Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 20

As the economic plight ofthe Inult developed into a political issue and it became evident that the fur trade 334 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

could no longer sustain them, Ottawa inoved north with a vengeance, formally accepting the fact that education and welfare were its responsibilities.

Well-intentioned teachers, nurses, doctors, welfare officers and adminis- trators galore arrived in the Arctic. To itionitor the behaviour of the new arrivals, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police increased its northern presence, being charged, among other duties, with distributing family allowances and old-age pensions.* Government handouts were

*Some of their patrols were aniazingly infrequent. ",lien an RC.MP constable arrivcd in the Belcher Islands on April 11, 1940, it was the first police visit since 1919. Official calls too "ere rare. "When I went to the Belchers in 1969," said former Commissioner Stuart 11odgson, "it A as the first public meeting that had ever been held there. As I recall, it was in a little oneroom schoolhouse that had been dumped offin the southern end of the Belchers rather than the north. As a consequence, a few houses were built for the local people, as their children were going to school.

Essentially, the main settlement was in the north end of the island. In any event, the meeting started about six o'clock and by midnight there were only myselfand the interpreter left. The rest ofour party had retired. At 2.00 A.M. as the meeting de,~ eloped into a sort of lull, I asked the people (all the locals were there-grandparents, parents, children and babiesthe entire settlement) if perhaps they would like to adjourn the meeting and they said, 'Oh, no.'At 2.30 1 again put the question to them, 'Have you anything more to talk about?' and they said no. I said, 'Well, perhaps we should adjourn the meeting,' and they again replied no, to which I said, 'Why not~'The reply was both astounding and humorous. They simply said that they had never had a meeting before and they thought it was a lot of fun. I was up the next morning at six o'clock. We had breakfast and left at seven to see the people at the north end of the island. When the plane landedand I opened the door, I was astonished to see the same people. They asked, 'Are we going to have another meeting?' The~ had travelled fifty miles overland that night in order to be there for another meeting."

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4.

Nurse at work in the Arctic

issued not as cash, which was still not a generally accepted means of doing business in the North, but as entries in RCMP ledgers. The police would itemize precisely what goods the people could receive and send the tally over to the FIBC store, which then handed out the merchandise. A typical 1945 monthly family ration consisted of fourteen pounds of flour, a pound of tea, three pounds of sugar, three pounds of rolled oats, two pounds of rice, six packages of Pablum and a gallon of coal oil. Not much to build a dream on, but better than starving. The notion of 336 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

receiving goods free from HBC stores that had previously traded them for furs was disturbing and not always understood. -The Mountie told me I could go into the trading post and buy anything I needed because I had family allowance," recalled Matthew Innakatsik of Baker Lake. "It didn't make any sense because I had never received anything for free before and I was afraid to do it."

The combination of nervousness about Canadian sovereignty, the paranoid influences of the Cold War, which gave the Arctic unexpected strategic significance, and the growing awareness in southern Canada that the Inint were severely deprived lent impetus to the government's involvement. Free match-box houses were provided for Inuit families in the main settlements, with electricity and water at nominal cost. The North became fashionable. Experts arrived by the hour, it seemed-scientists and human manipulators, all eager to carry the white man's burden. Minnie Aodla Freeman, a wonderfully wise Inuit from Cape Hope Island, summed up the effect of the influx most succinctly when she commented that the ideal Arctic

*Relations between the Mounties and IDuit were not limited to u elfare.

"Almost all the single RCM Policemen had native girlfi-iends," observed D-1- Cooch, a Canadian government ornithologist who specialized in on-site Arctic studies. "It was no big deal. But I remember being told about a young constable posted to Pond Inlet who was a very fastidious individual and apparently afraid of women, behaving like a bashU monk. One time, when his senior colleague had to go on patrol to Arctic Bay, he was out about five hours when he remembered something and went back. He could hear noises from the ground-floor bathroom, so he looked in and there was the monk in the bathtub with one of the local girls, scrubbing her back. There was a candle and a bottle of wine beside them and my friend, Cliff, said he didD't have the heart to walk in and disturb them."

