important intermediary point throughout the field notes. Most notably, while Cree and Athapaskan people are written about from a distance and merely observed, Innis directly interacts with Métis. For example, Métis Pierre
Mercredi is described as ‘very approachable, kind hearted, and generous’.31 Innis even interacted with a Métis who claimed to be related to explorer Alexander Mackenzie.32 Unlike their
Indigenous counterparts, these two Métis men were also described in relation to business and property ownership. In Innis’s configuration neither stands in need of protection due to their innate link to nature because they have essentially lost their Indigenous authenticity. Overall, it is clear that Innis relied on white males, the “big men” informants that Evenden saw informing his analysis of the North: the agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company, railway company officials, government employees and missionaries.33 It was these men – their accounts, opinions, and ideas
– that make up the majority of interviewees.
Ultimately, Innis’s field notes can only suggest how he viewed the north, what types of questions he was asking, and who he found important. What can be correctly recognized through his field notes is Innis’s deep attention to the modes of transportation, and how technologies adapted to life in North America modified human action and mindset. For example, Innis unequivocally states that the “Whole arctic civilization a capitalization of advantages of a swift river.”34 At several points Innis writes about how towns relate to the waterways. At Fitzgerald,
Innis describes it as “generally a transportation town” that derived “Tremendous advantage of
31 University of Toronto Archives, Innis Papers, Field Notes (1924 Mackenzie River) B1972-003 Box 6, File 4, pg. 12. 32 University of Toronto Archives, Innis Papers, B1972-003 Box 6, File 3, pg. 8. 33 Evenden, “The Northern Vision of Harold Innis,” 80. 34 University of Toronto Archives, Innis Papers, B1972-003 Box 6, File 4, pg. 4. 49 swift current loaded provisions heavy material going in and light coming out – adaptation of trade (furs) to river.”35
Similarly, the Peace River “is used as highway” with the tendency being “for agriculture
[and] settlement to spread northward up river and toward Peace River. Effect of swift current on direction of growth of town.”36 Embedded within Innis’s thought is a technological imperative that choreographs human thought and organization. For instance, in order to move the materials of the fur trade, humans must harness the current of the river. The technology adapted to this geographic element alters the way humans live their lives, from how agriculture and settlement are planned out, to the expansion and movement of culture. This sequencing is perfectly captured at the very beginning of Innis’s notes where there is a section devoted to the effects of fire. It reads like a stream-of-consciousness. As Innis surveys the railroad, the technology directs his thought patterns and thus displays how technology becomes volition. “Western country – rapid railroad construction... With railroads problem of divisional points for engines. Coming of immigrants. Lack of trees – easy to break – put into crop – wheat – handy – survey system effect on roads and choice of stations by railroads... Coming of radio and possible effects. Animals to disappear with fences and railroads – buffalo, deer. Rabbits, gophers persist along with coyotes.”37 Here it is not the technology of waterways that choreographs but the technology of railways. Yet, the outcome is the same, perhaps even more pronounced: the technology, as adapted to the environment, directs human organization and thought.
Building on this, Francis explains that the railway represented to Innis a mindset, or mentalité, that measured everything in quantitative, mechanical and mathematical terms of profits, material values and power, but not in human or spiritual terms. Innis believed that it was
35 University of Toronto Archives, Innis Papers, B1972-003 Box 6, File 4, pg. 4. 36 University of Toronto Archives, Innis Papers, B1972-003 Box 6, File 3, pg. 20-21. 37 University of Toronto Archives, Innis Papers, B1972-003 Box 6, File 3, pg. 3. 50 this technological mentality characteristic of Western civilization that spread across Canada and enabled the center and Britain to dominate it. To Innis, Canada’s limited transportation technology resulted in it being a region on the margin, beginning with the fur trade era.38 Innis would only begin to touch upon the association of technology with transportation and communication in the conclusion of The Fur Trade in Canada:
Fundamentally, the civilization of North America is the civilization of Europe and the interest of this volume is primarily in the effects of a vast new land area on European civilization. The opening of a new continent distant from Europe has been responsible for the stress played by modern students on the dissimilar features of what has been regarded as two separate civilizations. On the other hand communication and transportation facilities have always persisted between the two continents since the settlement of North America by Europeans, and have been subject to constant improvement.39
Innis continues to describe the effects of technology:
The supply of European goods, the product of a more advanced and specialized technology, enabled the Indians to gain a livelihood more easily – to obtain their supply of food, as in the case of moose, more quickly, and to hunt the beaver more effectively. Unfortunately the rapid destruction of the food supply and the revolution of methods of living accompanied by the increasing attention to the fur trade by which these products were secured, disturbed the balance which had grown up previous to the coming of the European. The new technology with its radical innovations brought about such a rapid shift in the prevailing Indian culture as to lead to wholesale destruction of the peoples concerned by warfare and disease.40
This excerpt reiterates Innis’s conviction that iron tools, and the process of industrialism, were but by-products of a prevailing mindset that was itself ‘technological’.41 To Innis, the technology brought about by the Europeans in the fur trade spurred changes in society on North America, by altering the ways humans sought profit, lived their lives, organized themselves and rationalized their relations. This was technology as volition; the power to change the mindset, the ways of
38 Francis, The Technological Imperative in Canada, 167-168. 39 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 383. 40 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 388. 41 Francis, The Technological Imperative in Canada, 169. 51 doing, the desires of humans. In many respects, his observation is bone-chilling. Humans may not be able to think themselves free of the material conditions by which they meet their corporeal needs. Essentially, what must be admitted is that humans are not in themselves all human or alone in their humanness – they are always more-than-human, ontologically and epistemologically. And thus, Innis begins his account, as much fable as history, with the beaver.
The animal stands as the entry point into this paradigm of technological thought, and admission of more-than-humanness.
Innis and Companion Species in the Fur Trade
No doubt Innis saw how ‘human life ways changed significantly in association’ with beavers.42 Therefore, the beaver, in Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada, can be understood as a
“companion species” as defined by cultural theorist Donna Haraway. In The Companion Species
Manifesto, Haraway tries to reconstruct the term ‘natureculture’ through her personal relationship with her dog Ms. Cayenne Pepper. In her short treatise, she attacks the
Enlightenment logic that positioned the thinking human subject at the centre of the world, the master not only of reason but of agency, too. Haraway argues that through Enlightenment logic, culture - the realm of human meaning and creativity - was set out as distinct from nature, the domain of non-human (or at least, non-human authored) matter and life. However, Haraway sees throughout evolutionary time, history and everyday life that humans and non-humans have always been caught up with each other in ways that make a nature/culture binary (and other associating binaries) impossible to sustain. Therefore, she deploys the word natureculture in order to neutralize the ‘prehensions’ and consequences of binary thinking that can only imagine
42 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 15 & 29. 52 the world through the (incorrect) concreteness of polar opposites. To Haraway to think of nature and culture as separate and not all conjoined is not only wrong, but unethical.
To elaborate, the category of companion species is not just about Haraway’s dog
Cayenne, or other companion animals or pets, such as cats or rabbits. Rather, it is figured as the complex contact whereby species (including humans, animals, plants, bacteria, and viruses) become intimately entangled with one another in mutually constitutive relationships.43 The word
“intimate” holds great meaning to Haraway. To Haraway intimacy is not only defined as a close, familiar and affectionate relationship by Haraway. It may also signify a close relationship built on a molecular familiarity, not having to do with feelings at all. Ultimately, intimacy springs from constitutive relationships engaged in shaping and being shaped by one another in practices of becoming. In this way Haraway broadly redefines co-evolution, not only in the traditional sense as “the mutual adaptation of visible morphologies like flower sexual structures and the organs of their pollinating insects.”44 She also argues that it “would be a mistake to see the alterations of dogs’ bodies and minds as biological and the changes in human bodies and lives, for example in the emergence of herding and agricultural societies, as cultural, and so not about co-evolution.”45 She instead argues that the human genomes most likely contain a “considerable molecular record of the pathogens of their companion species, including dogs. Immune systems are not a minor part of naturecultures; they determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.” For example, the “history or the flu is unimaginable without the concept of the co-evolution of humans, pigs, fowl, and viruses.”46 Therefore, the conception of intimacy that
Haraway is trying to iterate derives from the understanding “that there cannot be just one
43 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, pg. 15. 44 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, pg. 31. 45 Ibid, 31. 46 Ibid, 31. 53 companion species; there have to be at least two to make one... partners do not pre-exist their relating.”47 Through this contingency companion species express their ‘significant otherness’ within and between one another.
As Haraway points out, the word companion derives from the Latin cum panis, which means “with bread”; a companion is thus some being with whom one literally or metaphorically shares food, space and time.48 The etymological roots of the word lead Haraway to re-examine how companion species’ relationships operate. By redefining animals as companions, Haraway explains that animals cannot be looked upon with “unconditional love”, for to do so is pernicious and stems from a place of narcissism. She believes unconditional love allows humans to see other beings as mere fantasies, which exist only to fulfill our own needs and desires.
Instead, Haraway posits that love is about “seeking to inhabit an inter-subjective world that is about meeting the other in all the fleshy detail of a mortal relationship.”49 Actual love is about the “permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other” (keeping in mind that intimacy can be molecular). Accompanying another in love or intimacy is not about witnessing oneself, and fulfilling one’s needs through the other. The relationship recognizes what is required by the other or is present within the inter-subjective relationship that binds two beings together. So while it seems inconceivable that Haraway is arguing that all relationships do earn the title of love, she does suggest that any relationship that does aspire to love must start from a place of inter-subjectivity. Most importantly, the intimacy, molecular or otherwise, within companion species relationships bequeaths a co-constituted responsibility to recognize the mortal and material reality of the world as made up of the companion species’ everyday relations, and separate but entangled histories and evolutions. Humans cannot escape the material, or separate
47 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, pg. 12. 48 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 17. 49 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 34. 54 nature from the cultural, in order to isolate their existence. Rather, humans have and will always be joined by other animals and objects who assert their own agencies and subject-positions that demand to be accounted for in ways of affect and relation. Companion species relationships, to
Haraway, are responsive relationships.
So what is touched in a beaver skin on display in a museum or made into a coat, or what molecular record or more-than-humanness is embodied in a reading about the beaver in Innis work? Touched is the fur trade era of Canada, the colonization of Indigenous cultures, the establishment of Rupert’s Land, the technological imperative of the railway, the evolutionary path that made the beaver have two coats, the learned culture of dam building, the adapted hunting techniques best suited for beaver capture, the transition from the canoe to the York boat, the transportation, trade, and exchange of material goods to and from Europe across North
America, and host of other ‘histories, evolutionary time periods, and face-to-face time scales of mortal bodies and individual lifetimes’.50 Through this intimacy with the beaver, humans inherit these histories and time-scales. By doing so we connect ourselves to a range of historical threads and realities that force us to acknowledge the complexity of our relations and in doing so we are reminded to live fully in the world and to not assume that we can place ourselves apart. For as we can see, humans would not be the same without the companion species that inhabit their world. Our human mind, body and works are not ours and ours alone, for they have and are inhabited by other beings and mentalitiés.
Conclusion
Therefore, when Innis gives such a complete view of the beaver, he is epitomizing the beaver’s companion species status. And by doing so, Innis begins his paradigm of more-than-
50 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 63. 55 humanness. In Innis’s work more-than-humanness appears at varying points. It begins with the beaver’s life story, is expressed when he describes its economic worth as fur, it is in the technological imperative imbued in humans’ interaction with and thought of the environment. So while humans in Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada appear miniscule in comparison to grand forces, what Innis is really showing is that humans are not alone, are not just or only human, but always already accompanied.
The examples of more-than-humanness in Innis’s work do not end there. More-than- humanness can be seen in the ways humans of the fur trade are accompanied by their tools. Innis cites Peter Kalm who, in his Travels to North America, noted how the Indigenous people’s life ways were fundamentally altered by their wooden containers, and then again by copper kettles, metal hatchets, knives, scissors, needles and steel with which they could strike a fire.51 Through tools, human capabilities, time scales, and thought are altered. As such, humans are not just their physical body or their human mind. They are infused with tools and technologies that alter their understanding of reality and their bodies’ capabilities.
Even when humans are pictured in Innis’s work as significant actors, such as when he describes their actions in battle and making war, they are not alone, but present their more-than- human connections. For example, Innis writes,
The Crees by virtue of their position had driven the Chipewyans (Hearne’s Northern Indians) to the territory north of the Churchill River. With European guns they had driven back the Beaver Indians from the territory around Portage la Loche by going up the Churchill, and they had crossed over by the Saskatchewan to Lesser Slave Lake and the Peace River Trail to war on the Beavers and the Indians along the Peace.52
Here the Cree are strategic thinkers of battle and war, their actions alter other groups and significantly influence the human sphere. However, their actions and existence are accompanied.
