Trading with the Hudson's Bay Company, a case study of the Nipigon House Post, 1828-1838
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis critically examines generalizations offered in the fur trade literature regarding the impact of the amalgamation of the Northwest Company and Hudson's Bay Company upon Aboriginal trade partners. There are essentially two schools of thought. One asserts that Aboriginal trappers had become dependent upon European technology by the time of the 1821 amalgamation, and were forced to continue the trade exchange accepting the changes imposed by the Hudson's Bay Company during the monopoly period. The second perspective holds that Aboriginal trade partners were not dependent upon European technology and were adaptable, choosing to opt out of the trade exchange, focusing instead upon subsistence hunting and trapping to satisfy finite wants and needs. The focus of this research project is to evaluate these competing ideas about the amalgamation phase of the fur trade, using the records of Nipigon House Post dating between 1828 and 1838. \nThe fur trade is typically characterized by several predominant periods: the early fur trade, the competition phase, and finally the amalgamation phase. As each phase of the trade progressed, Aboriginal trade partners were affected in various ways. It is thought that in the post-amalgamation phase, there was a loss of Aboriginal bargaining power, and an extended time of hardship due to a widespread collapse in the viability of fur and food resources. This thesis examines how the Anishinabe community at Nipigon House Post was affected by the amalgamation. Data derived from the Journals of the Nipigon House are used to explore the Anishinabe community and their trade activities. Contrary to expectations deriving from the conventional fur trade literature that emphasize growing dependence upon the HBC, the Nipigon House data indicate adaptability to the monopoly period. This involved a limited demand for a narrow range of goods in keeping with the modest fur returns generated. Indeed many people focused heavily upon satisfying their subsistence needs, and sharply reduced their efforts at fur trapping. This contributed to a shift of the settlement system, with much more time spent along the lakeshore. These data suggest that the Lake Nipigon Anishinabe were not dependent upon European goods for survival. It can be concluded that reconsideration of generalizations about Aboriginal dependency during the monopoly phase of the fur trade is required.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".