Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands

Barman gives readers a preview of a socio-economic world that she fleshes out in her recent French Canadians, Furs, and Indigenous Women in the Making of the Pacific Northwest (ubc Press, 2014), set in the borderlands of southeastern British Columbia and Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Born into the itinerant world of free traders in the Kootenay region and raised on a farm near a Roman Catholic mission and the Hudson's Bay Company's Fort Colville at the Columbia River's Kettle Falls some four hundred kilometres to the south, Morigeau rejected the dominant society's gender expectations for marriage and motherhood and, instead, charted a course of self-sufficiency.