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In 2022, the editors of Journal of the Canadian Historical Association (JCHA) celebrated the journal’s centenary by organizing two roundtables at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association and inviting a group of established scholars to examine how the work of historians has changed over time in the journal. The result of those roundtables was the publication of their findings in this edition of the JCHA. Claudine Bonner’s work for this project focuses on “Black Canada,” Jim Walker’s on “Race,” Adele Perry’s on “Colonialism,” Donald Wright’s on “CHA Presidential Addresses,” Penny Bryden’s on “Political History,” Lara Campbell’s on “Women and Gender,” and I focus on “Indigenous History/Indigeneity.” My selection, I suspect, was the result of my collaborative Indigenous community-based research over the past decade that resulted in the publication of The Creator’s Game (UBC Press, 2018) and the digital animation Rotinonshón:ni Ironworkers (2020). I am Dakelh from Nak’azdli Whut’en — I was born and raised in Waterloo, Ontario — as well as a Canada Research Chair at McMaster University, and my research focuses on the history of Indigenous nationhood, self-determination, and sovereignty. While placing an emphasis on reciprocal community-based research partnerships, my work employs ethnohistory — the combination of written and oral sources — to frame its analyses and is centred around, as discussed below, the theories of “intellectual sovereignty” and “resurgence.” Certainly, my personal and professional background, as it does in all my work, had an important impact on how I approached this historiographic project.

Over the past century, the JCHA has published scores of articles on Indigenous history within the colonial borders of Canada. As a sampling of Canadian historiography, the JCHA offers a unique case study of the history of the field. While the journal has offered a dearth of scholarship on people of colour, for instance leading to the erasure of Black Canadians as prominent actors in Canada’s past,[1] the zealous study of “Indians”[2] in the pages of the journal is salient: over ninety pieces were reviewed for this historiography. However, much like the larger field of Canadian history, the journal has a fraught and contentious past with Indigenous Peoples, stories, and methods.[3] Unlike the erasure of Black Canadians, the fervent focus on Indians in Canadian history has had the significant effect of Canadians coming to “know” Indians who were produced within the power structures of Canadian imperialism, settler colonialism, and the academy as they sought to identify, classify, and organize the Other.[4] As Linda Tuhiwai Smith observes,

Imperialism and colonialism are the specific formations through which the West came to “see,” to “name,” and to “know” Indigenous communities. The cultural archives with its systems of representation, codes for unlocking systems of classification, and fragmented artefacts of knowledge enabled travellers and observers to make sense of what they saw and to represent their new found knowledge to the West through authorship and authority of their representations.[5]

Certainly, the JCHA and the discipline of history as a whole have contributed to this process of knowledge formation and the control it attempts to exert over Indigenous Peoples.

As this article will demonstrate, historically, articles appearing in this journal repeatedly cast Indigenous Peoples within a savage/civilized dichotomy, eliminated their agency, criminalized Indigenous self-determination, jettisoned their modernity, and ignored their sovereignty. They frequently placed Indigenous Peoples on the periphery and at times outright erased them from the historical record. The resulting damage to Indigenous communities has been staggering. Canadians’ understanding of Indigenous Peoples, as shaped by the scholarship within this journal, and others like it, has informed policy, education, and law at the expense of Indigenous communities. One of the major trends the journal has contributed to is the positioning of Indigenous history as “Canadian history,” thereby centring Indigenous history on the nation-state with little regard for the intellectual sovereignty of Indigenous communities.[6] The term intellectual sovereignty comes from the work of Robert Allen Warrior, who argues that Indigenous intellectuals, through their work and cultural production, can play a critical role in Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination.[7] I attempt to expand on this theory in my work and apply it to Indigenous historiography, arguing that historians of Indigenous history can contribute to an intellectual sovereignty that situates Indigenous history as an independent and unique course of study not tied exclusively or directly to the nation-states of the United States and Canada.[8]

