"Gift-Offerings to Their Own Importance and Superiority": Fur Trade Relations, 1700-1940 TOBY MORANTZ McGill University In recent years, a number of us working on the subarctic fur trade have begun to challenge the old historical and anthropological views concern­ ing the effects of the early fur trade on Indian societies. We have rejected claims by historians that Indians became "utterly dependent" on Euro­ peans supplies (Rich 1967:102) or by anthropologists that the fur trade radically transformed economic relations within northeastern sub-arctic In­ dians (Leacock 1954:24, 1978:255, 1982:160). Although this paper further explores the relationship of the hunting society to the fur trade, it attempts to look at dimensions other than dependency, and asks questions about the role of Cree1 culture, ethos and personality. In order to do this it focuses on one of the important features of the fur trade, the credit system. Since historical studies of the subarctic regions of Canada are relatively new, one might ask why it is necessary to challenge old views. Yet, a num­ ber of social scientists over the years, among them Speck (1915), Jenness (1977), Bailey (1969), Leacock (1954) have felt justified in commenting on underlying or precipitating historical causes although they had no access to supporting historical information. Looking at the historical perspectives advanced over the years, it is my own personal view that they fall in the two camps noted above, as exemplified in the works of Rich and Leacock. E.E. Rich was the official historian of the Hudson's Bay Company, back in the 1950s, and consequently had full access to the vast array of doc­ uments. However, Rich, originally a naval historian, was writing history at a time when the emphasis was on producing imperial history and he certainly did not break out of this convention in his work on the Hudson's 1 "Cree" here refers to the Cree of eastern James Bay. 133 134 TOBY MORANTZ Bay Company, except for one article on the Indian influences on the trad­ ing ceremony (Rich 1960). Thus, as so much of Canadian history of the time, and until recently, the Indians are represented as little more than a backdrop to the unfolding drama. It is not too surprising, then, to find that Rich (1987:102) wrote: "Within a decade of their becoming acquainted with European goods, tribe after tribe became utterly dependent on reg­ ular European supplies. ." Those of us who have read the post journals know that he could not have formed these impressions if he had also read the Company records that originated at the posts. A more recent history of the Company by Peter Newman (1985), written for a popular audience, also falls into this trap of drawing on prejudices, stereotypes, whatever you call them, from elsewhere than the records. It is my personal belief that the utter dependency notion comes from the present-day Canadian perception of Indians. A recent portrayal was written by a senior editor at Le Devoir, Quebec's prestige, high-brow newspaper. The actual article, though, appeared in L 'Actualite, a monthly, highly respected current issues magazine. The author, Guy Deshaies, wrote the article on the present-day controversy over establishing a NATO base in Labrador that would send out low-flying aircraft over the hunting grounds of the Montagnais. His opening paragraph reads (translation mine): In front of his shack surrounded by garbage, without running water or sewer, the man, a bottle in his hand, is swaying. His knees are wobbling as though he were walking on a waterbed. On the other side of the shack, three young children with a look of fright on their faces observe the movements of their inebriated father whose vociferous screams are echoed by the barking of the dogs. (Deshaies 1986:50) There is no disguising on whose side this writer's sympathies lie on this issue of a NATO base. More importantly, such a portrayal of Indians is the commonly held Canadian one. It is this stereotype, I contend, that has fos­ tered the notion that the fur trade, connected as it was to a technologically (and perhaps morally) superior society had immediate and devastating con­ sequences for Indian society. Even historians and anthropologists have been ignorant of the intricacies of this long, 300-year history. Among one of the first to disseminate this view was Diamond Jenness, whose anthropological writings on Canadian Indians have been of popular and enduring interest for the past 50 years. His discussion in his 1932 book, still in print, entitled Indians of Canada, leaves no doubt that the fur trade rapidly produced grave consequences among the Indians. He writes at some length of de­ moralization, the changing of the old order and dependence on the trading posts. The other category governing Indian portrayals in the fur trade liter- FUR TRADE RELATIONS 135 ature derives from ideological positions. Here, Leacock's work is a good example. Her Marxist interpretation of the