51 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 109-110. 52 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 202. 56
They are accompanied by the waterways, the geographic features and boundaries that order their actions. The waterways direct their movement, and impact their strategic thought. The tracks of land and paths map where and how they go. Therefore, their thought is not simply that of a human, but of a human in North America, in the boreal forest, on the banks of a river, in the current of swift water. All these connections and relations mark the Cree as more-than-human.
This example expresses how humans are always constituted by more than themselves they are constituted and therefore accompanied by the world around them.
There are numerous companion species contained within Innis’s The Fur Trade in
Canada other than the beaver. One such animal is the cargo-carrying horse. Innis describes the horse (specifically, Indian ponies called shaganappies that had goods tied to them with natural rope) in relation to the Red River cart. It is explained that the Red River cart became a “central part of the equipment” of fur traders in the West. Alexander Henry marvelled at the cart, and its ability to pass through “miry creeks, borne up by the grass roots, when ordinary waggons would sink to the hubs.”53 Innis cites an estimation that in 1873, 150 carts left Fort Garry for Edmonton.
As such, it was necessary that a large number of horses be maintained in order to pull these carts all across the prairies. G. M. Grant noted, in Ocean to Ocean, that,
every station of the Hudson’s Bay Company has a ‘guard’ or judiciously selected spot, well supplied with good water, wood, pasturage, and shelter where the horses are kept… [at Fort Pitt] There is a thick grove of aspens where they [the horses] take shelter in the coldest weather, and near it is the tent of the keeper. His chief work seems to be making little inclosures of green logs or sticks, and building fires of green wood inside to smoke off the mosquitoes. Round these fires the horse often stand in groups, enjoying the smoke that keeps their active tormentors at a little distance.54
In this example humans and animals are front and center. Here Innis adds humans as key factors in the fur trade, but of course they do not appear alone, but are accompanied. This example
53 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 296. 54 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 297. 57 demonstrates the inter-subjective relationship between companion species as elaborated upon by
Haraway. In order to transport fur pelts and trade goods across the land, humans relied on the labour of horses. However, in doing so humans needed to care for and maintain the animals.
Once again, humans are affected by the life of other beings, even mosquitoes, and therefore must adapt their thinking and conduct. This is demonstrated by the land set out for horses, the care devoted to the animals, and most importantly how humans interact with the environment and use horses as a technology. Once again this reveals the more-than-humanness of people as witnessed through a companion species relationship.
All of these examples are meant to culminate in the readers’ realization that the humans in Innis’s text are not insular beings. Be it technology as volition or the companionship of another life form, humans are not by themselves, or only made up of themselves. Essentially, the economic history of Harold Innis discusses the concepts of scarcity, demand and cyclonic development, but it is also an acute study of how corporeal beings meet their corporal needs. As such this chapter began by exploring Innis’s nascent feelings concerning the power of technology (as seen in his 1920s field notes) and the effect it has on the human psyche and body.
This understanding of technology that Innis developed early in his career would carry on and form the bedrock of his life’s work. Technology to Innis was about the power to control peoples’ mindset. Technology as volition helped structure and organize the material world in the human mind. And it was through the beaver that Innis was able to trace how the economics of technology was able to structure the national development of Canada.
For this reason, it has been argued that Donna Haraway’s conception of a companion species applies to the depiction and treatment of the beaver in Innis’s text. A companion species symbolizes the intimate (molecular or cultural) relationship between two species. One without
58 the other would not be the same, and therefore their mutual existence defines their actuality. This post-humanist insight augments the historian’s understanding of the historical person about whom they write. Most importantly, post-humanist thought dislodges the human as a privileged life entity and posits the human being as a composite of multiple forms of life, and multiple ways of thought. Was Innis writing his history as a post-humanist? This seems unlikely. However, his work’s range of interests in political economy, geography, history and communications might explain the complexity of his narrative lending itself so well to post-humanist analysis. As a composite of multiplicities, the human subject can no longer be understood through a singular human history. For its multiplicity means that it inherits multiple histories, evolutionary time periods, and face-to-face time scales of mortal bodies and individual lifetimes. The beaver shows how the humans of Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada must be seen a post-humanist subject, for it is the only way to (ethically) account for humans’ multiplicity.
59
Chapter 3: The Semantic Relations of Donald Creighton’s Fur Trade
Donald Creighton’s The Empire of the St. Lawrence: A Study in Commerce and Politics is not usually considered to be an essential reading in fur trade historiography. The 385-page tome is described as an account from the perspective of the merchant class of Canada, rather than that of fur traders. Creighton remarks that it” is an attempt to trace the relations between the commercial system of the St. Lawrence and the political development of Canada.”1 It entertains the idea that the St. Lawrence was “the inspiration and basis of a transcontinental, east-west system” within North America, but especially Canada.2
Like Innis, Creighton turns to the staples approach to explain Canadian commercial expansion. The work is given over to the strategies of Montreal-based companies using their
“cunning” to overcome American and Hudson’s Bay Company competition and geo-political diplomacy.3 His emphasis on merchants as a driving force of history later influenced the
“Montreal School” of Quebec history, in which scholars attributed Quebec’s developments in respect to the “bourgeois thesis.”4 Despite its emphasis on commercial development, the first 202 pages of Creighton’s narrative deal with the first staples economy of Canada that gripped the merchant class: furs. Moreover, this first section is concluded with what could possibly be one of the most elegant eulogies ever written about the end of the fur trade. For example, Creighton wrote, “A future more homely and less adventurous awaited it. And many things would be forgotten: the way of the Indians, the tangled portages as spring broke in the woods around, the day dawning in fear and sorrow over one of the vast northern lakes and the unbroken, flowing
1 Donald Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence: A Study in Commerce and Politics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002 [1937 & 1956]), xix. 2 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, xvii. 3 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 184. 4 Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 106- 107. 60 desolation of the winter prairie.”5 This emotive section typifies the rest of the book, as many sentences and whole passages are arrestingly vivid and coloured, and are splendid examples of prose quite unexpected in a history text. Of course, sometimes Creighton’s writing teeters into the overly grandiose, and comes across as strained. Yet, it is Creighton’s prose style that makes this work of history stand out. Indeed, The Empire of the St. Lawrence could be entitled “The
Tragic Empire of the St. Lawrence”. Herbert Heaton, reviewing the work, indeed suggested that
Creighton’s first book is a drama in three acts.6 Following Heaton’s analysis, it is valuable to reconfigure The Empire of the St. Lawrence as a three act play in order to initiate a pivotal re- reading of Creighton’s long established work. Afterwards, this chapter will explore the use of rhetoric and metaphor in Creighton’s writing in order to show his work’s significant connection to and reliance on fiction. The interpretations of LaCapra will be used in order to show how
Creighton’s choice of discourse is important. Ultimately, it will be shown how Creighton’s rhetorical choices reveal how language through emotion and affect situates the reader, as well as the author, within an affective web with the historical people of history texts.7
A Tragedy in Three Acts
Creighton’s stage is set in “Act I” with the British conquest of Quebec in 1759. He establishes the supremacy of the St. Lawrence within northern North America describing it as the core of the whole Canadian system and as the “ancient nucleus of the entire continent.”8 He outlines the economic and political ‘programme’ of the merchant class. This act is contained in
5 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 202. 6 Herbert Heaton, Review of The Empire of the St. Lawrence: A Study in Commerce and Politics by. Donald Creighton, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 4:4 (1938), 566. 7 Once again, I am using the term affect as conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari, which can be generally understood to refer to “bodily capacities to affect and be affected and/or the augmentation of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, and to connect, such that autoaffection is linked to the self-feeling of being alive – that is, aliveness or vitality.” Clough, “Introduction,” 2. 8 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 4. 61 the period culminating with the 1783 signing of the Treaty of Paris, its first great crisis. Here
Creighton notes how Canada’s geographic boundaries were unfairly demarcated and the St.
Lawrence drainage system truncated to the detriment of Canadian merchants. As Creighton described, Canada lost forever the vast territory between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. It lost the Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac and Grand Portage, and the water communication between
Lake Superior and the Manitoba basin.9 Creighton expressed how all of these points of territory had been “surrendered to an enemy which had been incapable of effecting the capture of a single one of them.”10
Not allowing defeat or admitting failure the Quebec merchants rallied around this river and its commercial possibilities.
It was the destined pathway of North American trade; and from the river there rose, like an exhalation, the dream of western commercial empire. The river was to be the basis of a great transportation system by which the manufactures of the old world could be exchanged for the staple products of the new. This was the faith of successive generations of northerners… and men followed each other through life, planning and toiling to achieve it. The river was not only a great actuality: it was the central truth of a religion.11
Having built upon Innis’s staple thesis, and raising up the hopes and feeling within the colony,
Creighton sets up the merchant class (and reader) for their next series of disappointments.
The second act is an eventful one. Within a 38-year-span the merchant class would suffer the injustices of the 1794 Jay Treaty, and the 1814 Treaty of Ghent. For although the merchants, fur traders and Indigenous people would bravely fight in order to re-secure trading routes, forts, and territory, they would nevertheless be let down by diplomats and plenipotentiaries in Europe and vacillating English Crown representatives. Problems compound in the period. Not only are old wrongs left unaddressed, but budding new staples industries do not garner support. For
9 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 80. 10 Ibid, 80. 11 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 6-7. 62 instance, in 1815 the Corn Laws shut out Canadian grain if the price fell below “67s. a quarter.”12 In 1820, the British preference for Canadian lumber is attacked; by 1821 it is reduced, and require certificates of Canadian origin. By the end of Act II in 1821, the fur trade vanished with the final surrender of the Montreal-based North West Company and its incorporation into the Hudson’s Bay Company. Montreal’s great highway into the Northwest interior was bypassed by the HBC’s more efficient entry point in Hudson Bay. With the loss of Astoria and the
Columbia, the vast old dominion of the North and Western trade route via the Missouri has no relevance. Moreover, the lumber trade is threatened, the grain markets open and close arbitrarily, the established colonies of Upper and Lower Canada remain at loggerheads over trade, commercial and domestic policy, and ominous activities are afoot in New York.
If the situation for the merchants could not seem bleaker, Creighton continues to outline the tragedies that befell them in the nineteenth century. Act III ends at an historic nadir, in 1849, eighteen years before Confederation: “the years 1783 and 1821 had each brought down the curtain of an act; 1849 meant the conclusion of an entire drama.”13 For Creighton, the year marking the tragic end of empire on the St. Lawrence became fixed in history. Creighton saw several moments that ultimately broke the unity and strength of the St. Lawrence Empire. First, the Erie, Champlain and Oswego canals, all artificially built to defy geography, linked the lower lakes, Vermont, and Upper Canada to the ice-free port of New York. These lowered freight rates from New York to Europe below those possible from St. Lawrence ports. Moreover, the drawback laws of 1845-6 permitted Canadians to export and import goods in bond duty-free through the United States. All of this clinched victory for American trade routes. Concomitantly, old colonial trade policies and preferences were scrapped by Britain, thus ending the economic
12 Ibid, 188. 13 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 382. 63 mainstays on which Canadian merchants had come to depend. Lastly, even after the union of
Upper and Lower Canada, their western and eastern sections remained divided in 1841.
Immigration, public works, land tenure, taxation, and public borrowing were all subjects of disagreement between sides of parliament separating French and English majorities. Creighton’s drama reaches a veritable crescendo in the passions flaring with the Rebellion Losses Bill, the
Annexation Manifesto, and the burning of Montreal’s parliament buildings. In the case of the latter, Creighton projects the pain and despair of the merchant community in the image of a violent conflagration consuming the very political structure they had looked to for their support.
As Creighton writes: “All the distresses of the depression, the resentment at Great Britain, the jealousy of American prosperity, and the deep despair at the frustration of the St. Lawrence broke, in their minds, in a white blaze of anger.”14 The play ends against the backdrop of ‘a red sky over Montreal.’15 Imagine a curtain descending upon the stage, leaving the audience to grasp the exciting and violent history of Canada, brimming with adversity and dashed optimism. For as
Creighton hoped to show in his work, through the perpetual tragedies of the merchant class, the formation of Canada was one marked by true struggle.16
The Play’s Actors: The St. Lawrence as Metaphor
This drama in three acts seems simple to interpret. The stage spreads from the St.
