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Historical Indian Affairs Agents

Information about officers and employees of Canada's former Department of Indian Affairs from 1875 to 1916 drawn from Library and Archives Canada records. The data was gathered by Benjamin Hoy in his research for A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford University Press, 2021). This data was linked, matched with authorities, and given geospatial coordinates by LINCS team members under the leadership of Jim Clifford. The name of this collection reflects the former official name (which has varied over time) of a branch of the Canadian government and does not condone the terminology, which persists in legislative and political contexts in Canada and the USA.

Describes 2470 individuals. Where available, their names, roles and occupations, agency names, familial relationships, religious denominations, and dates and places (including treaty territories) of occupation are provided with geolocations. Not all information in the source reports is included here. The data was matched where possible with external authorities, geospatial coordinates provided for places, and information added in some cases from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Unnamed individuals were retained with what information about them was available. Some data pertains to employees at residential schools for Indigenous children. Information is linked where possible to the location from which it was derived in the digitized source documents in the Library and Archives Canada collections.

Source Collection​

Library and Archives Canada, Indian Affairs Annual Reports, 1864-1990.

Building Borders on Aboriginal Lands

Creators and Contributors​

Benjamin Hoy, Jim Clifford, Susan Brown, Tyla Betke, Natalie Hervieux, Matthew Kunkel, Jakob McLellan, Sarah Roger, Zach Shoenberger, Thomas Smith, Jessica Ye, Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS)

Support​

The Historical Indian Affairs Agents dataset was made possible thanks to the generous support of Library and Archives Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Forward Linking Partnership Development Grant.

Dataset Details​