Katherine Angelina Hughes (November 12, 1876 – April 26, 1925) was a Canadian journalist, author, archivist, and political activist.

Hughes established branches of the Friends of Irish Freedom while touring the southern United States.

[1] She received her education in Charlottetown,[6] at the Notre Dame Convent and the Prince of Wales College, graduating in 1892 with a first-class teacher's license.

[1] Hughes founded the Catholic Indian Association in 1901,[7] an organization that sought to find employment for graduated students outside the reserve.

According to Pádraig Ó Siadhail, Hughes was sympathetic to conditions faced by Indigenous peoples in Canada, but she had "a racialized view of Aboriginal Canadians as wards of the state and neither questioned nor challenged government policy as represented by the Indian Act or the long-term goal of assimilation.

[12] In 1906, Hughes published her first book, which was a biography of her uncle entitled Archbishop O'Brien: Man and Churchman.

[18] As an archivist, Hughes collected oral history accounts from older adults about their experiences; she also sought textual and photographic materials.

[21] In 1913, Hughes moved to London, England, where she worked as secretary to John Reid, Alberta's first Agent General, in his Charing Cross offices.

[23] On her arrival in Dublin she was considered a home-ruler supporting a devolved government for Ireland within the United Kingdom.

She returned to London an advocate for Sinn Féin which, at the time, was calling fuller, if not complete, independence.

The ICNL had advocated self-determination as promoted by United States president Woodrow Wilson for Ireland.

[26] Robert Lindsay Crawford, an Irish Protestant journalist who in Ulster had led an independent breakaway from the Orange Order, allied with Hughes for this task.

Hughes was also responsible for the formation of a similar organisation in New Zealand, after Osmond Grattan Esmonde was detained at the outset of his mission.

Following these two missions abroad, Hughes was the principal organiser of the Global Irish Race Conference in Paris in January 1922.

Aueberg's letters to Hughes survived, and indicate that the couple discussed whether children should be raised in the faith of their mother or their father.

[2] There are several possible explanations for why this might have happened: Hughes' multiple travels scattered her records, letters written by the founders of the Canadian Women's Press Club were lost, Miriam Green Ellis and other colleagues unintentionally or deliberately excluding her in their publications, twentieth-century scholars potentially being reluctant to acknowledge an anti-suffragist, and negative perceptions surrounding her Irish activism.

[30] Hughes' activism was also ignored by scholars writing about the history of Irish nationalism in Canada, and these omissions may have been prompted by her ideological views.