“From missionary record books, to penal registers, to residential school files, the state and church have always wielded documentation to enforce and codify the violence of dispossession.”
The world’s largest collection of genealogical records lies sealed inside a fortified mountain vault just outside Salt Lake City. The vault belongs to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1894, the Church established the Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU) to amass records for a ritual known as proxy baptism, in which living members are baptized on behalf of the dead, offering them the chance to accept salvation in the afterlife. The Church’s aim is to document every possible human lineage; each name inscribed in its ledgers marks another soul to be saved.
Today, the GSU operates as FamilySearch, a global nonprofit that “help[s] people lost to history get found by their families.” As of 2024, FamilySearch hosts 20.5 billion records online and operates over 6,500 research centres across 149 countries. At first, visitors to FamilySearch’s website are greeted with images of cheerful individuals engaged in ostensibly secular genealogical research. A closer look, however, reveals a section for church members advertising a program called Ordinances Ready, which “searches your family tree and other sources to instantly provide you with names so you can focus on what matters most: drawing closer to Christ through temple service.”1
At the heart of FamilySearch’s vast enterprise lies the Index – the structured catalogue of names, dates, places, and relationships that makes its billions of records searchable. Through indexing, every digitized birth certificate, census record, or parish register is converted into data points that can be linked to a human soul. Indexing thus becomes a soteriological act, parsing humanity into the Saved (those who are named and can be brought into the fold) and the Damned (those who remain anonymous, “lost to history,” and beyond salvation).
To extend its reach, FamilySearch forms partnerships with cultural heritage institutions worldwide, among them the Archives of Ontario, the Royal B.C. Museum, and Library and Archives Canada (LAC), which have been collaborating with FamilySearch since the 1980s. Recently, LAC joined forces with FamilySearch and Ancestry.com – the world’s largest genealogy corporation, also based in Utah – to digitize and index the 1931 Canadian census, now accessible through all three organizations’ websites.
Such public-private partnerships and the outsourcing of archival labour are typically cast as a win-win, a pragmatic path toward the worthy goal of widening access to history. While existing critiques rightly focus on issues like paywalls and privacy breaches, more pressing questions remain unasked: what does it mean for Canada’s national archives to be complicit in the Mormon Church’s pursuit of global stratification? Whose labour sustains this massive undertaking? And how have archives been foundational to abetting Canada’s colonial imperatives of capture and control?
FamilySearch would have us believe its genealogical endeavours are carried out by a community of happy volunteers, processing records from the comfort of their homes. The reality is that the Church’s indexing program depends on the captive labour of prisoners. Since the late 1990s, the Church has enlisted incarcerated people in dozens of prisons and jails across the American West to perform this tedious work, with plans to expand internationally. The program is presented as an opportunity to build skills, serve the community, repair familial bonds, and – for Mormon prisoners – avoid excommunication. It is unclear whether non-Mormon inmates are informed of the true nature of their labour. Thus, the prisoner-cum-Damned is exploited to serve a theological agenda that is neither theirs nor of their choosing. As one participant remarked, “I would have done anything to get out of my cell.”2
The convergence of religious, carceral, and archival power reflects a much older colonial formation in which salvation, discipline, and recordkeeping have worked in tandem to impose order on populations and territory. From missionary record books, to penal registers, to residential school files, the state and church have always wielded documentation to enforce and codify the violence of dispossession. LAC’s partnership with FamilySearch and the Church’s use of prison labour are not aberrations, but continuations of the settler state’s project to assert dominion through archives, beginning with the founding of the Public Archives of Canada (PAC).
Long before Confederation, the elite of British North America were looking overseas for archival evidence to shore up the legitimacy of settler dominion. In 1832, members of the Quebec Literary and Historical Society combed the archives of London, New York, and Paris in search of materials that could unite the disparate colonies and anchor a nascent national imaginary. These pursuits – spun in classic liberal fashion as an effort to promote the arts, patriotism, and “harmony in private life”3 – quietly laid the groundwork for a documentary nationalism that the state would later institutionalize.
