Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Daniel Sims, Associate Professor of First Nations Studies; Adjunct Professor of Education, University of Northern British Columbia
News recently broke about how the RCMP’s security service infiltrated and surveilled Indigenous rights organizations in the 1970s.
Many of the people whose privacy was violated pointed out how these activities highlight the colonial nature of the Canadian state, but another theme also emerged — they weren’t surprised, and had suspected, that they were being watched.
These perceptions have been repeated as the news has expanded across the country, resulting in calls for an apology and more transparency.
Indigenous Peoples in Canada have been heavily monitored for hundreds of years in ways that non-Indigenous Canadians might find shocking. In fact, the sheer amount of information that exists about Indigenous Peoples due to this surveillance belies the stereotype that when it comes to Indigenous issues, there is not a lot of information available.
Colonial erasure (the removal of Indigenous presence from both past and present) and narrative forgetting (the creation of partial or distorted stories that obscure reality) may help explain this mistaken belief, but it can also reflect a simple unwillingness to engage with the evidence.
If anything, the real issue is how accurate the information is, an important consideration for researchers and investigators when examining any data set.
Missionaries and the fur trade
The first two major sources documenting Indigenous Peoples are private materials produced through missionary and fur trade activities. Neither were created with disinterested motives.
Missionaries, for example, wanted to show how successful they were, especially when it came to raising funds to continue doing their work. This type of information, incidentally — baptismal, marriage and death records — is useful for genealogy purposes, especially when combined with oral history.
The same is true for fur trade records. It’s important to remember that for most of its history, the fur trade functioned on debt. Knowing who someone was, including who their relatives were, could be fundamental to ensuring their debts were paid.
These records provided a wealth of information. If placed on a shelf like a collection of books, the records held by the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg would be more than 1.5 kilometres long. Similarly, the Roman Catholic Oblate records held in the Archives Deschâtelets in Richelieu, Québec, and the Provincial Archives of Alberta in Edmonton would be 710 metres and 275 metres in length respectively.
These are private documents, but the establishment of the Indian Department by the British Crown in 1755 led to the creation of state records.
While initially focused on maintaining good relations with First Nations, two changes in the 1800s greatly expanded the information that was gathered and maintained. The first was the decision to pay treaty annuities for three agreements signed in 1818 rather than provide the First Nations in question a lump-sum payment.
After this point in time, the Indian Department and its successors had a vested interest in knowing who should and should not get a payment. As more and more treaties were signed, more records were created. Today, numerous pay lists can be found in Library and Archives Canada. There’s also information on investigations into First Nations to determine if they should be part of a treaty and/or receive a reserve.
The creation of Indian status in Lower Canada in 1850 resulted in even more information being gathered. One reason most status applicants today only need to identify their parents is the availability of this information.
A similar dynamic exists in Métis citizenship and membership: although determined by Métis governments and organizations rather than the Canadian state, these records contributed to the development of extensive genealogies.
Residential schools, hospitals
The creation of state records didn’t end there.
In addition to the information collected by Canada’s so-called Indian Agents, the federal government’s decision to establish the Indian residential school system in 1883 and the Indian hospital system in 1936 blended private missionary and health-care records with Ottawa’s. Privately run residential schools and hospitals for Indigenous Peoples existed before both government systems.
(Library and Archives Canada)
Notably, because the Canadian government made various churches responsible for running the schools, those institutions kept detailed admission records and submitted quarterly reports to ensure payment for each student.
The government didn’t simply accept this information without scrutiny, and regularly verified it to make sure the churches were not inflating their numbers and claiming payment for students who didn’t attend.
This omits provincial records. Some provinces like British Columbia maintained separate death records for “Indians” well into the 20th century.
No shortage of information
In other words, a vast amount of information exists for those who know where to look. Dismissing it as inherently colonial — and therefore unusable — overlooks the extent to which Indigenous people and nations rely on these records today.
It also helps explain why many Indigenous leaders subjected to surveillance weren’t surprised. The RCMP was, in effect, just another state institution observing and documenting their lives. Many of these individuals likely appear across multiple archives — missionary, fur trade, treaty annuity, Indian status, Indian Affairs, residential school and hospital records.
To be Indigenous in Canada has often meant living under continuous observation.
Daniel Sims currently holds an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to research failed economic developments and concepts of wilderness in Tsek’ehne traditional territory (the Finlay-Parsnip watershed).
– ref. The RCMP’s surveillance of Indigenous groups exposes a centuries-long pattern in Canada – https://theconversation.com/the-rcmps-surveillance-of-indigenous-groups-exposes-a-centuries-long-pattern-in-canada-279543