Lawrence to the western lands where it flows. The chief heroic actors are successive generations of Canadian merchants. The villains are English diplomats, Americans, French Canadians, farmers, and the list goes on. However, it would be more accurate to consider the St. Lawrence as its own character or actor within the drama – at least the way Creighton describes it. For this
14 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 376. 15 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 385. 16 Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 228. 64 reason, Creighton can be seen as committing blatant anthropomorphism. As he sets his stage, it is the river, like Innis’s beaver, that figures as a living and human-like entity. For instance, he begins by attributing to the river’s reach “acquisitive fingers” that “groped into the territory of the plains.”17 The river “shouted its uniqueness to adventurers… it invited journeyings… it promised immense expanses.”18 Not only that, but it “consoled and inspired” and “whispered suggestions.”19 The river “entrenched upon the dominion of the Mississippi” and “grasped the shield.” 20More interestingly, just like the Greek hero Achilles, the river also possesses a “root defect, a fundamental weakness”, a so-called Achilles heel. On the rocks of the Niagara, the power and current of the St. Lawrence stumbles and falters.21
On top of this, the river is weak against invasion from the south. Just like the Greek hero who was prophesied to greatness but could not win the siege on Troy, “something stood between” the river’s “design and its fulfillment.”22 Through this language, Creighton is creating a persona for the St. Lawrence River, and providing a way for the river to interact with humans on a human level. In these quasi-biographical descriptions of the river, the reader gets a sense of a more-than-humanness through Creighton’s text.
Creighton is certainly anthropomorphizing the St. Lawrence River by projecting human features and behaviours on to it. He is using figurative language in order to raise the river up as a fully complex actor in the drama, deploying metaphor and utilizing irony. Metaphor is a mode of language that seeks to “translate things which are difficult to apprehend into things which can be apprehended, or conceptualize, or visualize, more easily.”23 By its simplest definition it is a
17 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 6. 18 Ibid, 6. 19 Ibid, 7. 20 Ibid, 6. 21 Ibid, 7. 22 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 7. 23 David Punter, Metaphor (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 3. 65 process by means of which one thing is made to stand in for another thing. And “the processes of metaphor are everywhere at work in language” or at least there exists within language a constant potential for metaphor.24 For example, when someone reads ‘at work’ they are not meant to believe that metaphors are sitting around with hammers, but rather they are to understand that something is happening and that a suitable way to convey a meaning is through metaphor. In instances such as this, metaphor can be seen as a means of translation – translation of an abstract idea into a tangible action. However, it is too simple to conclude that metaphor is only a means by which to translate and compare, because metaphor deals not just in likeness and similarity but in difference and dissimilarity. No two things are ever exactly alike; if this was possible metaphor would be nothing more than an exercise in identicalness. Rather, two things are identified with each other while still retaining separate forms. Metaphor makes the reader look at the world afresh and consider and reconsider the multivalent connections that words and concepts have with one another.
Ultimately, metaphors challenge the set circumstances of the world. As David Punter so articulately explained, “metaphor represents a basic operation of language: it seeks to ‘fix’ our understandings, but at the same time it reveals how any such fixity, any such desire for stability and certainty, is constructed on shifting sands.”25 Thus, metaphor embarks on a very complex task when it demands the reader to look at similarity and difference within a singular idea, for it is basically asking that in order to recognize something the reader must see it again as something else.
The importance of the use of irony and metaphor in history is expanded further by historian Dominick LaCapra and his reading of Jacques Derrida’s “conception of
24 Punter, Metaphor, 3. 25 Punter, Metaphor, 10. 66 supplementarity”.26 Derrida’s conception means that the categories through which we describe the world are always opposed by the other tendencies that are “always already” within the category that they theoretically oppose. For example, it is impossible to conceive of big without small, light without dark. Fundamentally, each word/concept carries or overlaps or supplements the other and therefore precludes the possibility of complete or pure identity. “Its function is to question the status of any central or dominant concept by revealing what it leaves out or
‘represses’.”27
For LaCapra, Derrida’s insight is of great importance to historians, because LaCapra believes historians constantly seek to break the world into categorical oppositions and by doing so distort the complexity of historical experience and texts: “To oversimplify, one might say that supplementarity reveals why analytic distinctions necessarily overlap in ‘reality’ and why it is misleading to take them as dichotomous categories. Analytic or polar opposites always leave a problematic difference or remainder for which they do not fully account.”28 Furthermore, analytic or polar opposites are highly problematic because they construct “ideal types and heuristic fictions.”29 LaCapra does not suggest that historians leave the world of categorical oppositions or distinctions because that would completely undermine any conception of critical rationality. But those historians should pay closer attention to how supplements contest one another and how they colour the language of a historian’s work. It is here that LaCapra explains how this can be done in historical writing, and he points to literature and the concepts of Mikhail
Bakhtin.
26 LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 151-152. 27 LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 152. 28 LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 152. 29 LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 152. 67
LaCapra draws on Bakhtin to argue that the genre of the novel is the best way to deal with and to portray the internal contestations within words and concepts. Specifically, LaCapra believes that Bakhtin’s three concepts of heteroglossia, dialogization, and responsive understanding are essential to overcoming oversimplification.30 “Heteroglossia refers to the objective condition of language marked by a plurality of perspectives and value-laden, ideological practices that are in challenging contact with one another. Dialogization designates the condition of subjects as speakers or users of language who are always involved in symbolic exchanges with other speakers.”31 As it is important to understand what Bakhtin said about dialogization, he can be quoted here at length:
But no living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme, and this is an environment that it is often difficult to penetrate. It is precisely in the process of living interaction with this specific environment that the word may be individualized and given stylistic shape…The word, directed towards its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex relationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all of this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile…The word, breaking through to its own meaning and its own expression across an environment full of alien words and variously evaluating accents, harmonizing with some of the elements in this environment and striking dissonance with others, is able, in the dialogized process, to shape its own stylistic profile and tone. Such is the image in artistic prose and the image of novelistic prose in particular. In the atmosphere of the novel, the direct and unmediated intention of a word presents itself as something impermissibly naïve, something in fact impossible, for the naiveté itself, under authentic novelistic conditions, takes on the nature of an internal polemic and is consequently dialogized. Such a dialogized image can occur in all the poetic genres as well… But such an image can fully unfold, achieve full complexity and depth and at the same time artistic closure, only under the conditions present in the genre of the novel.32
30 LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 311. 31 LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 312. 32 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 276-278. 68
The importance of Bahktin’s dialogized heteroglossia to LaCapra is that language becomes a
“site on which contesting and contested discourses of different periods, groups, or classes engage one another as sociolinguistic forces. Dialogized heteroglossia creates the space for critical and self-critical distance in language use, for it disrupts myth in the sense of an absolute fusion or bonding of a use of words to a concrete ideological meaning.” And secondly, dialogization is in some aspect internal, and thus introduces otherness and alterity into the self. This fundamentally renders self-identity problematic and raises into question “the constitution of the subject of discourse with relation to the word of others.”33 This is best seen in “responsive understanding” which Bakhtin sees as a taking in of other people’s words not for the purpose of interpreting them further through the self, but entering into an “interanimating relationship with new contexts”:
More than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses. Our ideological development is just such an intense struggle within us for hegemony among various available verbal and ideological points of view, approaches, directions and values. The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever new ways to mean.34
Of course, we cannot know if Bakhtin had any influence on Creighton, as there does not exist any proof that Creighton ever engaged with Bakhtin’s work. However, Creighton did possess strong opinions about the craft of history, and history’s disciplinary borders. As Carl
Berger notes, Creighton’s striking opinions as to history’s focus mostly likely derived from his childhood engagement with literature, and his encounter with R.G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history.
33 LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 312. 34 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 346. 69
In fact, Creighton worked under the strong opinion that history should be seen as a unique and autonomous intellectual enterprise. Born in Toronto in 1902, Creighton enrolled in
Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1921 and took the course in English and History, which included ancient and modern history, as well as languages.35 In 1925 he received his MA from Balliol College, Oxford and returned to the University of Toronto to teach. Although history would become his career, he admitted that his first love was literature.36 Creighton confided that Emile Zola was an inspiring example to him.37 This admiration for literature and the classics marks Creighton’s work, which is also conservative, nationalist and anti-American.38
His works such as Canada’s First Century and The Forked Road largely reveal his pessimism and his fear of a disappearing Canadian culture. In the end, Creighton was aware of his reputation and worried that he would be remembered only as a “pessimist, bigot, and a violent
Tory partisan.”39
After reading Collingwood’s The Idea of History, Creighton became more aware and entrenched in the belief about the distinctiveness of history in relation to the social sciences.
History’s literary qualities, reconstructive methods and re-enactment of past thought and activity through the individual mind meant that history could not be confined into one category of academia.40 To Creighton, the social sciences were unsuitable and uncongenial company for history. As disciplines, political science and philosophy to economics and sociology differed from history. History’s greatest link was to literature. To Creighton, the historian could learn their most valuable lessons from the realist novel, and from authors like Charles Dickens,
35 Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 209. 36 Ibid, 209. 37 Donald Wright, Donald Creighton: A Life in History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 91. 38 Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 232 & 236-237. 39 Wright, Donald Creighton, 8. 40 Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 220. 70
George Elliot, Honoré de Balzac, Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy, C.P. Snow, Leo Tolstoy and
Theodore Dreiser. Creighton derided the idea that nothing could be truly creative unless it was wholly imaginary. To him, history, too, could be creative, not just the works of fiction and poetry. 41
Creighton seems to have consciously decided to employ figurative language and model his work around aspects of the novel. In doing so, he in many respects challenges the reader to recognize the instability surrounding the use of language. When Creighton transforms the river into an actor or character he depends on figurative language to draw connections between words and concepts. Metaphorical language brings to the surface the supplementarity of words – their double meanings, and their hidden polemic relations. Not only the content, but the form of his work reveals the extent to which Creighton goes when relying on the genre of the novel. For example: “In those first summers of settlement, in the hard, clear northern sunlight, the land lay drowsy with the intoxication of its own rich , full-blooded vitality, proud of the almost tropically swift and splendid maturity of its leaves and fruits and grasses, unconscious of its destiny, waiting for nothing but the flaming autumnal death of its vegetation.”42 This simple sentence is extremely revealing. The words “unconscious of its destiny” reveals dramatic irony (“when the audience understand the implication and meaning of a situation on stage, or what is being said, but the characters do not”), a tool more generally associated with the novel and drama, and not of academic history.43 As Bakhtin explains, the form of the novel is the most open, and therefore
Creighton exposes himself the most to the process of dialogization with others. As such,
41 Donald Creighton, “History and Literature,” in Towards the Discovery of Canada (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1972), 18-19. 42 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 101. 43 J.A. Cuddon, “Dramatic Irony,” in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory revised by C.E. Preston (England: Penguin Books, 1999), 237. 71
Creighton and his reader must depend on one another, in order to reach ever new ways to find meaning.
These processes as identified by LaCapra can be seen at work within Creighton’s writing.
Take for example the last sentence of part II: “The strange, violent life of the fur trade, like the red blaze of one of its Indian camp-fires, died down in the grey morning of new endeavours and flickered out.”44 To begin, the sentence contains a simile. Once again, Creighton is signaling to the reader that a comparison is taking place. He wishes to show the similarities between two things, but yet the reader remains aware that the two articles of comparison are different.
Furthermore, when Creighton’s words and meanings reach the reader they have already undergone years of use and symbolic attachment. For example, the word ‘blaze’ derives from old
English, old Norse and old German. It can mean a hot burning fire, it can refer to a torch, it can mean to mark something like a trail or spot, it can refer to the colour white, or it can mean to blow.45 These are just some definitions and associations of the word, not to mention its synonyms and antonyms. This shows how one word, in a short sentence, can unfurl with meaning. By recognizing the supplementarity of the word, we are also recognizing and committing ourselves to the multiplicity embedded within the word and the processes of dialogization and heteroglossia. Depending on the reading of the word we can see the different
‘perspectives and value-laden, ideological practices’ contained within it. It is possible that if we read the meaning of word ‘blaze’ as a hot, burning fire we can construe negative connotations.
On the other hand, if we read a “red blaze” as ‘marking’ the trail or aura that the Indian camp- fire gives off, it can have positive imagery. Perhaps we can see the fur trade and its death, as figured by a red blaze, as marking out the territory, legacy and history of Canada; the ideological
44 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 202. 45 “blaze, n., v.” OED Online. August 2016. Oxford University Press. 14 August 2016 < http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/search?searchType=dictionary&q=blaze&_searchBtn=Search >. 72 implication can therefore provoke a positive, nationalist nostalgia. From these two possible readings we can see how the supplementarity of a single word can change and alter the sentiment of a sentence as it is communicated by its author and perceived by the reader – the participants in its dialogization and heteroglossia.
The word blaze is not the only example that can be drawn upon. For example, Creighton describes the Precambrian Shield as the “ancient nucleus of the entire continent.”46 The word nucleus derives from classical Latin, and has atomic, biological and astronomical meanings.
