The fur trade was the heart of the French empire in early North America.
The French-Canadian (Canadien) men who traversed the vast hinterlands of
the Hudson Bay watershed, trading for furs from Indigenous trappers and
hunters, were its cornerstone. Though the Canadiens worked for French
colonial authorities, they were not unwavering agents of imperial power.
Increasingly they found themselves between two worlds as they built
relationships with Indigenous communities, sometimes joining them
through adoption or marriage, raising families of their own. The result
was an ambivalent empire that grew in fits and starts. It was guided by
imperfect information, built upon a contested Indigenous borderland,
fragmented by local interests, and periodically neglected by government
administrators. Heirs of an Ambivalent Empire explores the lives of the
Canadiens who used family and kinship ties to navigate between sovereign
Indigenous nations and the French colonial government from the early
1660s to the 1780s. Acting as cultural intermediaries, the Canadiens
made it possible for France to extend its presence into northwest North
America. Over time, however, their uncertain relationships with the
French colonial state splintered imperial authority, leading to an
outcome that few could have foreseen - the emergence of a new Indigenous
culture, language, people, and nation: the Métis.
