By Nicholas Elbers, The B.C. Catholic

[Vancouver – Canadian Catholic News] – “Most adults have never set foot in an archive,” muses archivist Carey Pallister from behind a desk covered in large black leather volumes containing Oblates of Mary Immaculate sacramental records dating back to the early 1800s.

“Archival work is a mammoth task,” she told The B.C. Catholic. “Not only do you need to find the records, but you need to gather all that data together to understand anything.”

Archives, she said, “are not like libraries: the archivist is needed as a guide. Archives hold records, but they don’t always hold the records people think we have.”

Pallister has worked as an archivist for decades and spent 13 years as the Province Archivist for the Sisters of Saint Ann in Victoria. In 2022 she started an archives consulting business and has been working on reconciliation projects.

Pallister now works for the Archdiocese of Vancouver, digitizing sacramental records kept by the Oblate fathers relating to Aboriginal children, students, and adults in the Fraser Valley dating back to the early 1800s.

“We are hoping to make it easier for the communities that are mentioned here to find information about their communities.”

The records were kept initially at St. Mary’s Mission, but about 40 per cent of the records reference people and events in the surrounding region, Pallister said.

It’s slow work. At the time of writing, Pallister has documented information on more than 5,000 individuals, and she has only just reached the 1840s.

One major complication is that the records are written in a combination of Old French and Latin and need translation. Additionally, each priest was left with the task of transcribing the names they encountered as best they could.

“The challenge is the First Nations’ names,” said Pallister. “The French-speaking priest heard a name and wrote it down the way he thought it was spelled. Then the next priest comes along and hears it and has to think about the way it’s spelled.”

The names especially create problems for the digitizations because the data is only valuable if it can be accessed.

“In a European sense that’s how we find everything, by somebody’s name. But if the name is phonetic and spelled I don’t know how many ways,” it creates problems, she said.

Some names have upwards of 10 renderings, making it difficult to know who or where a record is referencing.

 

This problem with names demonstrates the complexity of archival work. It takes time and knowledge to unravel the often-puzzling reality of historical records, and specialized skills are needed.

Digitizing the Oblate records is part of a broader Canadian effort to make Aboriginal records available. Because the records often intersect with residential school history, there is a lot of mistrust about the dissemination of information relating to Aboriginal people.

Oblate records in particular have been at the centre of controversy due to questions surrounding access to the order’s archives in Rome. Truth and Reconciliation researchers have since been granted access to Oblate records in Rome.

Pallister understands the concerns, and while she affirms that the history of residential schools has suffered from a lack of transparency, she believes that expectations need to be managed.

It’s hard for most people to understand the scope of archival work, she said, not just because they have no experience with archives but because even the smallest archive has a tremendous amount of information.

A historical lack of staffing and funding has also contributed significantly to the relative lack of records on residential schools, Pallister points out. It’s not that documents were lost or hidden but that in many cases there was no one to create them or take care of them.

Pallister was recently able to tour the Vatican Apostolica Archives, and she said it’s remarkable how much archival material can go missing. The archives, which are one of the largest in the world and would extend 85 kilometres in length, are staffed by only 20 archivists.

 

 

Over the centuries the entire collection was moved across Europe following conquests and political upheaval, and much has been lost over time. Pallister thinks this reality is illustrative of the broader problem with archival work: if one of the most prestigious and well-known archives in the world can lose records and suffer from staffing problems, it should be understandable, albeit tragic, that data documenting Indigenous history might have some gaping holes.

Ultimately, the lack of trust “doesn’t offend me,” she said. “I think for reconciliation, everyone is doing what they can. The Archdiocese here is really committed, but it takes time to input this data.”

On the whole, the Archdiocese is “breaking new ground,” she said. “We are leaders in this, and hopefully, this model will be able to help other communities.”

 

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