Presenters: Henria Aton, François Dansereau, Kate Nugent

This presentation examines how the Society of Jesus in nineteenth-century Canada developed archival practices to establish continuity with its predecessors in New France and legitimize its claims to land, missions, and authority in Quebec and Ontario. Central to this effort was the Collection des archives du Collège Sainte-Marie (CACSM), housed at the Jesuit Collège Sainte-Marie in Montreal. We analyze the CACSM’s catalog entries to show how Jesuit archivists shaped a world through the records they produced, copied, and described—constructing a narrative that supported settler colonial power. These descriptive choices contributed to a hegemonic archival framework that reinforced Jesuit authority while marginalizing Indigenous presence and rights. We further trace how these cataloging practices persisted in subsequent indexes and finding aids created from the 1940s onward, shaping archival interpretation into the present. By examining how colonial ideology became embedded in archival description, we reflect on the enduring effects of these structures on contemporary archival work. Our study contributes to broader debates on archival ethics, colonial legacies, and the politics of historical recordkeeping.

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