VIDEOS: A gut punch: Wildfire destroys Robertson Trading in La Ronge [Video]

Scott Robertson said his father, Alex, was a Hudson’s Bay Company-trained fur buyer who spent years travelling Canada, trading with Indigenous peoples.

“That was back in the day when it was like becoming a carpenter or a plumber, or an electrician. You would go to school — fur trading school in Montreal for a year or more,” he said.

“Then you would cycle through as an apprentice all the various posts across Canada — the Arctic, the western provinces, sometimes you would wind up in the east — You would learn to buy all those idiosyncratic skins like polar bears, walrus hides, and beluga whale hides, and all that weird stuff,” he said.

In the course of moving around Western Canada, his father spent almost a quarter of a century in remote communities and came to deeply respect and appreciate the culture, history, and people of the Indigenous communities he …