Few Canadian historians have acknowledged the fact that Indigenous history — and Indigenous communities, for that matter — can and do exist outside of the nation-state since most studies have situated themselves as describing the significance of Indigenous historical action in relation to the development of Canada (Fur Trade, Indian Policy, etc.).[9] Yet, while the journal’s past with Indigenous history has been rocky, it has also been home to several important articles that helped push historians and the field in new directions that attempted to end the obscurity of Indigenous Peoples as historical actors and carve out important intellectual spaces within the discipline as well as within settler-colonial studies and Indigenous historiography. Articles by James W. St. G. Walker, Sylvia Van Kirk, Olive Dickason, Keith Thor Carlson, Madeline Knickerbocker, and Karen R. Duhamel made significant contributions, which have made the JCHA — primarily targeted at “professional” historians and non-Indigenous audiences — fruitful, if limited, for the study of Indigenous history within the colonial borders of Canada. One of its more significant limitations in the pages of the JCHA is the almost complete lack of histories published by Indigenous Peoples themselves. A comprehensive review yielded only three Indigenous contributors in the journal’s one-hundred-year history.[10] As will be discussed, this absence is not inconsequential, since there are now dozens of Indigenous historians in the field, and reflects larger problems within the field itself.

Crafting this historiographical essay involved a painstaking eighteen-month process of reading through over ninety articles that include or had some focus on Indigenous topics. All of the ninety-plus articles were synthesized and compiled into a master document that included their key arguments, evidence, and approaches in chronological order. Once completed, I sifted through the master document to identify any trends, themes, and/or gaps, and I first presented my findings as part of a roundtable at the annual meeting in 2022. What became immediately clear in my analysis was the absence of Indigenous voices from the pages of the JCHA, which will be discussed in the following pages. In response, I made a point of inserting Indigenous historians and various other Indigenous theorists to help complement my analyses in this article while recognizing that its readership would mainly be professional non-Indigenous historians. Given the page constraints of this article, I also had to make several difficult decisions regarding what articles to include, mainly by identifying which articles seemed to fit general patterns, while attempting not to overlap the other articles included in this volume. For instance, and again because of the page constraints and sheer volume of Indigenous-focused, full-length articles in the journal, I have not included an analysis of the presidential addresses or roundtables held to discuss recipients of book prizes, a few of which included Indigenous-focused books and one that was co-authored by Métis-Cree historian Jesse Thistle reflecting on Sarah Carter’s Imperial Plots.

Decades of Erasure

The early years of the journal (1922–1950), like Canadian historiography as a whole, focus on the fur trade or on early contact that downplays Indigenous Peoples as significant actors. If included at all, “Indians” are presented as a faceless homogenous group who occupy the savage side of the savage/civilized dichotomy. As a potential threat to civilization, they are condemned to play a secondary role to Canada’s “firsts.” As Jean M. O’Brien has argued, “firsting” is the assertion by non-Indigenous Peoples — through local histories, for instance — that they were “the first people to erect the proper institutions of a social order worthy of notice.”[11] Whether the topic is the fur trade, the so-called Spanish discovery of British Columbia, or Alexander Mackenzie’s trip to the Pacific, Indigenous Peoples are mentioned only in passing and described in stereotypical terms, such as warlike, thieves, drunkards, pagans, and simplistic, if they are described at all.[12] Certainly, this “professional evidence” of backwardness would have detrimental implications for how Canadians — including politicians, policymakers, educators, legal professionals, and the like — would approach Indigenous Peoples. As Robin Jarvis Brownlie argues, “Racism is ‘fundamentally a theory of history.’ . . . Theories of history based on ideas about race have provided members of colonial societies with a justification for displacing, dispossessing, and destroying Indigenous peoples.”[13] In several histories of the Red River region and the Prairies, the Métis are absent in the history of the area, as are the First Nations. As Mary Jane Logan McCallum has argued, “Aboriginal history was not just ‘obscure’ before the 1960s, it was made so.”[14] Written out of existence, Indigenous Peoples in these histories are relegated to the periphery and the past. Historians placed Indigenous Peoples out of sight in order to tell the “real” stories of white grandeur, discovery, and institution building, as captured by Walter N. Sage in his 1928 article:

