In 1915 the anthropologist Frank Speck had documented that the
Montagnais-Naskapi bands of Labrador held territory, essentially showing that private property ownership existed among
hunters and gatherers and arguing that this was an aboriginal,
precontact economic pattern (Speck 1915, 1923; Speck and Eiseley 1939). Speck’s evidence for private land ownership countered claims by Morgan, Marx, and Engels that collective, not
private, ownership was fundamental to hunting and gathering
societies. Speck’s study became more than an ethnographic obscurity when it was whipped into a “disproof” of Morgan, Marx,
and Engels by antievolutionists like Robert Lowie (1920, 1927).
Sparked by Strong’s unpublished data from Labrador (Leacock 1993:15; Leacock and Rothschild 1993), Leacock studied the
early Jesuit accounts about Labrador at the Bibliothèque nationale
in Paris and examined other historical sources for the sixteenth to
nineteenth centuries. A basic point emerged from her ethnohistoric research: Montagnais-Naskapi social life had been dramatically restructured due to the fur trade.
In 1950 Leacock went to Labrador to conduct ethnographic research with the Montagnais-Naskapi. By collecting genealogies
and mapping hunting territories, she was able to reconstruct
the historical transformations of the hunting economy and
Montagnais-Naskapi property relations. The combination of ethnohistoric and ethnographic sources deepened Leacock’s knowledge of the Montagnais-Naskapi and the historical changes they
had experienced. Individual ownership resulted from the
changes in property relationships triggered by the fur trade; it
was not, as Speck argued, an aboriginal economic institution. In
her tightly documented monograph, The Montagnais “Hunting
Territory” and the Fur Trade, Leacock (1954) carefully builds the argument. Speck had argued that the fur trade was relatively recent
(since the 1700s) and its impacts too short-lived to create completely new property relations. Leacock shows how indirect trade
began in the early 1500s and was of major importance by the early
1600s (1954:10–12). Citing historical accounts, Leacock documents
(1) that prior to the eighteenth century hunting bands were fluid
social groups freely ranging over large territories, (2) that individual ownership emerged in the eighteenth century, (3) that even
in the twentieth century property rules distinguished between
hunting for food and trapping for sale, and (4) that Jesuits, Hudson’s Bay factors, and government officials had been actively
changing Montagnais-Naskapi social and economic structures for
four hundred years (Leacock 1954). Leacock concludes,
It is becoming increasingly evident that Indian tribal life as
recorded in the nineteenth and even late eighteenth centuries
reflected important changes which had already come about as
a result of the Indians taking an active part in the world-wide
growth of trade and commerce. . . . The present study has taken
the position that the [Montagnais-Naskapi] are no exception.
Their apparent “primitivity” is deceptive. In order to reconstruct their aboriginal culture, one cannot simply record their
recent life and subtract those traits that are of obvious European origin. One must work from the understanding that fun-
damental socioeconomic changes have been taking place in
some parts of their area for over three hundred years, one aspect of which is the development of the family hunting territory. (1954:43)
Apart from its substantive merits, Leacock’s monograph contained two important, if tangential, points. First, the historical
changes of the Montagnais-Naskapi showed that traditional,
non-Western societies are not static—they change. This seems
like an obvious point today—and it is central to the ideas of Eric
Wolf (see pp. 350–56)—but it was not so clear to anthropology
prior to 1950 when “primitive” cultures frequently were characterized as conservative and stable rather than innovative and dynamic. Thus, Tylor could view non-Western societies as fossilized
representatives of earlier stages of human progress (see pp. 9–12),
Radcliffe-Brown could view social structures as expressions of
the stabilizing forces that maintain society (see pp. 154–55), and
Benedict could view the Native American worldview as representing stable cultural configurations (see pp. 81–85).
Second, Leacock’s emphasis on the transformations caused
by the fur trade highlighted two dimensions of change: changing concepts of property and gender relations. Although
sparked by an interest in primitive communism, Leacock intentionally camouflaged her interests in Marxism and evolution.
Writing her dissertation at the height of the McCarthy era, Leacock buried her theoretical interests in dense ethnographic detail. Years later she wrote that when she discussed the historical
transformations of production in Montagnais-Naskapi society, “I
cited, not Marx as I should have, but a chance statement of the
far-from-Marxist [Melville] Herskovits” (1982b:255). In 1954 it
was simply too dangerous to admit to an interest in Marxism.
Over the next twenty years the situation would change, and
Eleanor Leacock emerged as a leading Marxist anthropologist.