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.

A history of the North American fur trade, based on primary sources. The North American fur trade, set in motion by the discovery of the New World in the fifteenth century, was this continent's biggest business for over three hundred years. Furs harvested by Ojibwa natives in the north woods ended up on the sleeves and hems of French princesses and Chinese emperors. Felt hats on the heads of every European businessman began as beaver pelts carried in birchbark canoes to trading posts dotting the wilderness. Iron tools, woolen blankets, and calico cloth manufactured in England found their way to wigwams along the remote rivers of North America. The fur trade influenced every aspect of life—from how Europeans related to the Indians, how and where settlements were built, to how our nation formed. Drawing on primary sources, including the diaries of Ojibwa, American, and French traders of the period, this Society of School Librarians International Honor Book gives readers a glimpse of a little-known story from our past.

Nute's best-selling book portrays the indefatigable French-Canadian canoemen, whose labors were vital to the fur trade and whose influence reaches us through the colorful songs, place names, customs, and legends they left behind.

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.

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.

Here is the history of knitting around the globe, examining styles, techniques, and particular styles countries and regions—including England, Ireland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Iceland, Japan, Australia, Canada, United States, Peru, Bolivia, and more. Highlighted are 20 profiles of historically significant knitters who are using particular techniques today—plus 20 patterns that exemplify knitting traditions from around the world.

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.

With growing concerns about the security, cost, and ecological consequences of energy use, people around the world are becoming more conscious of the systems that meet their daily needs for food, heat, cooling, light, transportation, communication, waste disposal, medicine, and goods. Powering Up Canada is the first book to examine in detail how various sources of power, fuel, and energy have sustained Canadians over time and played a pivotal role in their history. Powering Up Canada investigates the ways that the production, processing, transportation, use, and waste issues of various forms of energy changed over time, transforming almost every aspect of society in the process. Chapters in the book's first part explore the energies of the organic regime – food, animal muscle, water, wind, and firewood-- while those in the second part focus on the coal, oil, gas, hydroelectricity, and nuclear power that define the mineral regime. Contributors identify both continuities and disparities in Canada’s changing energy landscape in this first full overview of the country’s distinctive energy history. Reaching across disciplinary boundaries, these essays not only demonstrate why and how energy serves as a lens through which to better understand the country’s history, but also provide ways of thinking about some of its most pressing contemporary concerns. Engaging Canadians in an urgent international discussion on the social and environmental history of energy production and use – and its profound impact on human society – Powering Up Canada details the nature and significance of energy in the past, present, and future. Contributors include Jenny Clayton (University of Victoria), George Colpitts (University of Calgary), Colin Duncan (Queen’s University), J.I. Little (Emeritus, Simon Fraser University), Joanna Dean (Carleton University), Matthew Evenden (University of British Columbia), Laurel Sefton MacDowell (Emerita, University of Toronto Mississauga), Joshua MacFadyen (Arizona State University), Eric Sager (University of Victoria), Jonathan Peyton (University of Manitoba), Steve Penfold (University of Toronto), Philip van Huizen (McMaster University), Andrew Watson (University of Saskatchewan), and Lucas Wilson (independent scholar).

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.

Jean Barman was the recipient of the 2014 George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award. In French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest, Jean Barman rewrites the history of the Pacific Northwest from the perspective of French Canadians attracted by the fur economy, the indigenous women whose presence in their lives encouraged them to stay, and their descendants. Joined in this distant setting by Quebec paternal origins, the French language, and Catholicism, French Canadians comprised Canadiens from Quebec, Iroquois from the Montreal area, and métis combining Canadien and indigenous descent. For half a century, French Canadians were the largest group of newcomers to this region extending from Oregon and Washington east into Montana and north through British Columbia. Here, they facilitated the early overland crossings, drove the fur economy, initiated non-wholly-indigenous agricultural settlement, eased relations with indigenous peoples, and ensured that, when the region was divided in 1846, the northern half would go to Britain, giving today’s Canada its Pacific shoreline.