Indigenous started the northern trade industry

For many city dwellers, January is the dead of winter. However, if you're a trapper, it’s the busy part of the year. While trapping has tapered off, it is historically the original economy of northern Canada.

Because of the fur trade, Western Canada was settled from the top down. Northern First Nations have a much longer history of European contact because of the fur trade.

Much of the history of Canada and the fur trade has been recorded from a European point of view. In fact, it brought change to the First Nations for both good and evil. Trade goods such as axes, iron pots and firearms made life easier, but traders also brought diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis.

The Hudson's Bay Co. (HBC) knew that, without the Indigenous people, there would be no fur traded, so they began vaccinating people shortly after the vaccine was invented in 1796.

Before the fur trade, fur trapping was an individual thing. People trapped fur for their own use and most of their time was spent hunting for food. After firearms were introduced, they cut back on the time spent hunting, so more time was spent trapping for furs.

Each family had a designated area and after 400 years of the fur trade, no species were at risk. First Nations managed their resources.

Fur trade stalled after a while. Indigenous people needed a knife, iron pot and gun powder and shot. But, because they were nomadic, they didn’t want a bunch of stuff. The HBC had to innovate, and the result was bannock, a Scottish bread, and flour became an important trade good.

The iconic Hudson's Bay blanket became their No. 1 trade good. This gave Indigenous people a reason to go back to the trading post and settlements grew up around the posts, which were established on waterways and traditional trade routes.

To the south, the great herds of buffalo were hunted to extinction and people were removed from the land, creating a total change in their way of life. The north was unique in that the people’s way of life remained largely unchanged. The fur trade brought wealth to both traders and their suppliers.

In southern Canada and the United States, it was illegal to sell firearms to First Nations, but the Indigenous people in the north traded freely for firearms because HBC wanted them on the trapline. The Cree travelled south and made an alliance with the Saulteaux and the Nakota.

They were known collectively as the Iron Nation because they had firearms. The plains Cree and the Ojibway, later known as the Saulteaux or Plains Ojibway, adopted the horse culture of the Nakota and together they moved south and west, removing the Gros Ventres and the Northern Shoshone as well as other tribes.

The fur trade changed the face of the plains and created the Cree commonwealth that exists from northern Quebec to the Rocky Mountains.