Newspapers - Indigenous & Métis
Your Indigenous ancestor may have appeared in a newspaper for various reasons; for example, in an obituary, death announcement, legal notice, or mentioned in a news piece. Smaller, local newspapers will have coverage of sports events, holiday celebrations, parades, or articles about fires or other local interest stories.
Online
Both Ancestry and FamilySearch.org have searchable collections of historical newspapers for all provinces.
TheAncestorHunt.com provides a comprehensive list of links to historical newspaper sites for all provinces, (scroll down to the Canada section).
Canadiana.ca provides a searchable collection of digitized historical newspapers for all provinces.
Library and Archives Canada provides a geographical list of newspapers by province and then by city/town names. Some of the titles have links to digitized copies of the newspapers.
This is a good resource for determining the name of the newspaper in the research location of interest. If the newspaper of interest does not provide a link to a digitized copy, it may be available by searching for it on Canadiana.ca.
An excellent, although fee-based, site is newspapers.com, which has good coverage of many smaller newspapers in Canada. Sometimes free short trials of this paid subscription database are available.
Other good resources for finding digitized copies of historical newspapers could be found by contacting the local public library, archive, or genealogy association closest to the area of interest. Please ask a staff member if assistance is needed.
Please refer to our provincial guide for your province of interest for more information on historical newspapers for that province. A few province-specific online resources are below.
British Columbia:
Surrey Libraries has the BC Historical Newspapers digital resource, searchable, containing full coverage for the Vancouver Sun (1912 to 2010), Province (1898 to 2010), and Victoria Times Colonist (1894 to 2010).
British Columbia Historical Newspapers 1859-1995 is a site hosted by UBC, and contains many smaller newspapers from all across BC.
Native Voice, the Official Organ of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia, has archived newspapers 1947-1955.
Alberta:
Peel’s Prairie Provinces: University of Alberta Libraries A division of Learning Services - Digitized newspapers from 1871 to 2013
Saskatchewan:
Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online / University of Saskatchewan
Manitoba:
Manitoba Life & Times: Newspapers
Ontario:
Archives of Ontario provides an online index of newspapers that are mostly available through microfilm interlibrary loan (via Surrey Libraries Family History Department):
The Ontario Community Newspapers portal offers a searchable database index of their large collection, which then provides contact information to assist researchers in accessing the full article.