Mythology, hogwash, and money.
Mythology, hogwash, and money.
A weird slavery claim, again. A shot across the Harris-Walz bow. Canadian genocide, again. It's all about the "narrative." It's all about the money.
First, many thanks to my subscribers for their patience and for their kind comments following Sunday’s Real Story newsletter. I’m still hard at those projects I mentioned. Miles to go before I sleep.
There was supposed to be a Monday morning roundup, but here we are on Tuesday with something much more substantial. So let’s just get into it. It’s about the mass media, and about stories that don’t get reported and questions that don’t get asked, at home and abroad.
Canada’s origins: A “bloody, violent racist mess.”
We’ll begin with this 2,710-word patch of Globe and Mail real estate from last Friday: Unfreedom in our fabric. The story of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its competitors – who laid the foundation for Canada – is tainted by British slave-owning families and the coerced labour of Indigenous peoples.
The essay is an adapted excerpt from Globe columnist Tanya Talaga’s just-published book, The Knowing, which appears to lean heavily on the genocide thesis of what you could call the “residential schools narrative” and the catechism of settler-colonialism wickedness.
The “Unfreedom in our fabric” essay purports to show that slavery was a central feature of the “bloody, violent, racist mess that defined the beginnings of Canada,” specifically the Hudson’s Bay Company.
I’m not going to belabour the points I’ve made elsewhere about the currently fashionable revisionism that relies on histrionics, deliberate misdirection and the redefinition of words to cast Canada as a slave state and Canadians as accomplices who must be constantly hectored to atone and pay penance for sins they never committed.
I’ll just point out, in passing for now, that all the deafening roars about settler-colonialism routinely cross over into polemics about the Israeli-Palestinian tragedies, which routinely cross over into Jew-hatred veiled thinly as “anti-Zionism.” It’s all part of the same gruesome package. It’s why you’ll see the same self-proclaimed Indigenous “allies” shouting the loudest at all those street rallies that are routinely misreported as “pro-Palestinian” protests.
To disclose my standpoint, there’s this, and more expansively, this Real Story edition: Revisionist "decolonization" & outright lies: slavery, emancipation and ironies.
Both of those essays should show that I’m quite an admirer of James Douglas, Hudson’s Bay Company factor and governor of the crown colonies of both Vancouver Island and British Columbia. An “octoroon” grandson of a “free coloured” woman from the Caribbean and a steadfast abolitionist, Sir James’ story doesn’t exactly fit within Talaga’s polemics, not least regarding Talaga’s treatment of the matter of Indigenous women in the HBC way of life.
Here’s Talaga: “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.’”
Fair enough. But then there’s Sir James’ wife, Lady Amelia, a high-born Irish Cree woman, and this inconvenient fact: While Eastern Canadians were celebrating the articles of Confederation in 1867, Sir James and Lady Amelia were savouring the first major aboriginal rights victory in Canada’s history: a Quebec court decision upholding the rights of those “country wives” whose marriages were solemnized by Cree customary law, including the marriages of Sir James’ own in-laws.
Talaga is a fine writer, but combing through her essay will produce evidence for HBC slavery only if you reformulate the term to encompass indentured service and labour contracts of the sort the HBC required of all its various workers, agents and traders. These are apparently instances of what Talaga calls “unfreedom,” which is equated with chattel slavery.
There is a reference to what might be a slave or slaves at York Factory in the 1680s, which was a rather long time ago, more than a century before slavery was restricted in Upper Canada in the first such law anywhere in the British Empire. There are allusions to the early HBC’s British corporate bosses’ family connections with the slave traffic of the East India Company and the Royal Africa Company. This is hardly news, and even now, after all these years, corporate bosses have a decidedly slovenly posture in regards to keeping slave goods out of their supply chains.
But there’s also this: “Few scholars study this neglected part of Canada’s history, but the University of Winnipeg’s Dr. Anne Lindsay is one historian who does. 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.”
If this is meant to mean chattel slavery existed from Montreal to the Prairies during the Rupert’s Land era, wouldn’t it have been useful to have cited one or two of these many untold examples? It shouldn’t have been difficult, if HBC slavery was so ubiquitous.
Here’s your answer: “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.”
So, slavery was a big thing during the HBC days - but the absence of evidence for it can be blamed on “erasure” and “a lack of record-keeping in a colonial narrative”?
There’s that word again. Narrative.
Here, Talaga quotes Lindsay’s work directly: “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.”
Okay, can we have examples of such encounters? According to this flattering portrait of Professor Lindsay and her work from two years ago: “Lindsay documents many instances of unfree labour, including enslaved people working for European settlers in Canada, like Joseph Lewis. Lewis, a Black man from New England, eventually ended up working for the Hudson’s Bay Company as a chattel slave in what is now The Pas, Manitoba.”
Well, that’s odd. Lewis isn’t exactly an unknown figure out of some occluded, erased history. He’s a fairly well-known historical figure. Here’s how he shows up in a piece in the Edmonton Journal in 2017:
Lewis — the name he used most often — was born in Manchester, N.H., in 1772, just as the American Revolution was beginning. In some Hudson’s Bay Company records he’s variously described as black, as mulatto or as “a coloured Canadian.”
Was he was an escaped slave? A free man seeking better prospects? We just don’t know. But sometime around 1792, he arrived in Montreal and joined the fur trade with either the Northwest Company or with its upshot rival, the XY Company. In July 1796, he switched allegiances and joined the Hudson’s Bay Company, signing an initial three-year contract to work as a “steersman” at a salary of £20 a year. The title and salary suggest he was a highly skilled canoe man. In the HBC records, he was praised as a sober, steady worker.
Are we now to take it that Lewis’ three-year HBC contract was an instance of slavery? Is the sternly abolitionist HBC factor and colonial governor James Douglas to be understood now as having been a slave of the Hudson’s Bay Company?
Who the hell knows.
But seriously, what’s the actual point of this never-ending fussilade of pamphlets, op-eds, books, slogans and harangues that depict Canada as the evil spawn of racism and slavery and white supremacy?
And what does this mania have to do with the nauseating celebrations that immediately followed the barbaric outrages committed by Hamas last October 7, and all the obscene “pro-Palestine” street melodramas ever since?
“The answer is that, long before October 7, the Palestinian struggle against Israel had become widely understood by academic and progressive activists as the vanguard of a global battle against settler colonialism, a struggle also waged in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries created by European settlement,” Adam Kirsch writes in The Atlantic.
“In these circles, Palestine was transformed into a standard reference point for every kind of social wrong, even those that seem to have no connection to the Middle East.”
Around the world and back again
There’s the stories we journalists tell, and the stories we don’t. It’s my nature to be drawn to stories you won’t find on the front pages and to wonder why those stories get deliberately ignored or just stupidly overlooked.