Corps de l’article

Those who become the keepers of the archives become stewards of human stories and relationships, of what has been an endowment to what will be. Because no legacy is enriched by counterfeit, a nation is ill served by a history which is not genuine. This is a high calling indeed and it must be said that too often the promise and the potential of this stewardship has gone unrealized.

George Erasmus[1]

In March 2011 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) held a forum “to begin dialogue surrounding the establishment of a National Research Centre.”[2] In his powerful keynote presentation, George Erasmus emphasized the “high calling” of archivists as “stewards of human stories and relationships” even as he noted “that too often the promise and the potential of this stewardship has gone unrealized.” Erasmus would know. As president of the Dene Nation during the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline protests; as National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations during the Oka Crisis; and as co-chair of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, he had many opportunities to reflect on the nature of archives and the mostly settler archivists who manage them.

Inspired by Erasmus’s words, we explore the past, present, and future archiving of the records known as Record Group 10. RG10 is a useful shorthand to describe records of the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) from the 1700s to the present. Over the years DIA had many names and institutional configurations, and was affiliated with various government departments.[3] RG10 consists of millions of memoranda, correspondence, diaries, reports, school records, survey plans, construction blueprints, budget documents, and other records; on media including paper, photographic media, magnetic tape, plastic film, and all kinds of digital media. The record group concept was adopted by Canada’s national archives in the middle of the twentieth century when it was known as the Public Archives of Canada.[4] Today, the national archives is part of Library and Archives Canada (LAC), and the records of RG10 are part of the much larger R216 fonds. In addition to accessing original RG10 records in LAC reading rooms in Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Vancouver, researchers can access digital copies via the LAC website and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network’s Canadiana Online website, and microfilm copies at provincial archives, university libraries, and other institutions.

We are Winnipeg-based settler scholars.[5] Greg Bak is an associate professor of archival studies in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba; Kenton Storey is a self-employed historian. We share an interest in, and diverse experiences with, RG10. Prior to his employment at the University of Manitoba, Bak was a senior digital archivist at LAC specializing in government archives but working mostly on digital infrastructure. Storey has worked as a freelance historical researcher since 2015, contributing to projects relating to Indian Residential Schools and First Nations bands from the Treaty 3, 4, and 6 regions.

Archiving often is imagined as something done to records after they are no longer in use by their creators. On the contrary, in this paper we treat archiving as part of the process of records creation, a continuum of actions that cumulatively result in records being created, organized, preserved, and consulted by record creators and eventually by researchers. From moment to moment, the meaning of the records shifts and changes, partly through actions taken by those that manage the records, including record creators, administrators, record keepers and archivists, and partly due to changing social and cultural contexts.[6] Records from the Indian residential school system, and other colonial interventions, are today considered evidence of genocide, by historians, politicians and the courts.[7] Fifty years ago they were understood quite differently; and one hundred years ago even more so. Such effects have been named as archival power by Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook.[8]

Archiving has not always been adequately recognized by historians as a knowledge-making activity in its own right.[9] Increasingly, archivists in Canada and internationally think of provenance, and records creation, as not simply the act of putting pen to paper or clicking a camera shutter, but spiralling out to include the people in front of the camera or whose activities or personal information is recorded, and all the people who kept the records.[10] Shifts in meaning effected through the actions of record managers and archivists are deepened by the removal of vast quantities of records through “housekeeping,” recycling, and destruction, and man-made and natural disasters. Such processes of selection and destruction close down some lines of inquiry and reinforce others. Once transferred to the archives, archivists appraise the records and make further rounds of selection. For all of its massive vaults and linear-kilometre runs of records, LAC saves, at most, 1–5% of the records that were created.[11] Processes of selection, arrangement, and accessibility must be foregrounded when consulting the comparatively few records that are archived (which may admittedly seem vast).

In reflecting on the future of RG10, we acknowledge the importance of TRC’s Calls to Action 69 and 70, addressed to LAC and the wider Canadian archival community. Citing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the United Nations Joinet-Orentlicher principles, these Calls, in broad terms, maintain that Indigenous Peoples should exert greater control over access to and management of archives in which they have an interest. This aligns with the First Nations Information Governance Centre’s First Nations Principles of Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession, which “establish how First Nations’ data and information will be collected, protected, used, or shared” and “assert that First Nations have control over data collection processes, and that they own and control how this information can be used.”[12] In terms of contemporary archival theory, we maintain that Indigenous Peoples must be counted as creators of RG10 alongside DIA bureaucrats and therefore have all of the rights that archival provenance attributes to record creators.

Additionally, we advocate for Indigenous control because these records are fundamentally different from other government records. Not only does the colonialism inherent in RG10 make it challenging to use, but more significantly, RG10 is imbued with institutionalized violence through the government’s efforts to surveil and undermine Indigenous Peoples, cultures, languages, and spiritualities. This makes RG10 a source of misinformation about and harm to Indigenous nations, communities, families, and individuals, in addition to being, often, a unique and irreplaceable source for histories of Canadian colonialism and for personal, family, community and national Indigenous histories. Finally, we explore how the past and present archiving of RG10 has created further harms and complications, and how changes in archival practices may affect the future of historical research and writing. Throughout, we strive to be mindful of the wisdom of George Erasmus, including his observation that “no legacy is enriched by counterfeit, a nation is ill served by a history which is not genuine.”

