“Human–Animal Relations in the Early Colonial Fur Trade,” explores two different beaver species that inhabit North America and Eurasia. These species look very similar, inhabit similar environments and fulfill similar ecological functions, but have markedly different histories due to how humans have interacted with them on either side of the Atlantic. While overhunting and deforestation drove beaver populations to near extinction in Western Europe by the 1500s, beavers thrived in North America before the colonial fur trade. Drawing from an array of sources, including the writings of John Heckewelder, this presentation examines the height of the seventeenth-century fur trade in today's eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and southern New York, showing how exchanges between Indigenous actors and Dutch colonists were also marked by an exchange of ideas and beliefs about the non-human world.

Leech, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, has studied the personal correspondence of John Heckewelder, a Moravian missionary who, in the 1800s, lived among a Lenape community that had converted to Christianity.

Please note the museum galleries are on the second floor, which is accessible only by stairs.

Seating is limited; reservations are highly recommended.