Along the Chipewyan-Cree Interface
The southern Chipewyan and Western Woods Cree are both subarctic hunting people who became intimately involved with each other as the EuroCanadian-organized fur trade spread through north-central Canada beginning in the late 18th century. My ethnographic studies in the mid to late 1970s focused on the nature of this interethnic landscape in recent times. While many transactions between the two groups were of a cooperative nature (joint labor, magico-medicinal services, intercommunity festivals), Chipewyan attitudes and assessments of their Cree neighbors
were highly variable and laden with much negative imagery. The latter were exemplified by intercommunity rivalries, fear of adversive Cree medicine, and highly structured negative stereotyping in oral folkore and ruses.
Meaningful interpretations of current interethnic behaviors and attitudes required systematic attention to: 1) the historical development of Chipewyan-Cree socioeconomic relations, and 2) ongoing structural or organizational requirements for group boundary maintenance. 
It was evident that Chipewyan and Cree populations had not competed on an equal footing in the developing fur trade political economy. While the Chipewyan had retained a position as hunters par excellence, the primary producers of the mercantile system, the Cree had some historical experience as successful middlemen, and the growing Metis Cree class filled a niche as fur trade laborers and seasonal outpost managers. Payment of reparations to Cree, patterned avoidance behavior by the Chipewyan, and the prominence of the Cree language in mixed ethnic settings reflected the socioeconomic dominance of Cree and Metis Cree over Chipewyan. In the contemporary context, Chipewyan continue to interpret disappointing transactions, threatening poses, and other unwelcome behavior in terms of the negative qualities that they have conventionally attributed to the Cree. These historical conventions, then, become an explanation of present behavior.