Origins

European national archives often were created as a service to the state. This was not the case in Canada. The roots of our national archives lie with the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec (LHSQ), an Anglophone body founded in 1824, concerned with demarcating Canada as a space within the British empire. LHSQ sought to create an archive because “it will raise us in the moral and intellectual scale of nations. It will cherish our noblest feelings of honor and patriotism.”[13] By Confederation, LHSQ’s advocacy had attracted a number of prominent political actors and senior government officials. Canada’s first archivist, Scottish-born, Montreal-based journalist Douglas Brymner, was appointed in 1872 a Senior Second-Class Clerk in the Department of Agriculture, where the archives were administratively located. In 1889 Brymner recalled, “I had the honour of being selected to organize the new branch of the Civil Service, and in June 1872 was furnished with three empty rooms and very vague instructions.”[14]

Vague instructions notwithstanding, Brymner already knew of a certain kind of record gathering through LHSQ. As early as the 1830s, funded by the Legislative Assembly of Quebec, members of LHSQ visited Paris, London, and New York to locate and transcribe documents related to the history of the Canadian colonies.[15] Brymner and his successor, the English-born, Montreal-based historian and librarian Arthur Doughty, continued this work, sending clerks across the Atlantic to hand-copy colonial records from public repositories and private collections.[16] Neither Brymner nor Doughty acquired many records of colonial or dominion government in Canada, at least partly because it was unclear whether responsibility for these rested with Agriculture or the Secretary of State.[17] In time, however, the Public Archives (as it was known following passage of the Archives Act of 1912, when it was removed from Agriculture) came to encompass records of the Canadian government and private records from families and organizations in Canada, in addition to mounting quantities of hand copied and, later, microfilmed records from Europe and the United States. Raymond Frogner and J. J. Ghaddar have argued the overarching goal of these activities was to assemble documentation to perpetuate the legal fiction of settler land ownership.[18] Nowhere in these growing collections was there recognition of Indigenous records or memory traditions.

As the structure of Canadian government grew more complex and the ranks of the civil service swelled, increasing quantities of records compelled their management, even if the Dominion Archives did not yet have a clear mandate for their acquisition.[19] Within DIA, key administrators were convinced of the importance of their records. Writing in the 1980s, RG10 archivist Bill Russell characterized earlier DIA efforts to preserve the records as “the white man’s paper burden,” and quotes DIA registrar A.E. St. Louis from 1937:

We possess … in the Public Archives and in our own Department Archives an unbroken chain of chronological events relating to our Aborigines … I wish to emphasize the fact that none of our papers can be classified as Indian legends or myths, but all of them bear the characteristics of historical monuments… They contain an almost continuous record of our Indian wards progress … related chronologically by our Superintendents, Inspectors, Agents, Farmers and lastly by those worthy representatives of the Church … I feel that it is incumbent on the Department to preserve from decay the remembrance of what these men have done for its wards and these records should be kept intact for historical purposes as an example to future generations.[20]

The resulting records stand as much a distillation of arrogance, ignorance, and the intent to efface as they are a reflection of the Indigenous nations they purport to document. Not least is the reification of the category of “Indian” to sit across from the category of (white, British) settler.[21] This binary misrepresents both sides, as can be attested by any settler of colour, francophone-descended settler, or settlers from anywhere other than Great Britain. Such misrepresentation, however, pales next to the implications for Indigenous Peoples. There were no Indians on Turtle Island prior to the arrival of Europeans. Rather, there was a panoply of diverse Indigenous nations, cultures, and languages. The Indian/settler binary obscured this diversity as a prelude to eliminating altogether the nations, peoples, cultures, and languages of Turtle Island: an act of genocide.[22] While both sides of the binary misrepresent the diversity inherent in each category, this genocidal intent makes the Indigenous side much more consequential.

Binary classification of all Indigenous Peoples as Indians has been enormously consequential in terms of DIA records creation and keeping. While European and Canadian treaty making with individual Indigenous nations demonstrates explicit and implicit recognition of the diversity of these nations, reliance on the Indian Act to provide blanket law, regulation, and policy offers a kind of template for the treatment of records by settler governments and archives. As the department that implemented the Indian Act, it is not surprising that DIA treated Indigenous nations and cultures as interchangeable while creating, keeping, and managing their records. The resulting records are incredibly messy, organized according to departmental personnel, administrative structures, and corporate functions rather than by the individual nations affected. Since policies were applied to the artificially homogeneous category of “Indians” by staff responsible for administering multiple communities, it is not surprising that many communities often have a stake in the same records, resulting in records that are entangled in the histories of many nations.[23]

Although some DIA staff may have had an elevated view of their moral obligations to keep their records, they often were kept haphazardly. Edward Sadowski has found that when they piled up, RG10 records were destroyed intentionally, as part of records disposition; destroyed accidentally through fire, flood, disassociation, and the other fates shared by carelessly kept records; recycled through wartime paper drives; or, perhaps, transferred to the archives.[24] What remains is an incomplete record set bent into the peculiar shapes of DIA and its genocidal mandate. To navigate these records, Mary Jane Logan McCallum has written, “You need to try to think like a colonizer.”[25]

