The Canadian Arctic Fur Trade: A Case Study of Freedom | Daniella Bassi
Summary
Historical Case Study: The podcast discusses the Canadian Arctic fur trade as an example of near-total freedom from state intervention, focusing on the early 20th-century trade between the Inuit and European traders.
Trade Dynamics: The trade was characterized by mutual non-aggression and non-interference, with traders learning the local language and customs to facilitate peaceful and effective commerce.
Flexible Credit System: A unique credit system allowed Inuit to trade furs for goods without immediate payment, with debts often carried over and sometimes forgiven, reflecting a high level of trust and cooperation.
Minimal State Presence: The Canadian government's presence in the Arctic was largely symbolic, with limited enforcement capabilities, allowing Inuit communities to operate under their own natural law systems.
Property Rights and Justice: Inuit society was based on private property and restorative justice, with a focus on maintaining harmony rather than punishment, which was respected by the traders.
Economic and Social Benefits: The trade improved the standard of living for both Inuit and traders, allowing Inuit to maintain their traditional lifestyle while accessing new goods and technologies.
Non-Intervention Policy: Traders refrained from interfering in Inuit customs and laws, fostering a peaceful coexistence and mutual respect that benefited both parties economically and socially.
Impact of Government Intervention: The podcast suggests that increased government intervention in later years disrupted this mutually beneficial system, implying that the initial absence of state control was advantageous.
Transcript
Well, my name is Daniellea Abassi. I'm senior editor at the Mises Institute and my talk is called the Canadian Arctic Fur Trade, a case study of freedom. So, when we talk about anarcho capitalism, total freedom and free markets, we're usually speaking in the abstract about how things might be. But today, I have an example of people who actually lived and traded in something pretty close to total freedom from the state. It wasn't back in the Middle Ages and it didn't involve any kind of voluntary subservience to a lord or some other private collectivity. It was in the first half of the 20th century in far northern Canada. I'm talking about the Arctic fox trade between the Canadian Inuit and white traders from Scotland, England, and various parts of Canada. If you've heard of Eskimos, you know the Inuit. They don't like this name because their cre enemies to the south gave it to them as an insult. eaters of raw flesh, people whose land was so barren, treeless, that they couldn't even cook their food. If you've ridden in a kayak or on a dog sled, you've used a traditional Inuit mode of transportation. The white fox trade was a period of Euroindian collaboration and peace. The traders bought white fox furs, which could actually be white, silver, or blue, to sell across Western Europe and North America. Back in the day, people loved their fur gloves, hats, and stoalls, especially in the 1920s, which unsurprisingly was the peak of the trade. The traders also bought seal skins, which were valuable because they're waterproof, um, and polar bears and other white furs, like Arctic hair. But foxes were pretty much the currency of the Arctic trade. You can tell from these photos of furs airing out. Inu traded these furs for firearms, ammunition, metal tools, dry goods and fun stuff like beads and tobacco and cool fabrics. Um, as the trade matured, Inuit purchased a wider variety of goods. More fun stuff, you know, like perfume and gramophones and silk underwear. Um, but the less fun stuff quickly became the new essentials of the traditional lifestyle, which of course was semi-nomadic and dominated by hunting and gathering. You can see some of the things they bought in these pictures of the inside of igloos. Uh, so what were the rules of the trade? They boiled down to mutual non-aggression and non-inference. The traders were also willing to accommodate Inuid in many ways. uh to be successful in the business. They learned the local Inukitude dialect. They shared food with trappers and their families. They extended credit generously and they interfered minimally with Inuit law. Let me elaborate a bit. Inuit outnumbered whites in the Arctic and they still do. So, no one expected them to speak English, but they also didn't like to use interpreters because they were concerned about privacy. Apparently, word about your finances and your personal life could spread pretty quickly, even at the ends of the earth. Uh so had preferred to communicate directly and intatute was the language of the trade. Most traders were at least proficient in the language if not fluent. Like many other cultures, Inuit society values generosity with food. So to gain the people's goodwill, the traders also mimicked local food sharing practices, which I'll describe later. They fed everyone who came to the post for free. Some traders also allowed arrivals to feed their dogs from the post meat cash. Um, in this time and place, the dogs just ate wild meat, raw meat, and they needed a lot of it because they weren't pets. They were working animals, and a family needed at least a few of these 100 pound dogs to move their stuff and get around. Otherwise, they'd be walking. Um, the free food wasn't anything special by our standards. It was hot tea, some kind of hard biscuit or bread, maybe something sweet to put on it, um, and some tobacco. But it was significant to the natives. So much so that in deciding where to sell their furs, Inuit considered the quality of these gifts in addition to fur prices, subjective value at work. Um, so competing traders could potentially convince Inuit to do business with them by offering better food gifts. And they did in fact try to oneup one another. For example, in 1920, Lancome and Hubard Trading Company was feeding arrivals canned milk, sugar, cheese, and butter at its post in northern Quebec, where it was a new player. The incumbent Hudson's Bay Company trader was dismayed. He wrote, "I'm afraid we'll have to follow their lead, as the best means of holding an Eskimo is through his stomach." So, of course, the trading didn't start right after the free meal. You know, it took their sweet time to get down to business. It was the culture. At first they rested up, then they gossiped. You know who was sick, who was looking for a wife, what mishaps had transpired. Finally, when the talk circled around to hunting, the trader would take in the furs and lay out tokens on the counter to represent them because Inuit didn't use fiat currency or count at the time. Um, the trappers took their time picking stuff out and they couldn't be rushed. Trading usually happened late at night and it usually happened in an unheated storehouse. So, you can imagine how