The Fort Stanwix Treaties Ethnographic Study was designed to document the legacy of treaty-making at Fort Stanwix for Haudenosaunee peoples and its impact on Indian policy from the colonial period to the present. This tension played an important role in the creation of a contested fur-trade landscape, perhaps more so than the seemingly power-free concept of the "middle ground" would suggest. This performance was contested: Fur traders' own practices and geographic preconceptions also planted the seeds of an increasingly race-based colonial mind-set, in which Indians and their way of life represented an "Other" that was simultaneously desirable and repulsive. Rather than focusing on terminal narratives associated with acculturation, I argue through the examination of archaeological and documentary sources that Anishinaabeg peoples performed "acts of residence." As a process of emplacement, such acts also empowered indigenous peoples. In this paper, I consider the issue of change and continuity that was at the root of Quimby's acculturative models for understanding fur-trading relations in North America, and consider the usefulness of recent theoretical shifts toward survivance and "residence" (after Silliman 2014) to offer a more comprehensive picture of social dynamics in the late eighteenth-century social and physical landscape of the western Great Lakes and the fur trade.
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