Community Politics of the Fur Trade

Reinterpreting the Great Lakes fur trade as a dynamic interplay of ambition, alliances, and evolving identities

The North American fur trade was more than a system of economic exchange. In this book, Amélie Allard examines the Great Lakes region as a dynamic landscape where European traders and Indigenous peoples negotiated clashing perspectives with the common purpose of trade and establishing relationships. Allard portrays the interactions between these groups as community politics and community building, highlighting both cooperation and contentious power imbalances during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Drawing on archaeological evidence including trading posts and wrecked canoes and historical documents such as traders’ journals and memoirs, Allard unravels the social complexities of this world. She demonstrates how processes of place-making—through foodways, the built environment, and place-naming—as well as both waterborne and overland mobility shaped the identities and relationships of Euro-Canadian, métis, and Indigenous peoples. Community Politics of the Fur Trade challenges traditional narratives of colonialism by suggesting that for many Indigenous peoples such as the Anishinaabeg and Dakota, the fur trade era represented a moment of possibility rather than an inevitable path to subjugation.