ABSTRACT
This is a study of the socioeconomic adaptations of several human groups to a typical northern Great Plains region in Canada. We call this region, “Jasper,” after our fictitious name for its principal service-center town. One of the groups, a reserve of Plains Cree Indians, has lived in the region from early times as aborigines. The others—ranchers, farmers, and Hutterian Brethren—settled in Jasper during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the 1960’s, all but the Indians were engaged in gainful economic activities bound up in the larger national agrarian economy of Canada and North America. Only the Indians did not produce crops or livestock for sale on the national market; they survived largely on welfare and various forms of “panhandling.” The amount of economic interchange between the four groups varied, but as in other cases where agriculturalists produce for an outside market, the exchanges focused on informal mutual assistance on labor and supplies. Nevertheless, the four groups participated in a common frame of adaptive processes with respect to their use of the natural and social resources of the region.