These records are organized according to their original order, a foundational principle within archival theory. Unlike libraries, where items are likely to be arranged by subject for the convenience of users, archives are fundamentally relational and arranged according to provenance.[26] A set of records (whether a number of items in a file or a number of files in a fonds) is understood to be more meaningful if kept together, in their original order, than if encountered separately. Organizing records by provenance and original order, rather than by subject, can make it more challenging for users to discover records that respond to their inquiries, but is essential to preserving the authenticity and meaning of the records.[27]

Challenges and Solutions

In “A Victorian Civil Servant At Work,” Douglas Leighton shows that the structure and culture of DIA as a centralized bureaucracy was shaped in part by senior administrators William Spragge and Lawrence Vankoughnet, who consolidated their control over all aspects of DIA administration in the late nineteenth century.[28] A consequence of the superintendent-general’s almost total control of DIA was that enormous volumes of correspondence from across Canada were centralized in Ottawa. To handle these records DIA implemented a central registry filing system in 1872, creating the Red Series and the Black Series “to distinguish between eastern and western Canadian correspondence.”[29] The central registry was itself an adaptation of an older “register-docket-letter book” system introduced in 1844.[30] Systems of record-keeping and record organization in DIA have changed many times over the decades, in ways that can be confusing for researchers today. For instance, up to 1907 records related to DIA operations in the Maritimes were included in the Black Series, which otherwise contained records of Western Canada. After 1907, they were added to the Red Series, which focused on Eastern Canada. Sean Darcy has described many such moments of change in DIA record keeping, noting that these were sometimes, but not always, retroactively implemented, with older records occasionally brought into newer systems of organization. Inevitably, such changes were not uniformly followed even on a going-forward basis by the clerks who managed the file registry at DIA headquarters in Ottawa.[31] Moreover, Russell has explained that prior to the late 1940s, despite more than half a century of centralized filing in DIA headquarters, there was not a standard filing system for field offices, and that “in lieu of such a filing system, agents seem to have created their own arrangements.”[32] Darcy has observed, correctly, that “comprehension of how records were organized, categorized and maintained provides researchers with a powerful tool when attempting to navigate the complex records universe of the Department of Indian Affairs.”[33] Nonetheless, his article, together with the rest of the literature on RG10, demonstrates just how challenging it can be to make sense of the “original order” of these records.[34]

Additionally, whether or not DIA records survived to be included in RG10 varies greatly, depending on the period. Darcy has noted, “The lack of direction in early Indian affairs policy was reflected in the contemporary record-keeping practices of the department … Haphazard record-keeping mirrored the administrative system.”[35] The period from Spragge and Vankoughnet’s centralization of DIA to the 1930s likely represents the era of greatest survival of the records, not in absolute quantities but by percentage, as the department was still a comparatively small operation, within which DIA administrators recognized the significance of their records and acted to protect them.[36] As the reach of the Canadian government extended through new programs, and the ranks of the civil service grew accordingly, records proliferated, accumulating in attics, basements and corridors where they posed a very real fire risk not only for the records, but for government buildings and staff.[37] During this same period, DIA expanded its operations geographically and in terms of its staff complement.[38] Sadowski has identified three major efforts to reduce government records between 1936 and 1956, each of which resulted in massive destruction of DIA records, including an astonishing purge of fifteen tons of “waste paper” in 1936, the recycling of five tons of “obsolete files” between 1939 and 1944 to aid the wartime paper drive, and the destruction of another five tons of “obsolete files” in 1945, in addition to more routine destruction through nascent records disposition processes, established by Treasury Board in 1933.[39]

While RG10 is certainly not complete, it is still enormous. Indeed, its size functions as a barrier to research, making it impossible for a single researcher to review more than a selection. In spite of digitization of archival finding aids and metadata by LAC, and digitization of archival records by LAC and Canadiana Online, RG10 records remain structured by the multiple historic systems of organization implemented by DIA. Adding further complexity, Indigenous communities assigned to a particular agency or district office changed over time, such that in a century and a half a community may have been part of three or four different agencies.[40]

These challenges can be illustrated with an example. The Yellow Quill Band is a First Nation that signed an adhesion to Treaty 4 in 1876 and received three reserves in Saskatchewan between 1881 and 1900. Entering the name of the band in LAC’s Collection Search, a researcher will discover under one hundred RG10 records. This is far from the total extant records; it represents only those files with “Yellow Quill” in their title, specifically. Not only must researchers understand historic DIA bureaucracy and filing practices, they must also understand what metadata is searchable in the tools used to discover the records. Contemporary digital search draws on keywords and titles created by clerks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often in complex and not generally intuitive ways. To find additional files, a researcher must utilize broader search criteria, including names of the Yellow Quill Band’s treaty district and local agency, and the names of DIA staff who oversaw the government’s administration of the band. This approach returns thousands of possibly relevant files. For example, a search of “Treaty 4” yields 2,400 results. Eliminating obviously non-relevant titles still leaves many files to review. This is due to broad classification of records by agency, but also because of replication of generic file structures at headquarters, in field offices, and in specific agencies. Searching by personal names brings other complications. Researchers might easily discover all the files specifically associated with a staff member. Nonetheless, they may never find all the records because correspondence is dispersed throughout DIA and government, in files not directly identified with personal names or not explicitly linked to the topic of interest. Identifying every relevant record is extremely challenging if not technically impossible.

