Abstract
This chapter focuses on how seeing, thinking, and acting at the scale of the district changed relations of rule between the HBC as indigenous people. The chapter focuses on how the district report was used by the company to make indigenous people into “industrious” economic subjects. The chapter interrogates how the company attempted to use the provision of credit and census to tie indigenous populations to specific districts. Attention is paid to how HBC officials determined the overall economic productivity of the district through annual comparisons and, at the same time, used districts to record and track the annual hunting returns of individual hunters. Through these techniques of rule, the company drew a line between industrious and indolent indigenous hunters. For the company, this form of knowledge could be used to close districts, tear down posts, or find ways to “motivate” populations of indigenous hunters to be more productive.
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Notes
- 1.
Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 94, no. 1 (2004): 173.
- 2.
Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 391.
- 3.
Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess?”; Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC press, 2002); Colin Samson, “The Dispossession of the Innu and the Colonial Magic of Canadian Liberalism,” Citizenship Studies, vol. 3, no. 1 (1999): 15; Russell Smandych, “Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, and Law: Settler Revolutions and the Dispossession of Indigenous Peoples Through Law in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 3, no. 1 (2013): 82–101.
- 4.
Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess,” 168.
- 5.
Charles Bishop, “The Emergence of Hunting Territories Among Northern Ojibwa,” A Ethnology, vol. 9, no. 1 (1970): 1–15.
- 6.
Arthur Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998 [1974]), 117; Arthur Ray, “Some Conservation Schemes of the Hudson’s Bay Company 1821–50: An Examination of the Problems of Resource Management in the Fur Trade,” Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 1, no. 1 (1975): 49–68.
- 7.
George Colpitts has made a compelling argument that the period identified by scholars as a profound moment of ecological collapse and degradation (from 1820 onward) likely has less to do with an objective decline and more to do with the information that was captured in chief factors district reports. The sudden degradation in Rupert’s Land and instances of starvation was, in part, a product of more extensive reporting practices than those carried out in post-logs. See George Colpitts, “Accounting for Environmental Degradation in Hudson’s Bay Company Fur Trade Journals and Account Books,” British Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1 (2006): 1–32.
- 8.
Letter presumed to be from Simpson in the Selkirk Papers, XXIV, 72, cited in Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 290.
- 9.
Letter presumed to be from Simpson in the Selkirk Papers, XXIV, 72, cited in Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, 290.
- 10.
Bishop, “Cultural and Biological Adaptations to Deprivation: The Northern Ojibwa Case,” A paper prepared for the Symposium Extinction and Survival in Human Populations, American Anthropological Association, November (1974): 12.
- 11.
The other difficulty with this ecological crisis, as noted by George Colpitts, is that scholars are reliant on the ecological narratives that surface in the district reports. Returns on fur and also chief factors’ frequent discussions of “Starving Indians” are taken as proof that indigenous societies simply could not adapt to “depleted resources bases”. Yet, as Elizabeth Vibert points out, “starving” was at times used to designate indigenous people who simply refused to trade with the company or to engage in what was deemed productive behaviour and, thus, starving could also refer to people who were without HBC provisions and goods see Elizabeth Vibert, Traders Tales: Narratives of Cultural Encounters in the Columbia Plateau, 1807–1846 (Oklahoma: Oklahoma University Press, 1997), 276–277. In this sense, the extent to which a state of ecological decline can be read through the remarks of HBC officials on starvation should be contentious and, at the very least, considered in relation to the moral categorization of licit and illicit modes of subsistence that the company’s notion of starvation also served to denote.
- 12.
Bishop, “The Emergence of Hunting Territories Among the Northern Ojibwa,” 7.
- 13.
HBCC, LAC, “Osnaburgh House Post Journal 1790–1791,” 1M111, B155/a/5.
- 14.
HBCC, LAC, “Osnaburgh House Post Journal 1796–1796,” 1M111 B155/a/11.
- 15.
Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1 (London: Pelican Press, 1991 [1867]), 694.
- 16.
Marx, Capital vol. 1, 695.
- 17.
HBCC, LAC, “James Tate Governor Report of Henley House,” 1M779/B/117/e/1. Curiously, this document is entitled a “district report”, but it focuses solely on Henley House and does not abide by the categories of the district reports that emerged following the 1821 merger.
- 18.
HBCA, AM, “Minutes on the Assiniboia District” [1823–1824], 3M43/D/4/87, [my italics].
- 19.
HBCC, LAC, “District Report from the Albany Department, Angus Bethune-1823,” 1M776, B/3/E/8.
- 20.
HBCC, LAC, “Minutes of a Council Held at York Factory Northern Department of Rupert’s Land, July 8, 1823,” 1M814/B239/K1.
- 21.
HBCC, LAC, “Minutes of the Northern Department Council, July 5, 1823,” 1M814/B239/K2.
- 22.
HBCC, LAC, “Thomas, Vincent, Albany District Report 1824–1825,” 1M776/B/3/e/10.
- 23.
HBCC, LAC, “Thomas Vincent, Albany District Report, 1824–1825,” 1M776/B/3/e/10.
- 24.
HBCA, AM, “Simpson Outward Letters Outward Report to London, 10th of July 1828,” 3M6/D.4/16.
- 25.
The chief factor of the Saskatchewan District was accused of misconduct for trading with Cree and Chipewyan people who were on the books in the nearby district of La Cross Lake. HBCA, AM, “Simpson, Letters Inward, Edmonton, December 1844,” 3M67/D5/12.
- 26.
Angus Bethune was a holdover from the NWC and negotiated the amalgamation of the two companies in 1821. Although he was assigned as the chief factor to Albany District, he had spent most of his career west of the Rocky Mountains and had little knowledge of Albany.
- 27.
HBCC, LAC, “Report from the Albany Department, Angus Bethune, 1823–1824,” 1M776/B/3/E/8.
- 28.
HBCC, LAC, “Albany District Report, 1824–1825, Angus Bethune,” 1M776, B/3/e/9.
- 29.
HBCC, LAC, “Flying Post District Report 1823–1824, William McRae,” 1M778/B70.e/1.
- 30.
HBCC, LAC, “Flying Post District Report 1823–1824, William McRae,” 1M778/B70.e/1.
- 31.
HBCC, LAC, “Flying Post District Report 1823–1824, William McRae,” 1M778/B70.e/1.
- 32.
HBCC, LAC, “Flying Post District Report, 1825–1826, William McRae,” 1M778/B70/e/4.
- 33.
HBCC, LAC, “Flying Post District Report, 1825–1826, William McRae,” 1M778/B70/e/4.
- 34.
HBCC, LAC, “Moose Factory District Report, Joseph Burly, 1826,” 1M782/B186/e/10.
- 35.
HBCC, LAC, “Lac La Pluie District Report 1829–1830,” 1M778/B105/e/9.
- 36.
HBCC, LAC, “Lac La Pluie District Report, 1829–1830,” 1M778/B105/e/9.
- 37.
HBCC, LAC, “Thomas Adler’s Whale River Post Report, 1815,” 1M778/B372/2/E/1, [my italics]; see also HBCC, LAC, “District Report on Isle a la Crosse, 1822–1823, James Keith,” 1M778/B89/e/1.
- 38.
HBCC, LAC, “J. D. Cameron’s Lac La Pluie District Report, 1825–1826,” 1M778 B. 105/e/6.
- 39.
See Karl Marx, Draft Notes on the Civil War in France (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1971), 171.
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Henry, A.J. (2020). District Space and Productive Labour. In: Districts, Documentation, and Population in Rupert’s Land (1740–1840). Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32730-9_5
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