Description
An Ethnohistorian in Rupert's Land provides examples of Jennifer S H Brown's exceptional skill in the close study of texts, including oral documents, images, artifacts, and other cultural expressions. The volume as a whole represents the scholarly evolution of one of the leading ethnohistorians in Canada and the United States. In 1670, the ancient homeland of the Cree and Ojibwe people of Hudson Bay became known to the English entrepreneurs of the Hudson's Bay Company as Rupert's Land, after the founder and absentee landlord, Prince Rupert. For four decades, Jennifer S.H. Brown has examined the complex relationships that developed among the newcomers and the Algonquian communities - who hosted and tolerated the fur traders - and later, the missionaries, anthropologists, and others who found their way into Indigenous lives and territories. The eighteen essays gathered in this book explore Brown's investigations into the surprising range of interactions among Indigenous people and newcomers as they met or observed one another from a distance, and as they competed, compromised, and rejected or adapted to change. Jennifer S. H. Brown taught history at the University of Winnipeg for twenty-eight years and held a Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal history from 2004 to 2011.