THE VOICES OF ANCESTORS COLLECTION
Welcome to the Voices of Ancestors Collection (VoA), a database of Indigenous writers and their works. Most of the work here was produced between the last decades of the 1700s and approximately 1870, with a few significant earlier and later exceptions. The database provides a mapping of the extent and scope of Indigenous writing emerging from spaces reaching from all three coasts of Canada to below the southern border in the period prior to the creation of the nation state of Canada. It provides a bibliographic compilation of Indigenous creators and their texts—personal letters and official correspondence, political statements, works on histories and languages, translations, memoirs—in both manuscript (hand written) and published forms (books, journals, newspapers and pamphlets). It includes the voices of over two hundred creators who have authored five hundred entries in the Works section. These can range from a single letter to a substantive archival fonds and multiple editions of a book. The writers represented here are chiefs, warriors, fur traders, cultural brokers, colonial administrators, missionaries, knowledge keepers, military officers, teachers, translators, physicians, political leaders, linguists, historians, diplomats, clergy, farmers, hunters, journalists, illustrators, lawyers—mothers and fathers, grandparents and elders. Scholars have explored in detail the historical literacies of Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States of America. The textual legacy of the peoples north of the border likewise testifies to the range, sophistication, experimentation, and astute deployment of new forms of inscribed communication.
The collection is not a comprehensive survey of textual activity in a particular space before approximately 1870; it is rather a cataloguing and sign-posting of what has physically survived. Literary histories are dependent on the vagaries of time and chance, the works and fragments that have escaped destruction by fire, water, and loss. Much inscribed communication (particularly in forms predating the arrival of Europeans) used organic matter such as birchbark as its substrate, and has accordingly simply returned to the earth. Nevertheless, what has survived reveals an extraordinary array of genres, approaches, languages, and voices.
VoA is a database of Indigenous writers and their works: with some exceptions it excludes transcriptions of spoken words—council minutes, speeches and oral statements, and petitions prepared on behalf of communities, for example. During this period, Indigenous peoples retained some level of control over their lives and territories before these were increasingly regulated by the state. In what became Canada, the impacts of the Gradual Civilization Act (1857), the Act for the Gradual Enfranchisement of Indians . . . Act (1869), and the Indian Act (1876), together with the federal government’s adoption of the recommendations of Nicholas Flood Davin’s Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds (1879) via amendments to the Indian Act 1884, ensured the closing down of other imagined futures. The terminus date of ca. 1870 was chosen as a transition period for Indigenous-settler relations in the land now known as Canada; the period prior to that remained rich in possibility, and these works are testimony to a relatively unknown history of textual engagement and exchange.
CREATORS
Creators are searchable by Indigenous (where known) and colonial/English/French names. Many of the people included here engaged with the colonial world and used names assigned by colonial officials, others their family/community name, and some used both. Indigenous names may have multiple spellings in roman orthography; keywords and variant spellings are recommended. Biographical details about families, locations, and occupations are provided, along with information sources for those who wish to explore further. The editorial methodology was designed to identify and describe extant materials from Indigenous creators, provide details about their creators’ lives—their families and communities, where they lived and travelled, what they wrote and published—and provide information about how to access these documents, in person or online.
WORKS
The findings of this project document the remarkable extent and scope of textual exchange—public and personal—among Indigenous writers, particularly in the nineteenth century, and the Indigenous-colonial encounter. It adds considerably to our understanding of Indigenous history of the book studies in Canada, and challenges assumptions about participation in the world of print culture. The VoA collection has been designed to make more accessible this less well-known textual material. The texts include
- correspondence, both official and family/personal
- political statements and discussion
- periodical and newspaper articles
- translations of religious and secular texts
- journals and memoirs
- histories
- travel writing and maps
- language studies and vocabularies
The database is in part a response to calls for acknowledgement, recognition, and repatriation of Indigenous-created materials; in this case, it provides a guide to the often obscure and scattered texts residing in collections throughout North America and beyond. It responds specifically to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action addressed to the academic community, and to the findings of Reconciliation Framework: The Response to the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Taskforce released by the Steering Committee on Canada’s Archives in 2022. It also responds to the committee’s clear assertion:
“At this initial stage of action and awareness in Canada’s archives, it is imperative to maintain focus on the fundamental message: Canada’s archival communities must respect First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples’ intellectual sovereignty over archival materials created by or about them. This monumental step cannot be overlooked. Acknowledging First Nations, Inuit, and Métis intellectual sovereignty is critical to changing current professional practice and essential to taking collective action toward reconciliation, relationship building, and healing. [bold highlighting in the original].” (p. 8).
