Listening to the Fur Trade: Soundways and Music in the British North American Fur Trade, 1760–1840

The North American fur trade is a central focus for ethnohistorical scholarship in Canada. In his new monograph on a familiar topic, Daniel Robert Laxer argues that “by listening, we can better understand the fur trade’s social dynamics and cultural contours” (22). Naturally, the sounds of the fur trade were for the most part ephemeral; we cannot hear the past as it really was. Despite this, Laxer demonstrates how scholars may still profitably attune themselves to the traces of these sonic histories.Chapters in Listening to the Fur Trade focus on key elements of the soundscapes attested by British fur traders in the heyday of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Sounds produced by gunpowder, firearms, and military instruments (chapters 1 and 3), during cultural and diplomatic exchanges inside and outside the trading posts (chapters 2, 4, and 8), and by human and nonhuman agents on the journey from the Saint Lawrence River valley to the interior (chapters 5 and 6) comprise most of the subject matter. Chapter 7 engages directly with Indigenous healing and hunting songs, especially those associated with the Midéwiwin and Wabanowiwin traditions of the Anishinaabeg. Throughout, Laxer demonstrates a keenly watchful eye—or rather, listening ear—trained on latent sonic evidence of cultural exchange. He correctly states that this evidence and his attendant questions about the meaning and social function of sound and music “have been addressed only peripherally by historians of the fur trade” (15). To remedy this, Laxer marshals a diverse assortment of textual, visual, and material culture sources beyond the traders’ accounts. Notably, he references several Indigenous oral histories that both bolster his historical arguments and point toward the continuing relevance of his findings.Laxer models a rapprochement between ethnohistory, on the one hand, and ethnomusicology and sound studies, on the other, but this is perhaps where Listening to the Fur Trade is most open to critique. One of Laxer’s more significant influences is Richard Cullen Rath’s (2003) How Early America Sounded, from whom he adopts the term soundways. Following Rath, Laxer also adopts the term soundscape from Canadian composer and pedagogue R. Murray Schafer. Yet he fails to engage with Schafer’s racist attitudes toward the soundways of Indigenous peoples. This is a significant oversight since recent scholars, especially Stó:lō scholar Dylan Robinson (2020), have focused on understanding “settler colonial listening positionality.” In a similar vein, Laxer identifies but ultimately does not make sustained use of anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Steven Feld’s influential “acoustemology,” a portmanteau of acoustic and epistemology and another critique of Schafer.Laxer makes several claims to the effect that “music was a key feature of positive cross-cultural encounters” (15; emphasis added), although music and soundways generally were, of course, a key feature of negative encounters as well. To this end, he often writes in positive terms of cultural exchange and syncretism. This is especially true in chapter 8, which puts forward an early history of Métis fiddling and jigging without commensurate examination of the exploitative conditions under which such exchanges took place. Collectively, these missed opportunities isolate Listening to the Fur Trade from much ethnomusicological and sound studies scholarship over the last quarter century, including that on colonial encounters and exchanges. Other reviews have identified Robinson’s Hungry Listening as a potential rejoinder to Listening to the Fur Trade, a recommendation echoed here.As a work of ethnohistory, Laxer’s monograph is exceptional for its novel focus on the sonic aspects of the fur trade and for its innovative reinterpretation of a range of sources. As a work aiming to interface with ethnomusicology and sound studies, it is perhaps less successful. That notwithstanding, Listening to the Fur Trade is an engaging, accessibly written sonic history that offers many insights to researchers across several fields.

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