Quantifying Indigenous Family Disruption and Resilience at the Beginning of the 20th Century Using Historical Census Data

Simona Bignami, Université de Montréal
Lisa Dillon, Université de Montréal
Gustave Goldmann, Université d'Ottawa
Eric Guimond, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada
Eric Pouliot-Thisdale, Indipendent Researcher
Steven Ruggles, University of Minnesota
Per Axelsson, Umea University
Kris Inwood, University of Guelph
Léonie Trudeau-Laurin, Université de Montréal
Laurence Veronneau, Université de Montréal
Carlos Ramirez, Bogota

Indigenous families have been the main target of assimilation policies of forced relocation and children’s removal to residential schools but have been, and still are, mostly absent from demographic research and official statistics. In this paper, we fill this gap by taking advantage of the newly released complete count of the 1901 Canadian census, which is considered one of the most thorough enumerations of Indigenous peoples in the world. We apply an innovative methodology, the household configuration approach, that captures the heterogeneity of Indigenous living arrangements rather than imposing pre-defined categories of family structure. By doing do, we find unexpected differences and similarities of Indigenous and non-Indigenous households, which need to be interpreted in light of the complexity of historical censuses and their representational nature as colonial settler instruments.

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 Presented in Session 8. Family Structure, Disruptions, and Outcomes