Traders' Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807-1846

Brave buffalo hunters, lazy Indians, Native women as beasts of burden - these are just some of the familiar images contained in fur traders' writings from the Columbia-Fraser Plateau. As the earliest ethnographic accounts of the Native peoples of northern North America, fur-trade records have long been mined for data by legal researchers, historians, and anthropologists. Traders' Tales provides the first sustained critical analysis of these fascinating historical documents.

Drawing on the latest techniques in ethnohistory and cultural and literary theory, Elizabeth Vibert unpacks the assumptions behind traders' views-assumptions shaped by culture, gender, social class, and race. At the same time the author explores the responses of the Native Americans of the Plateau region to the pressures and changes wrought by this early colonial incursion into latter-day Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia. The cultural perceptions of these white men in Indian country were open to inventive refashioning, and Native peoples played a central role in the encounter and in the way it was portrayed.

Traders' Tales is both an analyses of fur-trader writings as a form of colonial discourse and a meticulous historical narrative providing significant new insights into early Native-white relations in a little-studied region of the West. A broadly comparative perspective and finely tuned critical skills enable Vibert to shed new light on the nature of colonial cultural relations, and to illuminate the ways in which racism and ethnocentrism are constructed historically.