Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
Barb Gustafson lives in Prince Albert, Sask.
I recently went to The Bay, perhaps for the last time. The department store in my hometown closed long ago, and there were only two left in the province of Saskatchewan. Not for long – all locations across Canada will close by June 1, with Canadian Tire acquiring the fabled retailer‘s branding. I had to visit, one more time.
It was another reminder of how the retail world has changed. I thought of the wedding gifts we received, more than 40 years ago, purchased at The Bay. It was the place to go for a good-quality gift, a household item that would last, or a special outfit.
And I also thought about the legacy of the Hudson‘s Bay Company in Canada – not just the official and political history, but the history that is woven into my family, like the threads of a Métis sash.
There are tens of thousands of us in Saskatchewan, plus those in other provinces, who can trace our family roots through the HBC. For me, the earliest link is to Philip Turnor, the first surveyor employed by the HBC in the late 1700s. His journals chronicle the hardships of travelling via river and overland portage through modern-day Northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, mixed in with descriptions of the land and waterways. His early maps still exist, showing the beginning of understanding the vast land and many rivers flowing to Hudson Bay over which the company operated.
He would not have survived, in all likelihood, without the help of the Indigenous people already living on this land. They were his coworkers in travel, suppliers of food and care, saviours when winter came early – and, in one case, an Indigenous woman was his wife “à la façon du pays.”
Like many other British men who came to North America with the HBC, he took a “country wife.” Her name is not known or recorded, but there was at least one son from their union who then married and had a large family. Through generations, the sons typically joined the HBC’s ranks; the daughters married HBC men. They lived across the lands their grandfather had helped survey, tending to HBC forts and business.
That son, Joseph, was born in Moose Factory, Ont. He entered HBC service in 1799 as a labourer, later as a canoeman, a trader, interpreter and, at times, in charge of posts. His son, Joseph Jr., followed a similar path with the Company, serving at Cumberland House and Fort a la Corne in northeastern Saskatchewan. This is where my great-great grandmother and her dozen siblings were born, and where she married another HBC man, John Thompson, from the Orkney Islands of Scotland. We know he came to North America on the Prince of Wales II ship, worked as a labourer, then interpreter and postmaster before he died at age 36 in 1869 “after coming home ill.”
We know these details from the Hudson‘s Bay Company‘s records, held in their archives in Winnipeg. When an aunt set out to research our family tree – in the days before internet access – she travelled to the archives and pieced together that line of the family from the details there. She also contributed to some of the records, adding birth dates and other information not originally recorded by the company, with her name as the source.
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The archives of the HBC helped those of us here today to understand our ancestors. It was clearly a harsh life with all the inequities and prejudices of the day, the effects of which carry on to present times. But the glimpses of that life from the records also inspire admiration: the courage it took to load up and set off to discover an unmapped territory; the persistence to carry on when goods and surveying instruments were lost in rapids on a river; the determination of the grandmothers who were left with large families to raise when the men went back to England or, more often, died young.
It makes for a complicated relationship with a retail company, unlike any other. Yes, HBC over its more than 300-year history was a part of the exploitation of our country’s resources and, especially, Indigenous peoples. I could never bring myself to buy a point blanket from The Bay, the enduring corporate symbol with the distinctive bright stripes. Not even after the company acknowledged the blanket’s history – that it was not only seen as a trading item but also as a carrier of disease and symbol of colonialism – and pledged the proceeds of sales to support Indigenous people. Now, the chance to own one is gone as the shelves at the stores clear.
But the history of HBC also brought together my ancestors and helped make me – and my thousands of cousins – who we are today. More important than the blanket and the storied retail history, to me, is the symbol of the sash: the interweaving of British and Indigenous lives, and the legacy that will never end.