POSTPONED: WGS Speaker Series--Stacy Nation-Knapper on Narratives of Fur Trade Family Identities

STACY NATION-KNAPPER
Director, Year One Programs
Rochester Institute of Technology

“SHE WAS OF MIXED BLOOD, FAR ABOVE THE AVERAGE”: EXPLORING NARRATIVES OF FUR TRADE FAMILY IDENTITIES

TUESDAY, MARCH 24
12:30-1:45 P.M.
MCKENZIE COMMONS, LBR 1251

Fur-trade families of the Columbia River Plateau, a region that now falls within the United States and Canada, are a diverse group of people whose identities and stories have changed over time and depending on who is crafting the narrative. This project explores the ways several Plateau fur trade families have constructed identity and experienced external pressures on those identities over the course of two hundred years. Influences including the creation of the United States-Canada border, each country’s legal recognition (or lack of recognition) of Indigenous peoples, and cultural understandings of gender have shaped identity narratives for Plateau fur trade families. Through family records, interviews with journalists and researchers, and in public spaces including powwows and fur trade reenactments, fur trade family members exerted power over the creation of their identities, at times reflecting external influences and acting as counternarratives to outsiders’ stories about them.

Stacy Nation-Knapper is Director of Year One Programs at RIT and a historian of the North American fur trade. Nation-Knapper earned her doctorate in history from York University in Toronto with a dissertation on the memory and commemoration of the fur trade in the Columbia River Plateau. Her master’s degree in history is from Boise State University and she completed undergraduate studies at Montana State University in Biology, French, History, and Native American Studies. Nation-Knapper’s research interests include memory and commemoration, as well as environmental, Indigenous, and fur trade history.