“We See Hard Times Ahead of Us”: York Factory and Indigenous Life in the Western Hudson Bay Region, 1880–1925

• Published in: Journal of Canadian Studies
• Main Author: Coutts, Robert
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2018
• Subjects: Hudson Bay; Metis
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jcs.2017-0018.r1; https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/jcs.2017-0018.r1

Focusing on the community of York Factory and the surrounding region in northern Manitoba between 1880 and 1925, this article traces the transformation of the Muskego Cree and Metis peoples of the district from independent traders, hunters, and wage labourers to a colonized people with diminished economic opportunities. Through evidence gathered from Hudson’s Bay Company journals, reports, and accounts, as well as from Department of Indian Affairs records, missionary correspondence, and oral history, I describe how the establishment of a fur trade mode of production incorporated the Indigenous economy of western Hudson Bay into an international market of trade and production, making the people of York Factory part of a global economy based upon a capitalist exploitation of resources. I also suggest that, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the Hudson’s Bay Company conspired to mitigate the economic impacts of resource depletion on its profit margin in the York district by pursuing an arrangement with the Canadian government to assume financial responsibility for the Indigenous people of western Hudson Bay. The article will trace the process through which changing capital interests, both local and global, came to manipulate an age-old pattern of subsistence and labour, debt and trade, as well as economic interdependence.