Geraldine Moodie (1854-1945) National Historic Person
© Courtesy of Glenbow Archives
Geraldine Moodie was designated as a national historic person in 2024.
Historical importance: photographer and entrepreneur, her photographs are valued historical records for First Nations and Inuit lifeways in the Canadian North-West and North at the turn of the 20th century.
Commemorative plaque: no plaque installedFootnote 1
Geraldine Moodie (1854–1945)
A female entrepreneur working in a male-dominated field, Geraldine Moodie owned and operated at least three commercial photography studios. As the wife of a North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) officer, she was provided with what was, for a white female photographer, unprecedented and privileged access to Indigenous communities at the turn of the 20th century. While Moodie sought to develop a rapport with some of her subjects and to represent their shared humanity, her resulting carefully crafted photographs of First Nations in present-day Saskatchewan and Alberta, of Inuit at Qatiktalik (Nunavut), and of Inuit and First Nations at Churchill (Manitoba) reinforced stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples as exotic and peaceable. Yet her photographs are also a valuable historical record of First Nations and Inuit lifeways in the Canadian North-West and North at the turn of the 20th century.
Born Geraldine Fitzgibbon on 31 October 1854 in Toronto, she was the daughter of Agnes Dunbar Moodie, a botanical illustrator, and Charles Fitzgibbon, a lawyer and registrar with the Court of Probate in Toronto. Her maternal grandmother was Susanna Moodie, author of Roughing it in the Bush (1852), and her great-aunt Catharine Parr Traill was a naturalist and author. She met and married a distant cousin, John Douglas Moodie, in England in 1878. They farmed a homestead north of Brandon, Manitoba, before Douglas received a commission as Inspector with the NWMP in 1885. For the next 32 years, his mobility to various NWMP posts in the North-West Territories, the Yukon, and the eastern Arctic enabled Geraldine Moodie’s access to and photography of sites and of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people across Canada.
© Courtesy of Glenbow Archives
© Geraldine Moodie / Library and Archives Canada / PA-028853
© Geraldine Moodie / Library and Archives Canada / C-001814
Moodie was a visual memoirist of northern and western Canada from the 1890s to the 1930s as a botanical illustrator and a prolific photographer. She pursued copyrighting her photos with a vigour that was uncommon in other female Canadian photographers at the time, published her photos as a source of income, and ensured that they would be widely distributed in government reports and through postcards, prints, and photograph collages. She derived income from images that reinforced settler stereotypical understandings of the roles of First Nations and Inuit in colonial Canada.
Her photographs also, however, recorded the traditional lifestyles, dress, tattooing, and kinship relations of First Nations and Inuit in this period and hold contemporary value for the descendants of the individuals depicted in the photos and their communities. The images are important historical records that have enabled people to broaden their family connections and learn more about their ancestors’ material culture including their sewing and beading techniques. The value of the images to those communities provides a layer of contemporary meaning to the photographs in addition to the intentions of Moodie as a photographer in a colonial setting.
“The designation of Geraldine Fitzgibbon Moodie as a person of national historic significance is exciting and introduces Canadians to a relatively new and extraordinary personality who left a photographic legacy unequalled in its day. Throughout her life, Moodie moved outside the studio walls and social mores to capture images of the early Indigenous Peoples of the Prairies and Eastern Arctic, the last of the open-range ranching frontier, early North-West Mounted Police life, and to prepare studies of unique flora. She brought a different focus and understanding to her work which was distinctive to her male counterparts and for this Canadians are the beneficiaries."
This press backgrounder was prepared at the time of the Ministerial announcement in 2025.
The National Program of Historical Commemoration relies on the participation of Canadians in the identification of places, events and persons of national historic significance. Any member of the public can nominate a topic for consideration by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada.
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