The New Peoples is the first major work to explore in a North American context the dimensions and meanings of a process fundamental to the European invasion and colonization of the western hemisphere: the intermingling of European and Native American peoples. This book is not about racial mixture, however, but rather about ethnogenesis -- about how new peoples, new ethnicities, and new nationalities come into being.

The contributors to this volume (with the exception of the late Verne Dusenberry) were participants at the first international Conference on the Metis in North America, hosted by the Newberry Library in Chicago. The purpose of that conference, and the collection that has grown out of it, has been to examine from a regionally comparative and multi-disciplinary vantage point several questions that lie at the heart of metis studies: What are the origins of the metis people? What economic, political, and/or cultural forces prompted the metis to coalesce as a self-conscious ethnic or national group? Why have some individuals and populations of mixed Indian and white ancestry identified themselves as white or Indian rather than as metis? What are the cultural expressions of metis identity? What does it mean to be metis today?

It takes patience and dedication to recover and communicate the experiences and perspectives of those for whom the historical record is lacking or severely limited by the interpretation of others--it takes reading beyond words. The first edition of this highly praised collection presented some of the best new efforts to examine critically the possible interpretations of Native North American history and Native-European encounters over 500 years. In doing so it served as a model for revisiting Native history.

To this extensively revised new edition, three new "encounter studies" have been added, presenting original and thought-provoking work not previously published: the Frobisher expeditions and their relations with the Inuit in the 1570s; Thanadelthur, the remarkable Dene woman who brought her people to a peace with the Cree and to trade with the Hudson's Bay Company in the early 1700s; and the previously unexamined dynamics of Cree-Oblate missionary relations on Hudson Bay in the late 1800s to mid-1900s, as seen from both sides.

In May of 1868, Elizabeth Bingham Young and her husband of only fivemonths, Egerton Ryerson Young, began a long journey from Hamilton,Ontario, to the Methodist mission of Rossville, at Norway House. Overthe next eight years, Elizabeth supported her husband's work atRossville and then at the newly founded mission of Berens River, on theeast shore of Lake Winnipeg. In these remote outposts, she gave birthto four children, one of whom died in infancy, acted as a nurse anddoctor, and applied both perseverance and determination to learningCree, while also coping with poverty and a chronic shortage ofsupplies, both in the mission and in the community it served. WhenElizabeth died, in 1935, she left behind various reminiscences, notablyan extended account of her experiences at Norway House and BerensRiver, evidently written in 1927. Her memoirs offer an exceedingly rareportrait of mission life as seen through the eyes of a woman. Elizabeth's first child and only surviving son, also namedEgerton Ryerson Young but known in his youth as "Eddie,"was born at Norway House in 1869. Cared for by a Cree woman almost frominfancy, Eddie spent his early childhood immersed in local Cree andOjibwe life, culture, and language, in many ways exemplifying theprocess of reverse acculturation often in evidence among the childrenof missionaries. He, too, left behind hitherto unpublishedreminiscences, one composed around 1935 and a second dictated shortlybefore his death. Like those of his mother, Eddie's memoriescapture the sensory and emotional texture of mission life, a life inwhich the Christian faith is implicit rather than prominently ondisplay, while also providing an intriguing counterpoint to hismother's recollections. Like all memoirs, these are refractedthrough the prism of time, and yet they remain startling in theirimmediacy. Together, the writings of mother and son-conjoinedhere with a selection of archival documents that supplement the mainnarratives, with the whole meticulously edited by Jennifer S. H.Brown-afford an all too uncommon opportunity to contemplatemission life from the ground up.

In Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River Jennifer S. H. Brown presents the dozens of stories and memories that A. Irving Hallowell recorded from Adam (Samuel) Bigmouth, son of Ochiipwamoshiish (Northern Barred Owl), at Little Grand Rapids in the summers of 1938 and 1940. The stories range widely across the lives of four generations of Anishinaabeg along the Berens River in Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. In an open and wide-ranging conversation, Hallowell discovered that Bigmouth was a vivid storyteller as he talked about the eight decades of his own life and the lives of his father, various relatives, and other persons of the past. Bigmouth related stories about his youth, his intermittent work for the Hudson's Bay Company, the traditional curing of patients, ancestral memories, encounters with sorcerers, and contests with cannibalistic windigos. The stories also tell of vision-fasting experiences, often fraught gender relations, and hunting and love magic-all in a region not frequented by Indian agents and little visited by missionaries and schoolteachers. With an introduction and rich annotations by Brown, a renowned authority on the Upper Berens Anishinaabeg and Hallowell's ethnography, Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River is an outstanding primary source for both First Nations history and the oral literature of Canada's Ojibwe peoples.