The first obligation of this research is to the creators of these texts, and next to their descendants/communities. Honouring those relations and relationships is a role The People and the Text is uniquely situated to acknowledge and support.
SEARCH THE COLLECTION
Information in the database has been organized to allow keyword searches by name, geographic locations (nation, home community, province, and country), occupations, gender, languages, dates, subject matter, and linked open data identifiers. Details are provided about the locations of manuscript and print materials—usually libraries, archival collections, and museums in Canada and the United States—where items are held.
While viewing archival material often requires an in-person visit to the collection, libraries are striving to make much of this work available through digitization to online readers, on their own websites (Library and Archives Canada, for example) and through media such as the Héritage project. Links to digital versions where available are provided in the database. Published work is more accessible, through copies in libraries, and expanding repositories of digitized copies on the web. In Canada the primary online resource is Canadiana, a repository of published materials created in Canada dating from the seventeenth century. Additionally many items are accessible through library websites with digital collections of their own materials, and databases of out-of-copyright historical material.
Variant names and known spellings are provided, but nineteenth-century documentation and colonial records are inconsistent; caution and patience are advised. Works in syllabics are identified with English titles and descriptions. Published material is identified by WorldCat OCLC numbers (a cataloguing collaboration of libraries around the world) and is readily searchable on public databases.
CONTACT US
This initial stage of the VoA project is designed to bring little known and difficult to access materials to descendant communities, readers, students and scholars in order to broaden the field of Indigenous literary studies, historical research, and history of the book studies, and to facilitate greater community and public access to these texts. Gaps remain, and by its nature the search will remain incomplete, a work in progress. We welcome queries, suggestions, additions, and corrections as work goes forward. This continues to be a task of reading, restoration, listening, and making way.
Susan Paterson Glover,
Professor Emerita, Department of English, Laurentian University, and
Principal Investigator, Voices of Ancestors (VOA) Database
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND THANKS-GIVING
This collection had its genesis in a collaborative research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2015-2018) led by Susan Paterson Glover (English, Laurentian University) with historians Alan Corbiere (History, York University) and Thomas Peace (History, Huron University Western). The project examined networks of Indigenous-colonial literacies prior to the creation of the nation-state of Canada in 1867. The compilation of early Indigenous texts and creators here builds upon the scholarship of the many bibliographers and book and print culture historians whose work provided the inspiration and foundation, particular that of Joyce Banks, Lisa Brooks, Matt Cohen, Brendan Edwards, Karen Evans, Patricia Kennedy, Shelley J. Pearen, Bruce Peel, Penny Petrone, Phillip H. Round, Donald B. Smith, Robert E. Walls, Hilary Wyss, the contributors to the invaluable Dictionary of Canadian Biography, and James Constantine Pilling’s Proof-Sheets of a Bibliography of The Languages of the North American Indians (1885). The creation of the database would not have been possible without the bibliographic resources of the WorldCat library catalogue, and the many, many historians of North American Indigenous and colonial history whose footnotes yielded many of these entries. The Voices of Ancestors Collection likewise acknowledges the support of the Laurentian University Research Fund and the many valued colleagues at LU (re)building a bilingual and tri-cultural academic home for learning and research in northern Ontario, and the leadership and guidance of Susan Brown and Mihaela Ilovan of the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory. To Indigenous colleagues at Laurentian University for their teachings and example, to the Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham University for the Cadbury Research Library-Adam Matthew Digital partnership program, to Ivy Schweitzer and Gordon Henry and the “Indigenous Archives in the Digital Age” Conference at Dartmouth College, to the Indigenous Literary Studies Association and the Bibliographical Society of Canada/ La Société bibliographique du Canada, to librarians and archivists across the country who have cared for these works, and to the people behind The People and the Text, grateful thanks.