While the word may designate the core or central part of a thing, it also, depending on the discourse of the discipline, designates a function.47 For astronomy it represents the bright burning core of a meteor. In biology, it is the central organelle that contains most of the cell’s
DNA. Atomically it is the dense region containing protons and neutrons. Synonyms of the word include, heart, embryo, crux. From this what can be meant when the Precambrian Shield is describe as a nucleus? It is more than the centre of a continent. It is the centre that provides atomic energy, it is the burning core that glows in a night sky, and it is the centre of a living entity that holds the cell’s genetic instructions. The significance exerted by the word nucleus cannot go unnoticed.
The Empire as Novel
Up to this point, the processes of heteroglossia and dialogization have been demonstrated within Creighton’s work. However, a crucial aspect of Creigthon’s The Empire of the St.
Lawrence is its strong connection with the genre of the novel. Just because Creighton uses a vivid and colourful prose style does not necessarily mean that his work is akin to the novel as a
46 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 4. 47 “nucleus, n..” OED Online. August 2016. Oxford University Press. 14 August 2016 http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/view/Entry/128970?rskey=FrqmuV&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid 73 literary category. Moreover, even if Creighton saw the realist novel inspiring historians does not prove that his work can be read as a novel. This caution must be kept in mind given that many of
Creighton’s critics accused him of taking too great a liberty with historical actors’ thoughts, speech and expression, especially in his two-part John A. Macdonald biography.48 Fortunately, the definition of a novel is broad. At the most common level, a novel is “an extended piece of prose fiction.”49 It is important to note that the definition of a novel brings up the binary of non- fiction and fiction. Because the novel is so heavily associated with fiction it is also heavily associated with the imagination. However, the traditional distinction made between non-fiction and fiction, or fact and fiction, should not be taken as fully accurate. Etymologically, facts refer to performance, action, or deeds already done. A fact is a past participle, a thing done, over with, fixed in time, shown, performed, or accomplished. Fiction is etymologically close to fact, but differs by part-of-speech and tense. It too deals with action, but fiction is about the act of fashioning, forming, inventing, as well as feigning or feinting.50 Fiction derives from a present participle, and as such it is in process. Therefore, fiction can be understood as still at stake or not yet finished and can still possibly oppose fact. However, fiction does not inherently oppose fact and therefore make it (fiction) wrong. Rather fiction can also be understood as being capable of or liable to showing something we do not yet know to be true but will or could know.51
The difference between fact and fiction formed an old debate, “the ancient quarrel”
Aristotle and Plato saw dividing philosophers and poets. Where philosophers communicate in plain, rational language in order to convey a point, the poet has designs on his or her audience’s emotions and uses rhetoric in order to persuade. This is especially seen within works of drama,
48 Berger, The Writing of Canadian History, 225-226. 49 Cuddon, “Novel,” in Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 560. The word “extended” in the definition does not mean that a novel has a minimum page limit to qualify. 50 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 19-20 51 Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 19-20. 74 tragedy, or the novel, because readers can find themselves being led by these works into feelings of happiness, fear, joy, or anger. These emotions are not just likely responses to what is being read; rather, they are built into the very structure and operate as methods to solicit attention.52
For example, in explaining tragedies, Aristotle saw tragedies as luring in the audience by presenting a hero, who inspires feelings of pity or fear. Ultimately, the audience is to identify the hero’s plight as their own, thus establishing a strong bond.53 Thus, it is no trivial matter when emotions enter into a reader’s understandings of texts, words, stories, or arguments. To Plato rhetoric was harmful; to Aristotle, poetry had the ability to reveal truth through perceptive means rather than rational argument. In both Plato’s and Aristotle’s eyes poetry was not bound by strict rules of content or form. Without such restrictions poetry/fiction was free to employ the power of rhetoric, in order to persuade through melody, rhythm, allusions, and most importantly, emotions.
That rhetoric is clearly at play within Creighton’s work. For example, the St. Lawrence does not simply flow and drain into the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, it drives “seaward in a great, proud arc.”54 Creighton does not just use rhetoric to overstate the direction and movement of the river. He also relies on rhetoric to heighten the emotional nature of his narrative. For instance, the death of the fur trade is combined with the deaths of “Pond, McGill, the Frobishers,
Mackenzie, and the aged Alexander Henry.”55 These individuals figured as the great merchants, heroes of western trade and geographic adventure. Creighton does not simply write that the end of the fur trade is a sad moment. Instead, he infuses into his writing a sense of stark finality, and of bleak endings. Specifically, he traces the lives of these now-deceased venerable founders and
52 Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 2. 53 Aristotle, “The Art of Poetry,” in Aristotle ed. and trans. Philip Wheelwright (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1951), 301-302. 54 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 6. 55 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 202. 75 winterers of the fur trade first to their old age and impoverished later years.56 Not only does
Creighton describe the sadness of the occasion, but he impinges on the reader’s emotions and elicits a visceral reaction. The reader does not just learn of the sadness of the Montreal villagers or of the old society, but is deliberately led to enter into that emotion and be affected by it. Even if Creighton does not make the reader actually feel sad, the reader will at least be able to identify the feeling as expressed through the emotion in his sparse elegiac prose. Hence, he writes “Pond,
McGill, the Frobishers, Mackenzie, and the aged Alexander Henry were all dead. The ‘Marquis’
McTavish was twenty years in his grave.”57 Creighton’s work animates within the reader an emotional response. Under this condition, Creighton’s work, like the novel, allows us entry into an inter-animating relationship and to experience responsive understanding – two conditions that
Bakhtin identified as highly important and crucial to the genre of the novel.
This inter-animating relationship happens through Creighton’s reliance on rhetoric to help pull at emotional heart strings, to ignite the imagination, or to rally angry response at his analysis. Creighton certainly does not fully rely on rational argument to persuade the reader of his point of view – that the St. Lawrence was the main transcontinental link that helped to establish Canada. Rather, Creighton relies on the elasticity of his words and rhetoric to convey his message. The strategic supplementarity of words, contained in Creighton’s work, allows the reader to make new connections. This is possible because Creighton does not use plain language in order to explain himself. Rather Creighton uses words and combinations of words that are bursting with imagery or muddled up in metaphor. He does not stick to the straight, analytic language of an academic treatise, but veers off into his imaginative world where he asks that the
56 Creighton, The Empire of the St, Lawrence, 202. 57 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 202. 76 reader intensely imagine, until the pictures built of words impinge on the reader with the same energy that reality does.
It is not to be suggested that Creighton’s style is the most suitable way to write history.
Rather, Creighton’s work is one of the best examples within fur trade historiography to see how language allows for alterity within the self. Alterity is introduced into the self through language because it positions users within the orbits of others by its very nature of being held in common.
History already has and will most likely continue to possess the ability to show more-than- humanness and express the post-humanist perspective that challenges the pre-eminent position of human as a lone, single individual. By remaining aware of, and recognizing the importance of employing the processes of dialogization, heterglossia and responsive understanding through language humans, as agents, or more accurately bodies, can be understood as constituted through relations of affect.58 Language is always filled with affects.
Affect in Creighton’s Work
The work of Donald Creighton, if it were not for his use of rhetoric and literary conventions, would likely have unfolded as a sterile account of fur trade businesses based in
Montreal. Instead, Creighton wished to create a work of intense emotion and drama. The dialogic process of reading literature is evinced in The Empire of the St. Lawrence and thus allows for the heightened ability to experience alterity within the self. Alterity within the self through literature is also an effect, or a microcosm example of bodies constituted by relations of affect. The word
“affect” in this sense derives from French theorist Gilles Deleuze, who utilized Baruch Spinoza’s concept of “Affect/Affection”. Neither of these words denotes feeling. Rather, L’affect or
58 Brian Massumi, “Notes on Translation and Acknowledgments” in A Thousand Plateaus, xvi. 77
Spinoza’s ‘affectus’ is understood as an ability to affect and be affected. As Brian Massumi is careful to point out, affect is a prepersonal (independent of the person) intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation in that body’s capacity to act.59 On the other hand, l’affection or Spinoza’s ‘affectio’ is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting body. And a body must be understood and taken in its broadest possible sense to include ‘mental’ or ideal bodies.60
Affect differs from a feeling because a feeling is a sensual, somatic, and is lived and experienced through the body.61 Where affect is independent of a person, a feeling is personal and biographical because every person has a distinct set of previous sensations from which to draw when interpreting and labeling their feelings. Emotion differs from feeling and affect, too.
An emotion is the projection/display of a feeling. Unlike feelings, the display of emotion can be genuine or fake.62 What is important to take away from this rather long exercise in definition, is that affect(s) are intensities which act upon a body by another body, where all bodies are in constant states of becoming which underscore the latitude of what is possible of that body.
The putative differences between affect, feeling and emotion may seem specious. Yet, if we follow through with this thinking, we can see it being expressed when working through
Creighton’s text. For instance, the rhetoric contained within the sentence at the book’s conclusion is situated in an already emotive section: “In 1849, the accumulated sense of failure was so oppressive that it drove men to repudiate their unavailing loyalties and to destroy the
59 Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments,” xvi. 60 Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments,” xvi. 61 Lisa Blackman and John Cromby, “Editorial: Affect and Feeling” in Critical Psychology 21, Special Issue (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2007), 5. 62 Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8:6 (2005). 78 cherished system [of the St. Lawrence Empire] which had failed them.”63 The author uses the sentence to evoke the anger, frustration and disappointment within his historical actors. At first,
Creighton’s words affect readers through a non-conscious experience of intensity, such as when the words lift off the page and travel through visible waves of light towards their eyes. As of yet, the intensity is still a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. The readers respiration changes very little, but to let out a long exhale, the autonomic blood flow changes within the reader as muscles contract and relax as the reader sits back in their chair and closes the back cover. With the remnants of Creighton’s words in their mind, the reader sits and ponders his point of view. At this point, if he or she has engaged comprehensively with the entire text, the reader begins to digest what it means to fail, how it feels to cherish something, what it is like to endure frustration. Or, the reader scoffs and shrugs off Creighton’s view of the past as anachronistic. And just like that affect turns “extensive” and it becomes a conscious act, – it becomes a feeling. Later on, when the reader is asked an opinion about The Empire of St.
Lawrence, he or she may allow a half smile to form and, in response, whisper, “um....” And through that reader’s eyes, face and body language emotion is projected into the world.
Conclusion
Intensities of affect/affection, then, act upon a body by another body. And it is through this process that bodies fulfill the perpetual process of becoming (becoming-different) or the eternal, productive return of difference, which affirms Deleuze’s attempt to challenge the western tradition’s predominant and unjustifiable focus on being, identity and representation.64
For Deleuze, becoming does not represent a phase between two states, or a range through which
63 Creighton, The Empire of the St. Lawrence, 385. 64 Stagoll, “Difference,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, 74. 79 something might pass on its journey to another state. Rather than a final or interim product, becoming is the very dynamism of change tending towards no particular goal or end-state.65
Becoming must not be conceived of as transcendental time, or as a temporal backdrop against which changes occur. “Becoming-different is its own time, the real time in which changes occur, and in which all changes unfold.”66 In Deleuze’s thought, the human subject should not be conceived of as a stable, rational individual, experiencing changes but remaining principally the same person. The self, the human subject must be conceived as a constantly “changing assemblage of forces, of intensities, an epiphenomenon arising from chance confluences of languages, organisms, societies, expectations, laws and so on.”67
In this chapter, Creighton’s work has been organized as a drama and compared to the genre of the novel. This has been done in order to show how Creighton’s choice of content and form is not simply because of his baroque style. Instead, an examination into Creighton’s work is meant to reveal Creighton’s deep commitment to the imaginative powers of the novel and fiction. The dramatic structure of the narrative, its rising and falling action and creative presentation of the St. Lawrence and Canadian Shield, all suggest much is at play in Creighton’s work. When the reader takes into account Creighton’s use of supplementarity, heteroglossia and dialogization, his work cannot be seen as only a cheap attempt at metaphor, and rhetoric. Instead, the reader becomes aware of the risk Creighton takes and the faith he places within his reader.
Because the novel is the genre most open to dialogization, as asserted by Bahtkin, Creighton enters into a mutually affective interaction with his reader. As such, Creighton’s work provides one of the best examples within fur trade historiography in which to witness the affective power of language. Creighton’s work facilitates the reader’s ability to begin an exploration into
65 Stagoll, “Becoming,” in The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition , 26. 66 Ibid, 27. 67 Stagoll, “Becoming,” in The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition , 27. 80
Deleuzian concepts of affect, intensities, and becoming. Just as Innis, in different ways, provided complex combination of actors in his own narrative, Creighton’s use of language helps to decenter the singular human subject within and without history, and allows for a post-humanist approach to history.
