Despite long-standing academic interest in Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state, there has been little study of Indigenous elected officials as representational actors. We ask: What are the distinctively Indigenous forms of representation practised by Indigenous elected officials in Canada? And how does clarifying the role of Indigenous elected officials as representatives both contribute to and enhance our overall understanding of Indigenous politics, governance and sovereignty? We draw on the existing literatures on substantive representation as well as original interviews conducted with current and former Indigenous elected officials to develop an original conceptualization of Indigenous representation. These actors differ in their perceptions of themselves and their roles as representatives, the representational behaviours they engage in and the outcomes they seek. Our conceptualization of Indigenous representation engages with four themes: Indigenous perspective, Indigenous advocacy, balance with other imperatives including constituency representation and party discipline, and Indigenous nationhood.

Who runs and is elected is one of the most fundamental questions in political science as it pertains to the issue of descriptive representation. Despite the importance of this issue, until recently there were no longitudinal datasets on candidates in Canadian elections. This article presents two novel datasets including information on all candidates who ran in Canadian federal and Ontario provincial elections from 1867 to 2019. I present how these data were collected and how they can be used to gain new insights. I expect these data will be a valuable resource to Canadian political scientists for both research and teaching purposes.