Inuit and Empire: The Hudson’s Bay Company, “Native Welfare” in Arctic Canada and Labrador, and The Eskimo Book of Knowledge (1925–1931)

Abstract: Historians have not examined the Hudson’s Bay Company’s (HBC) “Native Welfare” program undertaken by its Development Department from 1926 to 1931, and the work of George Binney, who consolidated the company’s humanitarian and health initiatives in these years into a London-directed social engineering program. His book, The Eskimo Book of Knowledge , published by the HBC in 1931 in both English and Inuktitut, and Native Welfare itself, was largely developed to address problems perceived in the company’s newly acquired Moravian mission trade, but discursively, the health, welfare and social programming it advanced targeted all Inuit in Canada’s north. Similar to other corporate welfare programs developed by firms in North America and Europe, Native Welfare attempted to raise the health, morale and productivity of Inuit. But Binney’s book encouraged Inuit to self-identify as citizens of the British Empire. The HBC’s Native Welfare likely supported if not provided the ideological foundations of the Canadian state’s interventionist development programs in the Arctic after World War II.