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Chapter 4: Rhizomatic Propagation in Sylvia Van Kirk’s Fur Trade
Sylvia Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties, a history of women and relations in the fur trade, can be read and understood in many ways. If Innis’s historical narrative can be reformulated and
Creighton’s work refigured as a tragic play, surely Van Kirk’s narrative can be read as a love story or more accurately as an origin story of love in a North American context. The optimistic and romantic nature of Van Kirk’s work lends itself, perhaps, to recreation in a love poem.
When the earth was still forbidden A mystery to be unhidden You came to these shores Where the clouds did soar And the mountains stretched up to the sky, sometimes higher You had travelled the world with the goal to acquire And the first time I saw you, we were but two But, you were looking at me, and I was looking at you I pulled the hair back from my eyes You had a way so familiar that I could recognize And I swear by your expression It was a confession Of a love, of a pain down in your soul I could do nothing but console For the pain in your soul was the same as the one down in mine That cuts a straight line Down through the heart We call it love We wrapped our arms around each other Tried to join ourselves together We were making love The story, our origin of love
Here, my own reading of Van Kirk elicits a poetic response, whatever its actual literary merit. However, including Many Tender Ties in a post-human analysis of fur trade literature, and re-reading it for the ways it further concretized relations between historical actors in the fur trade and present-day readers is well justified. Of all of the shifts in the New Fur Trade historiography in the 1980s the focus on women as agents and actors became, with the greater focus on 82
Indigenous people, one of the most distinctive hallmarks in historical research. Sylvia Van
Kirk’s Many Tender Ties is emblematic of the trend, and has thus become essential reading for those who wish to study fur trade history. As Robin Brownlie and Valerie Korinek noted in the introduction of their edited collection, Finding a Way to the Heart, Van Kirk’s “feminist questions and insights helped pry open the narrow parameters of historical inquiry to expand the areas of life considered worthy of investigation.”1 Not only this, but Van Kirk and Jennifer
Brown’s 1980 texts would influence generations of future feminist historians. This is very high praise, and it is not unwarranted. As Van Kirk writes in her introduction, Many Tender Ties examines the “role played by Indian, mixed-blood and white women in the development of the fur trade society” in order to reconstruct the “complex, human dimension” of the trade.2 By focusing on and researching the lives of women in the fur trade, Van Kirk broke with older scholarship that traditionally focused on the European men of the fur trade and, to a much lesser extent, their Indigenous male counterparts. Van Kirk’s work confirmed and proved how the fur trade could not have proceeded without the active participation of Indigenous and Métis/métis women.3 Not only did her revelations about women in the fur trade disrupt decades of inherited knowledge from previous historical work, but her methodology proved to be highly significant.
Relying on the Hudson’s Bay Company records, and an array of traveler and trader accounts that were almost exclusively penned by men, Van Kirk read “against the grain” in order to find
1 Robin Jarvis Brownlie and Valerie J. Korinek, Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women’s History in Canada, ed. Robin Jarvis Brownlie and Valerie J. Korinek (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012), 3. 2 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 1. 3 The use of the term Métis/métis is complex and potentially contentious, and has different historical and contemporary meanings. Here is it used very broadly, where Métis may be understood as descended from French- Canadian heritage, and métis as mixed blood, including Scottish/English “country born”. 83 crucial insights into the role of women.4 Subsequent historical analysis continues to be devoted to the women of the fur trade era using precisely this method.5
Unlike the work of Innis and Creighton, Van Kirk did not write a history with a sweeping national theory of development. Nor did she solely focus on the economic side of the fur trade or the merchant class. Furthermore, unlike the non-existent women of Innis’s and Creighton’s narratives, and other historians relegating them to the role of mere bedmates of white traders, women in Van Kirk’s work were essential contributors to the spread and functioning of the trade.6 This is especially important when it is understood that the trade was a hybrid set of cultural values, norms, customary practices and familial networks throughout North America.7
As Van Kirk pointed out, the women of the fur trade provided food and pemmican, dressed fur, made moccasins and snowshoes, canoes and lodges.8 They could be counted on to be hunters, guides, transporters, diplomatic agents, spies and traders.9 As “women in between,” Indigenous and Métis/métis women often helped to ameliorate tensions in the relationships between the men of the fur trade. For all these reason, Van Kirk sees these women of the fur trade as the architects of the society that dominated northern North America from 1670 to 1870. The two hundred year timeline that Van Kirk lays out is vital to her overall argument and chronology. This is because
Van Kirk identifies three crucial time periods that stand as critical junctures for understanding
4 Brownlie & Korinek, “Introduction,” 3. 5 Such works include, Susan Sleeper-Smith, “Women, Kin, and Catholicism: New Perspectives on the Fur Trade,” Ethnohistory 47:2 (2000), 423-452; Michael Lansing, “Plain Indian Women and Interracial Marriage in the Upper Missouri Trade, 1804-1868,” The Western Historical Quarterly 31:4 (2000), 413-433; Clara Sue Kidwell, “Indian Women as Cultural Mediators,” Ethnohistory 39:2 (1992), 97-107; Jennifer S.H. Brown, “Partial Truths: A Closer look at Fur Trade Marriages,” in From Rupert’s Land to Canada: Essays in Honour of John E. Foster, ed. Gerhard J. Ens, John Elign Foster, R.C. Macleod, Theodore Binnema (Edmonton: U of A Press, 2001), 59-71. 6 Peter C. Newman, Company of Adventurers, 3 vols (Markham: Viking, 1985). 7 Gray Whaley, “ ‘Complete Liberty’? Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Social Change on the Lower Columbian River, 1805-1838,” Ethnohistory 54:4 (2007), 669-695. 8 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 56-64. 9 Ibid, 64-65. 84 changing female demographics within Canada and for assessing women’s roles within the fur trade.
Van Kirk’s Women of the Fur Trade
Van Kirk plainly states that a “major concern” of her study “is to show that the norm for sexual relationships in fur-trade society was not casual, promiscuous encounters but the development of marital unions which gave rise to distinct family units.”10 From this sentence, we can see that Van Kirk is not simply focused on sex, but about institutions, phenomena, and affective relations centered on intimacy and interaction, which fundamentally requires more than a single, lone individual. As such, Van Kirk’s work (the themes and topics) and her historical actors cannot be understood within isolation. Her study’s parameters also suggest the times she was writing in. As Jennifer Brown observed in an overview of literature of fur trade marriage after Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties, scholars only came to realize the variety of sexual relations marking the fur trade era that challenges broad generalizations.11
Van Kirk completed her Ph.D. in 1975 at the University of London. And as Jennifer
Brown, trained in anthropology and soon to write extensively about fur trade families, has reminisced, being a female graduate student in the 1960s and 1970s meant that women were in the minority. Both Brown and Van Kirk encountered few female professors, and were generally unsure of their position and future in academe. In their early correspondence to one another, they mentioned how little research and work had been done about women and families in fur trade studies.12 Indeed, Van Kirk had to defend her topic’s very existence, as well as its pertinence and
10 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 4. 11 Brown, “Partial Truths.” 12 Jennifer S.H. Brown, “‘All These Stories about Women’: ‘Many Tender Ties’ and a New Fur Trade History,” in Finding a Way to the Heart: Feminist Writings on Aboriginal and Women’s History in Canada, ed. Robin Jarvis Brownlie and Valerie J. Korinek (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012), 27. 85 importance. In describing her dissertation defence, Van Kirk confessed that “the internal examiner was E.E. Rich, who seemed not entirely convinced that all these stories about women constituted ‘real’ history.”13 Van Kirk studied and worked in the context of the women’s movement that prompted criticism of histories that had marginalized women in the past.14
Fortunately, the appearance of Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties in 1980 also coincided with the rise of women’s history courses and programs across North America, but specifically at the
University of Toronto where she landed a tenure-track position.15 As Elizabeth Jameson and
Shelia McManus argue, her work coincided with the first women’s histories to add women to the all-male casts usually written in narratives.16 Echoing these sentiments, Brown notes that while gender and Indigenous histories are now well established topics within history, this has only happened within the last twenty to thirty years.17
In her first letter to Brown in 1972, Van Kirk discussed some of her motivations concerning her research. In the letter she confirmed that women and their marriages a la façon du pays were important elements to fur trade history. However, she confessed that she was only marginally interested in identifying underlying trends and themes, and her true focus lay with individual experiences. Van Kirk was troubled by the “dehumanized way in which our history has been written.”18 For this reason, Van Kirk outlined that her thesis would touch on the “the mixed-bloods as a group,” but that she was “primarily concerned with the initial relationship between the White trader and his Indian wife, and will be dealing with mixed-blood women only
13 Brown, “‘All These Stories about Women,’” 28. 14 Elizabeth Jameson & Sheila McManus, One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests, ed. Elizabeth Jameson & Shelia McManus, (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2008), xv. 15 Brown, “‘All These Stories about Women,’” 29. 16 Jameson & McManus, One Step Over the Line, xv. 17 Brown, “‘All These Stories about Women,’” 32. 18 Ibid, 27. 86 in terms of their relationship with White men.”19 It can be safely assumed from her admission, that humans and their relations were the central focus for Van Kirk, not rational economic actors.
The first intimate relations Van Kirk set out to describe were those between European men working in the fur trade and Indigenous women. This form of intimate relations encompasses the first time period that Van Kirk addresses. Beginning with the first European-
Indigenous encounters in Canada, Van Kirk unequivocally states that Indigenous women were not only attractive companions, but vital socio-economic partners. In these early stages of the fur trade, Indigenous women distinguished themselves through their numerous and useful skills and labour, as well as trade connections. And Van Kirk dedicates the first four chapters in order to properly represent how and why Indigenous women rose to such prominence. The most important fact she identifies is that Indigenous women were the only female companions for newcomers during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Both the Hudson’s Bay and North West companies were strict adherents to the rule that forbade the entrance of
European women into fur country. However, the companies differed on policy concerning marriage after the custom of the country. The NWC, mainly due to their business model, tended to integrate more closely with Indigenous groups, while the isolated HBC forts made marriages less common. Yet over time, both companies and their men embraced marriage à la façon du pays. Taken altogether, Indigenous women accessed and possessed influential positions as
“women in between.” Unfortunately, this position of supremacy did not last long for Indigenous women. Soon enough, they were supplanted by their Métis/métis daughters.
In 1806 the NWC resolved that company men could only enter into marriage with a mixed-blood woman.20 However, this trend was widespread well before the turn of the
19 Ibid, 27. 20 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 95. 87 nineteenth century. As Van Kirk indicates mixed-blood women were perceived by many to be superior and more attractive partners for the European company men. It was believed that mixed- blood women were uniquely qualified to be the wife of a fur trader, as she was acclimatized to life in the West and familiar with Indigenous ways, while also being capable of successfully adapting to white culture.21 As such during this time, “daughters of the country” came into contact with heavier social expectations and increased forms of racial classification and prejudice. Van Kirk identifies this interim time period with no definite dates. However, she points to the establishment of the Red River colony in 1811, and the Catholic mission, established there to specifically minister to métis in the wake of the Battle of Seven Oaks in
1818, as powerful changes to the established customs of fur trade society. These new features of
European civilization changed the dynamic between Indigenous and European culture within fur trade society. The legal and spiritual contract implied in “marriage à la façon du pays” came under attack. Moreover, the more that mixed-blood women became acculturated to white culture, the more they lost their sphere of autonomy. Of course, Van Kirk situates this change within the framework of intimate relations. Out of concern for their children, white fathers thought it important to impose their culture, education and ways of life on their families.22 This to Van Kirk demonstrates the long lasting familial relations that should distinguish fur trade society and its distinct family units.23
Finally, Van Kirk reasonably asserts that if white women had been initially allowed to accompany husbands to Rupert’s Land, then intermarriage would most likely not have been as extensive and a unique fur trade society would not have formed. With this hypothesis in mind,
Van Kirk points to the mid-nineteenth century as the time when white women began to
21 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 96. 22 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 145. 23 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 7. 88 immigrate and settle within Canada. Their appearance further disrupted fur trade society, and contributed to the increase and entrenchment of racial prejudice overall. This racial prejudice was most notably expressed in the further degradation of the position of Indigenous women, and the lessening desirability of mixed-blood women as marriage companions. As fur trade men began to marry white women, the status and value of mixed-blood women continued to drop.
