Between Sovereignty and Statecraft: New France and the Contest for the Hudson Bay Watershed, 1663-1782

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes French-Indigenous relations in the Hudson Bay watershed from the early 1660s to the 1780s. The Hudson Bay watershed was a dynamic contact zone where Indigenous, French, and British politics, cultures, and economies clashed and intermingled. Whereas French colonial scholars have thoroughly examined French-Indigenous contact zones in other parts of North America, such as the pays d’en haut (Great Lakes region), the Illinois Country, and Louisiana, few have ventured to investigate French-Indigenous relations in the Hudson Bay watershed in any depth. Most of the scholarly attention on the region has hitherto focused on either local ethnohistories of Indigenous peoples or commercial and social histories of the British-run Hudson’s Bay Company.

This study examines French non-elites in the Hudson Bay watershed – coureurs de bois, company clerks, runaway soldiers, and veteran voyageurs – who acted as intermediaries and cultural brokers between Indigenous peoples and the French colonial government. This dissertation contributes to a broader scholarly discussion on Euro-Indigenous cultural brokers in contact zones by framing French non-elites as ambivalent agents of empire. While French non-elites, such as voyageurs and coureurs de bois, were instrumental to fulfilling French imperial projects and extending a French presence into the Hudson Bay watershed, they were not simply unwavering agents of imperial power. Their own agendas and interests often ensured that western expansion and French imperial designs advanced at an erratic, haphazard, and oscillating pace. This demonstrates that French imperialism in Western North America was not a monolithic top-down process but rather a multifaceted one, with competing voices, perspectives, and agendas.

Lastly, this study also challenges the chronological and spatial limitations of traditional Métis history. French non-elites underwent salient processes of métissage (cultural hybridity) to become backcountry specialists and cultural brokers between sovereign Indigenous homelands and the French colonial government in the Hudson Bay watershed. An examination of these French-Indigenous patterns of métissage that developed in the region over a one-hundred-and-fifty-year period provides crucial insight into previously unexamined cultural, economic, and political antecedents to the rise of the Métis. By analysing French-Indigenous métissage before, during, and after the British Conquest of New France (1760), this study rethinks the chronology of Métis peoplehood and nationhood Western North America.