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family now consisted of a husband and wife, four children and an anthropologist.*: After 1960, fainilv allowances and old-age pensions were sent directly to the intended recipients. Not only (lid some managers insist that old debts be paid before they extended any credit to their customers (a policy the Company claimed was not contained in their directives), but natives who dared send order forms to Eaton's catalogue department or any other compet.i.tor claimed their letters were occasionally mislaid. Even when orders did get through, usually on a cash- on-de livery basis, they could not always be claimed. Jean G.o.dsell, whose hushand was stationed with the JIBC in Fort Smith, recalled a typical scene when the long-expected mail-order goods finally arrived and the customers came to collect them: "One by one, they appeared at the wicket, their dusky faces wreathed in simles which soon turned to black anger when they found they could not take the parcels off in debt, as was the case with the trading stores. . . . Naturally, most of the parcels went back, but others came in on the next plane; still more came in on the steamer, and it was quite soine tirne ere the mail-order houses realized that Marie Chandelle, Rosalie Squirrel, Elsie Lame-Duck et at. were not, despite their substan- tial orders, the type of customers they desired."t

She married one- -Milton Freeman, a professor of anthropolo.*,, at the University of Alberta-and went on to write some of the best of the northern books, including SuTvival in the South and Life Aniong the Qallunaat.

tThe men had their own problems with mail-order catalogues, especially those pages featuring womens underwear. One trapper, gazing with fascination at the suggestive layouts,wrote awaV for "the lady on the far right of page 59."

338 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

Best of the newcomers to the North was James Houston, a Toronto artist who spent fourteen years on Baffin Island under contract to the Department of Northern Affairs, teaching the Inuit how best to market their soapstone creations. Carving, an intrinsic skill of the tnuit, had been used to fashion out of bone, stone and ivory the snow goggles, parka toggles, harpoons, arrowheads, ice-chisels, spoons, fish spears, talismans and toys that were part of their everyday existence. In 1949, Houston, a.s.sisted by Norman Ross, the HBC store manager at Port Harrison, collected a test group of Inuit carvings for the Canadian Handicrafts Guild in Montreal, which successfully sold the items. Gradually a market was built up for the best of the pieces. After a false start trying to produce bookends, ash trays and such, the carvers, under Houston's guidance, let their imaginations soar. By the late 1950s, the carvings had achieved international stature. The work was so successful partly because the carvers' own longing for a return to their ancestors' hunting days, expressed in their art, coincided with the southern buyers'

romantic notions of what "Eskimos" were all about. The native artists responded to the material they were working. Their sculptures were not as much artistic as ritualistic, the crystallization of moments in time.

"These are not cold sculptures of a frozen world," Houston noted. "They reveal to us the pa.s.sionate feelings of a people aware of all the joys and terrors of life. They also reveal an enormous freshness and ingenuity, a hunter's sense of observation." Once the soapstone trade was established, Houston and his then wife, Alma, moved to Cape Dorset.

"Oshaweetok, a famous Eskimo carver ... sat near me one evening casually studying the sailor head trademarks on two identical packages of cigarettes," Houston later recalled. "He noted carefully every subtle NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 339.

Artistand novelistjanies Houston

detail of color and Jorm, and he suggested to me that it must be tiresome for some person to sit and paint everV one of the little heads with exact sameness on an endless number of packages.... Looking around to find some way to denionstrate printing, I saw an ivory walrus tusk that Oshaweetok had recently carved. . . . Taking an old tin of writing ink that had frozen and thawed many times ... I dipped up the heavy black residue and smoothed it over the tusk. Taking a thin piece of toilet tissue, I laid it carefully on the inked surface and rubbed it lightly and quickly. Stripping the paper from the tusk, I saw that by good fortune we had a clear negative linage of Oshaweetok's incised design We could do that,' he said. And so we did." That was how Cape Dorset's block printing and sealskin stencil printing industry was born, 340 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

its evocative images later gracing museums and private collections the world over. By 1960, the HBC was buying forty tons of "Eskii-no" carvings a year for resale in southern Canada.*

