Krista Barclay

Krista Barclay, “From Rupert’s Land to Canada West: Hudson’s Bay Company Families and Representations of Indigeneity in Small-Town Ontario, 1840–1980”. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada 26, 1 (2015): 67-97.

Krista Barclay’s article uses both archival and family-based sources to contest community-based recollections of Indigenous heritage that rely more on myth than reality. Barclay draws on family heirlooms to highlight the role of Indigenous women within families in Ontario who have been made invisible in the community by acts of forgetting, both deliberate and incidental. Barclay’s seamless integration of the historiography with her archival and familial research shows a deft hand in both writing and relating history to the people it most affects. Her critiques of how commemoration can lose sight of the complications that Indigenous women and their children needed to navigate within settler-colonial society are especially cogent and relevant in the lead-up to Canada 150.