this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2025
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As an indigenous person who grew up under the shadow of this company. As a boy, I saw my trapper father trade his last furs with the company just before the fur trade industry collapsed in the late 70s. Even as a boy I saw how much work my parents put into processing a dozen furs in exchange for not much money. And this had happened to my family for generations!!!
HBC was made possible by directly exploiting indigenous people for 300 years. They basically owned the land where my family lived. Which meant they could do business in whatever way they wanted with my ancestors. They bought furs for the cheapest prices that could barely sustain the lives of the people they paid. Then resold the furs for enormous profit in Europe. They did that for almost 200 years without any regulation or control which meant it built them one of the biggest corporations in the world ...... all In the backs of indigenous people who had nothing much to live on.
Fuck the HBC ...... it's a beautiful thing to see that terrible name taken down and destroyed.
This perspective is really important. A lot of us see HBC as a sort of national symbol and we often ignore the exploitation that led to its prominence. Thanks for sharing.
Man, how old are you?
And I'm sorry for what your family went through.
50s .... I was very young in the late 70s when I saw my dad make his last deliveries to the HBC store in Moosonee in James Bay. But our family keeps several photos of mounds of furs that my parents processed in the 60s and 70s ... piles! with a hundred or more furs all processed by hand ... this means weeks of a trapper walking and wandering in the wilderness and covering hundreds of miles on foot, snowshoes and dog team ... then returning all the animals to be processed (we ate most of the meat by the way because it was a way to feed the family at the same time) ... days of skinning animals ... I remember our kitchen reeking of fox, beaver, mink and even wolf with racks drying nearby while mom cooked the meat in a stew. I have fond memories of watching dad deflesh furs on stretcher boards he carved by hand, then tearing pieces of cardboard to stretch the insides of the limbs of the fur. I know it sounds disgusting and even inhumane in this day in age but for us back then it was all a normal part of our lives. And then finally delivering everything to the store for a few hundred bucks ... for work, time, effort and skill that would have cost thousands!
Wow that's amazing! Sad at the same time because of the exploitation, but still. It's pretty awesome you got to witness this.
Thank you so much for sharing all of this
using examples: a boy of age 10 in 1978 would be 47 today