Reflections on Fur Trade Social History and Metis History in Canada

• Main Author: Ray, Arthur J.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: eScholarship, University of California 1982
• Subjects: Hudson's Bay Company; historiography; Metis studies; Marcel Giraud; Le Metis Canadien; Canada; Indian; Metis
• Online Access: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/86p100fp

A striking aspect of the historiography of Metis studies in Canada and the northern United States relates to the fact that Marcel Giraud's classic study, Le Metis Canadien, published in 1945, did not have the immediate effect of stimulating a great deal of additional research. While the quality of Giraud's work was of such high standards that his book is still an invaluable source, nonetheless it is useful to consider why it did not serve to spark further research in a wide variety of areas of the history of Peoples of Indian-European ancestry. Initially the problem was one of timing. The work appeared in 1945 when most historical research had been interrupted by World War II. New momentum was slow to develop. In the case of Native studies, the pace did not begin to accelerate until the 1960s. Initially anthropologists and archaeologists took the lead. They were primarily interested in Indian history. Much of their attention was focused on questions of contact tribal locations, post-contact migrations, changing ecological circumstances, and kinship systems responding to a variety of post-contact environmental as well as socio-economic pressures. The opening of the Hudson's Bay Company archives to the scholarly community and its subsequent transfer from England to Canada further stimulated work and permitted researchers to venture into new areas. Charles A. Bishop was one of the first ethno-historians to make extensive use of this previously inaccessible data base. Geographers and historians soon followed and a growing body of scholars began sifting through the Hudson's Bay Company's massive records.