In 1872, Douglas Brymner, the first head archivist of PAC (now LAC), operationalized this vision through the London Office: a little-known overseas branch charged with systematically acquiring records on Canada’s colonial past from the repositories of European imperial centres.4 When originals could not be obtained, Brymner enlisted a small corps of copyists to hand-transcribe the papers. For more than a century, until 1986, the London Office ferried hundreds of thousands of manuscripts from the metropole to Ottawa under the guise of “repatriating” Canada’s “scattered” heritage. Heralded as a “noble dream,”5 Brymner’s archival pursuits in fact provided the epistemic justification for clearing the land for settler occupation – a documentary terra nullius.
Manuscript by manuscript, the national archivists inscribed the official record with fabricated traces of empire in an attempt to erase Indigenous presence and sovereignty from both the land and from history itself. Yet their acts of un/inscription left traces. As one former PAC archivist observed, “No direct supervision of the copying staff was carried out […] Inevitably, errors and omissions crept in, and the PAC finds today that it must maintain all its transcripts as historiographical material so that modern researchers can check exactly what rendering of the sources their predecessors based their conclusions upon.”6 The errors and omissions that crept into the historical record – which the archive must preserve as palimpsestic evidence of its own artifice – fracture the façade of neutrality, bringing the colonial and carceral substrates of archival labour into sharp relief.
To conceal these substrates, the Canadian archival profession works diligently to uphold what Jamila Ghaddar calls archival fictions: the mythologies that allow the field to talk about itself and its colonial past without reckoning with its ongoing complicity.7 As Ghaddar argues, PAC’s bloodstained legacy is sanitized through the contemporary notion of total archives, which mandates preserving community records alongside state documents. While this paradigm is celebrated as democratic and inclusive – supposedly distinguishing Canadian archival practice from traditions elsewhere – it is, in reality, an instrument to legitimize archival conquest and impose coherence on a fractured colonial order. Sifting through the fictions that permeate the field, I am reminded of Cedric Robinson’s description of liberalism’s efforts to conceal its own violence: “one does a little hand-jive, a little mechanical magic, produces an illusion and looks for uncritical acceptance and obedience from the audience.”8
The mechanical magic of archives is so powerful that, by the time an indexed record reaches LAC’s online database, all traces of the prison–church–archive apparatus have been erased. What remains is a seemingly neutral digital artefact, stripped of its material origins. Most archivists remain unaware that Canada’s documentary heritage is being digitized by prisoners. In my three years of studying and working as an archivist, LAC’s partnership with FamilySearch has not once come up in conversation among scholars or practitioners.
Looking past this sleight of hand, LAC’s function as an instrument of archival warfare becomes clear when we understand liberalism, in political philosopher Mark Neocleous’s terms, as “a self-conscious doctrine of a war ‘exercised in permanent fashion against rebellious slaves, antagonistic Indians, wayward workers, and of course, the criminal more broadly defined.’”9 Viewed in this light, Brymner and his successors waged a deliberate campaign of archival warfare by extracting records from their original fonds and reassembling them into artificial collections in Ottawa. Theirs was not an effort to “bring home Canada’s national heritage,” but a tactical operation to fabricate a teleological narrative of Canadian nationhood and launder evidence of colonial genocide.
Since 1492, liberalism’s permanent war has relied on conversion as its engine, recasting conquest, enslavement, and genocide as redemption – a purification of the world in preparation for salvation. Today, the binary of the Saved and the Damned finds its bureaucratic re-articulation in the state’s division of its population into the legitimate and the surplus, with the archive serving as the battleground for both. In this formation, the “salvation” of the dead in the archives depends on the damnation of the living in prisons. The soteriological imperative thus provides both the moral rationale and the practical machinery for the systematic organization, classification, and subjugation of entire peoples.
If the London Office was the first tactical headquarters in the nation’s archival war, then the prison and the Mormon Church are its modern outposts. LAC’s partnership with FamilySearch creates a perverse symbiosis, where prisoners, as targets of the state’s permanent war, are now compelled to process the very records that legitimize its doctrine. There is nothing inevitable, however, about a national archive subcontracting its core functions to a Mormon non-profit or a multinational corporation like Ancestry.com, whose parent company, the Blackstone Group, is a major investor in Israeli tech. The drive to document all aspects of historical development – a foundational, yet unexamined, tenet of Canadian archival practice – produces an insatiable appetite for archival labour. Scrambling to fulfill their mandates, institutions like LAC choose to prioritize technological efficiency over the human dimensions of this labour.
