I am amazed at people bemoaning the loss of the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) immediately following the elimination of Bishop Grandin In my view, the impact of the HBC on the indigenous peoples of our region was significantly greater than that of Bishop Grandin So now that the Good Bishop has been written out of our history, I was actually thinking of asking St. Albert council to write out the HBC from our community as well. Unfortunately, business reality acted first!
Prior to contact with white explorers, the native peoples of our region were basically a hunter-gather peoples. However, with the coming of the European people, and especially the HBC (in around 1670), their lifestyles were dramatically changed to that of trapping and trading - disrupting their economies and traditional lifestyles forever.
Indeed, the HBC's success in the fur trade depended on the participation of Indigenous trappers, who were taught to provide the beaver pelts and other natural resources that fueled the company's business. The fur trade disrupted the traditional hunter-gatherer existence of, and economic relationships between, groups of indigenous people and led to their heavy reliance on European manufactured goods and foodstuffs, instead of their traditional food sources, largely eliminating their traditional lifestyles. Moreover, the resultant reliance of the native peoples on European goods led to an unsustainable lifestyle for many indigenous groups - which fact became ever more apparent as the fur trade waned and, finally, essentially collapsed. Indeed, the HBC's history and its role in colonization continue to be a source of conflict and discussion, with some Indigenous groups expressing concerns about the company's legacy and its impact on their communities.
It was this disruption that essentially set the stage for the need to try to integrate the indigenous peoples into a European lifestyle (their prior lifestyles having been all but eliminated by the European fur trade - which was, even then, diminishing) and the work of the missionaries in that regard. In my view, the work of people like Bishop Grandin was in an attempt to right the "wrongs" that actually had their origins almost 200 years before their arrival and to assist the native peoples in development of a lifestyle that might sustain them into the future they foresaw. The results of the failure of Bishop Grandin and his fellows can be seen in the downtown areas of the major cities all across Canada. The irony is that while people like Bishop Grandin are, today, seen as pariahs, the HBC is seen as a valued builder of our Country.
History simply cannot be viewed from a narrow single point of time but must be understood in its longer-term context. If you are bound and determined to re-write history, you must understand the "root" of that history and not just focus on its resultant and subsequent symptoms.
Don Thompson, St. Albert