This was further compounded by the fact that mixed-blood women were continually pressured to conform to Victorian sensibilities as dependent and demure gentlewomen. Eventually the legal status and economic rights of Indigenous and mixed-blood women were eroded and disregarded completely, especially when it came to matters of inheritance.24
Thus far, the narrative can be analyzed as conforming to the overarching structures already seen in Innis and Creighton. The sweeping generalizations now apply to women as a chief category of focus; the geographic span conforms to the same “empire” of metropolitan power (now in terms of gender) that imposed themselves in former political and commercial studies; and the chronological periodization is largely copied from previous works. However, it is in Van Kirk that a post-humanist point of view can be best identified. For while Creighton’s work introduces readers to the system of affect, Van Kirk’s work is better equipped and able to show how the complex Deleuzian concepts of bodies, assemblages, and desire may operate within history texts, and throughout historical experience (both past and present). Her work forces readers to be not only cognizant of their relations to history and the past, but is essential to identifying their position of more-than-humanness.
Undoubtedly, Van Kirk’s book changed the way fur trade history was understood and researched. However, the book did garner criticism, with some scholars such as Adele Perry,
Ron Bourgeault and Julia Emberley criticizing Van Kirk for not taking into account the colonial
24 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 117-119. 89 power relations that act on and restrict people, and specifically women’s choices and actions.25
As such, these critics view the book as presenting a romanticist perspective on sexual relations in the fur trade. Though Van Kirk’s book did not deny the existence of more exploitative forms of sexuality in the trade, such as prostitution, she clearly wished to dispel the prevailing view that relations in the fur trade were only casual and illicit. She clearly states in the beginning of her work that she would focus on long term monogamous ‘marriages’. Because of this, Van Kirk’s approach employs a very “liberal conception of agency” which in effect does lead her to speak on behalf of the historical, Indigenous women figures.26
Despite these detractions, few can criticize Van Kirk for not wishing to give women a more prominent (and accurate) place within fur trade history. At the end of her introduction,
Van Kirk surveys the state of women’s history in the 1980s: “Investigators of women’s history are discovering that the view of women as ‘active agents’ , instead of the simplistic view of women as ‘passive victims’, promises to provide the key to understanding women’s motivations and actions.”27 While critics might disparage Van Kirk’s conception of agency, Van Kirk is not guilty of simply bequeathing agency onto women. This is in large part due to her methodology which requires her to locate women not through their words, but through their actions, and basic existence. In order to do so requires Van Kirk to realize the female body’s relations of affect, its affectio/affectus. Many Tender Ties reveals a different understanding of what it means to be an agent, in that it obliterates the inadequate term completely. This is essential for a post-humanist reading, and also for intensifying our view of the meaningful latitude of historical persons’ bodies. In so doing it will also increase the ethicality of how historical persons are treated by expanding our interaction with and textual depiction of them. Agency, as defined by intentional
25 Brownlie & Korinek, Finding a Way to the Heart, 7. 26 Ibid, 7. 27 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, pg. 8 90 action, is too easily bequeathed onto historical actors (the main criticism against Van Kirk).28
Many people do not act intentionally as they are far too constrained by systems of capitalism, racism, sexism, or imperialism, and so forth. Their positions within a power matrix disqualify them of truly willful action, for their actions are not always freely chosen, nor performed. As such, it is hard to identify intentionality, especially for those subjects who are lost to written history. Thus, historians are greatly hindered, and operate at an ethical loss.29
As such, Many Tender Ties is perhaps the best example for showing a post-humanist method by which to decentre lone, humans within history, because it provides the most tangible and least abstract method to do so. When it was first published in 1980, Van Kirk’s work greatly affected fur trade historiography because it was one of the earliest works (along with Jennifer
S.H. Brown’s Strangers in Blood) to recognize the role and importance of women (specifically
Indigenous women) throughout North American fur trades.30 These two works varied greatly from past scholarship, such as E.E. Rich’s The Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670-1870 and
Frederick Merk’s Fur Trade and Emire: George Simpson’s Journal.31 Van Kirk was able to locate women through documentation usually written by and for men.32 These women were usually the partners, wives or children of fur trade employees or factors. Whatever the relationship may be, Van Kirk read these sources carefully to point out that women were present, and mattered greatly to industry and nations. Because these women left very little to no written evidence behind, Van Kirk had to rely on the words and accounts of others to help inform her.
28 William H. Sewell, “A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,” American Journal of Sociology 98:1 (1992), 19-20. 29 Munslow, “Ethical Turn,” in The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies, 97-98. 30 Brownlie & Korinek, Finding a Way to the Heart, 11; Brown, Strangers in Blood. 31 E.E. Rich, Hudson’s Bay Company, 1670-1870, 3vols (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1960); Frederick Merk, Fur Trade and Empire: George Simpson’s Journal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931). 32 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 32, 104 fn. 28, 118 91
This methodology, often noted in historical analysis in other respects, prove significant in Van
Kirk’s case because it led to an important way of thinking of the fur trade era.
First, in Van Kirk’s work, her main subjects of focus are women. However, the women are accessed through the accounts of other individuals. Fundamentally, these women are reconstituted through descriptions and accounts of their relations to men, of their industry and kin, and the sentimental feelings expressed by others. Taking this into account, Van Kirk’s reconstructed subject can be understood as heterogeneous, as a subjects made up of multiple intensities, as discussed by Deleuze.
To elaborate, in Deleuze’s ontology and aesthetics, intensities produce “everything which happens and everything which appear.”33 Intensities should not be confused with qualities or characteristics. Rather, these intensities, as processes generate the more tangible “extensive” properties or qualities of things. Intensity is “the determinant in the process of actualization.”34
In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze defines intensity as “an element which is itself difference” and “creates at once both the qualities in the sensible and the transcendent exercise within sensibility.”35 Differences of intensity include differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension and potential, and are, as Deleuze explains, the “sufficient reason of all phenomena, the condition of that which appears.”36 In his emphasis on intensities, Deleuze privileges sensation over form and “invites us to consider affective magnitudes.” This is important to our understanding of affect more generally. Affect, itself, is intensive rather than extensive.
Extension “organizes the world spatially into distributed blocks.” Therefore, if “we see the world, usually, as a set of extended objects and as part of a uniform and measurable space, this is
33 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 222. 34 Ibid, 245. 35 Ibid, 144. 36 Ibid, 222. 92 because we have synthesized intensities.”37 A concrete example of intensities is offered by Claire
Colebrook who explains that intensities are not “qualities – such as redness – they are the becoming of qualities: say, the burning and wavering infra-red light that we eventually see as red.”38
Therefore, an Indigenous or Métis/métis woman as written about in Many Tender Ties through her affect/affection of Van Kirk (through Van Kirk’s research and study) can be seen as an extensive body of synthesized intensities. This is further complicated, because the coalescing of her extensive qualities renders her (the woman) her own assemblage and within or a part of a larger assemblage. Assemblages, as conceived of by Deleuze and Guattari, are complex constellations of objects, bodies, expressions, qualities, and territories, subcultural expressions, and/or economic conditions (this is not an exhaustive list) that come together for varying periods of time to ideally create new ways of functioning. Importantly, this process of positioning multiple and heterogeneous elements is directed towards establishing a territory.
Territories are an important and essential creation, or side to an assemblage. For while assemblages coalesce into and from singularities that emerge from flows of all directions, and can congeal into any possible number of potentials, an assemblage’s most important and dominant trait is its malleability. For while an assemblage can create a new territory, it can also deterritorialize and reterritorialize. To deterritorialize occurs when things in an assemblage are disarticulated and exit an assemblage. Reterritorialization describes the process of new articulations that enter into an assemblage and begins to forge a new assemblage. These territories are what stabilize an assemblage for as long as the assemblage needs to be a stabilized heterogeneous singularity, and this constitutes the assemblage’s vertical axis. The horizontal axis
37 Perta Hroch, “Intensity/Intensive,” in Demystifying Deleuze: An Introductory Assemblage of Crucial Concepts ed. Rob Shields and Mickey Vallee (Ottawa: Red Quill Books Ltd., 2012), 96. 38 Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (New York: Routledge, 2005), 39. 93 is “where the break-up and transformations of input flows respond to physical systems and combines with organs and machines into organized ‘bodies.’” As aforementioned, bodies must be understood in the broadest term. Bodies can be organic or inorganic, human or inhuman, a person or the body-politic (just to give a few examples).39 Deleuze and Guattari also point out that an assemblage emerges when a function emerges; ideally an assemblage is innovative and productive. The result of a productive assemblage is novelty – it is a “new means of expression, a new territorial organization, a new institution, a new behaviour, or a new realisation. The assemblage is destined to produce a new reality, by making numerous and often unexpected, connections.”40
Van Kirk’s Assemblages
The concept of assemblages applies to all structures, from the behaviour patterns of an individual, the organisation of institutions, an arrangement of spaces, to the functioning of ecologies. This concept of assemblage might come across as large, expansive, and even unwieldy. Yet, within Van Kirk’s work one can become cognizant of the presence of this complex concept. An example of an assemblage can be identified through the written record of the nineteenth century Englishman John McNab. Through his words the assemblage form of a mixed-blood daughter through the extensive actualization of her intensities is thus revealed: “a handsome brunette, fine black expressive eyes, arch’d eye brows, high forehead, shaded with natural ringlets of black flowing hair, an aquiline nose, pretty mouth, teeth exquisitely beautiful, and the contour of her face of an oval form.”41 She, as an assemblage, is further augmented by her presence in Brandon House in 1816, and her relationship with an Englishman named John
39 Erin Kruger, “Assemblage,” in Demystifying Deleuze, 30. 40 Graham Livesey, “Assemblage,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, 19. 41 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 114. 94
McNab. Her assemblage expands further with her unique socio-economic position in Rupert’s
Land that gives her a “class-consciousness” and “English styles and values.”42 All of these heterogeneous entities and articles are ultimately organized in the body of Janette, the 16 year old daughter of a French Canadian father and Indigenous mother.43 This treatment of Janette does not, as the critics might say, signal “a liberal conception of agency.” Van Kirk does not take for granted colonial power relations, or more generally the structural conditions of young
Janette’s life. They are part of Janette, they are articles that form her as an assemblage, they affect her, and in doing so bring about becomings that are urged on by intensities, that require her eternal return to difference – it is anything but liberal.
As a more tangible example, one can look further into Van Kirk’s description. Janette is a
16-year-old mixed blood female. She is of marriageable age, and has thus caught the attention of an Englishman. This alone should signal to the reader what binds her; so far, her only value has derived from her acceptability as a wife. As a daughter of an engagé, she would be highly valuable to a Nor’Wester seeking not only companionship, but also connections to the trade.
McNab’s very description reveals her colonial and imperial context. As Métis, she is the physical outcome of settler-colonialism. Her hybridity reveals the racial prejudice that surrounded and insulated her existence, a condition more than implied in the very words of the male trader. Not a full blooded Indigenous woman culturally, but not quite white – Janette will undergo countless redefinitions of her racial quality and quantity. While her aquiline nose and “pretty” mouth may shield her from complete racial prejudice, it is the very things that John McNab uses to objectify and sexualize her. The descriptors “slender” and “delicate” reveal quite plainly the overt sexism that permeated her culture. Through Van Kirk’s short description, much can be discerned and
42 Ibid, 113-114. 43 Ibid, 113. 95 many colonial power relations be taken into account. Therefore, it would be incorrect to accept that the girl’s agency is based on Janette being an intentional agent, of whom we have no firsthand knowledge or evidence. Instead, the reader must think of her as a heterogeneous assemblage and take in all these things that contributed to her becoming (such as her being a brunette, a girl, a mixed blood person, from the 19th century, born in Rupert’s Land) in order to gauge not her agency or ability to act, but her power as an extensive body to affect and be affected. This is the only system that the reader truly has reasonable access to given the temporal and spatial distance from Janette. The reader can summarize how she affected John McNab, her family and her connection to the fur trade – these are her affective relations, which express her body’s power of latitude. This is a quite accurate assessment of her life, existence, and action, one of the first ways post-humanist thought fundamentally alters how history deals with agency.
More assemblages appear in Van Kirk’s work and can be seen in the functions of fur trade women to stand as exceptional examples of affect. Indeed, Van Kirk even directly acknowledges that “women’s roles were dictated in terms of their relationships to men: wife, mother, daughter or worker.”44 In her chapter “Your Honours Servants” Van Kirk goes through an extensive list of duties and abilities Indigenous women provided in service of the fur trade. As mentioned, these women made moccasins, snowshoes, and pemmican. They prepared hides, tended fish nets, hunted small game, made and paddled canoes, as well as guided or interpreted.
They shared the beds of European men and in turn become the mothers of a new group of people.45 Like Janette, each Indigenous woman can be seen as an individual assemblage.
