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The sea otter trade
The sea otter has the densest fur of any animal, and in the eighteenth century its pelts sold in Canton for sums that made a single voyage pay. The trade is a clear case of Indigenous people holding bargaining power and using it: they knew the prices, played ships against one another and demanded particular goods. The wealth funded a flowering of totem poles and potlatch later read as "traditional" although the scale was new and trade-driven. Then came the collapse: the otter nearly extinct, and the smallpox epidemic of 1862 taking an estimated two-thirds of the Haida.
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