When Jesuits returned to Canada in the 1840s, searching for and consolidating records that had been left behind in the aftermath of the suppression of their order in 1773 was a top priority. In addition to this work, Félix Martin, S.J.—the first archivist of the Jesuits in Canada—and subsequent archivists set out to copy records about New France held in Europe. Through this process, the Jesuits sought to build a coherent narrative of their order in Canada, and a sense of continuity with their pre-Suppression forebears.

This presentation puts forward a case-study that explores how the Jesuits used archival records to navigate land claims and concretize their influence and power in Canada. More specifically, we explore the documentation and description of records in the Collection des archives du Collège Sainte-Marie (CACSM). The archival unit at Collège Sainte-Marie, located in Montreal and founded in the 1840s by Martin, served as a dynamic repository of materials for the Jesuits in Canada until the school’s closing in 1968. The collection is now housed at The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada (AJC).

      Recent scholarly examination of cataloguing systems and archival descriptions have defined these as systems of knowledge and infrastructures of power that play an important role in knowledge creation (Ghaddar and Caswell 2019; MacNeil, Lapp, and Finlay 2020; Ghaddar 2021). Some of this research explores cataloguing and classification structures as tools of colonialism (Duarte and Belarde-Lewis 2015; Turner 2020). This paper builds on these studies by examining how the Jesuits used archival descriptions and catalogues to form a Canadian Jesuit identity that naturalized their presence on Indigenous lands and, by extension, that of other settlers.

      First, we argue that the descriptive indicators of both original records and copies emphasized land as a means to assert Jesuit presence and influence, and as a knowledge resource that sought to validate Jesuit territorial ownership, revealing the profound connection between the archive and settler colonialism. Second, we demonstrate that these descriptions are crucial actors that mobilize(d) knowledge production. The CACSM served not only as a repository for records produced by Jesuit settlers in their interactions with Indigenous communities around Montreal and in Northern Ontario, but as a teaching tool for students at Collège Sainte-Marie. Finally, we argue that the persistence of these catalogue descriptions, through the creation of other indexes and finding aids in the 1940s and beyond, demonstrates their structural impact and functions.

This exploration is part of broader considerations regarding the sharing of legacy archival descriptions on online platforms. As we develop The AJC online database and plan to provide open access to surrogates from the collection – while simultaneously reflecting on the scope of legacy archival descriptions – we interrogate our own actions from the perspective of knowledge building through time. As we increasingly encounter the need to decolonize archival practices, we demonstrate that it is necessary to understand how collection management activities and archival description have contributed and continue to contribute to settler colonial processes.