13: Final Project!

Here are some revisions I made to my project based on the comments and suggestions I received during the class conference:

Shawn raised a great point about cultural and material transformations going hand in hand. After reading his comment, I included a small paragraph in my section titled, “The Goods” discussing how the influx of new goods and cross-cultural contact changed both cultural and material consumption.

Along the same theme of transformations, I really like what Hannah wrote about the fur trade sparking an ecological transformation based on its impact on the beaver population of the US Northeast. I chose to include this in my section on “The Payment”, as it fits well with my brief mentioning of the traders themselves being exploited by the encounter. The exploitation of the environment often mirrors the exploitation of indigenous groups, a significant concept to highlight here.

Hope and Kaycie both expressed interest in how indigenous traders interacted with other Europeans besides the Dutch. While this particular project focused solely on Dutch-indigenous trading relations, I realize I need to elaborate on how multiple empires and indigenous groups engaged in overlapping ways. I specified this more in my conclusion, “Going Forward”.

Lastly, Prof. Kane reminded me of the importance of looking at the national differences between trading in cash and trading in goods. I decided to focus on this more in my conclusion, suggesting that new research should touch on how different nations acquired goods in the first place and how this may account for Mohawk traders’ dominance in the trade.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback on my StoryMap! If you are interested, here is my final version.

-Kailey