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Peter Lake


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Lesser Slave River No.124 AB
Canada

Always with them either a feast or a famine: Living off the land with Chipewyan Indians, 1791-1792


Author(s): Helm, J.

Year: 1993

Abstract:
In this paper, Helm estimates the food and calorie intake of 18th-century Chipewyans based on the detailed journal kept by the trader Peter Fidler. Fidler traveled with a party of Chipewyans between Great Slave Lake and Lake Athabasca, from September 4, 1791 to April 10, 1792. He recorded in his journal the daily number of animals killed and consumed. Helm is left to estimate the size, consumable tissue, leanness, and calories of the animals. She also has to estimate the size of the traveling party, which changes as they meet and travel with other groups. She concludes that the average daily intake for members of the traveling party was 6.15-6.89 lbs., or 5140-5780 kcal per person.

Emporium of the north: Fort Chipewyan and the fur trade to 1835


Author(s): Parker, J. M. P.

Year: 1987

Abstract:
This study examines the establishment of the fur trade at Lake Athabasca, with Fort Chipewyan as its focus. It covers the period from the entry of Peter Pond in 1778, to 1835. By then, the fur trade had recovered from the damaging effects of the competition between the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company that preceded their amalgamation in 1821. The study portrays the life of a fort as it was related to the fur trade of a district. Fort Chipewyan, headquarters of both the North West Company's and Hudson's Bay Company's Athabasca enterprises, offers an opportunity to examine the fur trade under the differing conditions prior to and after 1821. Although documents are lacking for the North West period, there are sufficient records to indicate the conditions of the trade. Fort Chipewyan, the first European settlement in Alberta, was ideally situated for the fur trade, located as it is at the hub of a drainage system. The fort was reached from the south by the Athabasca River and the streams running to the north and to the west became highways for expansion of the trade. Lake Athabasca stretches to the east. As a base for extending the trade, Fort Chipewyan ranked second, surpassed only by Fort William on Lake Superior. It was not only the fur trade that benefited from the establishment of Fort Chipewyan, however, because as the "Grand Magazine of the North" it became the base of operations for land explorers. Alexander Mackenzie, John Franklin, George Back, and John Richardson were a few of the men who gained fame after passing through its gates.

Mapping how we use our land: Using participatory action research


Year: 1994

Abstract:
The study area of the traditional land use and occupancy study profiled in this booklet is broadly speaking northeast Alberta, south of the Clearwater River, west of the Alberta/Saskatchewan border, north of the Cold Lake air weapons range and east of the Athabasca River. In this region Athapaskan, Cree, and Métis people have mixed with Euro-Canadians engaged in the fur trade since the arrival of Peter Pond in 1780. The area generally opened up to settlement with steamboats on the Athabasca, the Alberta and Great Waterways Railway and the impetus created by World War II to construct roads into the region. By the 1950s the industrial economy was becoming more and more established and Aboriginal participation in wage work began to increase. Through the 1960s and 1970s with the establishment of new tar sands plants with state of the art technology, Fort McMurray became a Canadian boom town, and there was less and less incentive for Aboriginal people to maintain a full-time presence in the bush economy. Trapping, hunting, fishing and gathering became part-time activities for most, and thousands of outsiders also began to hunt and fish in the Aboriginal homelands with the assistance of seismic access roads, four-wheel-drive vehicles and float planes. Life for regional residents continues to change at a fast pace as the Alberta-Pacific pulp mill comes on stream and tar sands projects are expanded. These factors provided the incentive for the Athabasca Native Development Corporation to undertake the traditional land use and occupancy study described in this booklet.

Risking rupture: Integral accidents and in/security in Canada's bitumen sands


Author(s): Greaves, W.

Year: 2013

Abstract:
The expansion of unconventional hydrocarbon development in Western Canada is one of the most contentious issues in contemporary Canadian politics. Although widely studied, little attention has been paid to the framing of Alberta's bitumen sands within distinct and incompatible discourses of energy and environmental security. This essay examines these discourses using the tools of securitization analysis, asking the basic questions of what each presents as needing to be secured, from what, and by what means. Presented with two sets of socially constructed in/ security claims related to the bitumen sands and proposed pipeline expansion, the author suggests the social theory of Paul Virilio provides a useful intervention into securitization analysis that allows the material implications of these discourses to be clarified and assessed. Drawing upon Virilio's critical account of technological progress and his theory of accidents, this essay proposes that conventional accounts of "energy security" in the bitumen sands cannot result in meaningful conditions of security because they remain premised upon continued and expanded hydrocarbon consumption in an era of anthropogenic climate change.

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