Brave buffalo hunters, lazy Indians, Native women as beasts of
burden - these are just some of the familiar images contained in
fur traders' writings from the Columbia-Fraser Plateau. As the
earliest "ethnographic" accounts of the Native peoples of northern
North America, fur-trade records have long been mined for data by
legal researchers, historians, and anthropologists. Traders' Tales
provides the first sustained critical analysis of these fascinating
historical documents.
Drawing on the latest techniques in ethnohistory and cultural
and literary theory, Elizabeth Vibert unpacks the assumptions
behind traders' views-assumptions shaped by culture, gender, social
class, and race. At the same time the author explores the responses
of the Native Americans of the Plateau region to the pressures and
changes wrought by this early colonial incursion into latter-day
Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia. The
cultural perceptions of these white men in Indian country were open
to inventive refashioning, and Native peoples played a central role
in the encounter and in the way it was portrayed.
Traders' Tales is both an analyses of fur-trader writings as a
form of colonial discourse and a meticulous historical narrative
providing significant new insights into early Native-white
relations in a little-studied region of the West. A broadly
comparative perspective and finely tuned critical skills enable
Vibert to shed new light on the nature of colonial cultural
relations, and to illuminate the ways in which racism and
ethnocentrism are constructed historically.
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