Is It Offensive to Wear the Hudson’s Bay Point Coat?

Standing in front of the conveyor belt, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had just spent the last few hours carefully sorting through the detritus of other people’s lives as it rolled by me. I had paid my way into a rag house, the colloquial name for a garment recycling centre, which gave me the opportunity to dig through previously donated clothing inside of the facility before the clothes got destroyed and turned into rags or compacted into bales and shipped off to other countries. This is where many vintage clothing stores find their inventory. My thrifting hobby had led me to start a venture called Searcher Vintage in 2023, where I would curate a collection of clothes that I would find and sell at pop-ups and markets.

Masked and gloved up, I rifled through seemingly endless piles of cotton and wool. That’s when I saw it tumble onto the conveyor belt. I was suddenly face to face with one of the most iconic garments in Canadian history. Second only to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Red Serge uniform, the Hudson’s Bay point blanket coat is among the most recognizable pieces of apparel to ever come out of this country, and there it was, right in front of me, ripe for the picking.

Known for their signature multi-stripe design, point blankets were first turned into coats by a group of Indigenous women who were hired by British captain Charles Roberts to create new winter outerwear for soldiers at the fort that he commanded near Sault Ste. Marie in 1811. The point coat was first sold commercially in 1922, eventually becoming such an important Canadian symbol that they were proudly worn by the Canadian national team in both the 1964 and 1968 Winter Olympic parades.

In The Company: The Rise and Fall of the Hudson’s Bay Empire, author Stephen R. Bown explains that the point blankets were “immediately popular” when HBC started selling them in the late eighteenth century, “sometimes amounting to half the trade goods passing through some Company outposts.”

I couldn’t resist the pull of history and suspected that the coat might be valuable, so I eagerly snapped it up before it passed me by. I consider myself to be a jacket connoisseur, specializing in coats of all kinds. Just ask my wife: the vintage jacket collection that I’ve crammed into the crevices of our basement and closets could easily pass for a museum exhibit. I loaded a massive clear plastic bag full of clothes into the trunk of my car and scuttled down the highway back to my house.

As I studied the jacket’s sublime craftsmanship at home, I trained my eyes on the pattern. For some, it elicits instant nostalgia and national pride. For others, it’s an enduring symbol of colonialism. The Hudson’s Bay Company is inextricable from the Canadian colonial project, one of the dominant forces responsible for the assimilation, subjugation, and displacement of this country’s Indigenous population. A large swath of Indigenous territory was claimed by English explorers and renamed Rupert’s Land after King Charles II’s cousin, Prince Rupert of Rhine. This region eventually was part of 8 million square kilometres of land claimed by HBC, stretching across the country from what is now northern Quebec and Labrador into parts of Ontario and across much of the prairies into the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and even a small section of the northern United States. Fur traders also brought diseases like tuberculosis and smallpox across the ocean with them, decimating Indigenous communities in the process.

Founded in 1670, HBC was the oldest company in North America until their recent decline, predating Canadian Confederation. The point blanket might as well have been the Red Ensign. When Bay stores closed across the country on June 1, 2025, after HBC filed for creditor protection, it became clear that the symbol had lost none of its sway over the Canadian psyche, even as the company itself was collapsing. The blankets, and anything with stripes on it, became coveted items during clearance sales. A healthy resale market remains for the coats; a similar jacket to the one I found at the rag house was listed for about $692 on eBay.

For Canada’s Indigenous community, the fall of HBC has been a complicated moment. In an interview with the CBC, Indigenous designer Stephanie Eagletail shared that her grandfather told her that he still wore point blanket coats today “to show them that we’re still here, that we survived . . . a genocide.” Conversely, in a 2025 essay for the Globe and Mail about the retail giant’s collapse, author Tanya Talaga, who’s of Anishinaabe and Polish descent, wrote that seeing a point blanket “sends shivers down many First Nations peoples’ spines, as they are often associated with smallpox.”

Is wearing a Hudson’s Bay point coat today akin to rocking a Confederate flag hoodie?

“I’m ambivalent!” Anishinaabe and Portuguese author Cody Caetano says about seeing non-Indigenous people wearing the point coat. “I do know some Native [people] might take offence about anything related to the Bay . . . because of the connotations and heft of the legacy, because it’s a company turned country,” he explains. “I’m only offended by someone non-Native wearing it [because] it’s ugly and gaudy.”

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Caetano then sent me an Instagram reel featuring a montage of well-heeled, mostly white young influencers attending a Skijoring festival in Banff. Skijoring is a winter sport where a person on skis gets pulled by an animal, typically a horse. The fashion looks displayed in the clip smack of cowboy cosplay. The styles are almost completely Indigenous in origin: Aztec patterns, mukluks, fringe jackets and pants. When a young couple kisses for the camera, the Hudson’s Bay point coat draped over the woman’s shoulder hits me like a jump scare in a horror movie. Seeing it in this context felt gross and appropriative, a twisted Canadiana. As iconic and instantly recognizable as the design is, those stripes also carry colonial baggage that remains difficult to shake off today.

What we wear is a representation of who we are, but that can get muddled by the competing contexts that come embedded in the clothes that we put on. When I wear my Carhartt J165 jacket in Hamilton, is it industrial cosplay? It can be hard for folks to tell whether I’m a steelworker on my lunch break or an aging hipster on the go. I regularly wear a vintage N-3B snorkel parka among other military jackets for aesthetic and qualitative reasons, despite being staunchly anti-war. It’s partly an effort by me to shift their context away from their original purpose, but there will still be many passersby who won’t be aware of or appreciate that perspective.

These are the choices that we must navigate in a capitalist society where we’re regularly forced to decide between nostalgia and a dark history, between convenience and exploitation. The Hudson’s Bay brand didn’t prove too toxic for Canadian Tire, which announced its acquisition of HBC’s intellectual property in May 2025. They promised to sell point blankets in their stores while giving all net proceeds and at least $1 million a year to the Blanket Fund, a grant program that “provides support for Indigenous cultural, artistic, and educational activities” that advance reconciliation.

It’s a gesture that also stands as a tacit acknowledgement that any future revenue earned from selling the point blanket pattern remains somewhat tainted by the past. Any engagement with the stripes is a kind of Faustian bargain. Getting rid of the point blanket entirely would be tantamount to brushing a fraught history under the rug. But highlighting the design too much as part of a corporate rebrand could also be seen as disrespectful. That a mere piece of cloth can hold so much meaning, positive and negative, is what keeps me from selling that jacket that I snagged at the rag house.

For now, the point coat that I found remains in a storage container in my basement. Consider it another piece for the archive.