However, if these women are connected together in a constellation they constitute an even larger and more powerful assemblage with the power to produce new culture, practices, systems of
44 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, pg. 7. 45 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 5 & 53-66. 96 meaning, behaviours, and experiences. Through their affective web (which includes so much from the ecological relationships of their environment, market demands, European men, and themselves), we can see how women (individually and as a whole) produced a new society. Of course, each individual woman operated under different power systems and from different positions of power, yet together, as an assemblage they were capable of producing a new territory, a new system of behaviour.
Peterson and Afinson saw this as generalization.46 Generalization can contribute to the erasure or suppression of the uniqueness and full expression of the subject. Yet, by conceptualizing these women within an assemblage does not generalize, since to Deleuze and
Guattari, a subject cannot be viewed as alone, or as singular. The subject is a long-standing point of contention for Deleuze and Guattari. In opposition to philosophers of consciousness (such as
Descartes), they maintain it is not a singular body that defines subjectivity, but a composition put together from pieces and prior collections. For example, the subject is differentiated from the biological body since the latter is composed of membranes, organs, nerves, physio-chemical processes. It is also sustained through the exterior things the body requires, such as nourishment, shelter, transport, love. The subject is therefore not a static or unified entity, but an “imposed web of connections and codes, flows of energy, segments and strata,” whose coordinates are contingently related to the biological and organic human body.47 Therefore, the subject and corresponding subjectivity is always in flux, and derives from the assemblage that congeals into the subject.
The Deleuzian conception of desire also alters how subjects are perceived. Assemblages operate through desire and desire is the circulating energy that produces connections between
46 Peterson & Afinson, “The Indian and the Fur Trade,” 12; Brownlie & Korinek, Finding a way to the Heart, pg. 7. 47 William Bogard, “Sense and Segmentarity: Some Markers of a Deleuzian-Guattarian Sociology,” Sociological Theory 16:1 (1998), 57. 97 assemblages.48 Desire for Deleuze is radically different from the definition put forward in psychoanalysis. To Deleuze, desire is not an oedipal lack (which he sees as stigmatizing), but a positive, productive flow. The force of the desire flow allows bodies to form connections and to enhance the power of bodies in their connection, because connections between bodies create new assemblages, and new vertical and horizontal axis by which those assemblies may act. Thus, this type of desire marks the possibility and potential for becoming in assemblages – new becomings and becoming different.49 Desire does not need to be identified as either an insatiable internal lack, or as a process whose goal is dissolution in pleasure. Rather it can create meaningful connections between bodies that change what those bodies as assemblages are and the power of the body’s latitude. This alteration in the definition of desire changes the way personal interactions and systemic relations between groups can be understood within fur trade history and Indigenous-settler relations.
Desire in Van Kirk’s Fur Trade
A significant portion of fur trade historiography is still tied up in debates surrounding power, autonomy and dependency. Historians have long tried to understand how and when power occurred and was used in Indigenous-settler relations; and what motivated Indigenous people into sustained relations with newcomers, despite growing exploitation and damage.50 A majority of these scholars have sought to explain Indigenous (and settler) actions through economic understandings, especially Indigenous peoples’ desire for European goods. 51 This
48 Alison Ross, “Desire,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, 66. 49 Mickey Valle, “Desire,” in Demystifying Deleuze, 48. 50 John Lutz, Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008). 51 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1982] 1997), 1- 102 & 158-194; Arthur J. Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660-1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). 98 desire, in turn, made Indigenous people dependent on Europeans, and allowed Europeans a position of power within their relationship. Innis himself used Indigenous desires for European goods as a major force determining their relationship with Europeans. While power is essential to understandings of Indigenous-settler relations, the Deleuzian conception of desire helps refine those understandings.
Even Van Kirk attempts to understand why Indigenous women entered into relations with white men (who clearly possessed and exerted power over them). Early on, Van Kirk points out that there exists considerable evidence that Indigenous women commonly took the initiative to enter into such bonds with European males.52 She further complicates the issue by showing how traders were initially very dependent on Indigenous people for food, shelter, and protection.
Indigenous women’s traditional skills and knowledge made them a valuable partner, but also allowed them to possess power and independence within European-Indigenous relations.
Overtime, this situation changed, and Indigenous women became “Your Honours Servants”. As servants, women rarely received monetary or in-kind wages for their industry and were exploited by companies and men for their cheap, and very necessary labour.53 To some extent, Van Kirk does rely on economic understandings in order to decipher Indigenous women’s actions. Van
Kirk sees women as playing an active role in the promotion of the material exchange of the fur trade.54 However, Van Kirk tempers this point of view by writing that “the lot of most women” was “to take a pragmatic approach to life” in order “to make the best of any possibilities offered to enlarge the limited sphere of their existence.”55 This logic includes Indigenous women’s desire for European goods that simply made their lives easier. As Van Kirk explains it, “it was
52 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 8. 53 Ibid, pg. 73. 54 Ibid, pg 75. 55 Ibid, 75-76. 99 much easier to boil water in a metal kettle than to laboriously heat it by means of dropping hot stones into a bark container. Cotton and woollen goods saved long hours of tanning hides.”56
Therefore, it is reasonable to see why women wished to create and sustain bonds with European men, who were their source of ‘revolutionary’ goods.
It is very important to recognize the language that Van Kirk employs here, as there is a similitude with Deleuze. Van Kirk’s language here is spatially biased, just like Deleuze’s. The pragmatic approach of an Indigenous woman requires that she attempt to enlarge the territorial space or “sphere” of her existence. In this moment, we can see the Indigenous woman behaving like that of an assemblage, which desires to connect with other assemblages in order to deterritorialize and reterritorialize in the hopes of creating a new territory, a new ridge of existence that would include the goods offered by Europeans. In doing so, the Indigenous woman undergoes the effects of her relation to others (specifically white men) and accentuates her becoming and constant differentiation. When her assemblage expands in connection with another, she expands upon the ability of her body’s latitude, upon her affective capabilities. She, as an assemblage, is fulfilling her productive manner and operating on her flow of desire, both of which Deleuze sees as necessary within a world that heightens difference rather than representation. Ultimately, in forming connections with other assemblages, desire becomes about social production. It is not a personal force that seeks to fulfill a lack or satisfy through pleasure.
Instead, it is a force for social production.57
In this way, Van Kirk moves her analysis away from general understandings of power and dependency. It moves the debate into a theoretical plateau, the benefit being that any subject’s actions or choices must first be understood as an expression of affect, as that affect
56 Ibid, 76. 57 Vallee, “Desire,” 48. 100 moves from the virtual and passes “transformatively through the flesh” and emerges as a connection to another assemblage.58 Through this conception of desire as a flow, once again, the subject is decentered in order to reveal how choice, subjectivity and motivations do not belong or pertain to a single individual, but rather the complex assemblage of which a subject is and is a part of.
Scholars who seek to prove or disprove the utility of European trade goods, and therefore
Indigenous dependency on them, miss the point offered in Deleuzian analysis. The desire for trade goods relates to the forming of assemblages that women chose to create. They did so in complex relationships marked by power, but also numerous other sets of constraints. The very title “Many Tender Ties” suggests the complexity and ambiguity of these relationships. The title derives from correspondence written by Chief Factor James Douglas. Expressing his thoughts on country marriages, he wrote,
There is indeed no living with comfort in this country until a person had forgot the great world and has his tastes and character formed on the current standard of the stage… To any other being… the vapid monotony of an inland trading Post, would be perfectly unsufferable, while habit makes it familiar to us, softened as it is by the many tender ties, which find a way to the heart.59
Based on the origin of her title, Van Kirk was not only addressing women, and their place within the affective web, but also the men of fur trade. Therefore, the conception of assemblages applies to both the men and women of Van Kirk’s history.
Van Kirk dedicates a great deal of her work to understanding why women entered into relationships with white men, but it must also be recognized that she devotes just as much attention to understanding why white men did not exit, but often times persisted in their relationships. It may seem obvious why European men sought relations with Indigenous women.
58 Brian Massumi, A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Routledge, 2002), xxiv. 59 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 36. 101
As has been mentioned, men were initially dependent on women for basic necessities, and relied on them to mediate culture. However, men’s persistence in these country marriages was not a given. In discussing the evolving appreciation white men had for country marriages, Van Kirk cites how initially many white men did not find Indigenous women particularly attractive. For instance, Chinook women’s practices of flattening their heads and covering themselves in salmon oil, did “little to recommend them” to European traders.60 Moreover, Van Kirk describes the initial hesitation some European men, such as Alexander Henry, George Nelson, and Daniel
Harmon, had to country marriage. These men were initially shocked by practices of fur trade marriage, with Nelson himself describing it “as a snare laid no doubt by the Devil himself.”61
However, under great social pressure to “adopt a code of behaviour which had gained its own legitimacy through long usage,” all three men conformed to the custom of the country. Van Kirk points to the many Hudson’s Bay Company wills written from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to find evidence of growing family ties and traders’ concern for the welfare of native dependants.62 Indeed, many men, in their wills, left specific instructions for the care and preservation of their families. Moreover, Van Kirk points to the actions of men while in the fur trade. If kept from their wives, men could refuse to work, threaten to run away, and some were even prepared to enslave themselves in order to pay off their debts if allowed to marry. It was also noted that men would complete a four day journey in as little as two and half days to return to their wives. And loyalty to their Indigenous families was a primary cause of many engagés remaining in the West after leaving service of the North West Company.63
60 Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties, 22-23. 61 Ibid, 40. 62 Ibid, 45. 63 Ibid, 42-48. 102
It is easy to discern from these examples that fur trade men were beholden to an emotional dependency, similar to the economic dependency evinced in the case of Indigenous women. However, these theories of dependency do not take into account the power of latitude these men (and women) had as bodies and, most importantly, as assemblages. It is true that men acted from a very different place of power from women. They could leave their families very easily, and they were not required to provide for them once they left. However, viewing men’s relations through an either or binary of power and dependency, where if men left they are understood as engaging their power, and that if they stayed they displayed dependence, is not fully accurate. This explanation requires further refinement. And it is through Douglas’s choice of words that a more complex and nuanced understanding of men’s actions in their relationships can be discerned.
Van Kirk’s choice of title, with words that display a peculiar juxtaposition, suggests significant meaning. To elaborate, the words “tender” and “ties” have seemingly contrary connotations. Tender in this usage implies softness, delicacy, perhaps even fragility. On the other hand, ties means to bind or lash together. Where one word is light, the other is heavy. Put together these words express great ambiguity. A tender tie is meant to explain the social bondage produced through relations of love. It is easy to see why concepts such as power and dependency are called forth. Yet, there is another implication that may be inferred. Once again, in similar manner to Deleuzian thought, the term ties has a spatial component. To tie together may indicate that something is tethered to a spot, and thus creates or shows as having an extension in space.
Just like an assemblage or territory, men’s social bondage or their tender ties, is a plateau upon which his body, his assemblage, envelops other bodies, other assemblages. And therefore, his actions, whether a man chose to leave or stay with his family, describes not only his affective
103 relations, or his place within an affective web, but it reveals his desire as an assemblage to deterritorialize and reterritorialize. His actions towards his family (no matter how joyful or painful) are illustrative of his productive desire to make anew. And as a decentered self, as an assemblage, fur trade men (like fur trade women) need not be understood through binary thought
(power versus dependence) which dictates historians’ understanding of their subjectivity or agency. Instead, action, intent and agency are revealed to be the productive nature, the circulating desire of people (as assemblages) who made up of “mad and transitory” singularities that reveal their infinite and startling potential for movement and affection.64
Rhizomes in Van Kirk’s Fur Trade
Post-humanist theory, applied to the work of Van Kirk suggests many instances of more- than-humanness in decentered human subjects. The Deleuzian concepts of intensity, assemblage and desire reveal how humans are heterogeneous, and always undergoing change. This view fundamentally alters how a subject’s agency, intentionality and subjectivity are produced, identified and understood. However, these concepts form the basis of a larger endeavour embarked on by Deleuze: to subvert and ease the grasp of representational thinking on society and traditional western philosophy.
For Deleuze, representation entails an essentially moral view of the world that derives explicitly or implicitly on what ‘everybody knows’. Deleuze conceives of philosophy as an antidote to this view. To Deleuze, representation cannot help us to encounter the world as it appears in the flow of time and becoming. It constitutes a particularly restricted form of thinking and acting. It works according to fixed norms, and is thus unable to acknowledge difference-in-
64 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 40. 104 itself. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze challenges the representational conception of philosophy. His example begins by contrasting the differences between the ‘poet’ to the
‘politician’. To him, the poet speaks in the name of a creative power, and seeks to affirm difference as a state of permanent revolution. On the other hand, the politician seeks to deny that which differs in order to establish or maintain a particular historical order.65 French scholar, John
Marks, has explained Deleuze’s cause as a proposition to ‘overturn’ Platonism, which is a way of thinking that distinguishes between “the original – the thing that most resembles itself, characterised by exemplary self-identity – and the copy, which is always deficient in relation to the original.”66 To Deleuze, Platonism is incapable of thinking difference-in-itself, preferring to conceive of it in relation to ‘the thing itself’.67 In order to go beyond representation, it is necessary, therefore, to undermine the primacy of the original over the copy and to promote the simulacrum, the copy for which there is no original.
