Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
Details and Registration
Join Daniel Laxer for the virtual launch of his new book Listening to the Fur Trade: Soundways and Music in the British North American Fur Trade, 1760-1840.
The Zoom link will be: https://yorku.zoom.us/j/99736700753
Meeting ID: 997 3670 0753
Daniel Laxer is an historical researcher in the Negotiations and Reconciliation Division in Ontario’s Ministry of Indigenous Affairs.
Listening to the Fur Trade uses the written record, oral history, and material culture to reveal histories of sound and music in an era before sound recording. The trading post was a noisy nexus, populated by a polyglot crowd of highly mobile people from different national, linguistic, religious, cultural, and class backgrounds. They found ways to interact every time they met, and facilitating material interests and survival went beyond the simple exchange of goods. Trust and good relations often entailed gift-giving: reciprocity was performed with dances, songs, and firearm salutes. Indigenous protocols of ceremony and treaty-making were widely adopted by fur traders, who supplied materials and technologies that sometimes changed how these ceremonies sounded. Within trading companies, masters and servants were on opposite ends of the social ladder but shared songs in the canoes and lively dances during the long winters at the trading posts.