Many historians studying the fur trade have argued or assumed that Indigenous peoples swiftly became dependent on the fur trading posts in North America for their survival. In order to gain insight into native-newcomer relations but also particuarly to address the question of dependency, this paper examines patterns of food exchange between Hudson’s Bay Company men employed at Moose Fort and the James Bay Cree homeguard that lived near the Fort from October 1783 to September 1785. It finds that the flow of foodstuffs from Indigenous peoples to Moose Fort greatly outweighed the flow of food from the Fort to Iindigenous peoples. Furthermore, this paper will argue that the traders of Moose Fort were consistently reliant upon these provisions supplied by Indigenous hunters, trappers and fishers, as periods when most Indigenous providers were absent from the area resulted in conditions of food crises at the Fort. Thus, the relations of food exchange at Moose Fort provided mutual benefits to both parties, but it was ultimately the Fort itself that was much more dependent upon this relationship. Overall, this evidence calls for more nuanced and less one-sided theoretical models of dependency in the history of the fur trade.
The Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England in the seventh century CE was a momentous period of religious change which had many far‐reaching effects. Anglo-Saxon paganism had attached a set of sacred and symbolic meanings to various natural features in the English landscape. In this belief system, trees and groves were strongly associated with healing and defensive powers. This paper will argue that due to the persistent presence of once-sacred trees and groves in the English landscape, combined with a continually widespread demand for health remedies, the pre-Christian associations of trees with healing and defense in England were not easily forgotten after the conversion period and in fact continued throughout the eleventh century. However, these pre-Christian symbolic associations were effectively subsumed within the hegemony of a Christian ideological framework. A continual, bidirectional alignment of these symbolic associations of trees with elements of Christian symbolism, namely that of Paradise and that of the Cross, served to explain and legitimize their syncretic continuation within this Christian framework. These insights invite us to appreciate some of the complexity of the syncretism that occurred during the period of Christian conversion in Anglo-‐Saxon England. They also invite us to further contemplate some of the lasting effects of this gradual syncretic process.
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