patient the traders had to be. Um, the trader would remove tokens from the table as the trapper chose items to show how much purchasing power the trapper still had left. When the transaction was finally finished, people left as soon as the weather permitted, although traders sometimes did complain that people lingered. Um, a very important feature of the trade is that it operated on a very flexible credit system. fur was the only thing Inuit could sell pretty much without limit to get the things they wanted. Um, but without some sort of credit arrangement, they would have had to wait until they had furs to buy anything. Also, game and fur yields varied from year to year, as they still do. Um, and when game was scarce, people would have to spend more time hunting and trapping. And when there were few foxes, you know, it wouldn't really be able to buy much. So traders did also even though traders did also accept meat, fish, fat, ivory and other animal products. But without credit in it would have borne all the risk of a poor harvest and they might have decided that trapping wasn't really worthwhile. Um so traders who had a lot to gain uh shouldered much of the risk by outfitting trappers with ammo and dry goods on credit the beginning of every season. Uh traders often provided free traps as well. They banked on Inuid having a good season and then selling their furs to them, which the trappers didn't necessarily have to do. Not surprisingly, the more successful and trustworthy the trapper, the more credit he had. But, as I've said, the system was very flexible. So, people who had outstanding balances from a poor season often received credit for the new season anyway, and traders carried the debt over for a few years. Unpaid debts were eventually wiped from the books, which is unique, and there wasn't any interest on this credit either. In general, Inuit had paid their debts, even if it took them a while. They generally considered debt a serious obligation. Traders were also very understanding of the vicissitudes of animal stocks and of life on the land. Plus, they knew that without the necessary supplies, an indebted trapper would have a harder time paying off his debt to begin with. Perhaps for all these reasons and maybe even some pity, private relief was also a feature of the trade, the Hudson's Bay Company, which was the biggest player for much of the trade, distributed dry goods and ammo during the toughest period when people were starving and came to the post empty-handed. And by starving, I mean that they had resorted to eating their dogs and their and their boots, which they did, you know, when times were hard. Long before government welfare came to many parts of the Arctic, the HBC also helped widows, uh, elders, ma trappers, people who really had no way to make a living. Um, the traders, the HBC traders also provided free the rudimentary medical aid. They pulled teeth. They helped with frostbite. They gave away medicines for colds and basic ailments. The HBC even kept reserves of walrus or whale meat for dog food, seal fat for human food, and seal or whale oil for heat, which you'd burn in a in a stone lamp or a different stove. Inuit could draw on these reserves when game was scarce. The HBC also bought caribou skins, which they essentially redistributed uh by selling them to Inuit in areas that were experiencing shortages. uh without new caribou skin clothing, people would be very cold, very uncomfortable because the clothing wore out every season, you know, from moving around and wearing the same thing pretty much all year. Um until summer when you maybe changed into canvas parkas or something like that. Anyway, the traders, the most important thing, the traders refrained from interfering in Inuit communities or trying to change their customs. The traders mainly wanted Inuid to trap and to encourage this they focused simply on supporting the people in pursuing the traditional life on the land. Trading posts were opened near areas recommended by Inuit as being rich and game and fur. And the traders never stood in the way of the summer walrus hunt or the fall caribou hunt. These were the source of winter clothing, of meat reserves, and of dog food. The dogs ate a lot of whale and walrus meat. While people bless you, mostly ate caribou, muskox, whale, and a variety of seals. The most interesting and telling form of non-intervention, though, and this might make some people uncomfortable, concerned executions of insane and dangerous people. In HBC records and retrospective employee interviews, there are at least a few stories of Inuit who went mad. They threatened to kill their family or neighbors, and they were executed by their community in self-defense. The killings I read about happened in the 20s and 30s. And they're interesting because the traders were told what had happened and they either didn't involve or minimally involved the police in the matter. In November 1924, for example, a trader uh recorded the following incident. Arrivals from Cape Smith report that people there in a very hard up state. They also brought the news that David was running wild there sometime in July and was going to break into the storehouse and get cartridges to shoot off some of the people. He was going about in a funny way and prevented all the people from leaving their tents, fired a dart at a young boy, sharpening his knife very often and making threats, treating his wife and family very severely and making other trouble amongst other men's wives. So they held fire and decided to put him out of the way. So his brother Amamukiaak and another man shot him. This person was always giving us a certain amount of trouble and minding everybody's business more than his own. As you see, the traitor wasn't very critical at all, and his comment about David's character may have been a way of vouching for the people's story. It doesn't seem that this killing was ever reported to the RCMP, which had arrived in the area two years before, and there's no evidence of an arrest or trial. The traitor had all the details to file a police report, but with peace and security restored to the community, it seems he chose to let the matter rest. Now, make no mistake, traitors were latent agents of the state, just as most state subjects are. Willing or not, they tended to collaborate with the RCMP when they came around, and they did report at least some killings. HBC trading posts even stored fuel for fighter jets during World War II, but the traders didn't actively try to interfere in Inuit law. They often knew everyone involved in these incidents. Uh so they tended to be understanding even though these killings were crimes under Canadian law by default because they were vigilante justice. Remember we're not allowed to take the law into our own hands. We all know that EuroIndian contact often ended in bloodshed. But for the most part Euroin relations in the Canadian