Series consists of records created and maintained by the Northern Administration and Lands Branch. The series includes records from the Northern Administration Branch, the Lands Division, the Office of the Administrator of the Arctic, the Resources Division, the Northern Coordination and Research Centre.
Canada. Northern Administration and Lands Branch : The Northern Administration and Lands Branch was established in 1951 as the main federal agency for the extensive northern development that was to occur in the 1950s and 1960s. Far more than had been the case with its predecessor agencies, the Mining Lands and Yukon Branch, the Mining Lands Branch and the Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch, the Northern Administration and Lands Branch was actively involved in many aspects of northern development. The Northern Administration and Lands Branch, under its new Director, G.E.B. Sinclair, again combined all northern administrative functions in its two divisions: Lands and North Administration. Regional offices of the Northern Administration and Lands Branch were maintained at Fort Smith, Hay River, Yellowknife, and Aklavik in the Northwest Territories and at Whitehorse, Dawson and Mayo in the Yukon. There were also subagencies at other northern locations. The Branch also supervised the work of numerous other federal departments in the North: Health and Welfare, Transport, Mines and Technical Surveys, Fisheries, RCMP, Agriculture, and so forth.
To aid in carrying out the wider scope of the federal government's northern functions in the post-war era, the Northern Administration and Lands Branch discarded the old, straight-numerical filing system begun in 1922 by the Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch and substituted a duplex-numeric system of files based on subject blocks or subject categories. This survived until the late 1960s. RG85 General Inventory