The prints and carvings grew so profitable that the following year a native-run West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative was opened at Cape Dorset to market the art. Nineteen similar outlets were soon opened in other communities, over stern protests from the HBC. "They were strongly against the move," recalled Ben Sivertz, then Commissioner of the Northwest Territories and a co-op advocate. "But the Eskimos took to it like ducks to water. We didn't have to tell therri what to do. They took over from the Hudson's Bay post manager the business of setting carving prices. Jim Houston told me lie was away when it happened, but when lie got back to Cape Dorset he was invited to a rneeting where everybody brought in their carvings. Each one was put on a table and all the carvers wrote down what they thought it should sell for,- they then averaged that out, and that was the set price. They did that on their own in place after place. The pieces were sent to Ottawa, where we dis- tributed them to the Handicrafts Guild and other merchandisers-in San Francisco, Paris, London and anywhere. The money was then sent back to the carvers, and that in fact was how cash on a large scale first came

*A less serious Company sideline was the U-Paddle Canoe rental service for adventurous holidayers who wanted to spend part of their summers following the trade routes of the voyageurs or exploring the wilder sh.o.r.es of the continent's sub-Arctic rivers. The Company purchased twenty-eight seventeen-foot aluminum canoes in 1964 and distributed them to posts at likely locations. There were enough rentals (at twenty-five dollars a week) to allow the H13C to break even, and by the time the U-Paddle service was abandoned twenty years later, the Company had a fleet of eightvcanoes, renting for a weekly $125.

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'rhe Hunt, mgraving b.yjuanisialzi, 190

to the North-though it still had to be spent in Hudson's Bay Company stores."

As retailing compet.i.tion grew more intense, so did the scrutiny of the IIBC's methods and mark-ups. The Company maintained that its objective for mature northern stores (those established five years or more) was a 23-percent return on net a.s.sets (before interest and taxes). Some outlets exceeded that average and many others, particularly in the more remote areas, fell below it because of higher transportation costs. Testifying before the Northwest Territories Council on 342 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

May 27, 1981, Marvin Tiller, then head of the HBCs northern operation, gave a rare insight into corporate pricing policies. The retail price of non-perishable goods, he stated, included a mark-up of up to 25 percent on top of landed costs, with the margin rising to one-third on most perishable items. He pointed out that stock in the North turned over only one and a half times a year, compared with eleven or twelve times in the South. Instead of trying to refute the accusation that perishables at the HBC's Frobisher Bay store were selling at 70 percent more than comparable items in Montreal, Tiller boasted that "to lay down fresh produce in Frobisher .)t only 70 percent more than Montreal prices is, in our view, a remarkable achievetnent of planning and organization." Goods at the HBC stores were-and are--expensive, but most of the added margin is accounted for by transportation costs. In 1981, a five-pound bag of potatoes at Pond Inlet, for example, sold for a ridiculous $7.10. But its actual freight cost was $5.15. "We are probably regarded as large and prosperous frorn money made out of the natives," d.i.c.k Murray, the IIB(:s managing director, complained in 1966. -The fact that in ninety-eight cases out of one hundred our men are able and dedicated, and work under conditions that most Canadians would refuse to work under for any length of time, is simply not taken into consideration."

perception of the I [B(: was changing. Clearest summary of that evolution was the observation of Adrian Tanner of Memorial University, writing in Queen's Quarterly. "When I lived in an Arctic trading post community in the late 1950s, where trade with the Inuit was still conducted using Hudson's Bay Company tokens rather than cash, the two subjects which we learned to avoid at the segregated social gatherings of the white inhabitants were religion and impact of the Hudson's NORTHERN GRIDLOCK 343.

Bay Company on the native people. We who did not work for the Company found it remarkable that all Hudson's Bay employees, from the old-time traders to newest clerks who had just arrived from across the Atlantic, had a staunch and unquestioning loyalty to their employer and its past actions, and that when a subject like this was raised they seemed to quickly be reduced to irrational argument and wounded feelings. ... By the time I went north again in the mid- I 960s the Hudson's Bay Company fur trade and its effects on the native people had become something of a dead horse which the Canadian public was only too willing to flog, thanks to authors like Farley Mowat, and to some of the native political leaders.

However, my own att.i.tude to the recent situation, if not to the past history, had by then become less harsh. The Hudson's Bay Company's oper- ation of its contemporary monopoly in the north seemed to be a model of benign responsibility, in comparison both to the European exploiters in other parts of the colonial world, and to the other 'marginal men' who were by then taking over power in the communitiesgovernment administrators, policemen, missionaries and teachers."

