Peter C. Newman in his second volume of the Hudson Bay Company history entitled Caesars of the Wilderness, writes of Isbister’s protest about the treatment of Native peoples that could have been written in recent time instead of in the early 1800s.
Newman writes: Isbister, the articulate son of an HBC clerk and a Cree mother, had joined the Company and served with distinction at Fort McPherson, then its northernmost outpost, which he had helped establish. Angered by what he considered [Governor] Simpson’s reluctance to promote Mixed Bloods, he resigned. After spending some years at Red River, he enrolled in the University of Aberdeen, was admitted to the bar, and eventually became dean of an important British teachers’ college. He used his prestigious position to lobby Westminster and the Colonial Office . . . but his speeches, articles and books went unnoticed. His petition remains one of the most eloquent and unanswerable indictments of Hudson’s Bay Company’s treatment of the Indian peoples.
“When we assert that they are steeped in ignorance, debased in mind, and crushed in spirit, that by the exercise of an illegal claim over the country of their forefathers, they are deprived of the natural rights and privileges of free born men, that they are virtually slaves . . . that by a barbarous and selfish policy, founded on a love of lucre, their affections are alienated from the British name and government, and they themselves shut out from civilization, and debarred from every incentive thereto – that the same heinous system is gradually effacing whole tribes from the soil on which they were born and nurtured, so that very few years hence not one man among them will be left to point out where the bones of his ancestors repose – when we assert all this in honest, simple truth, does it not behoove every Christian man to demand that the British legislature should not continue to incur the fearful responsibility of permitting the extinction of these helpless, forlorn thousands of their fellow creatures, by lending its countenance to a monopoly engendering so huge a mountain of human misery? For the honour of this great country, we pray it will not be; and sincerely trust we, some few voices will respond earnestly. Amen.”
For “Hudson’s Bay Company” and “British” substitute “Canada” and “Canadian”, for “Christian man” say “person”, and consider how relevant it seems to you under the present conditions. Unhappiness and outright misery among Canada’s native peoples have a long history, and then there are the rest of Canada’s people in need.
Wish your friends and neighbours “Merry Christmas!” Thoughtfully.
Douglas Allen
Seguin Township