This engaging and carefully researched book tells, for the first time, the story of William Marsh (1738-1816), an intriguing but little-known Revolutionary figure whose life crossed borders both national and political. It contributes importantly to the literature on American loyalists about whom few book-length biographies have been written. It traces through myriad sources the life of a founder of Vermont long overshadowed by the ample attention paid to his famed associates, Ethan and Ira Allen. The book also places Marsh in his family context, tracing the Marshes from Connecticut in the late 1600s to Upper Canada where many descendants found new homes after the American Revolution. In doing so, it explores the roots of his values, actions, and choices in the dramatic events through which he lived. Before the war, Marsh and several thousand other New Hampshire Grants settlers faced grave challenges to their land titles from New York which laid claim to the territory that was to become Vermont. A colonel in the Manchester (VT) militia, Marsh supported the Green Mountain Boys' paramilitary actions against the Yorkers' moves to dispossess the settlers. As the Revolution began, he played a key role in uniting the Vermont towns as they organized to request the American Continental Congress to recognize them as a state. When the congress refused, and when the British proposed to offer them recognition and support, Marsh turned to the British as offering the best prospects for Vermont as it struggled to survive on its own. Present at the British defeat at Saratoga in October 1777, Marsh was sent into exile in Canada. He next surfaced at Fort St. John, north of Lake Champlain, doing intelligence and refugee work for the British secret service under General Frederick Haldimand. Although the British failed to make Vermont into a British colony, Marsh and other Vermont loyalists and partisans secured Vermont's neutrality in the later years of the Revolution, protecting it from the severe British raids unleashed against New York. After the war, Marsh documented to the Loyalist Claims Commission the confiscation of most of his Vermont lands and secured grants for himself and offspring in Upper Canada. In the meantime, his father's Vermont holdings preserved a base for the family in their homeland. Returning finally to Vermont, Marsh spent his last twenty years out of the public sphere, rebuilding his life and livelihood among both old friends and enemies, while retaining on his own an attachment to Freemasonry reflected in his remarkable gravestone in Dorset, Vermont. Most of his children found success in Canada, even as they endured fresh economic challenges and troubled times through the War of 1812. A genealogical appendix adds substantially to the family's history, filling gaps and resolving numerous old questions that have beset the many descendants who have sought to trace their Marsh roots. Review by Tyler Resch, Research Librarian, Bennington Museum, Bennington, VT: This new biography opens the reader's eyes to the political and economic hardships of Vermont's settlers during the era of the American Revolution, a time when many were justifiably troubled about where their loyalties should reside. Its subject has lingered in obscurity until now, but Col. William Marsh: Vermont Patriot and Loyalist by Jennifer S.H. Brown and Wilson B. Brown, demonstrates that Marsh worked and associated with many well-known figures in early New England and nearby Canada. In revealing Marsh's little-known role in the creation of the feisty and independent state of Vermont, and his later work with the British on its behalf, the book makes a major contribution to its history, telling "the Vermont story" in fresh and readable ways and making sophisticated use of a wide variety of sources.

"A long-needed comparative analysis of...the officer class of the Hudson's Bay and North West companies before and after their merger in 1821...Essential reading for all serious scholars of the fur trade."-Ethnohistory "The book makes a significant contribution to our understanding not only of the fur trade but also to anthropology and Indian-white relations." -Pacific Historical Review For two centuries (1670-1870), English, Scottish, and Canadian fur traders voyaged the myriad waterways of Rupert's Land, the vast territory charted to the Hudson's Bay Company and later splintered among five Canadian provinces and four American states. The knowledge and support of northern Native peoples were critical to the newcomer's survival and success. With acquaintance and alliance came intermarriage, and the unions of European traders and Native women generated thousands of descendants. Jennifer Brown's Strangers in Blood is the first work to look systematically at these parents and their children. Brown focuses on Hudson's Bay Company officers and North West Company wintering partners and clerks-those whose relationships are best known from post journals, correspondence, accounts, and wills. The durability of such families varied greatly. Settlers, missionaries, European women, and sometimes the courts challenged fur trade marriages. Some officers' Scottish and Canadian relatives dismissed Native wives and "Indian" progeny as illegitimate. Traders who took these ties seriously were obliged to defend them, to leave wills recognizing their wives and children, and to secure their legal and social status-to prove that they were kin, not "strangers in blood." Brown illustrates that the lives and identities of these children were shaped by factors far more complex than "blood." Sons and daughters diverged along paths affected by gender. Some descendants became Metis and espoused Metis nationhood under Louis Riel. Others rejected or were never offered that course-they passed into white or Indian communities or, in some instances, identified themselves (without prejudice) as "half breeds." The fur trade did not coalesce into a single society. Rather, like Rupert's Land, it splintered, and the historical consequences have been with us ever since. Jennifer S.H. Brown is a Professor of History at the University of Winnipeg. She is coauthor of The Orders of the Dreamed: George Nelson on Cree and Northern Ojibwa Religion and Myth, 1823, and coeditor of The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Metis in North America.

From 1930 to 1940, A. Irving Hallowell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, made repeated summer fieldwork visits to Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba, and to the Ojibwe community at Berens River on the lake's east side. He traveled up the Berens River several times to other Ojibwe communities as well, under the guidance of William Berens, the treaty chief at Berens River from 1917 to 1947 and Hallowell's closest collaborator. "Contributions to Ojibwe Studies" presents twenty-eight of Hallowell's writings focusing on the Ojibwe people at Berens River.
This collection is the first time that the majority of Hallowell's otherwise widely dispersed essays about the Ojibwe have been gathered into a single volume, thus providing a focused, in-depth view of his contributions to our knowledge and understanding of a vital North American aboriginal people. This volume also contributes to the history of North American anthropology, since Hallowell's approaches to and analyses of his findings shed light on his role in the shifting intellectual currents in anthropology over four decades.