Hudson’s Bay Charter En Route To Museum – Is This Conservation Or Culturalism?

Three hundred and fifty-five years. That was the duration of time that the Hudson’s Bay Company existed prior to the beginning of its liquidation in March of this year. Founded in 1670 by Royal Charter of King Charles II, it is rather poetic that – over 300 years later – it would be dissolved under King Charles III.

The history of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the history of Canada are nigh inseparable. In line with the mercantilist policy throughout the remainder of the British Empire, the HBC effectively ruled Rupert’s Land. This was akin to the East India Company in the Subcontinent, and the British South Africa Company in Rhodesia.

As with all institutions of culture and identity in this country, the Hudson’s Bay Company had been fundamentally subverted, right under all of our noses. 

In an article published back in April, Jeffery Vacante of the Toronto Star pointed out that the liquidation of the Hudson’s Bay Company came at a very convenient time. Especially so for its American business magnate owner – Richard Baker.

Jeffery Vacante put it like this:

“In reality, Hudson’s Bay does not find itself in this position because of changing consumer habits… Rather, Hudson’s Bay finds itself in this position because its corporate ownership, led by the American real estate magnate Richard Baker, has decided to jettison its Canadian stores in order to more easily protect its American holdings… In other words, Hudson’s Bay’s descent into bankruptcy is not simply the story of yet another old company that failed to keep up with the times or with changing consumer behaviour… In this case, it is a story of the Canadian parts of the American-owned Hudson’s Bay Company being liquidated in an effort to protect its American assets.”

Now, I could make this an article about lambasting the Americans (which, trust me, I would love to do), but the Hudson’s Bay is just like every other fragment of Canadian governance and society in this aspect of its demise – infiltration, coercion, or destruction by our southern neighbours.

Instead, I would like to look at the fate of that Royal Charter which I mentioned in the opening paragraph. Back in September, two of Canada’s oldest families, the Thomsons and the Westons, announced a surprising joint offer to purchase the Charter.

It was not until November 21st that it was decided by the Ontario Superior Court to approve this bid.

The Courts announced that on December 3rd the Hudson’s Bay Company would put the document up for auction. The Thomson and Weston bid of $18 million would be the opening amount, and the winner of the auction would have to agree to donate the Charter to a Canadian public institution.

Before the announcement of the auction, the Thomsons and Westons released a joint statement on their intent to place the Charter in the shared ownership of the Archives of Manitoba, the Manitoba Museum, the Canadian Museum of History, and the Royal Ontario Museum, with its primary home being in Manitoba.

With the close of the Wednesday auction, the two families went unopposed. Their plan to donate the above institutions will move forward as planned – pending further court approval of the sale.

On its face, this seems like a healthy and happy fate for this historic part of Canada’s heritage. Personally, I am not so content with such an outcome. For a long time, I have loathed a tendency that people have for what can be referred to as “culturalism”. Broadly, culturalism is the worldview of so-called “civic nationalists” – people who maintain that a nation is defined by shared citizenship, while devaluing other key components such as a degree of shared ancestry, memory, and deeply felt identity.

In his essay On the Defence of Culture, Yukio Mishima uses the term “culturalism” to refer to a specific tendency of thought which I was reminded of when I heard about the auctioning of the HBC Charter:

“Culturalism is, in a word, that tendency which seeks to sever culture from its bloodstained womb of life and reproductive acts and judge it by some pleasant humanistic product. There, culture is transformed into something harmless and beautiful, the shared property of mankind, like a fountain in a plaza.”

This is how I feel when I hear that a Charter which was stamped by our King over three hundred years ago must pass into the hands of a museum. This Charter defined the course of our nation’s history. The Hudson’s Bay Company was the navel of Canada; a fundamental financial tie to the mother country. The continued existence of the Hudson’s Bay Company bound us physically to that history, and to that “bloodstained womb of life”.

I am not so prepared to let this tangible aspect of our patrimony be cut by foreign economic interest, auctioned like an abandoned storage locker, and tossed in a glass box to be gawked at and reinterpreted by ideologues.

You may think that I am being pessimistic with my last point, but even David Thomson, whose family is seeking to acquire the Charter along with the Westons, had this to say:

“I welcome the commitment of its custodians to consult with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities to foster an understanding of the significance of the Charter through the past and into the present and future.“

In fact, I implore the reader to scroll through the newswire list of statements on the acquisition. Almost all of them mention the Hudson’s Bay Company’s impact on Indigenous peoples, and how we need to preserve the HBC Charter for the sake of reconciliation.

Unfortunately, when people speak of interpreting Canada’s history through a lens of “reconciliation”, what they often end up doing is distorting that history and demonizing Canadian pioneers, settlers, and nation builders.

Reconciliation does not come from demonization. As we have already seen time and again with attempts to recontextualize Canada’s past, the history of the Hudson’s Bay Company will not be given the reverence or respect that it deserves. Instead, interpreting the HBC through a lens of reconciliation will be used as a pretext to demonize the very same old stock Canadian families that are acquiring the HBC Charter for these museums in the first place.

When I said that the story of the Hudson’s Bay was nigh inseparable from that of Canada, I was not kidding. The stories and ostensible fate of both the HBC and the nation of Canada are so similar, I could describe both using the exact same words. Tell me if this sounds familiar to you:

“Ruling over a vast domain, it was a key piece of the British Empire. Then as the British Empire began to recede, it was stalked and subverted by American interests. Initially, these American interests were seen as financial boons, and an opportunity to shed some of the colonial past in the place of a new image. Yet both of these would fail to deliver, as the Americans would pull the rug out from under it, and in the end ideologues would seize upon the weakness to place blame and guilt for colonization upon it.”

Canada is the Hudson’s Bay Company. Even if it is only a remote part of our history, it is a mirror for our nation overall. If we do not protect our country, and eliminate foreign influence in our government and nation, then eventually all Canada will be is a chapter in a textbook, and antiquities in a museum.