Underdeveloped identities: the misrecognition of Aboriginality in the Canadian census

Abstract

After more than a century of enumerating Aboriginality as a form of ethnic ancestry, in 1986 Statistics Canada added an Aboriginal ‘self-identification’ question to the census, effectively creating two populations: one based on ‘Aboriginal ancestry’, the other on ‘Aboriginal identity’. This paper argues that the legitimacy of the new Aboriginal ‘identity’ population stems not from its ability to measure Aboriginal identity more accurately than previous enumerative strategies, but from the fact that its ‘self-identification’ categories better produce the kind of data used by officials to implement development-based policies in their attempts to improve Aboriginal quality of life in Canada. Using interviews from Aboriginal census field agents, the paper explores how and why such policy classifications have come to be so deeply misrecognized as exhaustive or acontextual categories of identity and the kinds of Aboriginal sociality they potentially foreclose upon in doing so.

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