Robin jarvis brownlie biography of albert

by Patricia Harms
Brandon University

Number 72, Spring-Summer

Our understanding of the fur trade, the role of women within Aboriginal communities, European-Aboriginal relations and, in fact, the very foundation of Canada was fundamentally altered with the publication of Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, .

Sylvia Van Kirk’s work explored the histories of the fur trade from the intimate perspective of marital relationships or long-term partnerships. Van Kirk successfully demonstrated that the lives of Aboriginal women mattered and were critical to the success of the Aboriginal-European trade system.

As editors Brownlie and Korinek argue, by “inserting women into the story of the trade….[she] showed how the whole enterprise was founded on women’s ec