Blanketing a nation: Tracing the social life of the Hudson's Bay Company Point blanket through Canadian visual culture

The interest and popularity of the Hudson's Bay Company and their Point blankets across centuries and within Aboriginal, Métis, European, and Euro-Canadian cultures are evident in visual materials such as paintings, photographs, and advertisements produced in Canada. This thesis looks at possible associations that result from the continual presence of the Iludson's Bay Company Point blanket in creating a visual emblem of Canada. By highlighting what Arjun Appadurai has called the "social life" of an object, this project foregrounds the social lives of the Point blanket in Canada through three trajectories. All of these readings use Cornelius Krieghoff's The Trader, c.1850, as the central visual reference, and archival documents as primary support. The three trajectories explored in this thesis include reading the Point blanket as a sign in the visual language of the fur trade, as a commodity as well as "material link"---a qualifying term suggested by Harold Tichenor---in what Mary Louise Pratt calls a "contact zone," and finally, as an object that acts as a marker of Canadian identity.