INDIGENOUS CONSULTATION AT THE BC ARCHIVES The Records of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate
By Genevieve Weber Archivist
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n 2019, the BC Archives acquired the records of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in BC, often referred to as the Oblates or OMI for short. The Oblates are an international Catholic order of priests that first arrived in British Columbia from the Oregon Territory in the mid-1800s. To fulfil their mission of evangelizing the poor, the order established both “white” and “Indian” missions around the province. Often the priests and lay brothers, as a result of the remote nature of the communities in which they served, became de facto social workers, medical personnel and liaisons to the Indian Agents. A key aspect to their missionary work was the administration of 10 Residential Schools throughout the province. The acquisition is substantial in size and comprises records in many
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WHAT’S INSIGHT
formats: textual, graphic, cartographic and audiovisual. The collection encompasses a significant body of evidence relating to the colonial history of the province. Religious groups such as this one play a role in many aspects of society, and these records—committee files, sound recordings, photographs, mission correspondence and more—illustrate that. My job as processing archivist is to preserve and make accessible the records. This involves a number of responsibilities: researching the records to determine the core functions (the roles and responsibilities) of their creators; determining the original order of the records and arranging them to reflect the way in which they were created, used and stored; describing the records in order to provide context and help researchers understand them; re-housing the records for preservation and labelling all new
