Daniel R. Laxer: “Listening to the Fur Trade”

Words and Huron University College are pleased to welcome Daniel Laxer for an afternoon visit at Museum London!

The presentation will include singing and fiddling.

In Listening to the Fur Trade, Daniel Laxer unearths traces of music, performance, and other intangible cultural phenomena long since silenced, allowing us to hear the fur trade for the first time. Laxer’s book uses the written record, oral history, and material culture to reveal histories of sound and music in an era before sound recording.

“As fur traders were driven across northern North America by economic motivations, the landscape over which they plied their trade was punctuated by sound: shouting, singing, dancing, gunpowder, rattles, jingles, drums, fiddles, and – very occasionally – bagpipes. Fur trade interactions were, in a word, noisy. Daniel Laxer unearths traces of music, performance, and other intangible cultural phenomena long since silenced, allowing us to hear the fur trade for the first time.”

Come and learn about a unique aspect of the fur trade as Daniel Laxer presents in word, image and song, his discoveries. Copies of the book will be available for sale.