*One of the major changes in the Arctic was the introduction in 1960 of legally sold liquor. Previously, with no legal booze available, some of the more desperate Arctic hands, both aboriginal and white, had been swilling Aqua Velva after-shave lotion, Lysol or anti-freeze. HBC employees for a while enjoyed a tastier and more literary potion. Because the ink used by store mana,,ers to mark ledger entries kept freezing in their unheated stores, an enterprising Boston manufacturer introduced a new variety of red ink that contained so much alcohol it didn't turn solid. Once the H13C field hands discovered they could drink the stuff as well as write with it, orders for the scarlet concoction multiplied rapidly But the Company caught on and went back to filling inkwells with less delectable thirst-quenchers.

344 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

"THE IMAGE OF THF CLa.s.sIC FSKEN40 is still that of Nanook of the North, the indomitable hunter clad in a sealskin anorak and polar-bear pants, his harpoon poised for the kill," concluded Sam I lall, an Arctic doc.u.mentary filin-maker, in a 1987 study. "In the Arctic today, this vision is as ludicrous as that of Caesar, his toga flowing behind him, a bunch of grapes in one hand and a silver chalice In the other, striding through a traffic jam in Rome." That's true enough, but the Inuit still live in both worlds. They left behind the last vestiges of the Stone Age only four decades ago; most were born in sealskin tents by the light of whale-oil lamps. The limit, caught between past and present, must find their refrigerators, VHS recorders and Yamaha trail buggies'l.u.s.t as unreal as their fathers' and grandfathers' walrus-meat sledge runners, whalebone eye goggles and iglus. All those stately kayaks, umiaks, York boats and peterheads were displaced by functional 14- or 24foot square-stern aluminum canoes, weighted down with 25- or 45-h.p. Evinrudes. For long *ournevs, there were the de I lavilland Twin Otters operated by the many airlines criss-crossing the North; for short trips, snowmobiles.

That switch-from dogs to sno,"-mobiles-was the final farewell to tradition. The few dog teams that remained were seldom used, except as rentals to filmmakers or white tourists pretending they were Scott of the Antarctic. It was the whine of the snowmobiles' supercharged 250-cc motors that shattered the Arctic dream. Soon there were more skeletons of dead SkiDoos than caribou carca.s.ses around the community dumps. Local teenagers spent endless hours aimlessly racing the machines in and out of settlements, the unm.u.f.fled roar of their engines giving voice to their desperation and their anger.

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In this troublesome context the HBC became a natural target for discontent. Despite the natives' steady incomes, from government handouts, it was a strict Company rule never to grant an Inuk a Bay credit card. At the same time, the Company came to be perceived as an agent of destruction of the old values. "The Hudson's Bay Company ...

helped the government practice genocide of Eskimo dogs, by providing the necessary hardware in which Inuit were to become a.s.similated into Canadian society," charged Josh '1~emotee of Frobisher Bay. "This would also place the Inuit into a credit situation. Whether it was a commercial plot to a.s.similate Inint is not known, but it seems coincidental that civil service posts would open up where Hudsoil's Bay stores located."

Billy Diamond, Grand Chief of the Grand Council of the Cree of Quebec, complairied that as late as 1970 the 11BC store at Rupert House was not paying interest on funds it was holding for its custoiners-yet charging interest on credit overdrafts. "I was just starting out as Chief at Rupert," he recalled, "and you had to buy everything at the Bay store.

After vour furs had been auctioned off by the Company, thc money went directly to the store and they told you how much your furs had been worth, though there was no way of verifying it. Then you dealt for goods, but the store kept the balance and paid no interest. Even if you deposited money for safekeeping with the Bay-and I heard of people who had $25,000 with the Company-you got no interest.... It was only my generation that said, 'Listen, there's much more to life than the Hudson's Bay Company. There's a world out there!"'

