Power and Provisions in Anishinaabewaki: Re-Contextualizing Human-Environment Interactions During the Great Lakes Fur Trade

Abstract

Research on the French fur trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries highlights the unique political environment of the early French period in the Great Lakes (1650-1760 AD). The Anishinaabe found ways to leverage their transportation, location, relationships, and goods to their advantage. Despite feedback loops between the social and ecological, the role of relationships with the natural world are not often put into conversation with theories of power and control. Be it provisions or beaver, French interests were rooted in products accessible through Indigenous peoples. In this dissertation, I use political economy and political ecology as frameworks to characterize the role of social-ecological systems in the French period. Macrobotanical and microbotanical data from my 2019 fieldwork at the Cloudman site on Drummond Island, are used to examine the roles of Anishinaabe human-environmental interactions on the St. Mary’s River. I argue that socio-ecological practices like intentional forest management played a role in the avoidance of coercion, resource support for travel, and as a method of maintaining a territorial claim. Outcomes of this research support previously hypothesized connections between mobility and resistance and reveal that Anishinaabe people continued the sustainable practices of intentional forest management into the historic period. These results suggest alternative modes of engaging within a market economy that doesn’t develop into extractive methods.