5.8 Summary
The significance of the Columbian Exchange and the sharing of foodways, technology, and cultures that resulted can hardly be overstated. While a profound social and economic revolution shook the Eastern Hemisphere as the influx of crops and mineral wealth made merchants and monarchs wealthy, the Western Hemisphere struggled to adapt to new diseases, animals, and neighbours. The arrival of new technologies — iron tools, copper pots, rifles, axes — both broadened the Aboriginal world and narrowed it. As one scholar puts it, there was a “shift in subsistence strategies brought about by the fur trade as [pre-contact] exploitation of the total environment gave way to the specialized pursuit of fur-bearing animals.” Under these circumstances, food supplies sometimes suffered and Aboriginal peoples turned to the fur trade posts “to offset the increased danger of famine that this switch in emphasis entailed.”[1] This dependence was something that the French and the English encouraged.
Similarly, traditional ideas about the structure and inhabitants of the world were put aside as Europeans and Aboriginal peoples encountered and ultimately learned from each other. Genetic histories and futures, too, were inextricably intertwined. What is most important to note, however, is that these changes and adjustments did not occur in a short period of time. They are underway even now. There is a tipping point in the history of Aboriginal North America, that moment at which the issue at stake is not the quality of the relationship between two peoples but how to strategize survival in the face of a European imperialism that was, ironically, bankrolled by Aboriginal gold and silver and fed by New World potatoes. The shifting boundaries of conflict between the many peoples of North America is the subject of the next chapter.
Key Terms
Attawandaron: An Iroquoian people located in the contact and post-contact periods in what is now southwestern Ontario. Also known as the Neutral.
Blackfoot Confederacy: Also known as the Niitsitapi, an alliance centred in the western Plains, in territory that extended from what is now southern Alberta into Montana; consisting of the Piikuni (Piegan), Siksika (Blackfoot), Kanai (Blood), Tsuu T’ina (Sarcee), and A’aninin (Gros Ventre).
cayoosh, cayuse: Regional words for “horse” in the Cordillera and western Plains. Derived from the Cayuse First Nation, who were responsible for significant advances in breeding in the 18th century.
Chinook, chinuk wawa: A trade dialect developed on the West Coast comprising elements from several Aboriginal languages and subsequently adopting words from various European languages.
Columbian Exchange: The traffic of goods, ideas, matériel, foodstuffs, technology, knowledge, and bacteria between Europe and Africa (on the one hand) and the Americas (on the other).
disease vectors: Viruses and bacteria transferred from one living host to another. Examples include droplets (like those produced in coughi