The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was appointed in 1991 and submitted its final, 5000 page report in 1996.  During its five year inquiry, the Commission “held 178 days of public hearings, visited 96 communities, consulted dozens of experts, commissioned scores of research studies, reviewed numerous past inquiries and reports” (Highlights. “A Word From Commissioners”).  You may be surprised to discover that not all of this work appeared in the final report – in particular, the hearing transcripts were not included.  The transcripts were made available as part of a CD-Rom publication, “For Seven Generations,” but have not been freely accessible online until quite recently.

• Thanks to Commissioner Allan Blakeney, who donated his personal copies of the hearing transcripts and roundtable discussions, the University of Saskatchewan Archives and U Sask’s Special Collections units have recently finished a project to digitize and OCR these materials.  You can access them online from Saskatchewan’s cooperative public Archives site Our Legacy.

• Kudos to Frank Winter at the University of Saskatchewan for alerting the Gov-Info list-serv to their fabulous resource!

You can  view the Commission’s Final Report, Highlights from the Final Report and the Address for the Launch of the Report online on Indian and Northern Affairs Canada’s website here .

• • UBC Library also has a wide array of print materials published by and about this Commission, including the Final Report.  You can view the list of available titles by conducting a keyword search using the terms: royal commission aboriginal peoples.
  • UBC Library has several copies of the “For Seven Generations” CD-Rom mentioned above, available at call number E78.C2 F77 1997 CD-ROM

Posted: 04|8|10 at 10:11 am. Filed under: Online Resource (Free), Print Resource.
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