Between 1880 and 1890 the United States frontier was closed. Free land was exhausted and there existed no longer a frontier line, a “meeting point between savagery and civilization.” Canada still possesses such a line, which she will in all probability retain for many years to come. In fact in all the provinces except Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia there are still frontier areas where settlement is being steadily pushed into the wilds.[15]

The meeting of savagery (i.e., Indians) and civilization (i.e., British/Canadian institutions) would be a common interpretative framework throughout this period. In addition to the savage/civilized discourse, the introduction of Canadian “firsts” and the erasure of Indigenous Peoples — both intellectually and physically — during this period was further aggravated by the criminalization of Indigenous communities. In his 1939 article “The Illegal Fur Trade Out of New France, 1713–60,” Jean Lunn examines the “illegal” fur trade between Montreal and Albany, identifying Haudenosaunee intermediaries from Kahnawà:ke and Kanehsatá:ke as the primary “culprits” because they had circumvented the “legitimate” French-controlled trade in favour of trading with the English and Dutch at Albany. Despite Haudenosaunee citizens’ conducting these diplomatic and trading relations within their own sovereign territory, their self-determination is considered criminal. Criminalization, whether of the eighteenth-century fur trade or the twenty-first-century cigarette trade, as Audra Simpson has demonstrated in Mohawk Interruptus, had its origins in publications such as Lunn’s, with enduring consequences for the way the public came to “know” Indigenous self-determination.[16] Depictions of Indigenous Peoples as criminal, violent, and backward are commonplace during this period. Between 1922 and 1952, only one article focuses on an Indigenous person or topic exclusively: F. W. Howay’s 1930 biographical sketch of the Siksika chief Crowfoot.[17] Howay’s biography, while short, offers an interpretation of Crowfoot as an honourable figure in Canadian history, celebrating his loyalty to the Crown during the “North West Rebellion.” In doing so, it helps cast those that fought for their survival in the “Rebellion” as criminals, while describing Crowfoot as a “fearless” leader among the supposed uncultivated savagery of his people and the “changing times” brought upon by the influx settlers and whiskey traders — all the while withdrawing the agency of settlers in the violent reconfiguration of Canadian settler colonialism.[18] While Howay would offer the only focused study of an Indigenous subject during this time, that would begin to shift two decades later.

Ushering in the Indian Problem

The 1950s ushered in a noticeable shift in histories about Indigenous topics. George Stanley offers the first acknowledgement that Indigenous Peoples were central and significant to North American history in his article “The Indian Background of Canadian History.”[19] He does so, however, while offering a narrative of victimization and describing Indigenous Peoples as uncivilized. As Stanley would argue, “Despite their early superiority in numbers, the Indians were unable completely [sic] to withstand the impact of a more highly developed civilization.”[20] Furthermore, Stanley advances the idea of an “Indian Problem” — the notion that Indians stood in the way of civilization and progress and needed to be paternalistically managed while considering the arrival of non-Indigenous Peoples to the continent to be the start of history.

Nonetheless, his recognition of Indigenous Peoples as central to North American history is a noticeable change from the articles that preceded his. As Stanley argues:

Ever since the day Christopher Columbus landed on the shores of San Salvador, the Indian has been one of the principal actors upon the state of American history. To-day his role, in Canada at least, may be limited to a walking-on part, but he has never been dropped from the cast. The Indian is not a vanishing but a permanent factor in history: he is a problem or a resource in every country of the two American continents. . . . Abused in peace and in war, he has been saved by the vastness of the country and by his ability to adapt himself to his environment.[21]

By reinforcing a victimization narrative, portraying Indigenous Peoples as a homogenous group, and employing the damaging notion of the “Indian problem”— as opposed to the colonial problem[22]— Stanley’s writing typifies several other articles that appear during this time that push these narratives while also examining Indian policy. “Between the pre-literate, pre-industrial civilization of the Indians,” Stanley argues, “and the competitive, capitalist civilization of the Europeans, there could be no easy integration. The two peoples could not, however, live together in the same country in complete isolation. Contact between them was inevitable: and contact just as inevitably posed the problem of acculturation.”[23] This supposed problem of acculturation as discussed by Stanley would soon become a focus area of future historians.

