George Colpitts provides an exceptionally insightful look at how pemmican, a “native foodstuff composed mostly of large quantities of bison fat and dried, pounded meat,” became the driving force behind British – and to a lesser degree American – imperial and commercial expansion on the northern Great Plains and in the Canadian West during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries (1). On the one hand, Colpitts's work is an environmental study of the pemmican or bison “bioregion” – “a place categorically and gastronomically different from any other … in the New World” – which created the conditions and circumstances necessary for the pemmican trade to flourish (58). But with the onset of nineteenth-century “market forces … and increasingly intensive bison hunting,” this peculiar region experienced untold environmental changes that threatened to upend that world, such as the mass depletion of bison herds and the shift away from Native power and control over that region toward Euro-Americans (2). On the other hand, Colpitts's book situates this food, which “not many people liked to eat,” at the heart of British, Canadian, and American nineteenth-century history, as “pemmican became a driving energy source” of Euro-American empires in this region (1, 3). In a sense, Colpitts offers a glimpse into the American West, Native–European relations on the Great Plains and in Canada, the region's burgeoning buffalo and fur trades, and ultimately the colonization of the northern Plains “from the perspective of its food supply” (3). Further, the author integrates “Native and Métis history with Northern Plains environmental history” to look at the “nature and asymmetries of power in food exchange” between Native peoples and Euro-Americans within the pemmican trade, which in itself illustrates an altogether “different history of aboriginal–white contact” (7, 18).

Central to Colpitts's exploration of the pemmican trade is the penetration of imperial and market forces into Native hunting traditions and food exchanges with Euro-Americans during the early nineteenth century. At first, the Cree, Blackfoot, Assiniboine, Ojibwa, and other Plains peoples were able “to negotiate their wants and needs within the market by integrating their food trades inside their traditional seasonal rounds,” thereby forcing Euro-Americans to play by their rules and to conform to their cultural expectations of reciprocity (264). In other words, the “Pemmican Empire” was at first a Native-oriented and -assisted entity, a collaboration between Native societies and Euro-American trade firms such as the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). However, the gradual infiltration of market forces profoundly altered “Native … choices and behaviors” as the demands for pemmican in North America led to a “more concerted and intensive market hunting,” which incited “regional disequilibrium” as Native communities increasingly competed against one another for access to the bison herds (17, 113). Such competition precipitated the so-called “Pemmican Wars” as “rivalry and violence” escalated between Native groups and in turn reduced indigenous power in the northern Plains, created “massive food problem[s]” in the region, and allowed commercial companies such as the HBC to monopolize the pemmican trade (101, 130). With such violence and the commercialization of the pemmican trade by the mid-nineteenth century, Colpitts argues, these forces “seal[ed] the fate of the bison herds … being intensively hunted for food, to a very bloody and uncertain end” (147).

But within this declension narrative, Colpitts traces the emergence of a Métis (mixed-ancestry) society that specialized in hunting bison and harvesting pemmican, and at times served as the employees of trade companies and contributed to the violence of the “Pemmican Wars.” Or in other instances, the Métis experimented with commercial and political alternatives to offset the dependencies of the traffic in pemmican, by engaging in lucrative side trades like the tallow and the buffalo robe trades, or by forming “larger assemblies, amalgamations, and cooperatives” of Métis who were able to exert a measure of influence and leverage within the pemmican trade (199, 235). Colpitts suggests that such political and commercial innovations served the Métis well in their relations with both American and Canadian governments during the late nineteenth century, as the Métis secured a number of concessions “in treaty negotiations based on this hard-earned experience” (259).

If anything critical can be said of Colpitts's book, it is the mere fact that he overwhelmingly treats the Cree, Assiniboine, Blackfoot, and Ojibwa as the most important and illustrative groups of the Native experience in the pemmican trade, while downplaying the involvement of other indigenous societies like the Gros Ventre, Crow, Mandan, Saulteaux, and Shoshone. Needless to say, then, Pemmican Empire is an astonishing and innovative work, a testament to Colpitts's meticulous research and truly insightful connections and conclusions.