Unfreedom is in the very fabric of the Hudson’s Bay Company – and the origins of Canada

Tanya Talaga is a columnist for The Globe and Mail and the author of The Knowing, from which this essay is adapted.

In 1820, Sir George Simpson landed in North America, knowing nothing about the fur trade but bringing with him many years of experience in the West Indian sugar industry. Despite his lack of fur-trade experience, he had been sent to help oversee the merger of the Hudson’s Bay Company with its long-time rival, the North West Company, a prosperous fur-trade company started in the 1770s and based in London and Montreal.

For nearly 200 years, the North West Company, the short-lived New North West Company (also known as the XY Company and formed by disgruntled NWC workers) and the HBC had engaged in violent competition, each jockeying for control of the continent’s fur-trade business. Each had repeatedly leapfrogged over the other, rushing to explore areas inland to claim as their own.

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Simpson – a Scot and a ruthless businessman – quickly rose to the governorship of the entire Hudson’s Bay Company and its 250 trading posts throughout what was then called Rupert’s Land, holding the post until his death in 1860. He began his fur-trading career consolidating and closing trading posts, laying off staff and banning the sale of alcohol (he didn’t like any distractions from business). Vain and egotistical, he reportedly travelled with his own piper. He was also a misogynist and abuser of women, profoundly racist and by all accounts a bastard.

He was a man of his time. His uncle Geddes Mackenzie Simpson was a partner in the sugar brokerage Graham and Simpson, which had merged with the brokerage Wedderburn and Company in 1812. The Wedderburn family owned plantations and slaves in the Caribbean. Since 1810, senior Wedderburn partner Andrew Wedderburn Colvile had been on the board of directors of the HBC, and had taken note of the hard-working Simpson. By the 1820s, the slave trade was disintegrating, and the Wedderburn family looked to invest its money in the fur trade. It was Colvile who was largely behind sending Simpson to Rupert’s Land.

Given this, perhaps it’s no surprise that human slavery of those seen as lesser-than would come to form part of the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

This is a part of Canada’s history that is not widely known. It deserves a greater place in the national narrative. It is corrective history, and vital that Canadians understand that slavery existed in the fur trade in Canada. The HBC, the North West Company and the XY all had strong roots in the violent slave-owning empires of England and France. There was a complex web of relationships involving class, family dynasties and business interests of the fur trade, which intersected with the African slave trade and other interests of empire. They brought their laws, their morals and their values with them – and they were the foundations of Canada.

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In fact, Prince Rupert, the HBC’s first governor, was also a director of the Royal African Company (RAC), which in 1660 received a royal charter to run trade in West Africa. Fronted by James, Duke of York, who later became King James II, and Prince Rupert, King Charles II’s cousin, the RAC quickly became the monopoly licence controlling the transatlantic slave trade, a position guaranteed by a change in its charter in 1663. Thus, two British companies were instrumental to imperialism and to propping up the British economy during the height of the fur trade: the Royal African Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Many of the HBC’s first governors had served as directors of the RAC. Not only did they profit immensely from slavery, but they were themselves slave owners and plantation owners in both the Caribbean and in British North America. They also worked for a third British firm: the East India Company. Meanwhile, for a full 81 years between 1670 and 1799, the HBC had multiple clear, direct, strong ties between several of its governors and the RAC. One HBC director, Edward Ellice, owned at least 308 slaves on his plantations in St. Lucia, Grenada and Jamaica; a major artery in Winnipeg is now named after him.

Jean Selkirk is said to have been a full partner with her husband, Thomas Selkirk, in running the HBC in the 1810s. From her home in Montreal, while Lord Selkirk was actively involved in armed rebellions in Manitoba, Lady Selkirk made decisions on how to handle the conflict between the HBC and the North West Company and in running the HBC’s daily affairs.

Lady Selkirk came from a prosperous slave-owning family, the Wedderburns – the family that had joined forces with Simpson’s relatives in their slave-based sugar enterprises. She was the daughter of James Wedderburn Colvile and her uncle was John Wedderburn; both had gone to Jamaica and declared themselves surgeons, though they apparently had no such qualifications. They ultimately became wealthy plantation and slave owners with at least four estates. Aside from Lady Selkirk, many other members of the Wedderburn family also worked for the HBC – Andrew Colvile among them – and are listed in the Legacies of British Slavery database.

