Uncertain Counts: The Struggle to Enumerate First Nations in Canada and the United States, 1870–1911

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, Canada and the United States struggled to gain accurate demographic data on the First Nations and Métis communities they claimed to oversee. Enumerators grappled with linguistic and cultural differences, distrust, the ambiguity of racial categories, and the geographic mobility and isolation of many Native American communities. Understanding how, where, and why national census takers and Indian agents failed to overcome these challenges sheds light on the locality of federal power and the pathways through which Native Americans maintained their autonomy.

Colonial Numbers: Quantification, Indigeneity, and the Politics of Fiscal Surveillance

“…The amended law zeroed out funding and removed the mandate for the First Nations Statistical Institute (FNSI), a recently created institution that would support Statistics Canada data collection, as well as collect data for First Nations purposes (Barrera 2012). Collecting data about Indigenous peoples has long been a challenge for Statistics Canada because of durable distrust, not to mention an ethic of political refusal (Simpson 2014) around Indigenous nationhood and inclusion into the Canadian state (Hoy 2015), and contention around the efficacy of data collection (Walter and Andersen 2013). The FNSI's budgetary elimination came around the same time as the federal government's push toward transparency as the solution to problems facing First Nations.…”