Arctic were peaceful. The reason is that the state was pretty much absent from the Arctic. So let me tell you about that. In a time when many North American peoples were no longer sovereign, Canadian Inuit still ran their own lives because they were very isolated. Uh they were stateless communities that essentially lived by an Inuit version of natural law. That's what I describe it as. As you may have gathered from the incident I just told you about, each Inuit camp governed itself. There weren't any chiefs as in other native societies. People settled their own disputes, sometimes with the help of mediators, other times on their own. Respected individuals like great hunters and elders sometimes came together to decide how to deal with a major problem such as a person who' lost his mind. Uh but this happened on a very provisional basis. No one had indisputable coercive power over anyone else the way agents of a state have over its subjects. Each person could defend himself and his property against any aggressor. Meaning that each person had full property rights in his person. The flip side of this of course was that if you killed someone, you had to watch your back. If you killed someone wrongly, that is um Inuit law was based on private property and restorative justice. The goal of restorative justice is to restore harmony rather than to punish which is the focus of retributive justice systems like the one we live under. Inuit had communal property. This is just private property owned by a specific group instead of an individual. There were multiple Inuit groups and each had its own territory. This map of Inuit dialects gives you a rough idea of how many groups there were. The ancestors of these groups earned their property rights by living on the land and taking their livelihood from it. Just as other groups took possession of virgin land, they knew it land ownership in the era of traditional camp life from at least 1550 to about 1950 um didn't leave much of a mark on the landscape. There weren't any fences. Igloos melted in in the warmer months obviously and summer houses like this one uh could be dismantled and moved almost without leaving a trace. In much of the Inouit homeland, the frozen subs soil makes it impossible to grow food, except maybe on a small scale with a greenhouse. During the summer, there are some berries um and plants that can be harvested, but for much of the year, there's very little wild plant food available. The need to migrate around the group's territory. Remember that Inuit weren't full nomads, they were semi-nomads, meant that there weren't really permanent structures. But there were a few lasting signs of occupation and and possession. The the there were tent stones, depressions in the ground, and stone foundations that marked old camps. There were also old saw and stone houses. Um, and cannons also dotted the landscape. And they weren't like the little hipster stone piles you see everywhere. They were large like these. Uh, and that's because they were made by people who needed a landmark to find their way in a bare landscape. Finally, there were the tombs of the dead who weren't buried but were laid to rest on the hard ground and covered with stones. And I don't have a picture of one, sorry. Uh, finally, there um, proof to title of the land lay in people's knowledge of it. Neighboring groups knew each other and the limits of their lands. These boundaries were admittedly flexible, and people often did have fishing, hunting, and travel rights beyond their property. Uh but strangers didn't know the land at all, so they couldn't begin to claim it. Within the group, land ownership was also communal, but that didn't mean anyone could set up shop wherever. Uh because Inuit communities spent most of the year split up into small winter camps, two or three families only. Um each subgroup lived, hunted, and trapped in a specific area and came to be associated with it. These family plots of sorts could include sections of sea ice in addition to land. And according to geographer Peter Usher, individuals were also recognized as having preeminent rights to a trap line or fishing spot. People always had to ask permission to use land that wasn't theirs. Private property, of course, included movable goods like clothes, tools, and food. There were and there were special rules around food, which was probably the most valuable form of property depending on the situation. Inuit are known for their traditional food sharing practices which I mentioned earlier and even today they have community freezers in their villages. Uh but there were clear limits to this generosity back in the day and that's probably still the case today. Uh this is how it worked. There was a tacid obligation to share food with your group if you had any despair during periods of starvation. This was a kind of insurance policy. The idea was that if you shared what you had, the community would help you when you were starving, which was not an uncommon situation. This was a land with very low carrying capacity. Sharing with anyone who came under the horizon was a recipe for famine. So if strangers came begging, you played dumb. Food sharing didn't mean that there weren't individual property rights in fut. Meat was stored by specific people and households, and only members of their specific group could take from those caches. But even they had to ask permission. Taking someone's cash meat was probably one of the most serious thefts because it put victims at risk of starving. So natural law based on private property kept peace in Inuit communities. But although Inuit, as we have seen, already owned many parts of the Arctic, though not every square inch of it, as activist scholars would would have you believe, uh the Canadian government had claimed their homeland as its property since roughly the last quarter of the 19th century when the British government transferred it and a bunch of other lands to Canada. These maps give you a rough idea of how the country's internal boundaries changed over time um down to the present day. See, and that's that's pretty much how it is today. None of it was added in 1999. Nevertheless, the Canadian government had very few footholds in the Arctic at the dawn of the 20th century. By 1915, the whaling industry was in decline. But that was after more than a century of pretty much unimpeded foreign whaling in Canadian waters. Foreign explorers, prospectors, and anthropologists crisscrossed the region. Some even planted flags for other states. Otto Verduprop claimed the Spurge Islands and parts of Elmir. Who's that? Is that me? Anyway, sorry. Anyway, Otto Verduprop claimed the Spurge Islands and parts of Elmir Island for Norway and Robert E. Perry claimed the entire region for the US. Those claims didn't pan out, by the way. Um, and of course, you know, it went on sealing, whailing, trading, and migrating sometimes across international borders into Greenland and Alaska. And there were some clashes with between the uh Danish and Canadian government over over the Greenland hunting trips. Anyway, because the Arctic wasn't obviously any good for farm settlement, the Canadian government wasn't very interested in it. See, they didn't know about the oil and the uranium yet. So, they didn't want to do much up there. They were okay with with having the region function basically like a massive fur preserve. Nevertheless, all the foreign traffic kind of started to freak them out a bit. So they started sending Mounties north in the western Arctic where there was still a lot of whaling going on. The first police detachments were established in 1903 at Hersel Island, Fort McFersonson, and Fullerton Harbor. By 1919, there were 25 detachments and over 70 men in the Arctic. according to the RCMP. But in the Eastern Arctic, which was more isolated, there was no police presence until 1922 when the first RCMP detachments were established at Craig Harbor and Pond Inlet. The police were tasked with telling people that they were on Canadian soil, informing them of Canadian laws, extorting customs duties from whailing ships, and supposedly keeping order. Though they investigated crimes, the police were lenient toward Inuit at first because they considered them uh primitive people who had to be introduced gradually to so-called civilization. Um but even if that hadn't been the policy, the reality wouldn't have changed much. Many crimes simply weren't investigated, and this was because of the logistics involved. The police posts were ultimately few and widely scattered. It was almost impossible to cover the distances necessary to investigate every crime. Remember, this was a place with no roads, with extreme weather. Uh, pretty pretty hard to get around. People could easily avoid the police if they wanted to. Many whalers avoided fees by operating just out of reach, and Inuit accused of crimes could stay out of sight, too. It's also worth mentioning that in their day-to-day, the police directly relied on Inuit, who acted as guides, translators, provisioners of meat, and housekeepers. It's a little easier to enforce the law when the government pays you with money stolen from an anonymous taxpayer. And though this was true of the Mounties, the frontier conditions of the Arctic complicated things. When offenders were pursued, it took years to catch up to them, especially before the wireless radio, which only appeared in the late 1920s. Even when the Mounties did catch up to them, the charges were usually dropped due to lack of evidence and the difficulty of initiating legal proceedings. Judges had to travel north for trials. So a few years could go by before a case went to court. The first two Inuit to be tried under Canadian law were tried in 1917, four years after they killed two obllet missionaries. And in case you're wondering, the men were guiding the missionaries and things went south when one of the priests threatened and hit one of the guides. And don't forget that there weren't any courouses or jails. Let's see. They're having court outside. When people were held by the RCMP, they ended up helping out with chores and were even allowed to go hunting. This was the experience of the men in the last photo. Uh they spent years just hanging out. Basically, the enforcement infrastructure just wasn't there. All this is to say that the Canadian that Canadian state authority in the Arctic was more symbolic than real at this time. More than anything, the police were supposed to represent Canadian authority. And they mostly did this by planting flags and going on long patrols a few times a year, which they continued to do as late as 1969. Great use of taxpayer dollars. Though the Canadian government's presence and interference in the Arctic grew by the decade, it remained very weak until the World War II era, which brought a heavy military presence to the Arctic and more attention from Ottawa. In the absence of the state, Inuit and Whites met on the relatively level step of Inuit natural law. When disputes arose between them, Inu had applied the rules that kept order in their camps. And although the traitors were all state subjects, they had more leeway than ordinary citizens to defend their lives and property because they were pretty much on their own. No ambulances, no animal control, and more than likely no police. Um because traders couldn't defer to the state in an emergency, they were also living under natural law and practice, though they would of course have to answer to the authorities when the annual ship arrived. The statelessness of Inuit societies and the limited power of the Canadian state in the Arctic meant that there was essentially no monopoly of justice. The circumstances Oh, I apologize. Anyway, the circumstance created an environment of accountability and mutual respect for others as persons and property because under natural law, aggression has powerful and definite repercussions. In the Arctic, the government couldn't shield anyone from the consequences of his actions. So, no one could kill or steal with the short-term impunity that is possible when one entity administers all judgments and punishments. Acts of aggression could and did culminate in execution by the Inuit community. The case being decided in this picture is an example of that. But when everyone is fully liable for his actions, peaceful collaboration is often the best option. Though that doesn't mean that there aren't criminals and other deviants who cause trouble. The trade itself also encouraged people to keep the peace. The traders weren't in the region to plunder, to pillage, to colonize, to convert. They were there to do business with the locals. So, it didn't make sense to violate their property rights and piss them off. Likewise, Inuit saw the traders as a source of valued goods. They weren't oppressors. They weren't a burden. So, they didn't try to expel or kill them, which they had done with some of the earliest visitors to their homeland. Each group could continue to live by their norms and come together for trade and they could avoid conflict through mutual respect and mindfulness. In general, the my house my rules policy that reigned in the Canadian Arctic from roughly 1900 to 1945 though the trade continued thereafter for some time resulted in a higher standard of living for Inuit. They were able to continue their traditional life for a long time while adopting new goods and practices as they saw fit. It resulted in more wealth for traders and their companies who could enjoy a better lifestyle when they returned home to what they affectionately referred to as civilization. Call me crazy, but I'd say that the Canadian government ruined a good thing. And if you want to learn more about how that happened, you can check out my book on the fur trade, which will be out this fall. Thanks.
The Canadian Arctic Fur Trade: A Case Study of Freedom | Daniella Bassi
Summary
Transcript
Well, my name is Daniellea Abassi. I'm senior editor at the Mises Institute and my talk is called the Canadian Arctic Fur Trade, a case study of freedom. So, when we talk about anarcho capitalism, total freedom and free markets, we're usually speaking in the abstract about how things might be. But today, I have an example of people who actually lived and traded in something pretty close to total freedom from the state. It wasn't back in the Middle Ages and it didn't involve any kind of voluntary subservience to a lord or some other private collectivity. It was in the first half of the 20th century in far northern Canada. I'm talking about the Arctic fox trade between the Canadian Inuit and white traders from Scotland, England, and various parts of Canada. If you've heard of Eskimos, you know the Inuit. They don't like this name because their cre enemies to the south gave it to them as an insult. eaters of raw flesh, people whose land was so barren, treeless, that they couldn't even cook their food. If you've ridden in a kayak or on a dog sled, you've used a traditional Inuit mode of transportation. The white fox trade was a period of Euroindian collaboration and peace. The traders bought white fox furs, which could actually be white, silver, or blue, to sell across Western Europe and North America. Back in the day, people loved their fur gloves, hats, and stoalls, especially in the 1920s, which unsurprisingly was the peak of the trade. The traders also bought seal skins, which were valuable because they're waterproof, um, and polar bears and other white furs, like Arctic hair. But foxes were pretty much the currency of the Arctic trade. You can tell from these photos of furs airing out. Inu traded these furs for firearms, ammunition, metal tools, dry goods and fun stuff like beads and tobacco and cool fabrics. Um, as the trade matured, Inuit purchased a wider variety of goods. More fun stuff, you know, like perfume and gramophones and silk underwear. Um, but the less fun stuff quickly became the new essentials of the traditional lifestyle, which of course was semi-nomadic and dominated by hunting and gathering. You can see some of the things they bought in these pictures of the inside of igloos. Uh, so what were the rules of the trade? They boiled down to mutual non-aggression and non-inference. The traders were also willing to accommodate Inuid in many ways. uh to be successful in the business. They learned the local Inukitude dialect. They shared food with trappers and their families. They extended credit generously and they interfered minimally with Inuit law. Let me elaborate a bit. Inuit outnumbered whites in the Arctic and they still do. So, no one expected them to speak English, but they also didn't like to use interpreters because they were concerned about privacy. Apparently, word about your finances and your personal life could spread pretty quickly, even at the ends of the earth. Uh so had preferred to communicate directly and intatute was the language of the trade. Most traders were at least proficient in the language if not fluent. Like many other cultures, Inuit society values generosity with food. So to gain the people's goodwill, the traders also mimicked local food sharing practices, which I'll describe later. They fed everyone who came to the post for free. Some traders also allowed arrivals to feed their dogs from the post meat cash. Um, in this time and place, the dogs just ate wild meat, raw meat, and they needed a lot of it because they weren't pets. They were working animals, and a family needed at least a few of these 100 pound dogs to move their stuff and get around. Otherwise, they'd be walking. Um, the free food wasn't anything special by our standards. It was hot tea, some kind of hard biscuit or bread, maybe something sweet to put on it, um, and some tobacco. But it was significant to the natives. So much so that in deciding where to sell their furs, Inuit considered the quality of these gifts in addition to fur prices, subjective value at work. Um, so competing traders could potentially convince Inuit to do business with them by offering better food gifts. And they did in fact try to oneup one another. For example, in 1920, Lancome and Hubard Trading Company was feeding arrivals canned milk, sugar, cheese, and butter at its post in northern Quebec, where it was a new player. The incumbent Hudson's Bay Company trader was dismayed. He wrote, "I'm afraid we'll have to follow their lead, as the best means of holding an Eskimo is through his stomach." So, of course, the trading didn't start right after the free meal. You know, it took their sweet time to get down to business. It was the culture. At first they rested up, then they gossiped. You know who was sick, who was looking for a wife, what mishaps had transpired. Finally, when the talk circled around to hunting, the trader would take in the furs and lay out tokens on the counter to represent them because Inuit didn't use fiat currency or count at the time. Um, the trappers took their time picking stuff out and they couldn't be rushed. Trading usually happened late at night and it usually happened in an unheated storehouse. So, you can imagine how patient the traders had to be. Um, the trader would remove tokens from the table as the trapper chose items to show how much purchasing power the trapper still had left. When the transaction was finally finished, people left as soon as the weather permitted, although traders sometimes did complain that people lingered. Um, a very important feature of the trade is that it operated on a very flexible credit system. fur was the only thing Inuit could sell pretty much without limit to get the things they wanted. Um, but without some sort of credit arrangement, they would have had to wait until they had furs to buy anything. Also, game and fur yields varied from year to year, as they still do. Um, and when game was scarce, people would have to spend more time hunting and trapping. And when there were few foxes, you know, it wouldn't really be able to buy much. So traders did also even though traders did also accept meat, fish, fat, ivory and other animal products. But without credit in it would have borne all the risk of a poor harvest and they might have decided that trapping wasn't really worthwhile. Um so traders who had a lot to gain uh shouldered much of the risk by outfitting trappers with ammo and dry goods on credit the beginning of every season. Uh traders often provided free traps as well. They banked on Inuid having a good season and then selling their furs to them, which the trappers didn't necessarily have to do. Not surprisingly, the more successful and trustworthy the trapper, the more credit he had. But, as I've said, the system was very flexible. So, people who had outstanding balances from a poor season often received credit for the new season anyway, and traders carried the debt over for a few years. Unpaid debts were eventually wiped from the books, which is unique, and there wasn't any interest on this credit either. In general, Inuit had paid their debts, even if it took them a while. They generally considered debt a serious obligation. Traders were also very understanding of the vicissitudes of animal stocks and of life on the land. Plus, they knew that without the necessary supplies, an indebted trapper would have a harder time paying off his debt to begin with. Perhaps for all these reasons and maybe even some pity, private relief was also a feature of the trade, the Hudson's Bay Company, which was the biggest player for much of the trade, distributed dry goods and ammo during the toughest period when people were starving and came to the post empty-handed. And by starving, I mean that they had resorted to eating their dogs and their and their boots, which they did, you know, when times were hard. Long before government welfare came to many parts of the Arctic, the HBC also helped widows, uh, elders, ma trappers, people who really had no way to make a living. Um, the traders, the HBC traders also provided free the rudimentary medical aid. They pulled teeth. They helped with frostbite. They gave away medicines for colds and basic ailments. The HBC even kept reserves of walrus or whale meat for dog food, seal fat for human food, and seal or whale oil for heat, which you'd burn in a in a stone lamp or a different stove. Inuit could draw on these reserves when game was scarce. The HBC also bought caribou skins, which they essentially redistributed uh by selling them to Inuit in areas that were experiencing shortages. uh without new caribou skin clothing, people would be very cold, very uncomfortable because the clothing wore out every season, you know, from moving around and wearing the same thing pretty much all year. Um until summer when you maybe changed into canvas parkas or something like that. Anyway, the traders, the most important thing, the traders refrained from interfering in Inuit communities or trying to change their customs. The traders mainly wanted Inuid to trap and to encourage this they focused simply on supporting the people in pursuing the traditional life on the land. Trading posts were opened near areas recommended by Inuit as being rich and game and fur. And the traders never stood in the way of the summer walrus hunt or the fall caribou hunt. These were the source of winter clothing, of meat reserves, and of dog food. The dogs ate a lot of whale and walrus meat. While people bless you, mostly ate caribou, muskox, whale, and a variety of seals. The most interesting and telling form of non-intervention, though, and this might make some people uncomfortable, concerned executions of insane and dangerous people. In HBC records and retrospective employee interviews, there are at least a few stories of Inuit who went mad. They threatened to kill their family or neighbors, and they were executed by their community in self-defense. The killings I read about happened in the 20s and 30s. And they're interesting because the traders were told what had happened and they either didn't involve or minimally involved the police in the matter. In November 1924, for example, a trader uh recorded the following incident. Arrivals from Cape Smith report that people there in a very hard up state. They also brought the news that David was running wild there sometime in July and was going to break into the storehouse and get cartridges to shoot off some of the people. He was going about in a funny way and prevented all the people from leaving their tents, fired a dart at a young boy, sharpening his knife very often and making threats, treating his wife and family very severely and making other trouble amongst other men's wives. So they held fire and decided to put him out of the way. So his brother Amamukiaak and another man shot him. This person was always giving us a certain amount of trouble and minding everybody's business more than his own. As you see, the traitor wasn't very critical at all, and his comment about David's character may have been a way of vouching for the people's story. It doesn't seem that this killing was ever reported to the RCMP, which had arrived in the area two years before, and there's no evidence of an arrest or trial. The traitor had all the details to file a police report, but with peace and security restored to the community, it seems he chose to let the matter rest. Now, make no mistake, traitors were latent agents of the state, just as most state subjects are. Willing or not, they tended to collaborate with the RCMP when they came around, and they did report at least some killings. HBC trading posts even stored fuel for fighter jets during World War II, but the traders didn't actively try to interfere in Inuit law. They often knew everyone involved in these incidents. Uh so they tended to be understanding even though these killings were crimes under Canadian law by default because they were vigilante justice. Remember we're not allowed to take the law into our own hands. We all know that EuroIndian contact often ended in bloodshed. But for the most part Euroin relations in the Canadian Arctic were peaceful. The reason is that the state was pretty much absent from the Arctic. So let me tell you about that. In a time when many North American peoples were no longer sovereign, Canadian Inuit still ran their own lives because they were very isolated. Uh they were stateless communities that essentially lived by an Inuit version of natural law. That's what I describe it as. As you may have gathered from the incident I just told you about, each Inuit camp governed itself. There weren't any chiefs as in other native societies. People settled their own disputes, sometimes with the help of mediators, other times on their own. Respected individuals like great hunters and elders sometimes came together to decide how to deal with a major problem such as a person who' lost his mind. Uh but this happened on a very provisional basis. No one had indisputable coercive power over anyone else the way agents of a state have over its subjects. Each person could defend himself and his property against any aggressor. Meaning that each person had full property rights in his person. The flip side of this of course was that if you killed someone, you had to watch your back. If you killed someone wrongly, that is um Inuit law was based on private property and restorative justice. The goal of restorative justice is to restore harmony rather than to punish which is the focus of retributive justice systems like the one we live under. Inuit had communal property. This is just private property owned by a specific group instead of an individual. There were multiple Inuit groups and each had its own territory. This map of Inuit dialects gives you a rough idea of how many groups there were. The ancestors of these groups earned their property rights by living on the land and taking their livelihood from it. Just as other groups took possession of virgin land, they knew it land ownership in the era of traditional camp life from at least 1550 to about 1950 um didn't leave much of a mark on the landscape. There weren't any fences. Igloos melted in in the warmer months obviously and summer houses like this one uh could be dismantled and moved almost without leaving a trace. In much of the Inouit homeland, the frozen subs soil makes it impossible to grow food, except maybe on a small scale with a greenhouse. During the summer, there are some berries um and plants that can be harvested, but for much of the year, there's very little wild plant food available. The need to migrate around the group's territory. Remember that Inuit weren't full nomads, they were semi-nomads, meant that there weren't really permanent structures. But there were a few lasting signs of occupation and and possession. The the there were tent stones, depressions in the ground, and stone foundations that marked old camps. There were also old saw and stone houses. Um, and cannons also dotted the landscape. And they weren't like the little hipster stone piles you see everywhere. They were large like these. Uh, and that's because they were made by people who needed a landmark to find their way in a bare landscape. Finally, there were the tombs of the dead who weren't buried but were laid to rest on the hard ground and covered with stones. And I don't have a picture of one, sorry. Uh, finally, there um, proof to title of the land lay in people's knowledge of it. Neighboring groups knew each other and the limits of their lands. These boundaries were admittedly flexible, and people often did have fishing, hunting, and travel rights beyond their property. Uh but strangers didn't know the land at all, so they couldn't begin to claim it. Within the group, land ownership was also communal, but that didn't mean anyone could set up shop wherever. Uh because Inuit communities spent most of the year split up into small winter camps, two or three families only. Um each subgroup lived, hunted, and trapped in a specific area and came to be associated with it. These family plots of sorts could include sections of sea ice in addition to land. And according to geographer Peter Usher, individuals were also recognized as having preeminent rights to a trap line or fishing spot. People always had to ask permission to use land that wasn't theirs. Private property, of course, included movable goods like clothes, tools, and food. There were and there were special rules around food, which was probably the most valuable form of property depending on the situation. Inuit are known for their traditional food sharing practices which I mentioned earlier and even today they have community freezers in their villages. Uh but there were clear limits to this generosity back in the day and that's probably still the case today. Uh this is how it worked. There was a tacid obligation to share food with your group if you had any despair during periods of starvation. This was a kind of insurance policy. The idea was that if you shared what you had, the community would help you when you were starving, which was not an uncommon situation. This was a land with very low carrying capacity. Sharing with anyone who came under the horizon was a recipe for famine. So if strangers came begging, you played dumb. Food sharing didn't mean that there weren't individual property rights in fut. Meat was stored by specific people and households, and only members of their specific group could take from those caches. But even they had to ask permission. Taking someone's cash meat was probably one of the most serious thefts because it put victims at risk of starving. So natural law based on private property kept peace in Inuit communities. But although Inuit, as we have seen, already owned many parts of the Arctic, though not every square inch of it, as activist scholars would would have you believe, uh the Canadian government had claimed their homeland as its property since roughly the last quarter of the 19th century when the British government transferred it and a bunch of other lands to Canada. These maps give you a rough idea of how the country's internal boundaries changed over time um down to the present day. See, and that's that's pretty much how it is today. None of it was added in 1999. Nevertheless, the Canadian government had very few footholds in the Arctic at the dawn of the 20th century. By 1915, the whaling industry was in decline. But that was after more than a century of pretty much unimpeded foreign whaling in Canadian waters. Foreign explorers, prospectors, and anthropologists crisscrossed the region. Some even planted flags for other states. Otto Verduprop claimed the Spurge Islands and parts of Elmir. Who's that? Is that me? Anyway, sorry. Anyway, Otto Verduprop claimed the Spurge Islands and parts of Elmir Island for Norway and Robert E. Perry claimed the entire region for the US. Those claims didn't pan out, by the way. Um, and of course, you know, it went on sealing, whailing, trading, and migrating sometimes across international borders into Greenland and Alaska. And there were some clashes with between the uh Danish and Canadian government over over the Greenland hunting trips. Anyway, because the Arctic wasn't obviously any good for farm settlement, the Canadian government wasn't very interested in it. See, they didn't know about the oil and the uranium yet. So, they didn't want to do much up there. They were okay with