A unique glimpse into the French fur trade of the Great Lakes region
Edge of Empire Documents of Michilimackinac, 1671–1716
Translated by Joseph L. Peyser
Edited by Joseph L. Peyser and José António Brandão
Foreword by David Armour
Few places were as important in the seventeenth-century European colonial New World as the pays d’en haut. This term means “upper country” and refers to the western Great Lakes (Huron, Michigan, and Superior) and the areas immediately north, south, and west of them. The region was significant because of its large Native American population, because it had an extensive riverine system needed for beaver populations—essential to the fur trade—and because it held the transportation key to westward expansion. It was vital to the French, who controlled the region, to be on good terms with its peoples. To maintain good relations through trade and diplomacy with the nations in the pays d’en haut, the French built a number of posts, including one at Michilimackinac and one on the St. Joseph River (near Niles, Michigan). These posts were garrisoned by French troops and run by French commanders who contracted with merchants to manage business matters. Edge of Empire provides both an overview and an intensely detailed look at Michilimackinac at a very specific period of history. While the introduction offers an overview of the French fur trade, of the place of Michilimackinac in that network, and of what Michilimackinac was like in the years up to 1716, the body of the book is comprised of sixty-one French-language documents, now translated into English. Collected from archives in France, Canada, and the United States, the documents identify many of the people involved in the trade and reveal a great deal about the personal and professional relations among people who traded. They also reveal clearly the process by which trade was carried out, including the roles of both Native Americans and women. At the same time, the documents open a window into French colonial society in New France.
The Edge of Empire portrays little known details of the fur trade that took place at Montreal, Michilimackinac, and the western Great Lakes region during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Most of the documents, enhanced by informative annotations, are being published in English translation for the first time. Edge of Empire introduces us to men and women who played key roles in the governance and administration of New France, military expeditions, and the contentiousness of the fur trade.
—Keith Widder, former Curator of History for Mackinac State Historic Parks and author of Battle for the Soul: Métis Children Encounter Evangelical Protestants at Mackinaw Mission, 1823–1837 and Michigan Agricultural College: The Evolution of a Land-Grant Philosophy, 1855–1925
The late Joseph L. Peyser was Professor Emeritus of French at Indiana University South Bend. Professor Peyser spent the last twenty-five years of his life creating a body of translated documents that has been useful to many scholars of the fur trade and the history of the Great Lakes region in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. José António Brandão is Associate Professor of History and Associate Chair of the Department of History at Western Michigan University. He is co-editor of The Iroquoians and Their World, an ongoing series of publications related to the history and culture of the Iroquoian linguistic group. He is also co-director of the French Michilimackinac Research and Translation Project, of which the translated docu ments in this volume are a part.
224 pages, 6 × 9, photos, maps, notes, references, indexCopublication with Mackinac Island State Park Commission
978-0-87013-820-1, 0-87013-820-0, cloth, $39.95
March 2008, World Rights
Natives and Settlers Now and Then
Historical Issues and Current Perspectives on Treaties and Land Claims in Canada
Edited by Paul DePasquale
Beginning with the premise that Canada is engaged in the era of treaty implementation, Natives and Settlers discounts the myth of a postcolonial Canada. Informed by a colonial past that remains “refracted” in the current understanding and treatment of Native peoples, this collection reinterprets treaty making, rights, title, and land claims from Aboriginal perspectives. In the spirit of ongoing dialogue, essays by Sharon Venne, Patricia Seed, Harold Cardinal, Frank Tough, and Erin McGregor bring new insights to the interpretations of signed treaties and pre-contact treaty-making processes, examine land claims still under negotiation, and demonstrate the vitality of Aboriginal laws and paradigms in a country new to decolonization and nation building.
Paul DePasquale is a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory in Ontario. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Winnipeg where he teaches courses on Aboriginal literature and on early modern European travel and colonialism. He is a director of Brandon University’s Summer Institute of Indigenous Humanities and a member of several editorial boards. A former Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard University, he is currently involved in major research projects funded by Canadian Heritage, SSHRC, and the University of Winnipeg. DePasquale’s recent publications are on subjects ranging from images of Others in medieval cartography, to pedagogy, to Cree oral literature, to Iroquois history.
University of Alberta PressA copublication with Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée
U.S. Distribution
220 pp., 6 " x 9 ", October 2006
paper, $39.95
0-88864-462-0
Islands of Slaves
Thorkild Hansen
This is third title in Thorkild Hansen's classic trilogy on the Atlantic slave trade, originally published in Danish in 1967; and the first major translation and publication of the work in English.
In Europe and North America, few are aware that the beautiful and now wealthy Virgin Islands of St Thomas, St Croix and St Jan were once Danish settlements and outposts of the slave trade. Moreover that the question of the independence of the islands was never seriously considered by the Danes, who instead sold them to the US in 1917 for 25 million dollars, several decades after the official end of slavery. This was against the will of the majority of the islanders, who were opposed to rule by the Americans, wary of their iniquitous treatment of blacks. In Denmark meanwhile, the popular view of national history presides that Denmark was the first of the imperial powers to abolish the slave trade.
Thorkild Hansen's work breaks with these miss- representations of Denmark's role in the Atlantic slave trade. The third and biggest volume in the trilogy covers the period from the introduction of African slaves to the Danish islands, their official emancipation in 1848, subsequent sale to the Americans in the twentieth century, and reactions and resistance to these processes. Scrutinizing Denmark's moral obligation towards the islanders, the author draws extensively on primary sources, dramatizing and depicting real life characters into a moving and descriptive narrative.
The introduction is provided by the historian A.V. Adams who states that ' Hansen's trilogy and Dako's scholarly initiative and competence in translating it contributes not only to Danes' re-reading of their own history, but also to West Indians' understanding of theirs... Hansen and Darko's contribution reaches beyond the Caribbean into the larger history of African-diaspora slave resistance... And inasmuch as the islands under consideration of the United States of America, this book through its translation becomes a text of US historiography...'
Thorkild Hansen was a Danish foreign correspondent, novelist, travel writer and book reviewer, who wrote extensively on archaeological expeditions, travelogues, and on the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. He is known for his Slave Trilogy, for which he received the Nordic Council Prize.
ALSO BY THORKILD HANSEN• Coast of Slaves, 9-988550-31-6, $41.95
• Ships of Slaves, 9-988550-75-8, $38.95
African Books Collective, Oxford
Paperback Edition:
B&w illustrations, color photos
(978-9988-550-62-2)
462 pp., 6 " x 9 ", January 2006
paper, $39.95
9-98855-062-6
February 5, 2008