Making The Voyageur World

Through a detailed analysis of their unique occupational culture, Making the Voyageur World reexamines the French Canadian workers who dominated the fur trade industry and became iconic images of North American lore.

The essays in section 1 consider ethnography's influence on how Europeans represent colonized peoples. Section 2 essays analyze curatorial practices, emphasizing how exhibitions must serve diverse masters rather than solely the curator's own creativity and judgment, a dramatic departure from past museum culture and practice. Section 3 essays consider tribal museums that focus on contesting and critiquing colonial views of American and Canadian history while serving the varied needs of the indigenous communities.

British traders and Ojibwe hunters. Cree women and their metis daughters. Explorers and anthropologists and Aboriginal guides and informants. These people, their relationships, and their complex identities and worldviews were not featured in histories of North America until the 1970s, when scholars from multiple disciplines began to bring new perspectives and approaches to bear on the past. Gathering Places presents some of the most innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to metis, fur trade, and First Nations history being practised today. Whether they are discussing dietary practices on the Plateau, trees as cultural and geographical markers in the trade, the meanings of totemic signatures, issues of representation in public history, or the writings of Aboriginal anthropologists and historians, the authors link archival, archaeological, material, oral, and ethnographic evidence to offer novel explorations that extend beyond earlier scholarship centred on the archive. They draw on Aboriginal perspectives, material forms of evidence, and personal approaches to history to illuminate cross-cultural encounters and challenge older approaches to the past. These fascinating essays on aspects of the history of Rupert’s Land mark a significant departure from the old paradigm of history writing and will serve as models for recovering and communicating Aboriginal and cross-cultural experiences and perspectives.

A red squirrel stows away on a canoe to fulfill his dream of joining a group of voyageurs--men who paddle canoes filled with goods to a trading post thousands of miles away. A Finalist for the Minnesota Book Award It is 1792 and unbeknownst to a group of voyageurs traveling from Montreal to Grand Portage, an intrepid squirrel, Jean Pierre Petit Le Rouge, sneaks onto their canoe. Le Rouge is soon discovered because he can't contain his excitement--mon dieu he is so enthusiastic. The smells! The vistas! The comradery! The voyageurs are not particularly happy to have him, especially because Le Rouge rides, but he does not paddle. He eats, but he does not cook. He doesn't even carry anything on portages--sometimes it is he who has to be carried. He also has a terrible singing voice. What kind of voyageur is that? When they finally arrive at the trading post Le Rouge is in for a terrible shock--the voyageurs have traveled all those miles to collect beaver pelts. With the help of Monique, a smart and sweet flying squirrel, Le Rouge organizes his fur-bearing friends of the forest to ambush the men and try and convince them to quit being voyageurs. Written by a Newbery honor author, the book has over 20 black-and-white illustrations. A Junior Library Guild Selection

Voyageur is the French word for "traveler," but in the Great Lakes region during the seventeenth century it described those men who made their living trading furs and goods along water routes. Traveling by canoe, these voyageurs helped to establish north woods trading posts and settlements, opening up the West to future exploration. Young Jacques's father is such a voyageur. He works long hours in bitterly cold weather, absent from home for weeks at a time. As he awaits his father's return from a season of trading, Jacques dreams of the day he will hold the canoe paddle and join the ranks of voyageurs.Author Kathy-jo Wargin is known for her many stories celebrating Great Lakes lore and north woods history including the 2001 IRA Children's Choice Award winner, The Legend of the Loon. She lives with her family in Petoskey, Michigan. David Geister's body of work with Sleeping Bear Press continues to grow and includes The Legend of Minnesota, also written by Kathy-jo Wargin. He specializes in historic art and has a background in commercial art. David lives with his family in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In New France and early Canada, young men who ventured into the forest to hunt and trade with Amerindians (coureurs de bois, “runners of the woods”), later traveling in big teams of canoes (voyageurs), were known for their independence. Often described as half-wild themselves, they linked the European and Indian societies, eventually helping to form a new culture with elements of both. From an ecocritical perspective they represent both negative and positive aspects of the human historical trajectory because, in addition to participating in the environmentally abusive fur trade, they also symbolize the way forward through intercultural connections and business relationships. The four novels analyzed here—Joseph-Charles Taché’s Forestiers et voyageurs: Moeurs et légendes canadiennes (1863); Louis Hémon’s Maria Chapdelaine (1916); Léo-Paul Desrosiers’ Les Engagés du Grand Portage (1938); and Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie-la-Charrette (1979)—portray the backwoodsmen operating in a collaborative mode within the realistic context of the need to make money. They entered folklore through the 19th century literary efforts of Taché and others to construct a distinct French Canadian national identity, then in an unstable and continually disrupted process of formation. Their entry into literature necessarily brought their Amerindian business and personal partners, thus making intercultural connections a foundation of the national identity that Taché and others strove to construct and also mirror. As figures in literature, they embody changing ideas of the self and of the cultures and ethnicities that they connect, both physically and in an abstract sense. Because constructions of self-identity result in behavior, studying this dynamic contributes to ecocritical efforts to better understand human behavior toward both ourselves and our environment. The woodsmen and their Amerindian partners occupy the intriguing position of contributing to both damage and greater acceptance of the cultural Other, the latter of which holds the promise of collaboration and joint searches for sustainable solutions. Thus coureurs de bois and voyageurs, far from perfect models, can continue to serve as guides today.

Reid Lewis never wanted to be an ordinary French teacher. With the approach of the American Bicentennial, he decided to put his knowledge of French language and history to use in recreating the voyage of René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the first European to travel from Montreal to the end of the Mississippi River. Lewis’ crew of modern voyageurs was comprised of 16 high school students and 6 teachers who learned to sew their own 17th-century clothing, paddle handmade canoes, and construct black powder rifles.Together they set off on an eight-month, 3,300-mile expedition across the major waterways of North America. They fought strong currents on the St. Lawrence, paddled through storms on the Great Lakes, and walked over 500 miles across the frozen Midwest during one of the coldest winters of the 20th century, all while putting on performances about the history of French explorers for communities along their route. The crew had to overcome disagreements, a crisis of leadership, and near-death experiences before coming to the end of their journey. The Last Voyageurs tells the story of this American odyssey, where a group of young men discovered themselves by pretending to be French explorers.

It was crazy. It was unthinkable. It was the adventure of a lifetime. When Don and Dana Starkell left Winnipeg in a tiny three-seater canoe, they had no idea of the dangers that lay ahead. Two years and 12,180 miles later, father and son had each paddled nearly twenty million strokes, slept on beaches, in jungles and fields, dined on tapir, shark, and heaps of roasted ants. They encountered piranhas, wild pigs, and hungry alligators. They were arrested, shot at, taken for spies and drug smugglers, and set upon by pirates. They had lived through terrifying hurricanes, food poisoning, and near starvation. And at the same time they had set a record for a thrilling, unforgettable voyage of discovery and old-fashioned adventure. "Courageous . . . Exciting and always immediate." -- The New York Times Book Review