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It is clear that the foundational support for the fur trade in Canada came from slave-owning English and Scottish businessmen, who thought nothing of building an empire on the labour of Indigenous slaves. Few scholars study this neglected part of Canada’s history, but the University of Winnipeg’s Dr. Anne Lindsay is one historian who does. Her research reveals that many untold examples of chattel slavery existed in the imperial world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, extending from Montreal, over the Canadian Shield and into the Prairies. “Chattel slavery, alongside other forms of unfreedom, traced out along these webs, might be encountered any place that fur traders travelled, reflecting the racialized constructions of freedom and unfreedom they were familiar with,” she writes.

From the 17th century all the way through to the 19th century, on the basis of class, or caste, the colonizers built a segregated society in Canada.

Slavery – unfreedom – had strong and long roots in the James and Hudson Bay coasts and extending all the way into Manitoba’s Red River. One of the earliest surviving records of HBC activity around Hudson Bay, The York Factory General Account Book for 1688-89, notes a transaction of “one short English Gun given for a slave man, One Long: Eng: Gun given for a woman.”

Dr. Lindsay notes that the history of unfreedom – of slavery in Canada, of the buying and selling of Indigenous people and of their forced labour – is rarely discussed. It is a history framed by erasure, by a lack of record-keeping in a colonial narrative.

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Indigenous slaves were mostly women or young boys. They were stolen by war parties, then bought and sold like possessions. Our people were kept as HBC guides, translators, general labourers, domestic workers, passed around from one post to another. Slavery made many of our people economically dependent on the fur trade. Our women were stolen, they were trafficked, they were “married” off to the workers, the labourers and the traders of empire and given the most ridiculous, romantic name of “country wives.”

The HBC’s George Simpson openly referred to Indigenous women and those who were called “half-breeds” at the time as “brown bits,” “commodities” and “brown jugs.” He had at least 13 children whose mothers were Indigenous. After the women gave birth to his offspring, he threw them – and the kids – away. He tried to marry women off to subordinate employees, begged his friends to help cover up his behaviour, or just walked out. “If you can dispose of the Lady it will be satisfactory as she is an unnecessary and expensive appendage,” he wrote to a friend. “I see no fun in keeping a Woman, without enjoying her charms ... but if she is unmarketable I have no wish that she should be a general accommodation shop to all the young bucks at the Factory and in addition to her own chastity a padlock may be useful.”

Simpson believed the nature and moral character of Indigenous peoples meant they needed to be “ruled with an iron fist” and kept in a “proper state of subordination.” In fact, he thought educating Indigenous peoples was a complete waste of time – that schooling, like religion, was just another distraction from the fur trade. Educating them, he once wrote, “will be attended with little other good, than filling the pockets and bellies of some hungry Missionaries and schoolmasters and rearing the Indians in habits of indolence.”

It is essential that Simpson and his attitude be remembered as an important part of the Hudson’s Bay Company story: In him and in his conduct we are shown the principles of the men who ran it and how they viewed Indigenous people, particularly women.

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By the time Simpson had taken over, French and English fur traders had taken Indigenous women as wives for more than a century. Men needed partners on the land. If you weren’t from here, if you weren’t Indigenous, life was hard. It was even worse if you didn’t have the support of community. You did not know how to survive, where and when to travel, what to pick to eat, where to hunt, how to make clothes, canoes, proper shelters. The list is endless.

The women who became those wives were essential to the success of the fur trade, but, excepting the valuable research done by Jennifer Brown and Sylvia Van Kirk in particular, they have been largely forgotten by most historians – those who wrote Canada’s story as found in many school textbooks. This is in part because there was scarcely any record of their existence. Such was their level of disdain, the men and ruling classes at the time did not see the women as worth recording. That the lives of Indigenous women and children were poorly documented meant that, if they were separated from their families, they were subject to exploitation and easily enslaved. The sons of French and British workers and Indigenous women had no social standing. This left them, when they grew up to become young men and labourers, at the mercy of their employers.

Unfreedom thus defined the fur trade. It was a form of slavery unique to Canada that spread throughout all the lands the settlers touched. And it shaped the future of Canadian policy for centuries.

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Only occasionally, if women crossed paths with HBC or North West Company workers and ended up becoming one of their “country wives” – or, as the French called these arrangements, mariage à la façon du pays – do we ever hear of their existence. That phrase may conjure up some Hollywood-style images of “pioneer” times, of men and women proudly working together to eke out a livelihood. But life then was brutal, not the stuff of storybook romance, and these women had little to zero choice in their lives. Daughters were treated as commodities, traded for ammunition or land, sold to ensure a family’s survival. Without the voices of the women to tell us what really happened, those phrases and descriptions are naive at best. They are ridiculous and insulting.