While foundational, the arrangement of records by bureaucrats and archivists is not the only system of organization imposed on RG10. Microfilming created another arrangement with profound effects on how those records are discovered, as does digitization and their organization on the World Wide Web. Starting in the 1970s, the records were microfilmed in the order found in the files, with reels filled sequentially and without regard for whether each reel contained whole or part files.[41] Ian Milligan has discussed how processes of microfilming and microfilm access have shaped historical research over the decades in obvious and less obvious ways, while Susan Hill, discussing RG10, notes “There’s always stuff that fell off the microfilm truck.”[42] Starting in the 1990s, these microfilms were digitized and made available on the archives’ website, where they are accessed by microfilm reel number: researchers page through the digital “reels,” document by document. LAC staff have created some tools, such as lists organized as spreadsheets, to help researchers identify the contents of the reels. The system remains cumbersome, however, combining the locked-in order of microfilm with sometimes slow-loading digital copies, which inhibits the ability of researchers to skim an entire reel, as they could with microfilm.

Meanwhile, digitization of RG10, including many records not previously microfilmed, is ongoing by LAC and Canadiana Online. These two separate platforms have distinct content accessed through different search engines, with their own features. For example, Canadiana Online allows search by keywords within microfilm reel titles and within the content of the records themselves, but not by keywords within original RG10 file titles. While the potential to search by keywords across the content of digitized microfilm is promising, the search engine is far from perfect. Indeed, often the best way to discover specific content at Canadiana Online is with the more user-friendly LAC search engine. However, the LAC website does not make it easy for its users to learn that some records are available at Canadiana Online. For example, LAC’s catalogue links to records at Canadiana Online at the series level of description rather than sub-series or file.[43] It is not easy for casual users, then, to understand either DIA’s historic systems of records management; or LAC’s arrangements of the physical records; or their representation in microfilm reels; or to navigate the multiple online search tools to discover and access RG10 records.

In addition to such challenges of search and discovery, the records themselves pose other, deeper challenges. Darcy notes the organization of RG10 “reflects a world cosmology,” drawing researchers into the worldviews and perspectives of DIA staff, a point made above by McCallum as well.[44] Oftentimes these records demonstrate blatant racism and misogyny. LAC recently introduced a Historical Language Advisory on Collection Search, warning that:

Certain parts of the Library and Archives Canada (LAC) collection contain historical language and content that some may consider offensive, for example, language used to refer to racial, ethnic and cultural groups. Items in the collection, their content and their descriptions reflect the time period when they were created and the view of their creator.[45]

While helpful, this disclaimer does not warn that the original ordering, keywords, titles, and descriptions of archival records compel users to inhabit the mindset of DIA officials to search effectively, as noted by McCallum.

RG10 is fundamentally different from other government records, imbued with institutionalized violence through the government’s efforts to undermine Indigenous cultures, languages, and spirituality as part of its drive to eliminate Indigenous nations and promote non-Indigenous settlement. This violence takes myriad forms, subtle and overt, beyond the racist language and attitudes that are the most obvious manifestations of colonial discourses. Other records, such as census or military personnel records, also allow researchers to glimpse the lived experiences of past Canadians, but RG10 provides more intimate and often brutally negative portraits of Indigenous people and their communities, including personal information taken without consent. These records were created to surveil Indigenous communities across centuries, including through economic policies, policing, health, and education. This level of intrusion reminds us that the government treated Indigenous Peoples as wards of the state and sought to control and dominate them.

RG10 includes much information about Indigenous Peoples, but not the information that they would choose to record about themselves. These records were created to advance ends inimical to the people under surveillance. Allison Mills has characterized RG10 as “records of surveillance written by people who did not understand or respect Indigenous ways of being.” She has described the emotional impact of discovering records of her family members’ time at St. John’s residential school in Chapleau, Ontario—records that made her feel anger, pride, and frustration.[46] Mills has written of “a deep desire for more in the records—more mention of family members, more of their point of view, more written in their hand than the ‘X’ Louisa signed her affidavit with. I am frustrated, beneath the surface level anger, that these do not exist to be found.”[47] She has described a perverse information asymmetry perpetuated through RG10:

Residential school, in our family—as in many others—was a dark secret that could not be spoken about because of the pain and stigma associated with it. It is somewhat galling, then, that for many years researchers at Library and Archives Canada and libraries with copies of the RG10 microfilm had more access to this history than my family.[48]

McCallum similarly has noted:

As Indigenous academics, in order to undertake work on our own communities, we must be able to afford to travel to the national capital—the symbol of our marginalization, the seat of federal power and white, masculine colonial display. Here, we toil away reading records that were written and collected by people who were not part of our communities; records created and taken without our knowledge or consent under the regime of the Indian Act and later deposited according to pre-set mandates created, again, without our consultation… our work involves reading correspondence, mostly between people who clearly dislike Indigenous people or at best see them as a problem to be solved. They wrote documents that they never intended to share with the people they were writing about, even while they were making decisions that would intimately affect the lives of the people they were discussing.[49]

