 The Fur Trade in Canada also describes the cultural interactions among three groups of people : the Europeans in fashionable metropolitan centres who regarded beaver hats as luxury items ; the European colonial settlers who saw beaver fur as a staple that could be exported to pay for essential manufactured goods from the home country , and First Nations peoples who traded furs for industrial goods such as metal pots , knives , guns and liquor . Innis describes the central role First Nations peoples played in the development of the fur trade . Without their skilled hunting techniques , knowledge of the territory and advanced tools such as <unk> , <unk> and birch @-@ bark canoes , the fur trade would not have existed . However , dependence on European technologies disrupted First Nations societies . " The new technology with its radical innovations " , Innis writes , " brought about such a rapid shift in the prevailing Indian culture as to lead to wholesale destruction of the peoples concerned by warfare and disease . " Historian Carl Berger argues that by placing First Nations culture at the centre of his analysis of the fur trade , Innis " was the first to explain adequately the disintegration of native society under the thrust of European capitalism . " 
