'The Comforts of Married Life': Metis Family Life, Labour, and the Hudson's Bay Company
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the 1980s, scholars have sought to understand how the Canadian fur trade shaped the Metis. Less attention has been paid to the impact of Metis concepts of family and community on the nature of their relationship with their employer, the Hudson’s Bay Company (hbc). This article focuses on how Metis family structures in the English River District molded the contours of the community’s relationship with the hbc in the 19th century. More specifically, only certain families established a relationship with the Company, wherein male servants and their extended families laboured for the hbc in return for wages and/or access to Company resources. The Company’s willingness to participate in these types of exchanges with its employees’ families cultivated an intergenerational loyalty amongst those Metis, as successive generations were employed by the Company and, in turn, drew upon it as part of their economic resource network. Still, Company officials faced a dilemma. They recognized that these extended families were loyal contributors to the Company’s trading successes, but likewise regarded them as burdensome and a drain on precious resources. Throughout the 19th century, the ambivalence of the Company grew, negatively impacting its relationship with once loyal hbc servants and their families. The loyalty of families to the Company was only as strong as its loyalty to them. By the end of the century, as the Company’s focus turned to reducing its obligations to families, Metis loyalties also shifted to competing economic ventures, thereby threatening the hbc monopoly in the region. Resume Depuis les annees 1980, les universitaires ont cherche a comprendre la maniere dont l’industrie canadienne de la fourrure a faconne les Metis. Moins d’attention a ete accorde a l’impact des concepts des Metis de la famille et de la communaute sur la nature de leurs relations avec leur employeur, la compagnie de la Baie Hudson. Cet article se concentre sur la facon les structures des familles Metis dans le district du fleuve anglais a moule les contours des relations de la communaute avec la compagnie de la Baie Hudson du 19e siecle. Plus precisement, seulement certaines familles ont etabli des relations avec la compagnie, alors que les servants et leurs personnes a charge ont travaille pour la compagnie pour le salaire et/ou l’acces aux ressources de la compagnie. La volonte de la compagnie de participer dans ce genre d’echanges avec ses employes a cultive une loyaute intergenerationnelle parmi les Metis, a mesure que des generations successives ont ete employees par la compagnie et qui, a leur tour, ont accede a leur reseau de ressources economiques. Neanmoins, les responsables de la compagnie ont fait face a un dilemme. Ils ont reconnu que les familles des Metis etaient des contributeurs loyaux au succes de la compagnie, mais en meme temps, ils les consideraient comme un fardeau economique et une purge de leurs ressources precieuses. Au cours du 19e siecle, l’ambivalence de la compagnie s’est accrue, influencant de maniere negative ses relations avec les servants et leurs familles qui etaient autrefois loyaux. La loyaute des familles envers la compagnie etait aussi solide que celle de la compagnie envers les familles. A la fin du siecle, etant donne que la compagnie s’est concentree sur la reduction de ses obligations envers les familles, la loyaute des Metis a aussi change pour des entreprises economiques concur-rentielles, menacant ainsi le monopole de la compagnie dans la region.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".