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

Vibert, Elizabeth

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0806131942 ISBN 13 : 9780806131948

Editeur : University of Oklahoma Press, 2000

Synopsis

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 Traders' Tales provides the first sustained critical analysis of these fascinating historical documents.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.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Elizabeth Vibert is associate professor of history at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and coeditor of Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of Oklahoma Press
• Date d'édition: 2000
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0806131942
• ISBN 13: 9780806131948
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 384
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible