Iroquois in the West

"Iroquois principally from Caughnawaga, today's Kahnawà:ke, were recruited now two centuries ago on a par with Whites to man the large canoes taking trade goods west from nearby Montreal, coming back with animal pelts. While some soon returned home, others stuck with the fur trade, yet others made their lives across the west so far as possible on their own terms. Their stories speak to Indigenous self-determination and self-sufficiency. The book tracks four Iroquois clusters or bands across time, place, and generations. Set down among Montana Flatheads, Iroquois responded to their host's desire for the Catholicism they brought with them from Quebec by four expeditions to St. Louis in search of a Jesuit missionary, who no sooner arrived than lost interest, leaving Iroquois once again to mentor their hosts. The fur trade's economic imbalance impelled a second group, whose words quite remarkably survive as they were spoken, to overturn the status quo to the advantage of employees, they themselves engaging the American west. A third group opted for the Pacific Northwest fur trade, those doing so on the American side of a border put in place in 1846 discovering their long service mattered for naught when they sought to settle among their White counterparts, those in British territory faring somewhat better. Repeatedly lauded in travelers' accounts, a fourth cluster was displaced on their homeland becoming Jasper National Park, again on their new locale an Alberta boom town, yet still today self-identify as Iroquois."--