What is written in the history books shows there was little respect or regard for Indigenous women: They were rarely seen as equals. How many of our women – and I include those the history books have called “half-breeds” – were abused, lost and murdered during this time? Thrown away, treated as less than dogs? What happened back then speaks to how Indigenous women are still treated in this country. Those centuries normalized seeing Indigenous women as tools, easily expendable, the most vulnerable and forgotten.

In contrast, the strength of Indigenous women cannot be overstated. We learned fast and quick how to survive, how to protect and fend for our children, and of the importance of the bonds of family, of kinship. Those survival skills and instincts have not let up, and all of us who are here now know that we come from a long line of Indigenous women who fought for our survival, who gave everything of themselves to ensure that we would be here to step forward and speak up, right now in the 21st century, to challenge the stories told by this country.

Those stories, written by historians and generally believed by Canadians for more than 150 years, are not our stories. They have not been told by us but were taught in classrooms alongside the tales of the adventuring English and French who reached our shores and boldly explored the country – so-called “explorers” who came here, planted flags and declared the land theirs. They made us sick with their diseases, wiping out entire communities. They made Indigenous peoples dependent on them, they enslaved us, and if we did not comply with their rules, they imprisoned us. Or they just killed us.

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In 1869, the fledging Government of Canada’s prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, paid the HBC $1.5-million for Rupert’s Land. The company had gone into serious decline after the slave trade wound down and furs were no longer in fashion. The English merchants who had profited from and backed these enslaving and monopolizing ventures were turning their eyes elsewhere. Macdonald had dreams of expanding the British colony and keeping it out of the hands of the Americans, who were actively courting the land after their purchase of Alaska.

Rupert’s Land was seen as a natural extension of Canada, which already encompassed what are now Quebec, Ontario, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The British government knew it was advantageous to enlarge the colony and keep it in the fold, and it had urged the HBC merchants to sell the land to Canada. George Brown, editor of The Globe, believed taking over this new land was Canada’s right, calling it a “vast and fertile territory which is our birthright – and which no power on earth can prevent us occupying.”

No thought was given to the Indigenous peoples who made their living off the fur trade or to the women and families left behind by Scottish and British HBC workers. Everyone was discarded and forgotten, thought of as non-entities. This was yet another historical moment that would imprint upon colonial Canadian culture the underlying notion that Indigenous people, women especially, were disposable.

Macdonald knew all this. He knew that Canada was taking over land that was already populated with millions of Indigenous peoples, and that the HBC had its own “treaties” with Indigenous people and communities in order to be on the land. “No explanation it appears has been made of the arrangement by which the country is to be handed over. All these poor people know is that Canada has bought the country from the Hudson’s Bay Company and that they are handed over like a flock of sheep to us,” Macdonald wrote at the time of the turnover.

The Indians were a problem that Macdonald and his government had to deal with. Much of Ontario had been settled with treaties made by the Crown and Canada, from those made in Niagara in the 18th century, to the top of Lake Superior, with the Robinson-Superior Treaty of 1850. Now it was time to go west. Truthfully, Macdonald had no interest in making treaties with Indigenous peoples, whom he saw as a nuisance, standing in his way along the path to the country he wanted to build.

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In 1870, one year after Rupert’s Land was turned over to Canada, Macdonald wrote to Adams George Archibald, then the lieutenant-governor of Manitoba. “Sir, We are looking anxiously for your report as to Indian titles both within Manitoba and without; and as to the best means of extinguishing [terminating] the Indian titles in the valley of the Saskatchewan. Would you kindly give us your views on that point, officially and unofficially? We should take immediate steps to extinguish the Indian titles somewhere in the Fertile Belt in the valley of the Saskatchewan, and open it for settlement. There will otherwise be an influx of squatters who will seize upon the most eligible positions and greatly disturb the symmetry [organization] of future surveys.”

This bloody, violent, racist mess that defined the beginnings of Canada is what my great-great-grandmother Annie Carpenter was born into.

Adapted from The Knowing by Tanya Talaga © 2024 by Makwa Creative Inc. Published by HarperCollins Canada. All rights reserved.

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