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Practice and Mobility in the Late Eighteenth-Century Western Great Lakes Fur Trade

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Practice and Mobility in the Late Eighteenth-Century Western Great Lakes Fur Trade Communities on the Move: Practice and Mobility in the late Eighteenth-Century Western Great Lakes Fur Trade A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Amélie Allard IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Adviser: Dr. Katherine Hayes August 2016 © Amélie Allard 2016. All rights reserved. Acknowledgements I would like to thank all those who made this dissertation project possible: Kat Hayes for her wonderfully grounded and steadfast guidance, support and confidence in my abilities. My dissertation committee: professors Peter Wells, Jeani O’Brien, Rob Mann and John Soderberg, whose comments and suggestions helped in making this into a better project. I am also heartily grateful to Doug Birk for his willingness to share his invaluable insight into the Western Great Lakes history and archaeology, and for entrusting me with the Réaume project. I hope this dissertation does justice to his lifelong achievements. My thanks also go to the Crocker family, and Dan in particular, for their open-mindedness and interest in the project, as well as Rich Paper, Lina Belar and the people of the Wadena County historical societies for their continued enthusiasm about archaeology. Lastly, thanks to the University of Minnesota graduate TAs, undergraduate students and volunteers who participated in the field-schools and post-excavation analysis. Not only have you made this project possible, but working with you has also enriched my own learning experience. Lastly, this research was funded by the SSHRC of Canada, the state of Minnesota Legacy Amendment grant program, the graduate school’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, and the Anthropology department’s Block grants. i Dedication For my family: I couldn’t have done it without your love, constant and unconditional encouragement and support, or without those countless hours spent chatting on Skype so that I wouldn’t feel too far away from home. Thank you to my parents for supporting me even in the darkest moments, and for having transmitted to me your values and passion for history. Thank you. Je dédicace cette thèse de doctorat à ma famille : si j’ai réussi à terminer ce projet c’est grâce à votre amour et support inconditionnel, ainsi qu’à toutes ces innombrables heures passées sur skype qui m’ont permis de ne pas me sentir trop seule. Merci en particulier à mes parents, qui ont su me soutenir même dans les moments les plus difficiles, et pour avoir su me transmettre leurs valeurs et leur passion pour l’histoire. Merci. ii Abstract This dissertation elaborates a framework for interpreting the archaeological site of Réaume’s Leaf River Post, a late eighteenth-century fur trading post in Central Minnesota. It examines the construction of social relationships and community in relation to place both within the site and across the broader fur trade landscape of the Western Great Lakes. I consider the ways in which Euro-Canadian fur traders made sense of an unfamiliar landscape by producing a familiar social space (or places) while on the move. Firstly, they did so through daily practices that are recoverable archaeologically, such as foodways and architecture. Together, such activities served to produce a particular lived space, which also created a stage for the enactment of shared practices. I argue that the transmission of practical knowledge from old timers to newcomers, or sometimes from Native people to traders, worked to create a unique community of practice that revolved around fur trading. Given the mobility associated with this lifestyle, I further argue that mobility not only impacted the materiality of the posts in a particular way, but was in fact part of those shared practices that helped foster a sense of ‘groupness’. This community formation process involves operations of both differentiation and inclusion, which often worked simultaneously and along different layers of identity (social status, ethnicity, experience, etc.). Secondly, place-making and community formation processes also work at the power-laden level of the imagination, representation and discourse, which produce the ‘conceived space’. Here I use for evidence a number of journals and memoirs written by fur traders who operated in our region of interest in the late eighteenth century or the turn of the nineteenth century. These narratives offer valuable insight into the ways in which traders created a particular geographic imaginary through their movement across, and engagement with, the landscape and the people inhabiting it. They turned the unfamiliar landscape into familiar places through stories, food procurement strategies, place-names, mapmaking and references to ‘home.’ iii My overall objective is to demonstrate how tensions emerged between colonial ideals of sedentary life and the need and desire for mobility, and that the practices and imaginaries of the fur traders in fact embodied these tensions. When considering these issues, Réaume’s Leaf River Post reflects this ambivalence. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements............................................................................................................................. i Dedication ............................................................................................................................................. ii Abstract .................................................................................................................................................iii List of Tables .................................................................................................................................... viii List of figures ....................................................................................................................................... ix 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................................. 1 1) Identity and Community ................................................................................................................... 5 2) Mobility .................................................................................................................................................... 9 3) An Archaeology of Place: Framework and Datasets ........................................................... 12 a. Comparative Sites Overview ........................................................................................................................ 14 4) Fur Trade: Historiography and Relationship to Colonialism .......................................... 23 5) Chapter overview .............................................................................................................................. 30 2. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: THE ESTABLISHMENT AND MAINTENANCE OF “MIDDLE GROUND” PRACTICES .................................................................................................. 32 1) The Anishinaabe world entangled.............................................................................................. 33 2) Politics of Alliance and War .......................................................................................................... 40 3) Fur trade corporations and Joseph Réaume .......................................................................... 45 4) Concluding remarks ......................................................................................................................... 56 3. THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF A COMMUNITY ON THE MOVE: ...................................................... THEORETICAL INFLUENCES ......................................................................................................... 58 1) Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 58 2) Space, Place and Landscape: definitions and theoretical trends ................................... 60 3) The Production of social space: discourse and imaginaries ............................................ 64 a. Place-making through practice................................................................................................................... 66 b. Practices of the ‘lived space’: foodways and the built environment in archaeology .......... 70 4) Place-making through mobility ................................................................................................... 75 5) Concluding remarks ......................................................................................................................... 79 4. RÉAUME’S LEAF RIVER POST: A FUR TRADE PLACE ....................................................... 82 1) Réaume’s Leaf River Post: Site History and Overview ....................................................... 83 2) Methods and Results ........................................................................................................................ 86 a. First Hearth Feature: Stone Pile 2 - Unit 2 and surrounding area .............................................. 90 b. Second hearth feature: Stone Pile 4 - Units 12, 17 and 3 ................................................................ 94 c. Palisade wall ....................................................................................................................................................... 95 d. Refuse area .........................................................................................................................................................
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