From Great Men to Middlemen: A Survey of Historiographical Approaches on Cultural Brokers in the North American Fur Trade

The historical “great men” trope is one that has transcended the field of history and entered our cultural consciousness. Historical works by and about men “beating the odds,” overcoming unsurmountable adversities, and changing the historical trajectories of entire nations has spread this myth of the “great man.” Much of this image is situated in the field of “exploration history,” a history which speaks to a process which, beyond simply the discovery of something previously unknown, “usually encouraged some form of occupation, conquest, or control” and was done by men who were “no mere adventurers or renegade travelers, [but] were the forgers of links, the spinners of webs… not just between cultures and peoples but between whole ecosystems and environments.”1 Historian Dane Kennedy speaks about the issue of “great men” in “exploration history,” writing that:

explorers wrote about their own observations and experiences, giving their chronicles an autobiographical character… [so] it was their adventures and ordeals that drove their narratives. Invariably, they cast themselves as the heroes of their own tales…Just as explorers’ own narratives were inherently autobiographical, those narratives of expeditions written by historians and others generally adopted a biographical approach.2

The “exploration” approach in the history of the Atlantic world, as portrayed in the chronicles of the “great men” described by Kennedy, simplifies the complex processes of various systems and people groups working with and against each other into a single variable. For example, in topics such as the fur trade, there is a greater narrative that encompasses more people and communities who served as cultural brokers essential to the trade. In looking at the history of the fur trade in the Great Lakes area of North America, many scholars such as Sylvia Van Kirk and Jennifer S.H. Brown, writing in the 1980s, as well as more recent scholars such as Richard White and Michael A. McDonnell have recentered the narrative to focus more on the role of Indigenous people who served as cultural brokers and made trade between communities possible, rather than on individual European “explorers.”

Recentering and narrative of the fur trade from “exploration” history to one that highlights Indigenous involvement makes space for the inclusion of the cultural brokers who made the trade possible. Richard, John. Indians Bartering. Fur Trade — Trade De Before analyzing scholarship that shifts the focus of the fur Fourrures. The Begbie Contest Society trade to one that envelopes - La Société du Concours Begbie. Accessed November 26, 2022. http:// www.begbiecontestsociety.org/furtboth European and Indigenous perspectives, it is worth rade.htm, Fair Use. evaluating earlier sources such as The Fur Trade in Canada written by Harold Innis, a professor of political economy, in the 1930s. Although he refers to Indigenous nations as middlemen throughout the book, such as when he writes that “wars with intervening Indian middlemen… became increasingly expensive,”3 Innis centers his story on the importance of geography, more specifically the role of the beaver, in shaping the fur trade. He begins his introduction with the statement: “the history of Canada has been profoundly influenced by the habits of an animal” and that “it is impossible to understand the characteristic developments of the trade or of Canadian history without some knowledge of its life and habits.”4 While it may be true that the habitat and behavior patterns of the beaver shaped how the fur trade was carried out, a focus on this aspect of the trade ignores the communities who would have hunted, treated, and negotiated the trade of its fur.

On the other hand, van Kirk’s Many Tender Ties as well as Brown’s Strangers in Blood, speak to the experiences of Indigenous women as cultural brokers. Historian and anthropologist Bruce M. White praises the work of both these scholars as important in understanding the role of women in the fur trade, writing that “the major work on the differing roles of men and women in the fur trade has come … from the research of women historians and anthropologists.”5 Van Kirk does this by highlighting the vital importance of bringing attention to women’s involvement in the trade, contending that “the role played by women as actors upon the fur-trade stage is essential to a full understanding of the complexities of what was an unusual society in early Western Canada.”6 She specifies later that many Indigenous women were active agents, occupying “an influential position as ‘women in between’ two groups of men [Indigenous and European], a situation which could be manipulated to advantage.”7 Brown makes a similar point, arguing that the British working

for the Hudson’s Bay Company saw “the contributions that Indian women could make to the profits and expansion of the fur trade as guides, interpreters and intermediaries.”8 Van Kirk’s and Brown’s scholarship sheds light on the role that women played as cultural brokers in the fur trade and has contributed to the breakdown of the more autobiographical “great man” exploration approach described by Kennedy. Additionally, historians such as Susan SleeperSmith have continued this study of Indigenous women in the fur trade; for example, SleeperSmith situates these women in the context of Catholic kinship networks, claiming that “they relied on their Catholicism to maintain relative autonomy in relation to their husbands” and “used Catholicism to resist and reshape indigenous societal constraints,”9 further illustrating their agency in this world.

More recent works have also broken down the “great men” trope. For example, Richard White looks at “the middle ground,” described as “the place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages.”10 According to White, it is only by looking at the history of Indigenous and European relations through this lens that the narrative can shift from one that focuses only on the European metropole to one that also considers what was happening in the peripheries. In fact, in The Middle Ground, White writes that his “book is ‘new Indian history’ because it places Indian peoples at the center of the scene and seeks to understand the reasons for their actions.”11 In a similar manner, McDonnell’s Masters of Empire also grounds the history of events such as the fur trade from the lens of imperial history to that of the Indigenous communities living in the Great Lakes area. Like White, McDonnell argues that “the primary story of this era and this region has to be a Native-driven story.”12 In the study of cultural brokers, this shift in focus is essential; while cultural brokers may have been ignored or seen simply as historical side characters in the “great men” myth, when historians shift the focus to Indigenous actors, they make room to speak about the cultural brokers, the men and women whose work was the foundation of the fur trade.

The portrayal of cultural brokers in fur trade history has undergone significant transformation. The story has moved from explorer narratives, which emphasized “great men,” to a perspective that acknowledged Indigenous women’s agency and their place in the trade, to a narrative that centers peripheries and provides a more inclusive and holistic perspective on the trade overall. Van Kirk, Brown, White and McDonnell have done important work in shedding light on the people who used their agency in the in-between spaces and whose work did more to shape the landscape of the fur trade than a few “great men.”

Karolina Zyra

MAIH (History stream)