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To thrive along the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers in the nineteenth century required expertise rooted in generations of living on the land, along with some good fortune. Arriving in greater numbers after mid-century, many fur traders and missionaries lacked the skills to sustain themselves and keep their hunger at bay. These failures, combined with a colonial focus on agriculture and its limits in the North, served to create a nineteenth-century culture of food insecurity. Where northern Indigenous stories about hunger reassured, protected, educated, and enriched, colonial stories about hunger often stoked fear and anxiety; they described northern places as impoverished and unreliable. This essay explores this early culture of food insecurity through stories told by Oblate missionaries about their failed hunts, conflicts between traders and missionaries over securing land for gardens, accounts of starvation, "fasting," and their interpretation, and the experience of one exceptionally hard winter (1888–89) which reinforced southern perceptions of the North as an intrinsically harsh environment and food-insecure place. The essay closes with an examination of the impacts of the whaling industry on caribou hunting among the Gwich'in and Inuvialuit to demonstrate how colonial extraction created new forms of food scarcity, foreshadowing the environmental impacts of twentieth-century resource exploitation. This article argues that food insecurity was both a cultural expression and ecological consequence of nineteenth-century colonialism in the North. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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