Soon after Stanley’s article was published, a series of articles focusing on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Indian policy, foregrounding the “Indian problem” in particular, began to appear in the journal, including S. F. Wise’s “The Indian Diplomacy of John Graves Simcoe,” Leslie Gray’s “The Moravian Missionaries, Their Indians, and the Canadian Government,” and Yves Zoltvany’s “The Problem of Western Policy under Philippe de Riguad de Vaudreuil, 1703–1725.”[24] Similar to Stanley’s, Zoltvany’s article acknowledges the importance of Indigenous Peoples in Canadian history, specifically, the position of the Haudenosaunee as power-agents in their role as intermediaries during a period of French imperialism in the West prior to 1754. To understand France’s policy of westward expansion during this period (which he calls expansionism) and gain an appreciation of the larger French project, he argues one must understand the role of the Haudenosaunee actors.[25]

While these articles do not centre Indigenous Peoples themselves — Indigenous Peoples are mostly being acted upon in these pieces rather than acting as agents of their own will — they do mark a change in focus to Indian policy. In doing so, the scholarship emphasizes a notion of the “Indian problem” preceding the author’s to determine, if possible at all, the prospect of Indian acculturation. A series of articles in the 1970s would mark a noteworthy shift in interpretative frameworks.

Shifting Interpretations

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the proliferation of pan-Indigenous organizations helped push Indigenous politics into the settler public consciousness.[26] Against a backdrop of 1960s social movements and the rise of the transnational Red Power movement, Indigenous leaders once again — as they had been doing for decades — voiced a challenge to Canadians to reimagine their relationship with Indigenous Peoples.[27] While the 1969 White Paper and the response to it by Indigenous leaders have received the most attention from scholars, who mark it as the beginning of the modern Indigenous movement, Sarah Nickel rightfully points out that attributing the rise of Indigenous political movements to this singular moment flattens Indigenous history and ignores decades of political activism preceding the White Paper: “This direct causality implies that Indigenous politics exists, and is relevant and conceivable, only in relation to the settler state. Such a position not only disregards generations of Indigenous political interaction but also erases the flurry of political activity in the decades before the White Paper.”[28] In the pages of the JCHA, these histories of political activism would be nearly non-existent as these community-based stories were not within the purview of professional Canadian historians of the time.

While the discipline of history was slow to respond to the increasing visibility of Indigenous political and court action during the 1970s, an early article published by James W. St. G. Walker in 1971 signals the beginnings of a significant shift in the history of the journal and how historians approached Indigenous history. In a historiographical essay examining undergraduate bibliographies from universities across the country, Walker critiques the way Indigenous Peoples have been portrayed in Canadian history. Noting that Indigenous actors are often described as childlike (reflecting bloodthirsty or noble savage myths) and rarely understood within their own historical context, Walker concludes, “Clearly he is not often considered to be deserving of serious attention, or his society of scholarly analysis.”[29] Walker’s article was an important, though problematic,[30] call to action that identifies several reasons for the mistreatment and dehumanization of Indigenous Peoples in Canadian historiography. Foremost, Walker notes, is the reliance of historians on problematic source materials such as the Jesuit Relations, early travel narratives, and fur traders’ journals, which offer grossly skewed portrayals of Indigenous communities and actions. According to Walker, “Canadian historical writing reflects a belief in the manifest destiny of European civilization spreading across the continent from sea to sea.”[31] Therefore, Canadian historians need Indians to be villains in their national histories as they prop up the “heroics” of figures such as Champlain and the Jesuit martyrs. “One almost imagines that any defence of the Iroquois would be considered sacrilege or treason,” he writes. “Martyrs must have murderers, they must be righteous and wronged. No justifiable homicide is possible. The Iroquois made possible the martyrdoms and therefore must themselves be martyred to the memory of the martyrs.”[32] Prioritizing the “founding nations” of the English and French — as opposed to centring the various Indigenous communities within the colonial borders of Canada — even when considering topics of Indigenous history, further obscures Indigenous histories, he argues.

