August 2024: 

Susan Paterson Glover (Professor Emerita, English, Laurentian University), as the Principal Investigator of the Voices of the Ancestors Project (VoA), has joined TPatT, sharing her research on writing by Indigenous authors from the 18th and 19th centuries. Glover initially worked with historians Alan Corbiere (CRC, History, York University) and Thomas Peace (History, Huron University Western) to examine networks of Indigenous-colonial literacies prior to the creation of the nation-state of Canada in 1867. This collection had its genesis in a collaborative research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2015-2018). 

Most of the work listed in the VoA database was produced between the last decades of the 1700s and approximately 1870, with a few significant earlier and later exceptions. The database provides a bibliographic compilation of Indigenous creators and their texts—personal letters and official correspondence, political statements, works on histories and languages, translations, memoirs—in both manuscript (hand written) and published forms (books, journals, newspapers and pamphlets). It includes the voices of over two hundred creators who have authored five hundred entries in the Works section. These can range from a single letter to a substantive archival fonds and multiple editions of a book. The writers represented here are chiefs, warriors, fur traders, cultural brokers, colonial administrators, missionaries, knowledge keepers, military officers, teachers, translators, physicians, political leaders, linguists, historians, diplomats, clergy, farmers, hunters, journalists, illustrators, lawyers—mothers and fathers, grandparents and elders. Scholars have explored in detail the historical literacies of Indigenous peoples in what is now the United States of America. The textual legacy of the peoples north of the border likewise testifies to the range, sophistication, experimentation, and astute deployment of new forms of inscribed communication.

The VoA data will be added to the TPatT database soon, and will be accessible through the updated CWRC interface in late 2024. 

Image: From translation by Robert McDonald of Ostervald's Abrégé de l'histoire sainte (Genève, 1734) into the Tukudh dialect, 1885?  https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.46800