We are thrilled to announce that Brendan Edwards at Queen’s University Library is part of a small team (also including Feather Maracle, Six Nations Public Library, and Jane Griffith, Toronto Metropolitan University) that was successfully awarded a CLIR Digitizing Hidden Collections grant. Their project (Clippings: Indigenous Writings, Settler Colonial Representations in the Newspaper Scrapbooks of the Royal Ontario Museum, Digitally Rematriated to the Six Nations of the Grand River) was awarded USD $256,496.19 over 3 years.
Brendan Edwards, Curator, W.D. Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections, says, “I am so pleased to be involved in this important project that will not only shine a light on the ways in which Indigenous people were represented within print media during a critical decade in Indigenous-settler relations in this province and nationally, but which also prioritizes connecting and returning these stories to Indigenous peoples and the communities represented within the original news articles. Ultimately, this remarkable collection of news articles will be rematriated to the Six Nations of the Grand River as a digital resource that will serve as a research tool for students, genealogists, historians, and the Indigenous community broadly.”
The project will involve rehousing, digitizing, and describing a collection of approximately 20,000 clippings of news articles from over 100 Ontario newspapers between 1964 and 1974. The clippings were gathered by Ed Rogers and Basil Johnston, curators at the Royal Ontario Museum, via the Canadian Press Clippings Service, using one keyword: “Indian.” This manual process of reading and clipping new stories from newspapers from across Ontario took place during a period of significant change and development in Indigenous-settler relations within Canada. Many of the original newspapers have long since ceased to publish and most are not indexed, microfilmed, or digitized.
The 1960s and 1970s represented increasing Indigenous resistance to an encroaching settler state, and the news clippings feature examples of Indigenous-authored writing only available in these ephemeral, largely defunct, publications. The voices captured include numerous Indigenous perspectives in response to pervasive colonial media viewpoints. The digitized clippings will be an important research tool for contemporary Indigenous audiences and provide insightful historical perspective on truth and reconciliation efforts today.
Over 36 months (January 2025-December 2027), this project — carried out on Six Nations of the Grand River territory by Six Nations community members — will digitize all the articles, display them in an open-access output, connect them to the Indigenous people and communities represented, and further disseminate knowledge on these histories.
Feather Maracle, CEO and Director of the Six Nations Public Library, characterizes the project as “an important opportunity to have the voices of that decade revived and heard again. This time, they won’t be so easily silenced with the passage of time. The digitization and rematriation will allow these voices to be accessed by the author, their current day relations, and the faceless ones to come. Six Nations Public Library is very proud to be a part of this project.”
Mark Asberg, Vice Provost and University Librarian adds "This important project brings much needed attention and capacity to our shared responsibility in libraries and archives to surface and preserve unique and irreplaceable historical documentation, and ensure it is accessible for generations to come. This effort serves as a model of how we can deepen our shared understanding of the past and support critical reflection into the future."
Congratulations to the team, and for more information on the other successful projects, please see the CLIR website.