with having the region function basically like a massive fur preserve. Nevertheless, all the foreign traffic kind of started to freak them out a bit. So they started sending Mounties north in the western Arctic where there was still a lot of whaling going on. The first police detachments were established in 1903 at Hersel Island, Fort McFersonson, and Fullerton Harbor. By 1919, there were 25 detachments and over 70 men in the Arctic. according to the RCMP. But in the Eastern Arctic, which was more isolated, there was no police presence until 1922 when the first RCMP detachments were established at Craig Harbor and Pond Inlet. The police were tasked with telling people that they were on Canadian soil, informing them of Canadian laws, extorting customs duties from whailing ships, and supposedly keeping order. Though they investigated crimes, the police were lenient toward Inuit at first because they considered them uh primitive people who had to be introduced gradually to so-called civilization. Um but even if that hadn't been the policy, the reality wouldn't have changed much. Many crimes simply weren't investigated, and this was because of the logistics involved. The police posts were ultimately few and widely scattered. It was almost impossible to cover the distances necessary to investigate every crime. Remember, this was a place with no roads, with extreme weather. Uh, pretty pretty hard to get around. People could easily avoid the police if they wanted to. Many whalers avoided fees by operating just out of reach, and Inuit accused of crimes could stay out of sight, too. It's also worth mentioning that in their day-to-day, the police directly relied on Inuit, who acted as guides, translators, provisioners of meat, and housekeepers. It's a little easier to enforce the law when the government pays you with money stolen from an anonymous taxpayer. And though this was true of the Mounties, the frontier conditions of the Arctic complicated things. When offenders were pursued, it took years to catch up to them, especially before the wireless radio, which only appeared in the late 1920s. Even when the Mounties did catch up to them, the charges were usually dropped due to lack of evidence and the difficulty of initiating legal proceedings. Judges had to travel north for trials. So a few years could go by before a case went to court. The first two Inuit to be tried under Canadian law were tried in 1917, four years after they killed two obllet missionaries. And in case you're wondering, the men were guiding the missionaries and things went south when one of the priests threatened and hit one of the guides. And don't forget that there weren't any courouses or jails. Let's see. They're having court outside. When people were held by the RCMP, they ended up helping out with chores and were even allowed to go hunting. This was the experience of the men in the last photo. Uh they spent years just hanging out. Basically, the enforcement infrastructure just wasn't there. All this is to say that the Canadian that Canadian state authority in the Arctic was more symbolic than real at this time. More than anything, the police were supposed to represent Canadian authority. And they mostly did this by planting flags and going on long patrols a few times a year, which they continued to do as late as 1969. Great use of taxpayer dollars. Though the Canadian government's presence and interference in the Arctic grew by the decade, it remained very weak until the World War II era, which brought a heavy military presence to the Arctic and more attention from Ottawa. In the absence of the state, Inuit and Whites met on the relatively level step of Inuit natural law. When disputes arose between them, Inu had applied the rules that kept order in their camps. And although the traitors were all state subjects, they had more leeway than ordinary citizens to defend their lives and property because they were pretty much on their own. No ambulances, no animal control, and more than likely no police. Um because traders couldn't defer to the state in an emergency, they were also living under natural law and practice, though they would of course have to answer to the authorities when the annual ship arrived. The statelessness of Inuit societies and the limited power of the Canadian state in the Arctic meant that there was essentially no monopoly of justice. The circumstances Oh, I apologize. Anyway, the circumstance created an environment of accountability and mutual respect for others as persons and property because under natural law, aggression has powerful and definite repercussions. In the Arctic, the government couldn't shield anyone from the consequences of his actions. So, no one could kill or steal with the short-term impunity that is possible when one entity administers all judgments and punishments. Acts of aggression could and did culminate in execution by the Inuit community. The case being decided in this picture is an example of that. But when everyone is fully liable for his actions, peaceful collaboration is often the best option. Though that doesn't mean that there aren't criminals and other deviants who cause trouble. The trade itself also encouraged people to keep the peace. The traders weren't in the region to plunder, to pillage, to colonize, to convert. They were there to do business with the locals. So, it didn't make sense to violate their property rights and piss them off. Likewise, Inuit saw the traders as a source of valued goods. They weren't oppressors. They weren't a burden. So, they didn't try to expel or kill them, which they had done with some of the earliest visitors to their homeland. Each group could continue to live by their norms and come together for trade and they could avoid conflict through mutual respect and mindfulness. In general, the my house my rules policy that reigned in the Canadian Arctic from roughly 1900 to 1945 though the trade continued thereafter for some time resulted in a higher standard of living for Inuit. They were able to continue their traditional life for a long time while adopting new goods and practices as they saw fit. It resulted in more wealth for traders and their companies who could enjoy a better lifestyle when they returned home to what they affectionately referred to as civilization. Call me crazy, but I'd say that the Canadian government ruined a good thing. And if you want to learn more about how that happened, you can check out my book on the fur trade, which will be out this fall. Thanks.