Métis women played an essential role in provisioning the fur trade posts of the Abitibi Inland and western James Bay regions. Métis women from the Abitibi Inland Métis Community are documented hunting, trapping, and snaring a variety of birds and game, including geese, partridges, beaver, martins, and rabbits. Fishing—especially for whitefish—was common too. In addition to hunting, snaring, and fishing, Métis women actively participated in maple sugar production, as well as o

Métis communities in what is now Ontario have relied on big game as a source of winter food for generations, with moose being amongst the most important. Many historical records document Métis hunting moose, including in the Upper Great Lakes. For example, an 1893 report by James Cleland Hamilton in The Georgian Bay: An Account of its Position, Inhabitants, Mineral Interests, Fish, Timber and Other Resources describes: “A ‘moose yard’ is then a bonanza for the hunter, genera

Hyppolite Brissette’s fur trade career began in 1817 when he signed a three-year contract with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) as a “middleman” in a canoe brigade. With that commitment, Hyppolite began a decades-long fur trade career that took him across the Métis Homeland. Hyppolite’s first journey ended at Cumberland House, an HBC post in Saskatchewan. Cumberland House was a key stop for boat brigades heading west into the fur-rich Athabasca region, known for pemmican prod

Following his apprenticeship at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Island Lake District headquarters near Lake Winnipeg, Joseph Turner Jr. briefly returned east to the HBC’s coastal port of York Factory. There, Joseph Jr. served as a labourer for only a year before moving westward again to the Cumberland District on the Saskatchewan River in 1837. The HBC’s Cumberland District headquarters, Cumberland House, was a major site of pemmican production and an important stopping point for

Joseph Turner Sr., a devoted servant of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), began his career in 1799 at the depot at Moose Factory, a key trading post on the coast of James Bay. Like many HBC employees and “factory boys” of his time, Joseph Sr. spent years traveling between Moose Factory and its connected inland posts, navigating vast distances and forging relationships essential to the fur trade. Joseph Sr. married Emma, a Métis woman whose life was equally defined by resilience

As Métis boys who grew up learning from their fur trader father in the vibrant fur trading posts of the Upper Great Lakes, Henry, Pierre Guillaume, and John Charles Sayer were destined to join the fur trade themselves. By 1811, Henry, the eldest Sayer brother, had joined the North West Company (NWC). Henry’s younger brother, John Charles, had also joined the NWC by that time and was working in the Lac La Pluie District by the mid 1810s. The youngest brother, Pierre Guillaume