Le poste de La Pointe sur l’île Madeline, tremplin vers le monde franco-anichinabé de la traite des fourrures

Abstract

Beginning in the 1650s, a fur trade world emerged in the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River watershed, with Montreal as the nexus point linking the Pays d’en Haut to various St. Lawrence Valley French-Canadian parishes. Goods, pelts, peoples and social mores circulated throughout this watershed as manifestations of the intense mobility that defined fur trade society. This world endured into the nineteenth century despite a series of sweeping societal changes. A study of these ‘kinscapes’, using the fur trade post of La Pointe as locus, reveals a world where until the mid-nineteenth century concepts of national (or colonial) identities and state borders were essentially meaningless. Indigenous notions of kin, linked to French Catholic notions of symbolic kinship (godparents), created a whole series of inter-linked fur trade communities that shared sets of key core values and allowed a fur trade economy and society to endure and prosper for over 200 years.