Object-Kin & the Rise of Warfare-Capitalism in Fur Trade Societies: Indigenous Women's Labor, Material Culture, and Workscapes Across North America, 1758-1897

Abstract

In this dissertation, I propose a new framework for examining the history of the North American fur trade called object-kinship. This method—which critically examines the historical relationships between Indigenous peoples and the material objects they produced, used, or transformed—expands the scope for how historians should conceive of Indigenous women’s economic power between 1758 and 1897. Scholars of Indigenous kinship in fur trade societies, including Susan Sleeper-Smith, Jennifer S. H. Brown, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Sylvia Van Kirk, and Anne Hyde, have identified how women exerted power through the process of regulating access to critical resources via cross-cultural marriages or adoptions. Using object-kinship as a lens to interrogate the diaries, memoires, ledger books, correspondence, and military records of Euro-American fur trappers, traders, and U.S. Indian agents, however, I argue that Indigenous women’s economic power extended to the manufacture and curation of the physical material that made the fur trade a viable economy. In four chapters, I explore how both colonial, military, and corporate entities contested this power in four major geographic regions: the Old Northwest, the Louisiana Territory, the Rocky Mountains, and the Northern Pacific Coasts. By the early nineteenth century, private capital ventures and the U.S. military explicitly collaborated to embattle Indigenous women’s economic power in a process I call warfare-capitalism. Throughout this narrative, I highlight historical moments and analyze material culture objects from tribes throughout the North American continent which illustrate successful subversions of the warfare-capital tactic of resource commodification. What emerges from this methodology of object-kinship, then, is a history of the fur trade that emphasizes Indigenous peoples resilience, continuance, and futurity in spite of ever-evolving strategies of dispossession.