Trahant: The bankruptcy of an idea; Hudson Bay Company face of colonialism & capitalism

By MARK N. TRAHANT
Shoshone-Bannock
There is an important story that’s easy to miss: Hudson’s Bay Company, the Canadian department store chain, filed for bankruptcy protection last week in Ontario. The company says it’s facing a severe liquidity crisis and is unable to pay vendors and cannot pay its roughly 9,340 employees. The company is now selling off its remaining stock.

“It is hard not to have a sense of melancholy when considering the Application before me,” Ontario Judge Peter Osborne wrote. “Hudson’s Bay is the oldest company in North America and a very prominent Canadian department store. The company was founded in 1670. Now, approximately 355 years later, it is insolvent and seeks protection from its creditors.”

Hudson’s Bay was awarded a charter from King Charles II as one of the first modern corporations. It was the face of colonialism and capitalism. The company acted as the government over what is now Canada and the northern tier of the United States calling it “Rupert’s Land” named after a British prince. The charter granted plenary authority over those who were not “Subjects of any other Christian Prince or State.” That meant Indigenous world and lands were stolen without compensation. The Crown and the company at one point controlled nearly 4 million acres of land, ignoring the civilized rules of sovereignty or title.

Company traders introduced smallpox and tuberculosis to North America, wiping out entire communities. One major epidemic swept across North America around 1780. In the book, “Pox Americana,” author Elizabeth Fenn describes how quickly the disease spread across a Shoshone trade route that stretched in four directions, from the Southern Plains, on into Mexico, throughout the Northwest Plateau and into Canada. She wrote that there was no mortality data but she estimated that total deaths exceeded 50,000 people. In a tribal version of the narrative, Assiniboine historian Robert Fourstar wrote, “Smallpox epidemics came to our people three times. The first time approximately half of our people perished. Entire bands died.” He said warriors would prove their fearlessness by wearing the robes of victims – resulting in even more deaths from the disease. The sheer enormity of the societal earthquake is beyond imagination. Just think about three words: “Entire bands died.” Family, ceremony and community disappeared forever.

Hudson’s Bay officials described the loss in economic terms, a market slowdown in the fur trade. “This great fall is owing to our loss of Indians but what is worse, several of the Indians who brought the little we have got are since dead,” wrote Matthew Cocking in 1782. A few years later, the company was supplying vaccines to Indigenous people to protect its investment.

My family’s story came into the picture about in 1830s.

Nathan Wyeth built Fort Hall as a fur trading post on the Portneuf River in what is now southern Idaho. His idea was to operate as an independent, but he was up against the monopoly of Hudson’s Bay Company. His venture only lasted three years until he sold the fort to Hudson’s Bay Company.

One of my ancestors, Thomas Lavatta took up the trade running traps from Southern Idaho all the way to Manitoba. Last year I had a chance to look through some of the Hudson’s Bay archives to find that in those records he is listed as Thomas Lavallee, and had land holdings in Manitoba, Montana and Idaho. (The record is thin many of the documents at the Fort Hall Trading Post were destroyed in a fire in 1863.)

The Hudson’s Bay Company lost its U.S. operations after the Oregon Treaty of 1846 defined the border between the U.S. and Canada. The company claimed a million-dollar property loss – a demand that eventually was settled for less than half that in 1869.

Under American owners, the Fort Hall Trading Post was hit hard by the change of fashion in England. Shoshone and Bannocks preferred hunting large animals for food and clothes and the general demand for beavers declined. Who wanted a payment of only blankets or tokens, anyway?

I am not sure how I feel about the demise of the Hudson’s Bay Company. There is so much wrong with the company’s history and its painful extraction of wealth from Indigenous people. Yet I am a descendent of that legacy.

When the fur trade first began in the 17th century the trappers were discouraged from mating with the Native populations. But that didn’t last long. By the 18th century the idea of an Indian wife was considered a great help in the fur trading enterprise. That was my family. When I was a kid, I remember an elderly uncle telling me about how the family spoke Shoshone, Bannock, French and English. The language of trade.

Then there has always been trade across North America and it took place long before there was a United States, Canada, or a Hudson’s Bay Company.

One of the stories I love from the Lewis & Clark journals is about the encounter with the Shoshone. The captains painted a picture of poverty (likely a result of the smallpox pandemic) but then miss the signs of wealth, including bridles on the horses of “Spanish manufactory.” In the journal, Lewis wrote about a strip of dressed otter fur that was “the most elegant piece of Indian dress I ever saw.” The Shoshone trade route that included Mexican silver and otter fur had been in in place hundreds of years before Lewis and Clark.

Yet Hudson’s Bay ignored that legacy and operated as if Indigenous people did not exist as a partner or even as a customer. The company’s entire trading position was extractive, taking what it wanted.

It’s that idea that’s insolvent.

Mark N. Trahant, Shoshone-Bannock, is the former editor of Indian Country Today. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.