Jean Barman. Iroquois in the West

Jean Barman, the author of numerous writings including French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest (2014), presents the first comprehensive analysis of the Iroquois who migrated west for employment and who influenced the vast region from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. Although the title of her book, Iroquois in the West, suggests that it is a study of all the Iroquois or Six Nations people, her focus is on migrants from three Mohawk reservations: Akwesasne, Kahnawà:ke, and Oka. In her groundbreaking study, which treats both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, she goes far beyond the earlier writings by scholars John Ewers, Jack Frisch, and Trudy Nicks. The author masterfully reconstructs the lives of these Mohawks. In identifying the individual Iroquois, she has sifted through the thirty-five thousand names of “voyageurs” identified in Nicole St-Onge’s Voyageur Contracts Database and Bruce McIntyre Watson’s three-volume work Lives Lived West of the Divide. In doing so, Barman identified 1,100 men from the three Mohawk reserves, 600 of whom participated in the fur trade, mostly as paddlers of canoes during the years 1800 to 1821. In addition, from 1821 to 1858 the Pacific Fur Company, the North West Company, and the Hudson’s Bay Company hired 170 Iroquois. Barman also makes use of correspondence, diaries, fur company records, journals, mission records, and taped interviews with Mohawk descendants found in the holdings of the Library and Archives of Canada, the Canadian Museum of History, British Columbia Archives, Manitoba Archives, Glenbow Archives in Calgary, the Jasper-Yellowhead Museum, and the Huntington Library

American west · Archaeology · Economic history · Ethnology · Fur trade · Indigenous · Library science · Metis · Mohawk · Sociology · Watson · Anthropology · Canadian Identity and History · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology