Uncertain fate of Indigenous artifacts in the Hudson's Bay Co.'s Corporate Collection raises ethical questions during firm's liquidation

Winnipeg Free Press

16 hours ago

For a once-proud retail giant — built on a fur-trading empire so far-reaching it was known simply as The Company — it was an unceremonious end.
In March, after years of hemorrhaging at the bottom line, the Hudson's Bay Company announced it would begin liquidating its stores across the country, with the doomsday clock striking zero on June 1.
Shoppers driven by nostalgia and bargains flocked to stores for all things striped red, green, yellow and blue, the now iconic colour pattern of the three-and-a-half-century-old institution.
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Michelle Rydz, archivist with Hudson's Bay Company Archives, lays out a 1921 map that shows the disposition of land in Manitoba.
Savvier hunters, however, are still waiting on the sidelines and eyeing bigger prizes — HBC's private collection of 1,700 art pieces, 2,700 artifacts and even the company's Royal Charter are all slated for auction to help pay off creditors.
The 355-year-old document not only birthed Canada's oldest company, it effectively laid a foundation for colonial Canada itself — empowering HBC to operate like a sovereign government over Rupert's Land, which encompassed about one-third of present-day Canada.
The six-pages of imperial parchment, signed by King Charles II of England in 1670 and which gave HBC exclusive trading rights throughout the vast Hudson Bay watershed, could make a visually elegant trophy in a private collector's drawing room. And while no official valuation exists, clearly the collection's crown jewel stands to fetch more than a few beaver pelts at auction.
Additional details on the HBC Corporate Collection are scarce.
However, browsing @hbcheritage, HBC's official Instagram account for its heritage department, one gets a glimpse, finding images of Indigenous art labelled 'HBC Corporate Collection.'
This includes a handful of Inuit sculptures by unknown artists from the turn of the 20th century.
According to The Canadian Press, an unnamed source familiar with the auction process says items proposed for auction include 'paintings dating back to 1650, point blankets, paper documents and even collectible Barbie dolls.'
Neither HBC nor its auction house Heffel Gallery Ltd., responded to the Free Press questions about the contents of the corporate collection.
Nor have they identified publicly what's intended for auction. Many First Nations leaders worry Indigenous artifacts could be among the sale lots — items they feel rightfully belong to Indigenous communities, not in private mansions.
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The Hudson's Bay Company Archives currently hold all nine original supplementary charters, which were signed to mend the 1670 Charter of Incorporation. By the 1880s, the HBC found that its original charter was inadequate for conduct of its modern business, especially with regard to land sales. The HBC petitioned the Crown for supplemental charters, the first of which was granted in 1884. There are also supplementary charters for 1892, 1912, 1920, 1949, 1957, 1960, 1963 and 1970.
Unsurprisingly, that backlash is growing.
Leslie Weir, the librarian and archivist of Library and Archives Canada, is one of many who feels the charter is too historically important to remain in private hands.
And with HBC's deep historical roots in Manitoba — and much of its collection already housed at the Archives of Manitoba and the Manitoba Museum — several local organizations and public figures are opposing HBC's auction and argue the collection should come back to the province.
'Why don't they just make sure that these things that matter to the Canadian people, to Canadian history, to First Nations, Indigenous people … fall into the hands of the public?' Premier Wab Kinew said in late April.
The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC) has intervened to halt the auction.
In court filings from April, Grand Chief Kyra Wilson said it's highly likely some of the items slated for auction are 'of profound cultural, spiritual, and historical significance to First Nations people.'
The AMC has demanded a First Nations-led review of the artifacts, meaningful consultation, and repatriation of items of sacred and cultural significance for Indigenous peoples.
They've made some progress. The Ontario Superior Court conditionally approved the auction but required HBC to first submit a catalogue to the AMC and the court for expert review through the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board.
MIKE DEAL / FREE PRESS
Yet even if an item is declared 'cultural property,' that only restricts export, not domestic sale, and highlights broader regulatory gaps in Canada's heritage sector.
In better times, the HBC made significant cultural donations. This includes more than 20,000 artifacts to the Manitoba Museum in the 1990s and more than two million historical documents to the Archives of Manitoba in 1974, known as the Hudson's Bay Company Archives (HBCA), one of the world's most comprehensive archival repositories of its kind.
At the time, these donations were praised by many as enlightened acts of corporate social responsibility.
Today, the mood's very different.
As well as leaving 8,000 laid-off employees without severance packages, HBC argues they have a financial responsibility to their creditors and stakeholders and can't just give away such valuable assets.
As of early 2025, the company owed approximately $1.1 billion in debt, leading to its filing for creditor protection in March.
While discussions about Indigenous sovereignty intensify, the fate of HBC's collections raises thorny questions about who owns and controls Canada's colonial and Indigenous heritage alike.
Once stewards of colonial Canada, HBC has spent the last century stewarding that history.
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Almost every major western Canadian city, and particularly Winnipeg, has its origins as an HBC trading post. But by the early 20th century, rugged pioneers trafficking in fur pelts from armed garrisons were becoming store clerks selling perfume and silk stockings in glossy Bay department stores.
HBC had sold Rupert's Land to the new Dominion of Canada for £300,000 in 1870 without, of course, Indigenous consent.
The armed resistance it triggered — Métis leader Louis Riel's ill-fated resistance against the Canadian government's attempt to annex the Red River Settlement — was prime minister John A. Macdonald's problem and HBC could turn itself to new ventures.
The company opened its first department store in Winnipeg, at the corner of Main Street and York Avenue, in 1881. Winnipeg's middle-class could take in this emblematically Canadian experience with the security that followed Riel's defeat and Manitoba's entry into Confederation.
While HBC was helping to bring Canadians the luxuries of modern consumer life, it was also becoming more vocal about its historical role in modernizing the country.
In 1920, the year of the company's 250th anniversary, HBC released The Romance of the Far Fur Country. One of Canada's first documentary films, it's a nostalgic picture of the fur-trade era whose Indigenous subjects were sometimes asked to strike a more 'traditional' pose to suit the camera's colonial lens. (Romance was considered lost until Winnipeg filmmaker Kevin Nikkel reconstructed the film with Peter Geller, using original raw footage unearthed at the British Film Institute.)
It was also the year HBC launched The Beaver magazine, renamed Canada's History in 2010 and still active today.
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A map of Manitoba from 1921 showing the disposition of lands in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives.
Open an issue from 1920 and in between adventurous tales of traders, explorers and surveyors you'll find articles about HBC's purchase of 'Eskimo relics and Indian curios.'
In 1926, the company opened its flagship downtown store at 450 Portage Ave., cementing its roots as a Winnipeg institution.
The classical revivalist structure, radiating British imperial identity, still stands — although it was assessed at $0 in 2019 and required millions of dollars in upgrades to be brought up to code. The building was gifted by HBC in 2022 to the Southern Chiefs Organization, which is transforming the space into a mixed-use development and hub for Indigenous culture and community services. The handover ceremony included a symbolic payment of beaver and elk pelts.
Also in 1926, HBC established a museum in Winnipeg, a showcase of its collection, other fur-trade materials and HBC lore gathered over the centuries.
Today we know that very little provenance — recorded history of an object's origin and owners used to study its legal and ethical status — exists for artifacts acquired during this era.
Like early editions of The Beaver, the museum was not only an absorbing record of colonial history, but served as a PR tool, portraying the company as a heroic and civilizing force on the Canadian frontiers.
'These two positions always go together: the power to rule and control lands, peoples and waters (and) the power to document and control history,' says Adele Perry, University of Manitoba history professor and director of the Centre for Human Rights Research.
'And that's one of the really powerful things about colonial archives and records, and that's why the struggles with them exist.'
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The HBC Gallery at the Manitoba Museum includes a York boat, which was used by the Hudson's Bay Company to transport furs and goods along inland waterways.
HBC's interests in land management and rugged outposts did not end with the 1870 sale of Rupert's Land.
It continued to operate numerous posts across Northern and Western Canada well into the 20th century. These posts could act a little like an informal government arm, distributing food and goods allowances to remote communities, as well as supplying residential schools.
Northern communities could also receive materials on HBC credit, to be repaid with furs or other items, a system managed at the discretion of local HBC officers that could lead to deep debt.
Until the mid-20th century, HBC retained fertile land (known as the 'fertile belt') and extensive mineral rights in Western Canada, which spawned ventures including oil and gas exploration.
This history can feel obscured by the company's public image as a modern retail giant.
For many years, Winnipeg remained something of a Canadian nerve centre for the London, England-based company.
As the 'Gateway to the West' at a time when the city still radiated economic promise, Winnipeg was well-positioned to help co-ordinate transportation and distribution across the Prairies and the North, and its downtown edifice was the company's flagship Bay store for decades.
However, downtown Winnipeg's slow stagnation after the Second World War didn't bode well for 450 Portage Ave., and by the 1970s, HBC began to offload its guardianship of Canadian heritage to the Manitoba Museum and the Archives of Manitoba.
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Amelia Fay, curator of anthropology and the HBC Museum Collection at the Manitoba Museum, displays a pair of waterproof gutskin pants.
Established in 1974, the importance of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives to generations of researchers is hard to overstate.
Driven by what historian Robert Coutts calls the company's 'fanatical penchant for record keeping,' the collection comprises some 2,000 metres of documents — London Committee minute books, servant records, daily journals of agents at Hudson Bay posts, ship logs and so on — alongside volumes of architectural drawings, photographs and maps, maps and more maps.
'To know that land, to map that land, is an element of control… That's the history of colonialism, in a way, right there,' says Kathleen Epp, keeper of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives.
Plumbing the collection's depths, historians have grappled with colonialism's complexities and tragedies; climatologists illuminated the historical patterns of climate change; storytellers drew inspiration for yarns of war, historical romance and shipwreck; Indigenous researchers studied family genealogies and found evidence for land claims, treaty rights cases and status claims.
Lined up neatly are all of HBC's successive charters until 1970 — each a marker in the company's 355-year history. But missing is the story's first chapter: the original 1670 Royal Charter.
'We know exactly where it belongs in our system,' Epp told the Globe and Mail.
'We think of (the charter) as part of our records in a way already because … we've got the rest of the story and so we feel like it makes sense for the charter to be here and to be as publicly accessible as any of the other records.'
The year 1994 was another eventful one for the HBC's collections. That's when the company officially transferred the HBCA to the Archives of Manitoba, which had managed it for 20 years.
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Drawers full of HBC blankets and sashes.
It's also when The Beaver — whose triumphantly colonial tone had softened over the decades — became independent from HBC and when the company entrusted a vast but incomplete collection of its cultural objects to the Manitoba Museum.
The most famous is the 16-metre replica of the Nonsuch, the ketch that sailed into Hudson Bay in 1668-69, commissioned by HBC to celebrate its tercentenary in 1970. It was gifted to the museum in 1973.
But after visitors explore the ship's intricate carvings, cramped living quarters and muzzle-loading smoothbore guns, hopefully they'll wander over to the museum's HBC Gallery.
There they'll find brass tokens used as currency in the fur trade, a Plains hide dress and birch-bark canoe, and an array of other Indigenous and colonial objects related to navigation, exploration, retail and trade — just a segment of the museum's massive HBC collection.
Amelia Fay, curator of anthropology and the HBC Museum Collection at the museum, worries that if what's left of HBC's collection ends up in private hands it could hinder the study of key parts of colonial and Canadian history.
'To me, breaking up a collection breaks up that story,' she says.
'And then, of course, there's obvious ethical concerns. If there are Indigenous belongings — those going without consultation (is) perpetuating a colonial harm that museums are grappling with today. We're trying to repair those harms by reconnecting communities to belongings and looking into repatriation and rematriation.'
In May, the museum formally apologized to First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities for holding ancestral remains and belongings in its collections without consent. It further committed to repatriating more than 40 ancestors through its 'Homeward Journey' initiative.
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Samples of wood carvings to be sold in the stores.
As for its HBC collection, Fay explains that a key part of her job is doing detective work — piecing together patchy clues to trace the communities HBC employees visited in the 1920s while collecting for the company's new museum.
Some pieces may have been purchased from their makers, but given the deep power imbalances, those deals can echo the dubious terms under which land was signed over to colonial powers.
Fay says when her team tracks down descendants of the original creators, some ask for the artifacts back right away. Others want the museum to keep and care for them, at least for the time being.
'I think it's an important role museums can play: we can be this intermediary space where things can be safe, they can be publicly accessible,' she says.
'People can come and learn from them, and when the time is right, on the various levels that may be, then they can eventually find their way home.'
While HBC has been ordered to hand over its auction catalogue to the courts and to the AMC, whether it will willingly return items widely considered sacred or rightfully belonging to Indigenous communities or the public remains an open question.
Cultural property is often cited as one of the world's largest unregulated markets, and Canada is no exception.
'We do not have any legislative or legal framework in Canada at the national level for anything related to repatriation… which is what makes it a bit difficult,' says Janis Kahentóktha Bomberry, executive director and chief executive officer for the Canadian Museum Association (CMA).
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The Hudson's Bay Company became maior distributors of contemporary Inuit art. A small number of carvings are represented in the museum collection.
The association has vocally supported the AMC and criticized HBC's auction plan.
'But there are standards where we're asking for the full return of cultural belongings to occur with the involvement of appropriate Indigenous nations and as equal partners,' she says.
Bomberry is referring to the CMA's 2022 report titled Moved to Action: Activating UNDRIP in Museums, whose guidelines surrounding repatriation reflect the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action.
But like the international rights frameworks they draw on, the CMA's report is more of a moral manual than a rule book. This means the responsibility to research provenance, an expensive and chronically underfunded task, and pursue repatriation and rematriation falls primarily on collectors and museums.
It's a bit like asking a company to bankroll an audit that could show it's been profiting from looted goods, and hoping their conscience kicks them into action. Not every museum or collector is going to show the right stuff.
Still, Canadian law offers a window of hope to Indigenous and public stakeholders: depending on what the federal review decides, some of HBC's corporate collection could be designated 'cultural property' — blocking its export and keeping it in the country.
At that point, it's feasible that philanthropists might step in, purchasing key works and donating them to back to the appropriate Indigenous parties or public museums and archives.
HBC seems to be promoting this apparent 'win-win' outcome.
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Travel boxes featuring personal items that may have been included in a York boat crew member's kit.
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Adam Zalev, managing director of HBC's financial adviser Reflect Advisors, notes in an affidavit filed in April that 'government and quasi-governmental institutions, museums, universities, and high net worth individuals acting on their own accord or as potential benefactors to certain Canadian museums and institutions, have expressed interest in the art collection.'
Some still resent the possibility that priceless and sacred artifacts could be reduced to dollar values. The forthcoming sale leads to unflattering parallels between the company's grand entrance more than 350 years ago and its hobbling exit today.
'This is a moment where the Hudson's Bay Company is conducting itself differently than it did, say, 40 years ago, when they clearly engaged in good faith and created a lasting structure with both the Archives of Manitoba… and then the Manitoba Museum,' says Perry, the historian.
'Here we are reliving in a tiny way, the Royal Charter of 1670 and the transfer of Rupert's Land of 1869-70 (where) the thoughts and experiences of peoples in these places are of the most minor consideration.'
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Conrad SweatmanReporter
Conrad Sweatman is an arts reporter and feature writer. Before joining the Free Press full-time in 2024, he worked in the U.K. and Canadian cultural sectors, freelanced for outlets including The Walrus, VICE and Prairie Fire. Read more about Conrad.
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