Such tendencies were soon to change, thanks in large part to two pivotal articles that would make the JCHA a site of influential Indigenous histories. The widely popular “Women in Between,” by Sylvia Van Kirk, appeared in 1977, followed by Olive Dickason’s “Europeans and Amerindians: Some Comparative Aspects of Early Contact.” Van Kirk’s article, which became a staple of Canadian historiography, included on syllabi across the country, argues that Indigenous women, a rarity in Canadian historiography, were critical intermediaries during the fur trade era who were able to advance their power and influence as “women in between” Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities.[33]

While not receiving as much attention at the time, Dickason’s article offers a ground-breaking examination of the colonizing endeavours of various empires (France, Britain, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Sweden) that seeks to revise and reconstruct the early colonial history of North America. In her article, Dickason not only points out the numerous similarities between these empires and the structure of settler colonialism, a theory later developed by Patrick Wolfe, but also recognizes the sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples decades before it became popular to describe Indigenous nations as such: “Throughout all these dealings, Amerindians were hampered by the fact that Europeans never accepted them as sovereign members of the ‘Family of Nations’: neither did they accord them equality in social status.”[34] Once celebrated as a trailblazing Métis historian, Dickason did not, as biographer Darren R. Préfontaine painstakingly documents in the biography Changing Canadian History, have Métis ancestry and would not be considered Métis by today’s criteria.[35] Nonetheless, her article and larger volume of work are extraordinary for the time and forever transformed the way Indigenous Peoples were approached in Canadian history, law, and popular culture. While historians Arthur Ray, Sylvia Van Kirk, and Olive Dickason have been celebrated as key figures in a “seismic shift” in Indigenous history because they present Indigenous Peoples as agents of history and important in their own right, Indigenous historians such as Mary Jane Logan McCallum have pointed out, as stated previously, that the Indigenous obscurity they were correcting was produced by the discipline in the first place. Thanks to new popular areas of focus, such as Métis history, several articles would help bring to the surface other ignored histories beginning in the late 1970s and help reconsider the prevailing interpretations.

Reconsidering the Fur Trade and Métis History

While articles from the late 1970s to the early 1990s continue to explore Indigenous agency, they also repeat hard-dying myths about the “benefits” of Canada’s assimilation policies. However, one of the highlights of the period is, beginning in 1979, a burgeoning, and later hotly debated, genre of Métis history focusing mostly on the nineteenth century and almost exclusively on Métis men.[36] In one such article that appeared somewhat later in this period, Lyle Dick examines the shifting discourse around the 1816 Seven Oaks Incident and argues that only after 1870 was the event reinterpreted by Anglo Canadian historians as a massacre, an interpretation then used to justify dispossessing the Métis of their lands.[37]

Reflecting these shifting patterns of interpretation, Philip Goldring’s 1986 article “Inuit Economic Reponses to Euro-American Contact” not only offers a rarely seen focus on an Inuit topic but it also subscribes to a thesis of “accommodation and adaptation,” an approach then gaining popularity that recognizes Indigenous Peoples as agents in their own right. As Goldring argues, “It is now recognized that native populations often affected the pace and direction of Euro-American penetration of British North America’s resource frontier. . . . Incomers relied on natives for information, for indigenous technology for survival and travel, and for labor, before overseas investors made continuous commitments of men, capital, and good to remote regions.”[38] Goldring’s article signals a significant change in historical scholarship produced about, but not by, Indigenous Peoples leading into the 1990s.

