Using the TCP data to study Indigenous households’ living arrangements at the turn of the 20th century: Challenges and opportunities

Although a vast body of literature identifies an indissoluble link between Indigenous families and their organization in households, the residential arrangements of Indigenous Peoples in Canada have received little attention to date because of the lack of available data. The Canadian People (TCP) project’s complete-count census data offers a unique opportunity to fill this gap, since one of its main goals is to support demographic analyses of smaller population groups, notably Indigenous Peoples. In this paper, we take advantage of the TCP 1901 census data for Manitoba to draw the first historical portrait of Indigenous households’ structures at the beginning of the twentieth century, which is key to quantify the devastating effects of assimilation policies put in place by the newly established Canadian government, including children’s removal to residential schools. Our portrait of Indigenous households’ living arrangements provides a more precise picture of nuclear households and multihouseholds in Manitoba in 1901 than previous analyses of census sample datasets have allowed. Our comparison between the TCP data and the original manuscripts on microfilm, which was needed to validate household boundaries and relationships, emerge as a vital step of analyses not only about household structures but also about Indigenous enumeration in historical censuses.