The first HBC Governor west of the Rockies made his first tour of the forts with a note to himself in mind: the potential profit in Christian conversion of his newly acquired, autonomous Indigenous trading partners.

On August 15, 1824, George Simpson, Governor of Hudson’s Bay Company “North” (mostly west), left York Factory for the Oregon Territory.

      His mission was to make the newly acquired west coast trading posts profitable.

      After a bloody competition with the North West Company, and a decisive gunfight at Seven Oaks near the Red River, HBC had absorbed its rival trading company by Imperial British decision in 1821. Fraser, Thompson, and McKenzie had been NWCo. men.

      Like those ‘explorers,’ Simpson set out on the river highway with some colonial paddlers and the essential Indian Guide.

Unlike the previous company, he set out with a mission to test the west coast peoples’ receptiveness to Christianity; to introduce it and recommend it. A Company-and-King minded man, Simpson noted the profit that religious conversion would bring. He made a lot of notes.

      It was a key part of Simpson’s overall mission, which was to secure British North America in the west by making its trade competitive and resistant to America’s northward aspirations.

      The War of 1812 between the British and USA had only demarcated a 49^th parallel border between them so-far into the Great Plains.

      On the west coast, the British Crown sought treaties with Spain, Russia, and the Americans long before it ever made any treaties concerning land interests with the Nations who enjoyed ancient sovereignties there. Simpson’s work resulted in the Russia treaty at Alaska in 1825, and the Oregon Treaty with America in 1846.

200 years later, the actual role of the Christian churches among Indigenous Peoples has only just begun to be acknowledged for the Trojan Horse it was.

      Not until the indescribably tragic case of Blackwater v. Plint, 1997 – so unbearable to testify to, half of the dozen plaintiffs took their own lives during the hearings into church and state’s crimes against them as children in Indian Residential School – did BC settlers even acknowledge that its early work towards “Christian civilization” of Native Peoples was “flawed” and “regrettable” in 1998.

      They/we, the BC settlers, certainly have never come to terms with the way we profit from the most unforgivable truth about Britain’s churches’ role: to dehumanize the Peoples as they were; to peddle the myth that Britain’s God is superior to the Gods of these Peoples; and preach the associated divine right of its kings as if European domination was a natural inevitability – denying the sovereignties, jurisdictions, and land titles of the Native Nations to this day in colonial courts and international forums.

When today’s Indigenous Elders are questioned about why their people moved away from productive, beautifully situated, spiritually connected, and traditional seasonal villages – to the ill-suited, waterless, and usually barren Indian Reserves (all that was left to them by BC and Canada’s Indian Reserve Commissions, finally legislated in 1924) – one reason recalled is to be close to the church. Every Reserve had one.

      Terrorized by biological warfare, and with the only access to treatment or vaccination coming (when it inconsistently did) from a handful of legitimate Reverends, the connection between church and survival was often made.

Although moving to Indian Reserves was forced by two much more compelling reasons – government armed and escorted relocation, and deadly settler violence outside the reserves – community organizing around the on-Reserve church played a part.

      Most every traditional spiritual practice and ceremony of governance was criminalized under the Indian Act for over 75 years. Indigenous politics and religion sometimes survived just under the skin of a church, because gathering at church was the only kind of gathering not broken up by Indian Agents. Sometimes with a watchman posted outside, holding a cross and a Bible; and with raised voices signing Onwards Christian Soldiers inside; the secretly illegal gathering was sheltered. The Native Brotherhood, the Shaker religion, the Native Church, all ended up using the cross as a shield from the ills of the world, just not in the same way the Missionaries told them it would work.

      Christianity was used, in the end, as west coast Peoples’ defense against the invading foreigners who sold it to them. At least the physical symbols and the deceptive cloak of singing was effective.

Simpson, during his time, used his knowledge of the Sinixt, Sto:lo, and coastal Salishan Peoples to drive a hard inter-colonial boundary through their countries. The Oregon Treaty split their countries apart, on either side of today’s Canada-US border.

      The first western Governor of the HBC produced a legacy of bad faith and betrayal: promoting the lie of a beneficent Christian mission, making agreements for Britain’s essential trade in furs and geographical knowledge based on recognition of the Tribes, when he relied entirely on them, while at the same time engineering the infrastructure that would purposefully overtake and dispossess them. This legacy was the making of British Columbia.

As Native politicians famously orated in the 1970s, and ever since: “In the beginning, we had the land and all they had was the Bible. Now we have the Bible and they have the land.”

It started today, 200 years ago, with the first visit of the HBC Governor to the trading forts of the west. It continues today, with the Christian monarch’s head on every piece of Canadian currency and mounted on the wall behind every Canadian judge.

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For more on the early Oregon Territory, Simpson, European treaties over Indigenous lands, Missions and biological warfare mentioned in this article, see:

The Oregon Encyclopedia online

The Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, Manitoba Archives

The Canadian Encyclopedia online

Archive Quarterly ~ journal of “the west wasn’t won archive project”

Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, UK https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C29