Fort William, on the north shore of Lake Superior, became an important gathering location within the historic fur trade when the North West Company relocated their Lake Superior district headquarters there in 1803. Annual gatherings at Fort William brought together North West Company employees from across its vast geographic network. These gatherings at Fort William became known as the ‘Great Rendezvous’. The Rendezvous was an important part of the annual fur trade cycle. It

The Upper Great Lakes are known for their treacherous waters, where unpredictable weather and hidden shoals have led to untold numbers of shipwrecks over the centuries. Many—including the wrecks of the Hackett at Horse Island and the Labatte family at Thunder Beach near Penetanguishene—have been preserved by Métis communities through stories and passed down through the generations. With such events looming large in Métis communities’ memories, it should come as little sur

Métis people have long used their deep place-based knowledge to secure gainful employment and earn a livelihood for themselves and their families. One of the most common Métis place-based professions was guiding. By the turn of the twentieth century, Métis in the Mattawa region were well known for their roles as expert guides for visiting anglers and hunters. As the century progressed, some worked as canoe trip guides for summer camps. The expert skill of these Métis guides h

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

Growing up in the heart of the historic fur trade, the Sayer brothers—Henry, Pierre Guillaume, and John Charles—were part the emergent Métis kinship network that extended throughout west central North America. Their father, John Sayer, was a trader who married Obemau-unoqua, an Indigenous woman, in the traditional manner known as à la façon du pays. Born around Lake Superior between the 1780s and 1790s, Henry, Pierre Guillaume, and John Charles Sayer were raised within the bu