McCallum has observed that “one hazard of being an Indigenous researcher of federal DIA records is that they are filled with our ancestors, most often in perfunctory ways that sap the humanity from their names (if names appear at all). And the paternalism and racism, overt or not, are palpable.”[50] Describing one such encounter, she writes:

My great-great-uncle Arnold’s name jumped off the page at me unexpectedly, and I sat there stunned. A wave of contradictory thoughts about family, history, the Canadian state, and archives washed over me. I felt like I had hit the jackpot—there was my uncle! But I also felt uneasy, like I was finding information about my family in the wrong way: this was not how family history is usually learned.[51]

RG10 has immense value today as Indigenous Peoples pursue reparations for past injustices and learn more about the histories of their communities and families. The contemporary utility of RG10 is an example of how no one can anticipate the value of these records in the future. A century ago, when DIA administrators asserted the records to be of national significance, they did not anticipate that they would be used to criticize their own conduct in implementing government policies. Neither did they anticipate descendants of the subjects of their surveillance would use them to research family histories. While impossible to be certain how future generations will use it, we know that RG10 will continue to have value, and that the national archives should continue to facilitate its use, especially by Indigenous Peoples. Nonetheless, it is the very nature of these records, and especially their origins in settler bureaucracy, steeped in racism, that makes them so prone to spread misinformation and cause further harm.

Given the importance of RG10 for Indigenous Peoples, and especially because of the dangers of misrepresentation in the records, Indigenous Peoples should exert greater control over access and management of the records. First, however, they need to be aware of the records’ contents, which is difficult to achieve with any certainty due to the current organization of the records. RG10 should be available in multiple orderings, something that is possible with current digital systems.[52] Original orderings by DIA staff are crucial to reconstructing colonial systems of governance and understanding colonial decision-making, and must be preserved. Other original orderings might also be preserved, as when DIA or LAC staff reordered them based on era or administrative location (e.g. in headquarters versus regional offices or agencies). Non-original orderings could be introduced that would meet other needs of Indigenous communities without requiring each researcher “to try to think like a colonizer” and inhabit the mindset of DIA staff. Such orderings might, for instance, allow records to be grouped by Indigenous nation; according to Indigenous cultural features or chronologies; by specific community, family, or individual names; and to reduce access to specific records that misrepresent Indigenous individuals, families, communities or nations.

Such a system is presently being developed by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, located at the University of Manitoba, albeit under a different mandate than the national archives and with smaller collections and different resourcing.[53] At the same time, LAC has laid the groundwork for a more participatory, community-informed approach to managing records of interest to Indigenous Peoples through its Indigenous Heritage Action Plan.[54] This is a portfolio of established programs, such as Project Naming, which since 2002 has brought Inuit input into the description of photos from the north, in partnership with Inuit organizations and governments; as well as more recent ones like Co-Lab, which allows crowdsourcing and participatory input from a broad range of LAC users. As part of the “We Are Here: Sharing Stories” initiative, LAC archivists have added large quantities of file-level descriptions of RG10 records into their online catalogue, making them discoverable by keyword search, without navigating DIA filing systems or administrative hierarchies. Such efforts are excellent, but reorganizing RG10—or rather, multiply organizing RG10, without losing its original orderings—could facilitate new research relating to specific Indigenous nations and their own topics of interest. We understand this would require substantial investment by LAC, starting with extensive consultation with individual Indigenous communities and including the creation of a platform capable of sustaining multiple arrangements of these records and preventing access to those records deemed harmful by Indigenous communities. This investment is warranted because of the historic injustices these records document, the unique and problematic nature of the records, and the harms associated with leaving RG10 as it is. Moreover, LAC’s path of reconciliation is bound up in this work.

TRC Calls to Action 69 and 70, addressed to Library and Archives Canada and to the wider Canadian archival community, require that settler archives fully implement two United Nations instruments: the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the Updated Set of Principles for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights Through Action to Combat Impunity, which the TRC refers to as the Joinet-Orentlicher principles.[55] UNDRIP requires that settler archives, first, acknowledge the right to Indigenous self-determination and, as a corollary, the right to fully informed and prior consent in the management of archives. Fully informed and prior consent extends to how archives are accessed, and must take into account the distinct social, cultural and legal systems of Indigenous nations.[56] Managing access to archives in light of fully-informed and prior consent, and in light of Indigenous legal and cultural protocols, necessarily will require that Canadian archivists engage with Indigenous communities in administering records in which any specific Indigenous community has a stake. Guidance on when and how such engagement should occur is provided in the Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives’ Reconciliation Framework, written in response to Call to Action 70, as well as earlier documents like the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials by the First Archivist’s Circle, and the International Council on Archives’ Adelaide-Tandanya Declaration.[57]

