The fur trade in the Great Lakes area was, in many ways, a middle ground between Indigenous and European cultures. Between the French and various Indigenous communities in the Great Lakes region, because the Indigenous people controlled the lands where the peltry came from, it was beneficial for those who wished to trade with them to treat them as equals, whereas, once the United States began taking land from Indigenous peoples out west, there was no “middle ground” and the Native peoples were treated as lesser than and obstacles. One of the alliance strategies that arose was the creation of complex kinship networks fostered by French traders marrying Native women, which helped French traders as they moved around harvesting peltry by creating a network of people that would feed and protect them. It was essential that neither side had enough power to truly control the fur trade and create a sort of monopoly, as is what happened in the Upper Missouri region once the fur trade expanded in that direction.
Material culture is an essential part of historical documentation, especially for the fur trade, where most products were clothing. With written documents, there’s a high level of bias within how everything is written, and it can be very difficult to determine what in a document is accurate, taking into account the perspective, the audience, the author, and the cultural context in which the document was written. There is a similar amount of work that must be put into understanding what material culture signifies, but it’s much more difficult for a piece of clothing to be biased, or for the author’s perspective to fundamentally alter what it means for the rest of the world. For example, the Anishinaabe outfit worn by Lieutenant Andrew Foster is a very loaded piece of clothing, and tells us a lot about how cultural exchange was happening in the Great Lakes region in the 18th century, and while it’s important to understand who made the various parts of the outfit, it’s easier to comprehend the relationship between Foster and the Anishinaabe and their mutual gift giving because you know the outfit was made by different Indigenous people in the Great Lakes. In comparison, some of the written documents that we read about in Encounters at the Heart of the World by Elizabeth A. Fenn are falsified, and while we know that know based on comparing to other documents created at similar times and oral tradition and, in addition, material culture, people in the past may not have known that there wasn’t a Welsh tribe living in the Dakota region of the Americas. Material culture also helps define some unwritten rules that existed amongst people in regards to how they dressed, why, and how they obtained the materials to create their clothing.