To do so Deleuze and Guattari access the term “rhizome” – a term that commonly refers to underground root growth, the rampant, dense propagation or repetition of roots that characterizes such plants as mint or crabgrass.68 Each rhizomatic root may take off in its own singular direction and make its own connections with other roots, with worms, insects, rocks or whatever, forming a dynamic composition of “interkingdoms and unnatural participations” that has no prescribed form or end.69 This description of what a rhizomatic root does emphasizes
Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term as mapping the process of networked, relational and transversal thought. Rhizomatic root thought is opposed by “arborescent thought”, which is a metaphor of a tree-like mapping structure that orders epistemologies and forms of historical
65 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 71. 66 John Marks, “Representation,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, 229. 67 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 77. 68 Stivale, Gilles Deleuze, 118. 69 Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 242. 105 frames and homogenous schemata. Arborescent thought is concerned with the ordering the lineages of bodies and ideas that can trace back to an original and individual base – everything rhizomatic thought is not.
70
Once again in Deleuzian philosophy, the rhizome underscores how everything and every body
(be they concrete, abstract or virtual) must be viewed as multiple through relational connections or as heterogeneous singularities in dynamic compositions. Deleuze and Guattari identify the nature of the rhizome as that of a moving matrix, composed of organic and non-organic parts forming symbiotic and “aparallel” connections, according to transitory and as yet undetermined routes.71 This is Deleuze’s challenge to Platonism.
To elaborate, Deleuze and Guattari insist bodies and things ceaselessly take on new dimensions through their contact with different and divergent entities over time. In this way, the concept of the rhizome marks a divergent way of conceptualizing the world. Reality should not be thought of and written as an “ordered series of structural wholes, where semiotic connections
70
Applying Deleuzian rhizomatic thought to the understandings of the past in the present fundamentally changes the representational nature of historical writing. The rhizome’s emphasis on propagation and repetition is the best possible way of challenging and instituting the demise of representational thinking. Instead of representing something in an author’s work as an inferior copy of a past original, it repeats that thing through the author’s and reader’s bodies’ affective exchanges. To return to Van Kirk’s subject, when historians represent the lone, individual
Indigenous or Métis/métis woman, they are representing an inferred inferior copy of some ideal progenitor that she is meant to represent, and that the historian truly does not know or understand. However, if an author acknowledges her life and existence through affect, she can rhizomatically propagate or repeat her body, for as her body affects a body she deterritoralizes its
72 Felicity F. Colman, “Rhizome,” in The Deleuze Dictionary, 234. 73 Colman, “Rhizome,” 234. 107 assemblage and reterritoralizes it into a greater whole. For example, the reduced (less complex) rhizomatic transversal chain would figure as follows:
…Indigenous womanrhizomefur traderrhizomefur trader’s writingsrhizomethe reader…
What this example is meant to convey is that the subject has entered into a web of affect which has made it, her, the subject more sprawling and full of life than ever before, because the subject is no longer a single, voiceless female on her own, but can be known, seen and felt through her subject-body’s ability to affect and be affected, virtually and in reality, rizhomatically. What this produces is a method that is far more ethical in its treatment of historical people who can only be looked upon from the present. Representation is unethical, for it asks for mimicry and imitation, not for authenticity. In so doing, the historian can fundamentally strip those they represent of their position as an ontologically separate and real entity within the world. Despite attempts to remain beholden to the evidence and serve “justice to the other”74, the representational model of thinking that underlies historical writing, logic and sense, is not capable of expressing the difference-in-itself of any single thing. Only by harnessing the power of repetition will history be able to propagate properly the rhizomatic other of the past.
Conclusion
As Brown has noted, the title choice of Van Kirk’s book reveals the optimistic and romantic perspective of the author. Even though both Brown and Van Kirk in their research found that fur trade unions evinced everything from “tender enduring affection to abuse and
74 Mark Jackson, “The Ethical Space of Historiography,” Journal of Historical Sociology 14:4 (2001), 467. 108 neglect,” Van Kirk decided to devote her attention and work to those bonds that endured.75
However, as has been suggested, the title Many Tender Ties captures the ambiguity of fur trade relationships. Her title reveals how even enduring relations possess dynamics of power and dependency, social bondage and love, cruelty and great empathy. So while Van Kirk may be censured for choosing to study only the enduring relations of the fur trade, what she was also studying was the complex way people decided to interact with one another. She seeks to decipher the reasons and motivations between two peoples’ choice to come together and not to separate
(and the opposite). As such these relations are not understood in a binary framework that allows for or predicts for only two outcomes. In their relations with one another, Indigenous women and white men do not just manifest roles of either power or dependence. Rather their actions, agency, and subjectivity not only demand but require that historians take into account all the ways bodies manifest. As such, it is not appropriate to figure these historical people as only singular intentional agents, as it is next to impossible to access their true feelings and thoughts. Therefore,
Van Kirk’s methodology recommends that historians encounter past people through their bodies’ affective capabilities. By recognizing how past people may affect and be affected, readers can understand others through a transversal web of affect that they too inhabit.
The beings/bodies in Van Kirk’s work are heterogeneous singularities that coalesce in order to create assemblages and territories. These historical people therefore do not act only from places of power or dependency, but possess and deploy the Deleuzian conception of desire.
Desire, as a productive force, shows that historical people when they act are augmenting, changing, or simply expanding on their bodies’ affective latitude, and territory of their assemblage. This breaks with representational models of thought, because historical people in historical texts are not thought of as a copy of a past original. Instead, through affective relation,
75 Brown, “‘All These Stories about Women,’” 34. 109 historical people are understood as rhizomatic becomings, which propagate themselves.
Therefore, the author does not give them agency, but explains how those past people affected the other bodies within an affective transversal web. Ultimately, this provides for a greater aesthetic and ethical treatment of past people – a goal which is worthy of its pursuit.
My poem, prefacing this chapter is an example of just this pursuit. The poem suggests my own post-humanist reading of Van Kirk’s work. It also represents my body’s position in the transversal web, as it is affected by the historical people in Van Kirk’s work. The emotion of love, on which I base the poem’s story, is the extensive affect that the historical people have exerted on me, which allows me to organize my physical and mental world. More importantly though, the poem is meant to show first the separateness of bodies, and how they are uniquely contextualized, as, within and between assemblages. Next the poem displays the circulating energy and productive force of assemblages, which is the desire to (re/de)territorialize. Thus, the poem is a microcosm of a Deleuzian thought. I do not claim to present a poem with literary merit. However, my poem does show my attempt to aesthetically define and describe historical people through repetitional thinking that is based on a concept of difference-in-itself. And it is through this that I wish to ethically interact with the other(s) in and of history, in order to find and gain every new ways of meaning.
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Conclusion
This thesis has attempted to displace the pre-eminent position of the single, rational human in the study of history. In so doing, it has addressed the representative methods of the texts of Innis, Creighton and Van Kirk. It has been argued that the human being/subject is an interplay of forces taking place within larger forces, an assemblage located beside and within other assemblages. A diverse range of post-humanist theory has been drawn upon, including the writings of Donna Haraway, Dominick LaCapra, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari. Post-humanist theory has been used in order to better understand how the human subject/body can be conceptualized in history as an assemblage, and therefore affects and is affected.
At focus in this thesis is Harold A. Innis’s The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to
Canadian Economic History, Donald G. Creighton’s The Empire of the St. Lawrence: A Study in
Commerce and Politics, and Sylvia Van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670-1870. The fur trade, as demonstrated through the historiography, is a subject rich in complex relationships and power dynamics. These three texts constitute special case examples to explore possible ways authors and their readers interact with and enter the past.
Moreover, these three works all contributed to a dominant model imposed on Canadian history, the Laurentian thesis. Arguably, the Laurentian thesis developed a cohesive way of thinking about the past grounded in geography, and which established a chronology and spatial developments that are still imposing themselves into current thinking. Because these three works share in a dominant form of thinking, they offer a fertile ground upon which a post-humanist re- reading can be undertaken and their ideas placed within a larger meta-narrative.
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In each of these works, human subjects within and without the text (the historical subjects, authors, and readers) are constituted by and constitutive of multiple forms of life. The authors’ conscious decisions to include features of the fur trade past – rivers, geomorphic structures, forests, animals, and multiethnic, gendered encounters – in the end provide a means to demonstrate how all the human subjects partaking in historical knowledge are assemblages that are made up of heterogeneous articulations and aspects, ranging from their environment, physical features, their unique imperial or colonial contexts, to their intensities, unique becomings, and particular desires. Innis’s work reveals how the beaver, if understood as a companion species as theorized by Donna Haraway, exposes the heterogeneity of historical subjects. By first establishing, through Innis’s field notes, his idea of technology’s impact on human volition, readers of The Fur Trade in Canada may begin to see the heterogeneity of people. This human heterogeneity is then reinforced by showcasing how human history/reality would not be the same if it were not for the presence of other physical beings within it. It is argued that Innis’s close attention to the life and habits of the beaver (a non-human being) is an acute example found within Innis’s work that showcases post-humanist argument and thought.
Building on this, Creighton’s content and form, so modelled on the novel as a form of literature reveals the heterogeneity of authors and readers of history. In reading Creighton’s work, it is argued that close attention must be paid to his use of language, specifically his practice of analogy and metaphor. By recognizing the St. Lawrence River as an active character within
Creighton’s narrative, the reader may also gauge the extent to which he relies on the form of the novel and the processes of heteroglossia and dialogization. Because of this, it is contended that
Creighton’s work relies on affective communication in order to envelop the reader, and link him or her to the author and the past. Lastly, Van Kirk’s work shows an affective methodology which
112 links authors, readers and historical subjects together. This chapter first establishes Van Kirk’s important role in broadening the purview of fur trade history. Van Kirk, as well as other scholar’s introduced a range of new people and topics into the narrative of the West. Van Kirk read against the grain in order to access the past lives of fur trade women and children through the documents of white men. Her methodology allows for a Deleuzian reading of her text. It is argued that the Deleuzian concepts of assemblages and desire are highly visible through the way
Van Kirk describes her characters and explores their actions and motivations. To conclude, the chapter suggests that Van Kirk’s historical people rhizomatically propagate themselves, thus diminishing the historian’s problematic representation of past peoples’ agency and intentionality.
Alternatively, it is surmised that historical people reveal themselves through their bodies’ latitude to affect and be affected.
By linking these three works, the overarching transversal web of affect is revealed. In doing so, this thesis provides a way around the dominant representational mode of thought prevalent in the study of history and presentation of the past, and proposes that rhizomatic repetition provides a more ethically aesthetic approach to writing about other entities and humans. Through Innis, a post-human reading magnifies the role of elemental strata to human existence: animal life and what is often considered lifeless shield granite; it reveals the potent imaginative turns in Laurentian and Hudson Bay watersheds in Creighton’s commercial history; and the complex dependency of bodies in Van Kirk’s fur trade.
Ultimately, all of these texts disrupt history’s more typical reliance on representational thinking. For if a body is a heterogeneous singularity in dynamic composition, than it cannot be a static copy of an ideal original that expresses only difference-of-the-same. Historians lose themselves debating the faults of Innis’s “copy” – the “bias” of Innisian geographic determinism
113 is often dismissed as archaic. By the same token, due to his own difference-of-the-same thinking,
Innis believed his copy of the fur trade, as a staples industry, endured to his present, and would still shape the phenomenon of the “staples trap” in modern developing economics; Creighton imagined that his frustrated geographic design still dourly hung over his contemporary society and would extend to our present Canadian reality; Van Kirk’s “tender ties” still links tender relations with ambiguity in a modern and post-modern Canada. These texts suggest an on-going need for history to express difference-in-itself, which as Deleuze argues can only be done through repetition and transversal thought. To repeat does not mean to copy the same thing over and over again, but rather it implies beginning again to ensure an eternal return to difference.
Rather than relying on representation to portray difference-of-the-same, I have argued that
Deleuze’s affect/affection is a promising method by which to be cognizant of other historical bodies. Only by recognizing difference-in-itself will history be able to write accurately about the past and others – in its own attempt to forge ever new ways to gain meaning.
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