| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Elizabeth Vibert. Traders' Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807–1846. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1997. Pp. xviii, 366. $29.95.

Almost without exception, works on the fur trade in North America mine fur-trade documents (and a range of other sources) for factual details on what really happened. This book is very different: Elizabeth Vibert's aim is to explore "European perceptions of colonized peoples" (p. xi). Most fur-trade scholars are sensitive to the biases and prejudices in their sources, but few write about them at any length, and none has exposed the cultural worlds of traders to the degree Vibert has. Couple this achievement with Vibert's focus on the Columbia Plateau, a region overlooked by historians, and this becomes a book not to ignore. 1

In her "study of perception and representation" (p. 48), Vibert manages to analyze both the familiar (the impact of epidemic disease) and unfamiliar (landscape, traders' images of Plateau Indian society and gender). With other poststructuralist, postcolonial historians, Vibert assumes that truth consists not in objective facts (which do not exist) but in socially constructed, multiple subjective realities. Her language betrays her premises, as she speaks of her "project," of "interrogating" images, of ethnography and fur-trade documents as equally fictionalized. For theoretical inspiration, she draws not just on her dissertation advisor, Terence Ranger, but widely on a literature that, although rooted in Africa, is global. Alongside the names of Simon McGillivray, David Thompson, and other traders appear Pierre Bourdieu, James Clifford, Mary Louise Pratt, Gyan Prakash, and other postmodern scholars in the humanities and social sciences: an unusual juxtaposition for the oft-provincial world of fur-trade scholarship. . . .

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