Chapter 12. Children and Childhood
12.4 Childhood in the West
Historian of childhood Jennifer Brown pointed out years ago that the fur trade society brought together people who had experienced highly different childhoods. Many of the officers of the HBC were themselves orphans “recruited through the Grey Coat charity schools” of London.[1] Their connections with their peers in the company were strong, as were their relationships with Indigenous women and wives. The HBC officers who settled at Red River did so with an eye to establishing a society near The Forks, an intergenerational community at the confluence of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers. They insisted that the company set aside resources for schooling, and when that was not forthcoming, they exercised what patriarchal authority they had in a strange land and had their métis sons shipped off to Britain for their education. Daughters stayed closer to home where they spent their childhood in a more Indigenous-inflected environment.
The NWC traders did something similar. Those with connections to Montreal sent their sons and daughters alike to the St. Lawrence towns at a relatively young age. The work of Sylvia Van Kirk and Jennifer Brown on this topic suggests that Indigenous mothers were highly critical of packing off children to remote educational institutions, which were, in any case, alien to their own experiences.[2] There was, however, the expectation that the children would return, not least so they could provide for their parents in retirement in the Red River Colony. Although the history of the fur trade in the West provides many examples of traders on fixed-term contracts who arrived, had relationships, and then departed, perhaps leaving their wives and children in the care of Indigenous in-laws or a freshly appointed Euro-Canadian trader (a process sometimes called “turning off”), the record is also clear that many of these relationship (husband/wife; father/children) were anything but casual.
Indigenous women approached parenting differently. First, the evidence suggests that they were accustomed to rearing fewer children. As Brown writes, Indigenous families “were usually small, and children were commonly born three, four, or more years apart, owing to long periods of nursing that reduced the mothers’ fecundity and sometimes to post-partum taboos on sexual relations.”[3] Under these circumstances an Indigenous child could expect something close to undivided maternal attention (certainly compared to the lot of their European contemporaries). Second, Indigenous women engaged in co-mothering, at least outside of fur trade society. Once they were brought into the fold of the European posts and forts, Indigenous mothers often found themselves caring singlehandedly for their young while the pressures to have more children in closer succession increased.
Fertility rates in the fur trade society were by all indications closer to the habitant model than to traditional practices among, say