The Joinet-Orentlicher principles speak to the need to preserve the archives of colonialism to document gross violations of human and Indigenous rights, including genocide, and call on archives to prioritize the needs of survivors and those of the families and communities of the people who did not survive these atrocities. Written by Louis Joinet in the late 1980s and updated by Diane Orentlicher in 2005, the principles establish the right to know about violations of human rights; the right to justice; and the right to reparation and to guarantees of non-recurrence. The principles position archives as a bulwark against deniability that violations occurred, an essential resource in documenting the experiences of victims and the actions of perpetrators. The principles implicitly call for what in archival studies is referred to as survivor-centred archives: archives that reduce ongoing harms and foreground the needs of survivors, their families, and their communities. The NCTR offers a Canadian example of a survivor-centred archive; the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, which keeps archives of the Cambodian genocide, offers another.[58]

Future Archival Orderings

Libraries deal primarily with information that the author and publisher have intentionally placed in the public sphere; in this context, promoting open access makes sense. Archives, however, usually deal with information that was kept private and often confidential by its creators. Archives are part of a culturally-specific framework for making available and restricting information according to accepted protocols and practices in settler Canada.[59] Archival records are not only unpublished, but often unpublishable due to laws for intellectual property, privacy, access to information, property and contracts. Even when such laws prohibit the publication of records, archives are still able to administer legal access by researchers, including digital access. For example, the Copyright Act prohibits unrestricted sharing of digital copies of content over which the archives holds property rights but not intellectual property rights, such as a letter received rather than written by the donor. Nonetheless, the archives can provide access to the letter in their reading room, and even offer a digital copy to individual researchers for research purposes.[60]

It is not only laws that prevent archives from making all their holdings available on the internet. Ethical considerations also come into play. Records may include content that is hateful, racist, or otherwise objectionable, which archives may choose not to openly circulate to avoid causing harm. For example, photographs of mass hangings and lynchings are recognized to enact and extend colonial and racist violence, and archives increasingly are avoiding posting them to their websites.[61] Photographs showing nudity, especially those without documented consent, also might not be included on archival websites, even if there is no specific legal reason not to publish them.[62]

In this, archives are somewhat different from libraries, though perhaps not as different as first appears. Despite easy alignment between open access and published information, libraries may similarly restrict access to publications that are hateful, racist, or otherwise objectionable, requiring that such materials be used on-site, or restricting access to a subset of specially-qualified users. Nonetheless, archives are as different from libraries as archival records are from books. Archives have developed a range of access arrangements, quite apart from the binary of open or closed. This could be called appropriate access, in contrast with open access. Appropriate access is key to understanding why, for example, archives might restrict access to records that are declared to be open in their donation agreement.[63]

As records of colonialism RG10 is inherently multi-jurisdictional, documenting intercultural encounters.[64] The Indigenous nations with which Canada and earlier European colonial powers signed treaties have their own legal traditions, traditions recognized through UNDRIP and in Section 35 of Canada’s Constitution Act.[65] Nonetheless, RG10, to date, has been managed with an eye on only the law and culture of settler Canada, as records of the Canadian government, with the government maximizing access to them through access policies and by copying and disseminating the records through technologies such as microfilm and digitization.

On December 22, 1971, Lloyd Barber of the Office of the Commissioner on Indian Claims wrote to Dominion Archivist Wilfrid I. Smith to ask RG10 be microfilmed “so that the many bands of Indians across Canada are assured of the fastest and simplest means of acquiring information … this would mean that the various people who will be involved in rights and treaties research could organize the material to suit their purposes.”[66] Smith replied on January 10, 1972 that “this would be a monumental task” but the archives would consider its feasibility.[67] On July 4, 1972 Jay Atherton, chief of the Public Records Division of the Public Archives, mentioned in a letter to Brian Pratt of the Commission on Indian Claims that the Public Archives had started microfilming the Black Series.[68] On April 14, 1976 Atherton provided an update on the program to Dinah Hoyle of the Office of the Secretary of State:

In 1973, the Public Records Division commenced a programme to microfilm and index 4,000 linear feet of Indian Affairs Branch records in our custody. Completion of the programme will facilitate research by permitting the dissemination of the records on microfilm to research centres outside Ottawa, and will ensure the preservation of records which might otherwise be damaged or destroyed because of frequent handling. Approximately 1,300 feet of the material has been filmed to date. This includes records relating to the Indians of western Canada between 1870 and 1930 (the Black Series Files), as well as school files, annuity paylists, trust fund ledgers, and headquarters letterbooks.[69]

This microfilming not only predated the Constitution Act and UNDRIP but also access to information and privacy legislation. RG10 was microfilmed under a 1967 policy that radically expanded access by “reducing the period researchers had to wait for the release of federal records, from five decades to three,” resulting in the release of substantial quantities of government records.[70] Robert Hayward wrote in 1984, shortly after the Privacy Act had come into effect, “the purpose of the policy [of 1967] was to make available to the public as large a portion of the records of the government as was consistent with the national interest.”[71]

Hayward’s comment should be qualified in at least two ways. Under the access policy of 1967, RG10 was treated the same as other government records. The colonial nature of the records, including their provenance within multiple cultures and legal systems, settler and Indigenous, and their reflecting and enacting of colonial violence, was not recognized. So, when Hayward describes the purpose of this policy as providing maximal allowable access to government records, he must be understood to mean maximal allowable access within the terms of settler Canadian law and culture only. This is the “national interest” he references.