Reduced in their function to local supermarkets, the stores began to expand their merchandise racks, featuring such southern specialties as soft-p.o.r.n magazines, 346 QUEST FOR A NEW EMPIRE.

canned lobster, Poly-fil parkas with Velcro pocket fasteners and every possible variety of junk food. The surfeit of Kool-Aid, Coca-Cola, chocolate, bubble gum and potato chips from the HBC store meant that most young Inuit lost their teeth by the time they were teenagers.*

The HB(:,,, presence had radically altered the Inuit way of life, and while it was easy enough to be critical of the Companys impact, there was no permanent escape from the malignant forces of the white man's civilization. Within that context the Bay demonstrated remarkable restraint, and many of its local managers earned their reputations for fair treatment of their customers. "I got to know probably twenty or thirty of the Bay managers and I never knew one who was a rascal,"

recalled Ben Sivertz. "It was life ofa specialized kind and I think that the rect.i.tude and decency of the Bay men was remarkable, though I'm not talking now about s.e.xual relations with Eskimo women. That's one aspect that needs special interpretation. But all that stuff' about how mean they were about the prices they paid for fur, that was Company policy.

I am not sure there was any other way to do it." Even Billy Diamond relented in his criticism of the modern HBC. "The Company took a look at our needs and has tried to adapt to what we're doing up there andat the same time they're trying to give us a chance to take control of a lot of things," he admitted. "They used to be the only guys selling gas, outboards and Ski-Doos. We've taken over all that and the local trappers'

a.s.sociation is ordering its own canoes and supplies. The Hudson's Bay Company really streamlined its operations to bringing in the groceries, appliances and clothing.

*The 500-year-old remains of an Inuit woinan found in 1978 in a Greenland cave had a near-perfect set oi teeth.

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It's no longer a credit outlet." Nellie Cournoyea, an Inuk born in Aklavik and currently Minister of Health, Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources and Minister of Public Works in the Northwest Territories, agrees: " I'm indifferent to the Bay. To us it is just another store with no particular significance."

Under the IIBC's-and later the government's-sponsorship, I I fe was certainly better for the old and the sick, and having a box of matches was an improvement on rubbing sticks together to light a fire. But the argument about whether the Inuit were happier then or now can never be resolved. "I know people were happier in the old days," said William Kuptana, an elder at Sachs Harbour. "But I know for sure the~, were not happy every day." Former Commissioner Stuart Hodgson recalled asking Jimmy Kilabuk at Pangnirtung the same question. "I don't know," was the reply. "But I'll tell you this: when I was a young man, I can never, ever remernber being warm."

Minnie Aodla Freeman, the Inuit author, placed the Company in its proper perspective when she told a 1980 conference that it had "made easier lives for Inuit since 1670. They were in my home area of James Bay long before I was born, fur trading with my ancestors.... I think one of the reasons why Inuit welcomed the Hudson's Bay Company was the fact that the Company never tried to change Inuit ways of behaving or thinking. Yes, they changed our equipment, to better steel knives, steel saws, steel nails, steel axes and manufactured cloth. Inuit understood it was the furs that the Hudson's Bay Company were after. Inuit hunters had employment through the Hudson's Bay Company. It was the familiar job Inuit enjoyed. We still hear older Inuit today saying that the Hudson's Bay Company is most useful in Inuit lands. . . . Hudson's Bay Company sold Fort Garry tea to Inuit first, before it was sold in Bytown ...

pity!"

PART III.

MERCHANT PRINCES.

CHAPTER13.

THE LORDS AND THE.

GOOD OLD BOYS.

"In Fnglanel we gave them knighthoods; in Winnipeg they became directors of the Hudson's BaY Company.

Director joc Links, IIBC

THE TRANSITION OF THE BAY MEN from merchant adventurers to merchant princes was slow, painful and absolute. By the end of that long cycle, the Hudson's Bay Company had become a major retailing empire with no sense of privilege or feeling for history. But in the halfcentury leading up to that lapsed state of grace, the Company's top management went through a series of stops and starts, scrious internal wrangling and several boardroom convulsions.

The protagonists in this jousting for control were the governors, deputy governors and their enn.o.bled retinues trying to rule the Company from London pitted against a group of' fiercely proud, down-home Good Old Boys trying to run the Company from Winnipeg. The two groups did battle with the obdurate conviction of crusaders, each side serving the righteousness of its cause.

On the surface, it seemed an uneven contest. The British lords and knights were exquisitely aware of the subtleties of their clout and cla.s.s. Their authority was so persuasive because it flowed not from any divine right or self-proclaimed sense of superiority. They really were the best and the brightest in the upper crust of a society that

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