Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade (review)

Reviewed by: Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade Thomas Wien Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade. Carolyn Podruchny. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp. 416 The plot of Making the Voyageur World unfolds like a journey, following its supremely mobile protagonists from Lower Canada to the farthest reaches of the ‘upper country’ and from the beginning to the end of their careers. The sights along the way are varied indeed. The introductory chapter offers a quantitative portrait of the occupational group over the period of study (1760–1820), discusses characteristic voyageur values, and proposes subversive ways of reading the fur-trade clerks’ and partners’ writings that are the book’s main source. It is here, too, that Carolyn Podruchny presents the notion of liminality, which frames her analysis throughout. Beginning her special kind of traveller’s account at the point of embarkation, she first explores the Lower Canadian setting and the hiring process. Consideration of the voyageurs’ ethic of non-accumulation rounds out this mostly economic chapter. Chapter 3, [End Page 586] much of which first saw print as a prize-winning article in this journal, deals with the ritual aspects – most memorably, mock baptisms – of the voyageurs’ journeys. Podruchny eloquently argues that these rites of passage, as well as the men’s appropriation of landscape and their workplace terminology, show that ‘the journey itself was a social space for the teaching of new values’ (53). Next comes a study of the labour along the canoe routes. Podruchny skilfully weaves material drawn from folksongs into the analysis of the proverbially difficult working conditions. Introduced by a stimulating analysis of maypoles, chapter 5 (‘The Theater of Hegemony’) examines forms of voyageur resistance to masters’ control of their lives. The next chapter is devoted to voyageur sociability – play, camaraderie, rivalry, and the possibility of homoerotic relations. In chapter 7, we arrive at the interior posts, the scene of varied work routines and more intense interaction with Aboriginal groups, notably in trade. That interaction is viewed from a gender perspective in the next chapter, analyzing relations between voyageurs and Aboriginal women. Podruchny depicts a highly sexualized fur trade, stressing reciprocity between the partners and the transitory nature of many relationships. The last chapter briefly surveys the fate of ex-voyageurs, especially those who remained in the interior as freemen. Celebrating fluidity, syncretism, and métissage, Making the Voyageur World is about cultural interaction. Like other ethnohistorians studying the colonial period, Podruchny sets her story in a ‘time of possibility’ in intercultural relations (308) and chooses to emphasize ‘cooperation rather than conflict between European Americans and aboriginal peoples’ (306). The choice serves her well. Probing beneath the carefree, flamboyant, indefatigable folk hero’s attributes, Podruchny portrays men who discovered new ways of experiencing the world, first within the canoe brigade, and then on prolonged or permanent sojourns among Native people. Making sensitive use of a rich collection of fur-trade and travellers’ narratives as well as of her cultural historian’s tool kit (Bakhtin, Gramsci, Turner . . .), the author does not entirely reject the stereotype. Rather, she probes its limits by imaginatively reconstructing the voyageurs’ experience of an inter-cultural space. To her credit, Podruchny is by no means blind to the tensions and the ambiguities accompanying the voyageurs’ explorations. Among the signs of dissonance she notes voyageurs boasting that they were more skilful than Aboriginal people, giving their version of a cliché of European colonialism (11); significant numbers of voyageurs whose contact with Native people was very limited (62); voyageurs expressing [End Page 587] fear that the latter would profane their burial sites (84); the incidence of violence in their relations with the Aboriginal population, including women (230, 252, 283); evidence of the limits of these women’s agency in contact with voyageurs (265) and even of their presence at the posts (275). In a sense, the theme of cultural interaction is built into the very structure of this westward-looking book, with its extended parallel between journey and career. The author’s preferred travelling companions, so to speak, are the men whose intercultural voyage took them (and...

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