WINNIPEG, Manitoba — Near the old perfume counters at Hudson’s Bay department store in Winnipeg, Canada, a symbolic exchange took place.
The head of Hudson’s Bay—the oldest company in North America—accepted beaver and elk pelts from Indian leaders in exchange for the building, the company’s flagship.
The ceremony took place a year ago when Hudson’s Bay, the once-chartered company to found the colony that became part of Canada, gifted its six-story, 55,000-square-meter boarded-up building in the center of the City to a group of First Nations.
But what seemed like an act of reconciliation is now up for debate as the cost of transforming the building has become clearer: Was it a real gift or an empty one?
The transfer has focused attention on the evolving relationship between Hudson’s Bay and the indigenous peoples of Canada, and the company’s central role in the history of a country founded on the fur trade between Hudson’s Bay and them.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and others at the ceremony hailed the transfer as an act of reconciliation between Canada and its oppressed indigenous population. But the details of the deal raise questions about economic equity as Canada works to achieve reconciliation with its indigenous peoples.
The indigenous owners plan to convert the store, built in 1926, into a multi-use building for their community that would include restaurants, a rooftop garden and a healing center.
In 2019, appraisers said the building was worth nothing — or actually less, because it would cost up to C$111 million to renovate, or $82 million. The company declined to comment on the matter.
For generations, at least for non-Indigenous patrons, a visit to the City Center was not complete without a visit to the elaborate neoclassical Hudson’s Bay monolith that encompassed the most select blocks of the commercial area.
The transfer was a powerful act, particularly for people like 27-year-old Darian McKinney, one of two indigenous architects tasked with the building’s transformation. Like many other indigenous Canadians, McKinney never went to the store. “Even if you could afford to shop in Hudson’s Bay, you would feel like you didn’t belong,” he said.
“The atmosphere in Downtown Winnipeg was rooted in the exclusion of indigenous peoples,” said Reanna Merasty, 27, the other indigenous architect working on the building’s redevelopment.
The building’s new owner, the Southern Chiefs Organization, is struggling to raise the last C$20 million of the C$130 million it says is needed to renovate the building, which sits largely empty.
In the 20th century, Hudson’s Bay evolved from fur trader to modern retailer, opening department stores across Canada. But nearly a century after it opened, the Winnipeg store closed in 2020, a victim of the pandemic and online shopping.
Owned since 2008 by American real estate magnate Richard Baker, Hudson’s Bay found itself saddled with a worthless structure that—designated a historic building in 2019 against the company’s wishes—couldn’t be demolished but was forced to continue paying taxes on it.
But then the Southern Chiefs Organization contacted Hudson Bay with an offer to take over the building and turn it into a center for Indian life, said Grand Chief Jerry Daniels, the organization’s leader.
“It’s quite appropriate, because the indigenous peoples actually built Hudson’s Bay,” Daniels said. “And that’s the story that needs to be told, that we really built this Country.”
In recent years, Canada has been forced to “recognize that the core of Canada as an entity is a colonial project,” said Adele Perry, a professor and expert on colonialism at the University of Manitoba.
By: NORIMITSU ONISHI
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6769413, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-20 21:00:07
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