by Roland Bohr
History Department, University of Winnipeg
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Nahoway: A Distant Voice is a unique, deeply personal and emotional narrative of the author’s quest to discover and reconnect with her Cree/Scots ancestry in the Hudson Bay fur trade. Donna G. Sutherland has published several scholarly articles and a book on Aboriginal and fur trade history. However, with Nahoway, Sutherland took a different approach as her latest book is not intended as an analytical scholarly inquiry into aspects of Aboriginal/ European relations within the fur trade in the Hudson Bay Lowlands, but as a moving narrative of a personal quest, combining aspects of the spiritual with archival research.
The book begins with the description of a dream or vision of her distant female ancestor Nahoway, compelling her to embark on a decade-long quest to reconnect with the Aboriginal component of her ancestry and family history, which had been suppressed in her family for generations.
The first chapters of the book juxtapose Sutherland’s academic studies of the fur trade and Aboriginal history with spiritual approaches to the subject, to some extent based on spiritual practices and concepts current among contemporary Aboriginal people. In the following chapters the author brings to life some of her Cree/ English/Scots ancestors who lived on the shores of Hudson Bay during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of them coastal Cree people, others employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) from England, Scotland and the Orkney Islands. Due to intermarriage, the biological boundaries between Aboriginal and European became increasingly blurred, and many of the individuals the reader meets throughout the narrative were part Cree, part European. However, cultural and ethnic distinctions were often more rigid than biological ones. In this context, based on the interpretation of fur trader’s correspondence and journals, as well as Aboriginal oral traditions, the author details perceptions of race and occurrences of discrimination from both an Aboriginal and a European perspective.
The narrative centers on Sutherland’s ancestor Nahoway, a woman of Cree/Scots descent, who was born in the late 1700s and eventually married fur trader William Sinclair, with whom she traveled extensively between Hudson Bay and trading posts in the interior and with whom she had a large family. Other important members of their family trees are introduced as well, often through extensive quotations from primary documents and the author’s commentary to contextualize these individuals.
The book is a comfortable read, primarily directed at a non-academic audience, but of interest to the professional fur trade or Aboriginal historian. One purpose of the book is to show how combining archival research with oral traditions, artefacts and Aboriginal spiritual concepts can provide a rich understanding of the interconnectedness of the lives of the original inhabitants of North America and the European newcomers and their descendants, especially those with ancestral roots in both. Furthermore, even though Aboriginal and Métis women in the fur trade left few if any written records, the book demonstrates how much can be learned about their lives through a combination of the interpretation of archival records through the lens of Aboriginal traditions and concepts.
A strength of the book is in the rich archival research and the amazing detail gleaned from Hudson’s Bay Company records and the personal correspondence of mostly men involved in the fur trade in various positions and capacities.
To provide context for the narrative about Nahoway and her Cree kin, Sutherland interweaves sections on Aboriginal life ways, subsistence activities, cultural and spiritual practices and concepts with almost every chapter. Unfortunately, to a great extent she draws on sources from outside a Lowland Cree cultural context, substituting information from Aboriginal cultures from other regions of North America, sometimes as far away as the southwestern US. These overgeneralizations somewhat diminish the impact of the narrative, grafting practices and concepts from outside the Hudson Bay Lowlands to the coastal Cree of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Included in this rather vague and sometimes misleading portrayal of distinct Aboriginal cultures and their belief systems are current Aboriginal spiritual practices that may or may not have been part of the belief systems and worldview of the eighteenth and nineteenth century coastal Cree.
Another strong point of the book is that it connects the story of Nahoway and her kin to concrete locations, such as monuments, buildings, riverbanks and rock faces from the shores of Hudson Bay to the Red River Settlement/Winnipeg, where important events in the lives of the people under discussion happened and that can still be visited today.
Overall, the book is a comfortable read with a compelling and at times suspenseful narrative that will hopefully help to encourage others with a similar Aboriginal/European heritage to explore and reconnect with the life stories of their ancestors whose lives and actions were an integral part in shaping Manitoban society.
Page revised: 15 February 2015
