Introduction

The Hudson's Bay region of the Canadian north captured the imagination of seventeenth-century Europeans seeking the elusive northwest passage to the Far East. The romance of the north and its promise of future riches led adventurers and agents of foreign governments to explore its land and sea. They encountered a fabulous array of fur-bearing animals – beaver, ermine, mink, fox, fisher, marten, lynx, hare and muskrat – setting the stage for the development of the European fur trade and for significant shifts in human–land relationships in the north thereafter.

A system of fur trade posts was established by the Hudson's Bay Company and the Northwest Company (which merged into a single business in 1821) that served to attract Aboriginal people to the areas around the posts and to encourage more intensive trapping of fur-bearing animals, in exchange for European goods (Fig. 13.1). Prior to sustained European contact, the Cree followed a seasonal subsistence cycle based on shifting plant and animal availability (Fig. 13.2). During the fur trade, they became enmeshed in a European industry that intensified and concentrated their subsistence activities on harvesting fur-bearing animals such as the beaver. This eventually led to abandonment of the seasonal cycle of mobility and to an increasing dependence on particular tracts of land, the economy of the fur trade, and imported resources.

The demographic and ecological consequences of the fur trade, though seemingly minor at the outset, acted incrementally through time to transform life in the Canadian north (Preston 1986).