Search results for ""Author Timothy Cochrane""
University of Minnesota Press Making the Carry: The Lives of John and Tchi-Ki-Wis Linklater
An extraordinary illustrated biography of a Métis man and Anishinaabe woman navigating great changes in their homeland along the U.S.–Canada border in the early twentieth century John Linklater, of Anishinaabeg, Cree, and Scottish ancestry, and his wife, Tchi-Ki-Wis, of the Lac La Croix First Nation, lived in the canoe and border country of Ontario and Minnesota from the 1870s until the 1930s. During that time, the couple experienced radical upheavals in the Quetico–Superior region, including the cutting of white and red pine forests, the creation of Indian reserves/reservations and conservation areas, and the rise of towns, tourism, and mining. With broad geographical sweep, historical significance, and biographical depth, Making the Carry tells their story, overlooked for far too long.John Linklater, a renowned game warden and skilled woodsman, was also the bearer of traditional ecological knowledge and Indigenous heritage, both of which he was deeply committed to teaching others. He was sought by professors, newspaper reporters, museum personnel, and conservationists—among them Sigurd Olson, who considered Linklater a mentor. Tchi-Ki-Wis, an extraordinary craftswoman, made a sweeping array of necessary yet beautiful objects, from sled dog harnesses to moose calls to birch bark canoes. She was an expert weaver of large Anishinaabeg cedar bark mats with complicated geometric designs, a virtually lost art.Making the Carry traces the routes by which the couple came to live on Basswood Lake on the international border. John’s Métis ancestors with deep Hudson’s Bay Company roots originally came from Orkney Islands, Scotland, by way of Hudson Bay and Red River, or what is now Winnipeg. His family lived in Manitoba, northwest Ontario, northern Minnesota, and, in the case ofJohn and Tchi-Ki-Wis, on Isle Royale. A journey through little-known Canadian history, the book provides an intimate portrait of Métis people.Complete with rarely seen photographs of activities from dog mushing to guiding to lumbering, as well as of many objects made by Tchi-Ki-Wis, such as canoes, moccasins, and cedar mats, Making the Carry is a window on a traditional way of life and a restoration of two fascinating Indigenous people to their rightful place in our collective past.
£21.99
University of Minnesota Press Gichi Bitobig, Grand Marais: Early Accounts of the Anishinaabeg and the North Shore Fur Trade
The journals of two clerks of the American Fur Company recall a lost moment in the history of the fur trade and the Anishinaabeg along Lake Superior’s North Shore Long after the Anishinaabeg first inhabited and voyageurs plied Lake Superior’s North Shore in Minnesota, and well before the tide of Scandinavian immigrants swept in, Bela Chapman, a clerk of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, fetched up in Gichi Bitobig—a stony harbor now known as Grand Marais. Through the year that followed, Chapman recorded his efforts on behalf of Astor’s enterprise: setting up a working post to compete with the Hudson Bay Company, establishing trading relationships with the local Anishinaabeg, and steering a crew of African-Anishinaabeg, Yankee, Virginian, and Métis boatmen. The young clerk’s journal, and another kept by his successor, George Johnston, provides a window into a story largely lost to history. Using these and other little known documents, Timothy Cochrane recreates the drama that played out in the cold weather months in Grand Marais between 1823 and 1825.In its portrayal of the changing fur trade on the great lake, Gichi Bitobig, Grand Marais offers a rare glimpse of the Anishinaabeg—especially the leader Espagnol—as astute and active trading partners, playing the upstart Americans for competitive advantage against their rivals, even as the company men contend with the harsh geographic realities of the North Shore. Through the words of long-ago witnesses, the book recovers both the too-often overlooked Anishinaabeg roots and corporate origins of Grand Marais, a history deeper and more complex than is often told. Gichi Bitobig, Grand Marais recalls a time in northern Minnesota when men of the American Fur Company and the Anishinaabeg navigated the shifting course of progress, negotiating the new perils and prospects of commerce’s westward drift.
£18.99