The 1990s — marked by the Canadian military invasion of Oka in 1990, the Gustafsen Lake Standoff and the Ipperwash “Crisis” in 1995, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1996, and the Delgamuukw decision in 1997 — saw an explosion of revisionist studies, influenced by the larger events of the time, that accord agency to Indigenous Peoples beyond a victimization narrative.[39] John Lutz challenges the idea that Indigenous Peoples became irrelevant after the fur trade, arguing instead that they played an important role in the economic development and industrialization of British Columbia during the second half of the nineteenth century. Jean Monroe contests the victimization of Indigenous Peoples in her examination of twentieth-century hydroelectric systems, as does Janet Chute, whose 1996 article about Anishinaabe leader Shingwaukonse relies heavily on Indigenous perspectives and sources, a growing trend during this time in the larger historiography. In her piece, Chute wades into a prominent debate within Canadian historiography that sought to identify what “Native agency” entails. For “Native agency” to be a more useful analytical tool, Chute argues, it needs to move beyond the agent/victim dichotomy so prevalent in the field.[40] As Gerald Vizenor’s work reminds us, the notion of “agency” is in itself quite problematic, in that it can be used to frame Indigenous Peoples and history within narratives of victimization, tragedy, and dominance.[41] Instead, Vizenor offer us the theory of “survivance” as a release from those narratives in which “survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of an estate, and in that sense, the estate of native survivancy.”[42] Another limitation of the histories of this time is that they still tend to treat the nation-state and its structures as the linchpin of Indigenous history. What occurred within Indigenous communities, beyond and between the cracks of colonialism — which is to say, Indigenous self-determination — remains absent.[43]

With the infusion in the late 1990s and early 2000s of “new” methods and sources — certainly they were not new to Indigenous historians such as Knowledge Keepers and Elders — such as Indigenous oral history, and ensuing debates about their utility, Indigenous scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Winona Wheeler caution researchers against employing Western analytical lenses when conducting Indigenous research or working with Indigenous communities.[44] Wheeler argues in relation to Canadian historiography:

So when historians have no relationship with the storyteller, or lack the lived experience, or have no personal investment in the histories they study, or do not understand the nature, quality, and role of Indigenous oral histories, it is no surprise that our oral histories become de-spiritualized, sanitized, amputated. The stories and teaching do not die when they are recorded on tape, rather it is the way they are treated by historians that kills them.”[45]

Following such challenges set out by Wheeler and the pivotal publication of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies, a slow but influential stream of scholarship produced with, rather than on, Indigenous communities begins to make itself felt within Canadian historiography and the pages of the JCHA.

A New Millennium of Scholarship and Community-Based Research Partnerships

The past two decades have witnessed a sharp increase in articles examining Indigenous history within the journal. By the early 2000s, the savage/civilized dichotomy and victimization narratives were no longer in use and historians pushed their interpretation of Indigenous self-determination in new directions. Historians also used new and influential interpretive lenses to approach Indigenous topics. Myra Rutherdale and Jim Miller employed Benedict Anderson’s theory of “imagined communities” in their article about the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67, while Mary-Ellen Kelm used Mary Louise Pratt’s theorization of “contact zones” in her examination of rodeos in the Canadian West.[46] These articles have contributed to the rewriting of Canadian and Indigenous history by focusing on the power and influence of Indigenous Peoples within their own histories. While significant, they are nonetheless limited by their reliance on non-Indigenous theorists. By the late 2000s, however, the journal was publishing interpretations that increasingly employed Indigenous methodologies, theories, and sources focused on deeply collaborative research partnerships. Such articles as Keith Carlson’s “Precedent and the Aboriginal Response to Global Incursions,” my own “Engendering Nationality” — which is also the journal’s first article by an Indigenous author — and Madeline Knickerbocker’s “What We’ve Said Can Be Proven in the Ground” were part of a growing trend among historians of Indigenous history to base their studies on Indigenous theories, methods, sources, and community-based research partnerships.[47] Each of the forementioned articles, produced in collaboration with Indigenous mentors, adopts Indigenous perspectives, self-determination, time frames, and, at times, languages as the foundation of its analysis. These articles are what I, along with other Indigenous historians, would classify as resurgent histories; that is, they are Indigenous histories from the inside that consciously value the intellectual sovereignty of Indigenous communities and employ Indigenous and decolonial research methodologies. This new wave of scholarship is being led by Indigenous women, particularly historians such as Brittany Luby, Sarah Nickel, and Lianne Leddy to name a few.

