A close-up image of Jean Baptiste Carpenter's contract with the Hudson's Bay Company, taken by his great-great-great-granddaughter, Tanya Talaga, in Winnipeg, in November, 2024.
On Monday, a Toronto judge granted the Hudson’s Bay Company protection from its creditors. Canada’s oldest retailer now has mere days to come up with a financial plan to resurrect what is left of the HBC, with reports that it could close half of its 80 stores and leave nearly 10,000 jobs hanging in the balance.
I’m willing to bet that news sent a sad jolt through many Canadians of a certain age: those of us who grew up before the advent of online shopping. There was a time where every big city in Canada had a flagship store, their entrances embossed with the HBC logo, proudly trumpeting the founding of the company on May 2, 1670. And what’s more Canadian than The Bay?
Yes: What’s more Canadian than a department store, born from a fur-trade monopoly and run by British governors, that built the foundations of Canada while taking advantage of or even enslaving Indigenous Peoples to gain economic dominance, resources and land? Ironically, in the 21st century, the story of the HBC involves another empire altogether, too.
And yet Indigenous Peoples have a complex relationship with the HBC – and for many, watching its slow death brings mixed emotions.
Our relationship with the company was set 355 years ago, when Prince Rupert – who was instrumental in creating the Royal African Company, the dominant force behind the African slave trade – became the HBC’s first governor. He lorded over a vast territory christened “Rupert’s Land,” which stretched across what is now modern Canada and the northern United States. To be clear, this land was taken from the millions of Indigenous Peoples who lived on it. The Christian missionaries followed, bringing with them a belief in their right to dominate and convert, an original sin that would lead to forced attendance in Indian Residential Schools, the creation of the Indian Act and the othering of Indigenous Peoples.
In my third book The Knowing, in which I searched for my long-lost great-great-grandmother Annie Carpenter, I detailed the HBC’s origins after learning that the Carpenter family had been “employed” by the company. Last November, I visited the HBC archives, which had been donated to the Manitoba government in 1994 and added to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Memory of the World Register in 2007, and found a treasure trove of maps, early photographs, and the “Indian ledgers” from hundreds of HBC posts over the centuries. It was here that I read of Peechum Mistikoonap (a.k.a. Metokinabe), Annie’s father, whose name was changed from Ininiw to English as he became Jean-Baptiste Carpenter. I saw his original contract to work as a “labourer” for the HBC, touched by his own hand and signed with an “X”. I read the names of the families who were in Peetabeck – Fort Albany during the 19th century – and are still the bedrock of the Omushkego community. These ledgers represent the history of colonization of Canada – a story bound up in the country’s founding culture of economic servitude and the ways in which the legacy of this company plays out to this day.
But of late, the HBC has been trying to redeem its relationship with Indigenous people. In 2023, it donated its flagship Winnipeg store to the Southern Chiefs’ Organization, a group that represents 34 Manitoba First Nations and is currently transforming the heritage building into housing, a museum and retail spaces. It’s called the Wehwehneh Bahgahkinahgohn project, which translates to “It Is Visible,” a name that speaks to the effort to bring Indigenous lived truths of the fur trade to light. This is economic reconciliation at work.
The Hudson’s Bay Foundation also invested $1-million into Oshki Wupoowane, a fund that takes proceeds from sales of the iconic HBC Point Blankets – the sight of which often sends shivers down many First Nations peoples’ spines, as they are often associated with smallpox – and uses them to financially support cultural activities.
The road to reconciliation is long. Credit where it’s due: the HBC was trying to make things right, even if it was on its deathbed. But what happens next? HBC president Liz Rodbell has said that the company faces significant pressures, including Donald Trump’s tariffs and Canada’s retaliatory ones, which she says have directly affected their refinancing efforts.
So it appears the HBC is falling victim to the kinds of market forces that led to its birth. The HBC was set up by one empire, in Britain, and driven by consumer demand for furs; now, the American empire and changing consumer behaviours are threatening to take it down.
Here’s a thought: From the current chaos, what if something different emerges, this time with Indigenous people – and Canadians – as active business partners, helping to chart a new future?