When Maps Become the World

Abstract

the information sent to his superiors in London was just as much shaped by Indigenous knowledge as it was by European cartography. In her introduction, Belyea notes that Fidler operated in the context of fur-trade rivalry. The HBC was founded by Royal Charter in 1670 and granted a monopoly of all the trade within the Hudson’s Bay watershed, the region known at the time as Rupert’s Land (present-day northern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, Canada). By the 1780s a serious challenge to that monopoly was mounted by the Northwest Company (NWC), founded in 1789 by fur traders based in Montreal. The HBC governors in London realized that accurate cartographic and scientific knowledge of their territories was needed in order to stave off NWC encroachment and preserve their position as a trading monopoly. As a result, making detailed maps became the key to business success in the fur trade and political power in Rupert’s Land. Compounding the HBC’s increasingly perilous situation was the depletion of the fur supply, which forced traders to search further inland into territory that was mostly uncharted by Europeans. Belyea argues that Fidler’s reliance on Indigenous knowledge also shaped the cartographic information he conveyed in his journals. She observes that Fidler’s journal entries were often accompanied by small sketch maps, which he said either were drawn by quick visual observation or were copies of Indigenous maps provided to him. Belyea notes that to European eyes the maps were not scientific since they were neither drawn to scale nor oriented, and thus rendered useless on their own. To Fidler, they were crucial to illustrating what he conveyed in his journals, and to historians of the fur trade they represent a clear indication that surveyors and cartographers relied on Indigenous knowledge of the spaces the trading companies sought to control. Fidler’s journals are also significant because they provide the earliest ethnographic study of the Indigenous societies living on the western plains and across the continental divide. Prior to Fidler’s work, Europeans were only vaguely aware of these people, and the few references to their existence were found in nebulous descriptions produced by explorers fifty years before Fidler arrived in the region. Belyea notes that Fidler’s detailed descriptions of Indigenous nations such as the Piikani remain to this day the most reliable documentation of a western-plains people’s seasonal movements and the buffalo hunts that sustained their way of life. Belyea also argues that much of Fidler’s observations from his time spent with the Piikani hints at a considerable appreciation and understanding of their culture. As his use of Indigenous maps demonstrates, Fidler understood that his endeavour to provide scientific surveys and records depended on Indigenous cooperation and their willingness to share geographical knowledge assembled over generations. The journals reproduced in this book give the reader insight into how the wider fur trade relied on the respect for Indigenous knowledge of the territories they had inhabited for centuries, and that the Hudson’s Bay Company wanted to scientifically map and govern.