Unfreedom in Canada's Fabric

 

This past Saturday there was a lengthy article in the Globe and Mail Opinion section by Tanya Talaga with the title Unfreedom in our fabric, with the image of a Hudson's Bay Blanket and a length of chain. Talaga, an Indigenous person, writes exceptionally well on Indigenous subjects, eloquently cutting to the heart of issues of the present day and the past.

 In this piece she makes the connection between 18th century British Empire families which had made their fortunes through Caribbean sugar plantations and the fur trade in what is now Canada.   As unconnected as they might seem, the abolition of slavery in the Empire meant that these families needed to look elsewhere to generate wealth and the region then known as Rupert's Land, run by the Hudson's Bay Company was ideal. In fact, Prince Rupert, first governor of the HBC, was also a director of the Royal African Company which had a monopoly in the transatlantic slave trade. 

A common thread was the exploitation of human beings. Most of those involved in running the fur trade treated Indigenous peoples as less than human. Talaga notes that this is a grim aspect of Canadian history we have chosen to ignore, although a scholar who is an exception is Dr. Anne Lindsay. Here are a few paragraphs from the article that draw upon Lindsay's work: 

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. 

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. Open this photo in gallery:

Voyageurs, illustrated in the 1880s, portage on a trip from Lake Winnipeg to York Factory, whose fort was established by the HBC in the 1680s. Its records from that era include notes of transactions for human beings.GLENBOW FOUNDATION LIBRARY/SUPPLIED

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. 

Do I really want to know about this sordid past as a generally proud Canadian? Honestly, I don't, but neither do I feel that I have the right to ignore it. As a member of Canadian society and as a Christian I acknowledge the importance of Truth and Reconciliation as a process. And we now dutifully make our Land Acknowledgements in many settings, including in many congregations of the United Church. But I can't turn away from the truth, even when it makes me uncomfortable. We still have a long way to go, a lot to learn, and so much to change.