Secondly, when Hayward wrote in 1984 access to government records did not include the internet. Photocopying and microfilming were possible and becoming easier and cheaper. The Public Archives offered sets of microfilmed RG10 records to provincial and territorial archives, and other organizations and institutions, with the aim of reducing travel and research costs, such that claims researchers (or other researchers) might travel to Vancouver or Winnipeg, say, rather than to Ottawa.[72] The spread of desktop computing in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s; the opening of the internet for private and commercial use in the late 1980s; and the creation of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s offered Canadian archives a new access model. Digitizing archival records and circulating them online became increasingly common, often with special funding from within the Canadian government. Records already on microfilm were easy and cheap to digitize.

RG10 was a prime candidate for digitization, given its heavy use, particularly in claims research. A 2008 proposal to digitize the School Files microfilms, written by archivists at LAC and submitted internally, noted that “The School Files are used in residential schools research and will be used extensively in upcoming day schools research claims.” Digitizing the records and publishing them on the LAC website, according to the proposal, “would increase greatly the accessibility of RG10 records which are constantly researched,” asserting “First Nations communities are very interested in having most if not all of the RG10 records available online.”[73] Although no evidence of this was provided, it may have seemed an obvious point given the use of these records. The content of the records, which include quantities of private and confidential information, some of it inaccurate and prejudicial to Indigenous interests and perspectives, does not appear to have factored into the decision to publish them on the internet – just as it did not factor into the earlier decisions to microfilm the records and distribute the microfilms. At any rate, LAC may have considered the records already “open” as they had been distributed on microfilm across the country in the decade preceding the Privacy Act. That many of the School Files in particular should have been closed under the Privacy Act is not raised in the proposal. Digitization proceeded.

In 2016 a research team from the University of Saskatchewan published their study of student health information in the digitized RG10 School Files. The researchers noted that “there is no evidence that these health examinations were carried out with the knowledge or consent of parents. These records include detailed, sensitive and individually identifiable material.” Since the records are openly available from the LAC website, “University-based researchers … are under no obligation to have their research protocol reviewed or approved by a research ethics board,” even though the team’s focus on 1919–1953 meant that “many of these children and their descendants are still alive today.”[74] After consulting Indigenous academics and community members, the researchers concluded that publication of anonymized and aggregated research results was consistent with the TRC mandate to make known the harmful effects of the residential school system, and was in the interest of the Indigenous communities with which they consulted. Nonetheless, the researchers remained concerned for the stewardship of these records.[75]

The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) commented on this use of the open access, digitized School Files, noting, “Many of the school series records contain information that could cause discomfort, harm or embarrassment to individual survivors. For example, it was commonplace for admissions records to track whether students had syphilis. Other records often feature highly racialized comments about students and their families written by Indian agents, teachers or principals.” Despite their mandate to make known the harms of the residential school system, NCTR would not do so at the cost of “re-victimizing Survivors through the inappropriate use or disclosure of information.”[76] NCTR, then, has taken a different approach from LAC. The most harmful of these records, despite being available on the LAC website, cannot be accessed through the NCTR web catalogue except with approval from NCTR’s Academic Research Access Committee, “a committee of Indigenous scholars and community representatives who review academic research access requests to ensure the research is done with respect to the subject community, [and that] cultural protocols are observed.”[77]

Slogans like “information wants to be free” present access as a binary: open or closed, restricted or unrestricted. Kimberly Christen has explored the phrase’s genealogy and found it rooted in “deeply emotive and ideological American narratives” that, through “a type of historical amnesia,” enable the transformation of Indigenous lands into public lands, available for non-Indigenous settlement, and the parallel declaration of Indigenous knowledge as “folklore” that is placed into the public domain.[78] The hypocrisy of this is underlined by strictly enforced settler laws for property and intellectual property that enable settlers to flourish on Indigenous land, and to claim copyright on Indigenous knowledge that they record in text, photograph, or video.[79] Raymond Frogner and Mary Jane Logan McCallum have described, in different contexts, how settler laws and policies prevent Indigenous Peoples from knowing the histories of the harms inflicted through colonial institutions like residential schools and healthcare, through the strict enforcement of settler laws, exclusively, around privacy and information governance.[80] NCTR has proposed amendments to the Copyright Act to recognize Indigenous community ownership of Indigenous Knowledge, in alignment with UNDRIP.[81] This would go part way to addressing the present legal imbalance.

Archives routinely apply the principle of appropriate access to open or unrestricted content by regulating access in reading rooms and online, sometimes on individual items and sometimes in relation to entire collections or series. Growing concerns over the last fifty years for Indigenous agency in the administration of Indigenous records, for example, has led some archives to not digitize records that they might have digitized in the past, and to restrict access even in the reading room to the same records.[82] Calls for all archives to follow such practices are growing. The Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives’ Reconciliation Framework states that “Respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples’ intellectual sovereignty over the archival materials created by them or about them” means “ensuring they have complete control over who has permission to access and use these materials.”[83] In other words, even if a settler donor or government declares records to be open, archives are charged with administering the principle of appropriate access through a range of more nuanced policies, such as open access on site but not online; access with a signed research agreement, whether on-site or online; or, in the case of NCTR, digital access with approval from their Academic Research Access Committee. Thinking about access with this kind of complexity avoids maximalist arguments that allow one party to the creation of a record unilaterally to declare a record to be open; or, once a record is open, that it should automatically be available online; or, once a record has been posted online, it can never be taken down.