But this model was unsustainable from the start because it rested on a colonial fantasy – the presumption that archivists can preserve an entire social world within the custody of the state. As one professor recently told me, LAC has all but abandoned the total archives approach and now focuses almost exclusively on government records. The total archives paradigm – and the colonial fictions it upholds – is collapsing under the weight of its own myth. Our task, then, is to exploit these contradictions, to hasten the system’s collapse, and to wage counter-war across multiple terrains of struggle.
Following Orisanmi Burton, I have located the production of state archives within the prison – “behind enemy lines,” as Black Panther veteran Jalil Muntaqim puts it – to expose the antagonisms that exist in the liberal archive in Canada: between the archive’s professed ethos of democratic inclusion and its origins in colonial genocide and ongoing reliance on carceral labour. From this perspective, the archival labour of prisoners reveals three interrelated dynamics with direct implications for counter-war: prisoners serve as vanguards of resistance, their work behind enemy lines can catalyze struggles beyond the prison walls, and, as Muntaqim observes, incarcerated people – especially imprisoned Black radicals – constitute “the tip of a counterinsurgency spear.”
On one hand, incarcerated indexers sharpen the state’s counterinsurgency spear by transforming physical records into searchable databases that reinforce surveillance, management, and discipline. On the other, this same intimate engagement with records contains the latent potential for insurgency. Consider the Freedmen’s Bureau records processed by prisoners in the FamilySearch indexing program. The Bureau – tasked during Reconstruction with aiding formerly enslaved people, negotiating labour contracts, and facilitating land redistribution – was consistently undermined by political opposition and chronic underfunding.10 The act of indexing, then, becomes a place to encounter evidence of ruling class betrayal. The captive indexer is made to process data that elucidates the very origins of the racial capitalist order that their incarceration is founded on. By illuminating the long arc of struggle that connects the formerly enslaved to today’s prisoners, this encounter produces a profound epistemic rupture – a breach in the enemy’s archival defences through which the state’s counterinsurgent spear can be turned against itself.
To appropriate the Index is to engage in a form of archival warfare, using the force of the state's own claims against it. It is to read the Index as a narcissistic document that points not to its supposed referents – the insurgent, the prisoner, the enslaved – but to its own creators: the overseer and the prison guard, the bureaucrat and the policeman, the Mormon missionary and the liberal archivist performing their little hand jives.
But all the while the people are training – sharpening the spear – so that when, inevitably, the overseer looks away and the prison guard flinches, when the bureaucrat errs and the policeman is blinded by his hubris, when the missionary and the archivist are exposed for their carceral collusion, the insurgents are ready, poised to wage counter-war, to forge from these loopholes of retreat new definitions of what it means to be human and free.
Footnotes:
- “Ordinances Ready,” FamilySearch, accessed October 18, 2025, https://www.familysearch.org/en/church/ordinances-ready.
- Shane Bauer, “Your Family’s Genealogical Records May Have Been Digitized by a Prisoner,” Mother Jones,
August 13, 2015, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/mormon-church-prison-geneology-family-search/ - Danielle Lacasse and Antonio Lechasseur, The National Archives of Canada 1872-1997: The Canadian Historical Association Booklet No. 58 (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1997), 7.
- Bruce G. Wilson, “Bringing Home Canada’s Archival Heritage: The London Office of the Public Archives of Canada, 1872-1986,” Archivaria, no. 21 (Winter 1985-86): 30.
- Ian E. Wilson, “ A Noble Dream’: The Origins of the Public Archives of Canada,” Archivaria, no. 15 (Winter 1982-83): 21.
- Wilson, “Bringing Home Canada’s Archival Heritage,” 31.
- Jamila Ghaddar, “Total archives for land, law and sovereignty in settler Canada,” Archival Science, no. 21 (2021): 62.
- Cedric Robinson, “On the Liberal Theory of Knowledge and the Concept of Race.” Unpublished paper.
- Mark Neocleous, War Power, Police Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 82, quoted in Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), 50.
- Daniel Backman, ““A Vast Labour Bureau’: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Administration of Countervailing Black Labor Power,” Yale Journal on Regulation, no. 30 (2023).
Noa Sanders is a writer, community organizer, and archivist based in Toronto.