Touching wood: Jim Clifford, Sam Huckerby, ‘Logging and Settlement beyond the Rapids: Unmaking Algonquin Space in the Ottawa Valley, 1817-61’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 3, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Touching wood: Jim Clifford, Sam Huckerby, ‘Logging and Settlement beyond the Rapids: Unmaking Algonquin Space in the Ottawa Valley, 1817-61’, Canadian Historical Review, 106, 3, 2025

07Oct25

Abstract: Growing demand from the British timber market led loggers to push deep into Algonquin territory in the first half of the nineteenth century, and tens of thousands of agricultural settlers followed suit. While the Algonquin faced unrelenting pressures from the timber industry and agricultural settlement, colonial governments representing the Crown failed to negotiate the acquisition of Indigenous land as required under the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Using expanded timber ship immigration data from 1817 to 1839, as well as agricultural census manuscripts, we reappraise how timber extractivism operated in conjunction with settler colonialism to dispossess the Algonquin in the Ottawa Valley. Our case study, which focuses on Westmeath Township, demonstrates the interconnected processes that prioritized and enabled thousands of settlers to transform remote, unceded land into a neo-European landscape, effectively “un-making” Algonquin space in a short period of time. Settlers followed the timber roads up the Ottawa Valley beyond the Rocher Fendu Rapids in the 1830s and 1840s, drawn in part by the high prices paid by timber camps for oats and hay. Farmers extended the ecological transformation of the regions begun by the loggers, clearing forests to establish permanent farms above the rapids. Timber extractivism and settler colonialism fed one into the other as the logging camps provided labour opportunities and a market for animal feed, timber ships provided cheap passage, and settlers provided food and labour.

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