Allan Greer, ed. Before Canada: Northern North America in a Connected World. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, January 2024.
Before Canada is a multi-disciplinary collection of essays devoted to aspects of northern North America in the centuries and millennia prior to 1800 CE. It may not have been conceived as a contribution to environmental history, but it has much to offer scholars in that field, beginning with the fact that, rather than presenting “Canada” politically, as a territorial state, it defines its subject spatially and topographically. This volume showcases the work of historians, archaeologists, and literary scholars in a deliberate attempt to foster discussions that cross disciplinary boundaries.
This volume showcases the work of historians, archaeologists, and literary scholars in a deliberate attempt to foster discussions that cross disciplinary boundaries.
I think the most useful way to introduce the volume to NiCHE readers would be to survey the constituent chapters, highlighting their “environmental” aspects. One contribution, by Université de Montréal archaeologists Adrian Burke and Christian Gates-St-Pierre, traces ancient Indigenous circuits of exchange across eastern Canada; using stone and pottery artifacts, they were able to map out trade routes and social interactions linking peoples living thousands of kilometres apart. Alberta-based archaeologist Jack Ives takes a different approach, charting the amazing odyssey of Dené migrants, spurred on by a devastating volcanic eruption in their homeland, from the Mackenzie Valley all the way to Arizona and New Mexico. Ives’s main evidence comes from rawhide moccasins of far northern design that were found in caves overlooking Great Salt in Utah.
Jack Bouchard, an historian of the Atlantic world, explores the prehistory of the Newfoundland fishery in the fifteenth-century movements of European fishers from Iceland to the coasts of West Africa. Brad Loewen combines historical and archaeological evidence in a study of how Mi’kmaq, Innu, Iroquoian, and Inuit peoples acquired wooden whaleboats from Basque whalers and used them to to sail the high seas, increasing their range and transforming their way of life in the process. A related chapter by Memorial University archaeologist Lisa Rankin examines the effects of contact with Europeans and their material culture on the Inuit of southern Labrador. MIT English professor Mary Fuller draws on textual (Hakluyt) and cartographic (an early globe) sources to gain a sense of how the geography of eastern Canada was understood in England around the year 1600. Two other chapters focus on the importance of water and aquatic space in seventeenth-century New France. Helen Dewar takes a legal-historical approach and demonstrates that the French North America empire developed as an extension of French maritime jurisdiction. The Oxford literary scholar Katherine Ibbett, for her part, analyses the theme of water and the perils of canoe travel in the writings of the Jesuit, Paul LeJeune.
My own contribution, co-authored with Sam Derksen, concerns the role of alcohol and violence in the Canadian fur trade. It is followed by a wide-ranging essay by Christopher Parsons, the one card-carrying environmental historian on our team. Taking a very long-term perspective, Parsons emphasizes the tremendous mobility of plant and animal populations: even iconic species such as the beaver and the sugar maple came to Canada from Eurasia. He then offers of critique of the tendency in twentieth-century scholarship to speak of nature and the environment as a static backdrop for human activities.
Before Canada showcases a variety of topics and disciplinary approaches representative of current scholarship on the Early Modern and pre-colonial past.
Before Canada showcases a variety of topics and disciplinary approaches representative of current scholarship on the Early Modern and pre-colonial past. My hope is that it will serve to stimulate further research that continues to deepen and broaden our sense of the Canadian past.
Feature Image: A chart of the sea-coast of Newfoundland between St. Laurence and Point May [cartographic material] / survey’d by order of Hugh Palliser esqr. commodore & c. & c. by James Cook. 1765. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, R12788. Purchased with the assistance of a Movable Cultural Property grant accorded by the Department of Canadian Heritage under the terms of the Cultural Property Export and Import Act.
Allan Greer