changing relations of produc­ tion in northern Algonquian society is augmented by another ideological position, namely that of primitive communism. I understand this to mean, in the northern Canadian context, that prior to contact with the Euro­ peans, the Indians enjoyed the classic communistic society. All property was communal. There were no leaders as society was egalitarian. Women and men were equal. However, all this changed with contact when mate­ rialistic values were introduced. Leacock's pre- and post-contact views of Algonquian society have not held up in the face of careful, detailed his­ torical research. Her judicious use of historical narratives has been the basis of her evidence. For example, in supporting her claim that relations between men and women in 17th-century Montagnais society were equal, Leacock uses the narratives of the Jesuit Father Paul Le Jeune (Leacock 1978:249). Although Le Jeune notes that "the women have great powers here" (Thwaites 1896:5:181), he also states that he "never heard the women complain because they were not invited to the feasts, because the men ate the good pieces or because they had to work continually. ."(Thwaites 1896:6:233). Clearly, the historical evidence is ambiguous and in this ex­ ample, as so many others, Leacock practises what Ronald Cohen refers to as the "abandonment of scientific rigor for the service of ideological rhetoric" (in Leacock 1978:259). In both these examples, the historical research was not systematically developed to support these claims, in keeping with today's practice of rigidly applying good historical and ethnological principles. Those of us now doing ethnohistory have the advantages of hindsight and are now in the position of re-examining past interpretations of how Indians fared dur­ ing the fur trade period. It is a history we have discovered that is both long and varied from one geographical region and one time period to the other. The gun, within the fur trade context, has come to symbolize dramat­ ically the technological superiority the Europeans had over the Indians. It is a symbolism that has pervaded Canadian society, aided no doubt by the writings of people like Jenness. Implicit in this claim of technological superiority is the notion that social and political relations are likewise su­ perior and tend to dominate the technologically inferior people. Therefore this technological dependence has received most attention among the few ethnohistorians who have turned their attentions to the portrayal of the Indian-white relations. Joan Townsend (1983), among others, has shown the comparative inefficiency of firearms compared to native weaponry. More recently, Shepard Krech (1987), has refined the discussion of dependency on material goods, preferring to speak of substitutions and noting, as have others, that there were a range of economic adaptations to the subarctic 136 TOBY MORANTZ Indian involvement in the fur trade. In this discussion, I would like to examine Cree-white relations in a context other than technological or economic dependency, for it seems to me there are other aspects that bear on this issue. It is only by con­ ducting particularistic studies that we can reconstruct all the variations leading to determining some of the general principles that governed such relations. We already know that a number of conditions affected the na­ ture of Indian-white relations, namely, availability of food, type of food re­ sources, fur trade competition, inland vs. coaster populations and so forth. Such factors helped determine the extent to which the Indian population could demand or expect that the Europeans conform to their sense of re­ ality. Thus, there is Rich's (1960) study of the Hudson's Bay Company conducting an elaborate Indian trading ceremony prior to actually trading and Ray's (1980:267) examination of subarctic Indians as shrewd consumers contrary to the stereotype of their being easily tricked. We also know that contrary to the belief that the fur trade swiftly engulfed all peoples, the Naskapi and/or northern caribou hunters as well as the Inuit stayed out of the fur trade for several hundred years until the Company made concerted efforts in the mid-1800s to draw them in (Morantz 1983). To continue this exploration of Indian-white relations, I would like to look more closely at the credit system as it operated within the Hudson's Bay Company sphere. Credit was an integral part of the fur trade and, surprisingly, has received little attention in fur trade studies. This system changed little over the 200 years for which I have documentation but the economic, political, social and ecological contexts changed, a topic which will be touched upon here. As applied to the fur trade, the practice of extending credit by the Hudson's Bay Company involved an advance of merchandise to the hunter by the trader in the late summer or early fall, to be repaid by the hunter in fur pelts the following June.