In this academic book, J. Colin Yerbury explores the impacts of the European fur trade on Athapaskan-speaking First Nations groups living in (what is now) northern Canada using source documents written by explorers, traders, officials, and settlers. Dividing two hundred years of indigenous-trader contact into four distinct periods, Yerbury examines ethnohistorical sources to analyze the economic and social impact of fur trading on indigenous groups. He concludes by summarizing sociocultural adaptations occasioned by the fur trade ranging from shifts in hunting patterns to interactions with new diseases to altered kinship systems. Throughout, Yerbury quotes from travel narratives, administrative journals, Hudson’s Bay Company records, and other period documents. Includes endnotes, bibliography, and index.
