Amelia McLean Paget was born in 1867 at Fort Simpson, in what is now the Northwest Territories. Her father, William McLean, was a Scot involved in the fur trade and her mother, Helen Murray, belonged to an illustrious Metis family which had been active in the fur trade for generations. Amelia’s life spanned some of the most tumultuous events in the West, including the disappearance of the buffalo, the North-West Resistance, and the establishment of the reserve system. She had a more sympathetic appreciation of Aboriginal culture than is found in many of her contemporaries. In People of the Plains(first published in 1909), she records her observations of the customs, beliefs, and lifestyles of the Plains Cree and Saulteaux among whom she lived. She died in Ottawa in 1922.

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Sarah Carter, F.R.S.C., is H.M. Tory Chair and Professor in the Department of History and Classics, and Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. She is a specialist in the history of Western Canada and is the author of Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, Capturing Women, and Lost Harvests. Sarah Carter was awarded the Jensen-Miller Prize by the Coalition for Women's History for the best article published in 2006 in the field of women and gender in the trans-Mississippi West.

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