In addition to this series of resurgent histories, several important works in the past decade have sought to decolonize not only the field of history but also the institutions, such as museums, that perpetuate this history. An article by Anishinaabe-Métis scholar Karine R. Duhamel on the response of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights to “Canadian 150” and “re-storying” the foundations of Canadian nation-building is a perfect example. In the article, which details the planning and curatorial process undertaken for the museum’s exhibit, Duhamel urges those working with Indigenous histories to move beyond the “politics of recognition” and foreground accountability and reciprocity:[48]

Chiefly, Museums wanting to engage in Indigenous histories must focus on the process by which they conduct research and prepare exhibitions, understanding that the way in which they establish processes and conduct research is as important as the product itself. Institutions themselves must move beyond recognition and be willing to acknowledge alternative constructions of history and time as well as new ways of knowing. It is only through working with Indigenous peoples and in truly and authentically representing them as they wish to be represented (or, in some cases, not be represented) that tangible museological reconciliation can happen.[49]

Although its target is museum practices, Duhamel’s challenge also rings true — or at least it should — with the field of Canadian history and the scholarly publications that spread Indigenous histories. These more recent publications do not simply mark a change in the Indigenous topics that scholars are working on but rather in how those topics are approached to begin with. Through the use of Indigenous community-engaged methods, these publications not only changed what historians were writing about but how they were writing about Indigenous topics in collaboration with Indigenous communities.

Conclusion

While major contributions to Indigenous historiography have appeared within the pages of the JCHA, there remain several glaring omissions in topics, themes, approaches, and authorship. Topics such as Canadian Indian residential schools (there are two articles on early seventeenth-century Jesuit schools and one on day schools), the North, Indigenous Two-Spirit and queer history, and Indigenous women, especially Métis women, are largely absent in the Journal’s pages. To the best of my knowledge, despite the extraordinary number of full-length articles on Indigenous Peoples over the past century, only three Indigenous historians have appeared in the pages of the journal: myself (Dakelh), Karine R. Duhamel (Anishinaabe-Métis), and Jesse Thistle (Métis-Cree). This absence is neither insignificant nor innocuous. As McCallum has argued, the professionalization of the field, with its restrictions on who is allowed or not allowed to know, teach, and practise history and its relationship to Canada’s assimilation policies in the arena of education has limited Indigenous critique and participation.[50] This trend has begun to change: Brittany Luby, Sarah Nickel, Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Susan Hill, Winona Wheeler, Rob Innes, Alan Corbiere, Lianne Leddy, Crystal Fraser, Kim Anderson, and Allyson Stevenson are but a few of the award-winning Indigenous historians working in the academy today. However, they have chosen to publish elsewhere.

In addition to the concern about authorship, a critical mass of Indigenous scholarship not tied to the nation-state and exercising intellectual sovereignty has yet to find its way into this journal. Admittedly, this journal may not be the place for sovereign histories, given its ties to the nation-state and the Canadian Historical Association — an organization that has recently made significant strides but that has historically been hostile to Indigenous historians, methods, and interpretive lenses. Nonetheless, critiques of Canadian settler colonialism, its connection to white supremacy, or critical reflections on the journal’s role in promoting “foundational” Canadian nation-building narratives would still find room in the journal. While the journal has made important contributions over its history, and there is a limited sampling of deep community-based research partnerships, scholars must turn to other scholarly publications to find the most innovative and ground-breaking studies of Indigenous history, ones that centre the Indigenous methodologies, regeneration, and decolonial research practices currently making waves in the field and place community accountability and reciprocity at the fore.