For this assignment I chose the archives of the newspaper The British Colonist for its long history, dating back to 1858, and its relevance to me as it was a newspaper published in Victoria, BC. Since newspapers were the main source of information for many in the 19th and 20th centuries, I believe it heavily influenced the views and opinions of its readers. Newspapers are also a primary source of information when it comes to education and research for its documentation of current events and portrayal of culture, values and language used at the time of publish.
I wanted to learn the when the terms “First Nations”, “aboriginal”, and “indigenous” become widely used in popular media so these were the search terms I used. My initial search yielded very few relevant results or no results at all so I refined my question to “When did the terms “First Nations”, “aboriginal”, and “indigenous” first appear in newspapers to describe the native peoples of Canada?”
What I found was that the term “First Nations” was never used in the entire publication of The British Colonist that ended in 1980. I was also not able to find usage of “Aboriginal” to describe the native peoples of Canada. In all cases, the term was used to describe the native peoples of Australia. Uses of the term “indigenous” date as far back as the 1960s and seems to be the more progressive term used by activists at the time for indigenous rights since it was used in a quote while the title of the article used “natives”. The transition in the use of terminology is evident.
It seems like most regions with a colonial history use one overarching word to describe the people native to the area before the arrival of colonists. From my search, it seems like in Canada, the chronological order of the terms used were “Indian”, “natives”, and then “indigenous” with some overlapping transitions. These are broad terms that writers at the time used to refer to all of the peoples of Canada.
My question was not conclusively answered as there were significant limitations to my search. The archive was not complete and the search function’s outdated design made the process very time-consuming and prone to errors.