HIST 316L Week 2 Discussion

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316L

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History

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Apr 3, 2024

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docx

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1. How was the French Jesuit interaction with the natives in New France different from that of the Spanish among the tribes in the Southwest? 2. How did the French, Russians, and English involve the natives in the fur trading industry and how did they reshape the land? 3. What was the role of the native women in support of the fur trading industry? Did this practice vary from tribe to tribe? Among region? Seeking opportunities for wealth, French and Dutch settlers engaged in fur trapping and acquiring furs to trade. To accomplish this, the Dutch settlers formed a friendly alliance with the Five Nations of the Iroquois, which was necessary to obtain access to the lands rich in animal pelts. 1 Because trading with first the Dutch and then other Europeans became a means to acquire more and more colonial goods, such as guns, knives, fishing hooks, and other wares, the Iroquois and other tribes began to focus more on fur trapping to trade with these settlers. European demand for furs only served as a catalyst for the Native American tribes to concentrate their time to trapping. 2 As the fur trade grew and eventually expanded into using bison pelt over beaver pelts, enterprising colonial companies started trading Native Americans for robes made from those bison pelts. However, working bison pelts into commercial robes required a great amount of labor. The bison hide had to be tanned by being stretched on a frame to dry, then wetted and scrapped multiple times with drying time in between. The hide was then thoroughly dried again over fire. Finally a grease made from the bison’s innards was rubbed vigorously in the hide and dried again, with a final laborious process of softening the inner pelt by multiple whips across a rough sinew string. 3 This huge labor need was filled by native women in the northern Plains. 4 This often resulted in polygamy by the native men in those tribes who were wealthy enough in horse stock to pay multiple bride-prices, so that he could have a small workforce in female labor. 5 However, native women impacted the fur trade far more than just through their labor intensive efforts in creating marketable robes. In the early 1800s, as more and more trading companies pushed into the Plains, native women from various tribes became entangled in mixed marriages with European traders. 6 Since native women in many tribes were responsible for producing trading wares and distributing them among the tribe, they were the primary agents of trade between tribes. 7 Therefore, when European men encountered the varying tribes to trade for fur pelts and robes, they often dealt with the native women. As trade became more open, native women would purposefully congregate at fur trading posts to encounter the traders. These encounters soon gave way to romantic entanglements. 8 These inter-racial trysts became known more as marital unions between native women and trading company male employees. Fur trading companies saw these unions as beneficial because native women could provide services such as translators, conciliators, and tribal cultural interpreters, which trading companies exploited to gain economic advantages in the fur trading regions. 9 1,2. Clack, George, Mildred Sola Neely, and Alonzo L. Hamby. 2009. Outline of U.S. History . Vol. [Rev. ed.]. New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.umuc.edu/login.aspx? direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=387211&site=eds-live&scope=site . 3. Mair, C., 1891. The American Bison: It's Habits, Method Of Capture, And Economic Use In The North-West . Montreal: Dawson Brothers, p.105. 4-5. Pekka Hämäläinen. 2003. “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures.” The Journal of American History 90 (3): 849. doi:10.2307/3660878. 6-9. Michael Lansing. "Plains Indian Women and Interracial Marriage in the Upper Missouri Trade, 1804- 1868." The Western Historical Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2000): 413-33. Accessed March 27, 2020. doi:10.2307/970101.
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