Sara Mary Moore was born in Moose Factory in 1818. Her Métis father, George Moore Jr., was a steersman with the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), who had entered the company’s employ as a labourer half a decade earlier. George and his wife, Emma, raised Sara Mary within the vibrant Métis fur trade world of traders, guides, and woodsmen along western James Bay. In 1833, George briefly moved east “to Canada” before retiring to the Red River in 1834. Then, about 16, Sara Mary moved

New Year’s has long been an important day of celebration in many Métis communities. For some, the date was marked with happy visiting among friends and relatives. For others, New Year’s was a time to let loose. For those of the latter inclination, the need for a lively New Year’s party was further heightened after the 1821 merger of the Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company when HBC Governor George Simpson imposed new rules to curtail Métis workers’ love of parties and

George Atkinson was born at Moose Factory in February 1839 to Samuel Atkinson and Sara Mary Atkinson (nee Moore), whose Métis family had rich connections throughout the Métis Homeland from Moose Factory to Red River. When he was just 15 years old, George joined the Hudson’s Bay Company, following in his father’s footsteps and those of his Métis grandfather, George Moore Jr., who had originally joined the HBC in 1812 and served within the Company for several decades. In his fi

Following his apprenticeship at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Island Lake District headquarters near Lake Winnipeg, Joseph Turner Jr. briefly returned east to the HBC’s coastal port of York Factory. There, Joseph Jr. served as a labourer for only a year before moving westward again to the Cumberland District on the Saskatchewan River in 1837. The HBC’s Cumberland District headquarters, Cumberland House, was a major site of pemmican production and an important stopping point for

By 1859, the Abitibi Inland Métis Community both exhibited and asserted a distinct collective identity apart from First Nations, settlers, and others within the ranks of the Hudson’s Bay Company that employed many of the community’s members. This distinct collective Métis identity was on full display during a fight that broke out in Moose Factory between “the Half breeds” and Norwegian labourers at the Hudson’s Bay Company post’s annual New Year’s Day dance, and later recorde

Throughout the fur trade era, Métis employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company and North West Company—such as Thomas Favill, Nicholas Chatelain, William Sinclair, William McKay, Bte. Jourdain, and Joseph Guimond—held numerous and diverse occupations in the Rainy Lake region. Métis workers often served as versatile jacks-of-all-trades alongside non-Métis apprentices, post-masters, and clerks. Diverse Métis occupations included fishery operations, net making, hunting, cutting cord-w