HST 680 Treaties, Land and Indigenous Governance

Primary Sources

For certain assignments you might be asked to use primary sources. Primary sources are works created at the time of an event, or by a person who directly experienced an event.

It is the content that matters and an on-line source can still be a primary source. For example, an online copy of a newspaper from May 8, 1945, is still a primary source even though the original article has been digitized.

Primary sources can include:

• Interviews, diaries, letters, journals, speeches, autobiographies, and witness statements
• Original hand-written manuscripts
• Government documents and public records
• Art, photographs, films, maps, fiction, and music
• Newspaper and magazine clippings
• Artifacts, buildings, furniture, and clothing

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are works that are written after the original event or experience; they provide criticism or interpretation of the event or experience.

Some examples of secondary sources are:

• Textbooks
• Biographies
• Historical films, music, and art
• Articles about people and events from the past

To find primary sources in the TMU Library catalogue

Use keywords for your topic or historic person along with one of the following words:

• archives
• charters
• correspondence
• diaries
• documents
• interviews
• letters
• manuscripts
• notebooks
• oratory
• pamphlets
• personal narratives
• pictorial works
• sources [this term is often used for collections of primary sources]
• speeches

Examples:

• indigenous peoples canada government relations history sources [using subject search]
• indigenous women canada biography [using subject search; some of the resources contain oral history or tell personal stories in the tellers own words]
• canada history sources [using keyword search]
• canada history sources [using subject heading search]
• quebec province pictorial works
• soldiers canada correspondence
• speeches addresses etc canadian
• women canada diaries
• canada history to 1763 (new france) sources [using subject heading search]

Library and Archives Canada (See also the resources listed on the Treaties page of the Indigenous Law library guide)

Archives of Ontario (For example, see the online exhibit: The James Bay Treaty (Treaty No. 9))

Peel's Prairie Provinces (From the University of Alberta Libraries. This website contains both an online bibliography of books, pamphlets, and other materials related to the development of the Prairies, as well as a searchable full-text collection of many of these items. For example, a search using the word Treaty retrieves 1000 results)

City of Toronto Archives (there is mention here of Toronto falling under Treaty 13)

Toronto Public Library Digital Archive (includes books, pamphlets, maps, photographs and manuscripts)

Using Google to find resources. A couple of key words can turn up interesting sources. For example, a search blackfoot treaties returns almost 3 million results, and the first sites loaded look very promising. However, if you want to focus on tribes in what is Canada rather than the United States, you may want to include canada as a third keyword: blackfoot treaties canada This search still recovers almost 1.5 million results. Remember to check the source of a site to determine if it is a credible site. If consulting wikipedia, do not normally cite these entries but they can point you to new sources and search terms to find the original source documents or images of interest. You can use the "images" filter of Google to limit your search to visual resources that may be useful as a primary source. 

Some digital collections from Adam Matthew Digital  that may be useful for American historical studies follow:

• Defining Gender, 1450-1910
• Eighteenth Century Journals I & II
• Empire Online
• Frontier Life
• Slavery, Abolition, Social Justice

Some of the Alexander Street Press collections may also be useful:

• Early Encounters in North America
• North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories
• North American Indian Thought and Culture
• North American Women’s Letters and Diaries
• Oral History Online
• Smithsonian Global Sound

Archival Newspaper sources

Don't forget to consult the Archival Newspapers section of the Journals and Articles Page of this guide.

Government Documents

Use the Early Canadiana Online link under the Digital Collections section from the Journals and Articles Page to find resources that are categorized in three distinct collections: Monographs (think of these as digitized books, mostly published before 1930), Serials: Periodicals, Annuals, Newspapers, and Government Documents.

Consult also the resources from Library and Archives Canada that you will find by following the links to our Law Librarians' guide:
 

• Indigenous Law and Legal Resources 

  This is the home page for the library research guide to Indigenous Law & Aboriginal Law.
  Sub pages include the Treaties & Legislation page that will be especially applicable to this course.

Primary Sources on the Web: Finding, Evaluating, Using -- a concise guide to finding and evaluating primary sources online created in 2015 by a sub-committee of the Instructional and Research Services Committee of the Reference and User Services History Section in the American Library Association.