It is not for settler scholars such as ourselves to suggest what appropriate access to RG10 might look like. The future of RG10 must be determined by the Indigenous Peoples whose lives, ancestors, and communities are at stake in these records. Given entanglements in the creation and keeping of these records, it is common for multiple Indigenous communities and nations to have an interest in the same records. It may be necessary to take some records down from the web, and especially the School Files, at least for a time. While appropriate public access protocols are determined through discussions between LAC and affected Indigenous communities, research access might be determined, case-by-case, by an Indigenous-led committee as at NCTR. We are mindful that some researchers may view such newly imposed limitations on access with suspicion, and as a means for the federal government to impede academic research and limit the ability of First Nations to hold the Crown to account. We recognize that Canadian access and privacy legislation, intended to protect the privacy of individuals and promote access to government information, has at times stymied timely and open access to governmental records. Nonetheless, access restrictions for reasons of privacy or confidentiality must exist, both to protect citizens and to allow the functioning of government. Going forward, the access and privacy protocols of individual Indigenous nations should be applied alongside those of the government of Canada, for exactly the same reasons.

Conclusion

It is essential that we continue to recognise archival spaces, especially state archives, for their original intent: to create national narratives that seek to legitimise the nation state by excluding Indigenous voices, bodies, economies, histories, and socio-political structures.

Crystal Fraser and Zoe Todd[84]

Canadian public archives served as a kind of documentary armoury in the colonial project preserving the textual evidence to enshrine, conceptually and legally, the settler fact.

Raymond Frogner[85]

On the one hand, RG10 provides information about Indigenous Peoples that is structurally racist and even harmful. On the other, RG10 offers abundant evidence of Canadian colonialism that is demonstrably truthful and authentic, in the only way that archival records can be truthful and authentic: relative to context and in light of the histories of the creation and keeping of the records. For anyone seeking to understand current or past conditions experienced by Indigenous Peoples within the settler state of Canada, RG10 offers crucial information about the beliefs, prejudices, desires, and intentions woven into settler colonialism, along with the implementation of specific policies and resultant harms for individuals and broader communities. This information is equally essential for historians of Canada and for Indigenous claims research, as Indigenous nations and communities document past abuses and advance their own social, cultural, political, economic, and demographic resurgence.

The Canadian archival community’s Reconciliation Framework is a response to the TRC’s Call to Action 70, and aligns with longer traditions in archival studies that recognize subjects of records as co-creators of the records.[86] We await a comprehensive response to Call 69, which requires LAC “fully adopt and implement” UNDRIP and Joinet-Orentlicher. LAC has made real and substantial progress through its Indigenous Heritage Action Plan, but to “fully adopt and implement” UNDRIP and Joinet-Orentlicher, in our opinion, requires RG10 be managed with direction and fully-informed, prior consent from individual Indigenous nations and communities. This is necessary to address the records’ potential for harm; to respect Indigenous rights to self-determination; and to establish Indigenous control over their own spiritual, cultural, and knowledge resources. We further suggest that in recognizing the legal and cultural pluralism described in Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution and in UNDRIP, LAC examines practices in archives that already manage records in complex contexts of legal pluralism, such as at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Archives, where each member nation has the right to veto the release of records.[87]

Respecting legal and cultural pluralism could reduce or change the terms of access to many records that currently are open and available online. To date, when researching histories of Canadian colonialism scholars have followed their own personal ethics to guide what sources to employ, what topics to address, and whether and where to publish the results. In the future, such research might be different. Historians may be required to engage with archivists and Indigenous communities before undertaking research in RG10, regardless of whether they make use of original, microfilmed, or digitized records. This is the path being charted through the NCTR access policy.

The issue here is not simply that some microfilmed and digitized RG10 records, particularly the School Files, have been shared without apparent regard for settler Canada’s privacy laws. All of RG10 has been archived, administered, and used by researchers without regard for the knowledge traditions, access protocols, and research needs of the Indigenous nations, communities, families, and individuals who are most impacted by the records, who share in the records’ provenance and ownership, and who did not consent either in the creation or management of the records.[88] This past management of RG10 goes against the spirit and letter of UNDRIP, and against those provisions in Joinet-Orentlicher that speak to the need for Survivor-centred archiving of the records of human rights violations.

We anticipate that some scholars will view the ideal of community control, and any resulting changes to access, as an affront to intellectual freedom. We say this to these critics: Indigenous community control of RG10 should be embraced. It should be embraced not only because it is required by the legal pluralism asserted through Canadian treaties with individual Indigenous nations, in Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, in the recently in-force United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, and in alignment with the TRC’s Calls to Action and the First Nations Information Governance Centre’s Principles of OCAP®; but also because it will intrinsically lead to better and more meaningful research through collaboration between academics and Indigenous communities. Indigenous nations are best positioned to ensure that the records documenting their colonization and resistance are accessed and used appropriately, with due care for the records’ potential to cause further harm by spreading inaccurate information. And, as noted by George Erasmus at the start of this article: “no legacy is enriched by counterfeit, a nation is ill served by a history which is not genuine.”