Jennifer Brown
UWinnipeg professor emeritus Jennifer Brown has published a new collection of essays detailing the complex relationship between the Indigenous peoples of Hudson Bay and the English newcomers of the 17th century.
An Ethnohistorian in Rupert’s Land: Unfinished Conversations gathers eighteen essays from four decades of Brown’s investigations into the range of interactions between Cree and Ojibwe people and the entrepreneurs of Hudson’s Bay Company as they met or observed one another, competed, compromised, and rejected or adapted to change.
“In recent years … I have tended away from fur trade studies and have become, if anything, more of an ethnohistorian: Indigenous stories, memories, and voices in the documents are of principal interest, these days,” Brown writes in the book’s introduction.
“I and a good many colleagues (Indigenous or not) are taking the multiple Indigenous sides of the stories seriously along with the others, and finding new meaning and significance in historical records of all kinds, written, oral, and material.”
The book will be on display from Oct. 11 – 14 at the American Society for Ethnohistory annual conference being held in Winnipeg, where it will also be recognized in a series of sessions around its topics. It’s available to purchase now from Athabasca University Press.
About Jennifer Brown
Jennifer Brown taught history at UWinnipeg for 28 years and held a Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal history from 2004 to 2011. She served as director of the Centre for Rupert’s Land Studies, which focuses on Aboriginal peoples and the fur trade of the Hudson Bay watershed, from 1996 to 2010. She is the editor of the Rupert’s Land Record Society documentary series (McGill-Queen’s University Press), which publishes original materials on Aboriginal and fur trade history. She now resides in Denver, Colorado, where she continues her scholarly work.
