I have come to realize over the decade and a half since I first discovered the Wailers that popular music can serve as a useful entry point for understanding the past.  This should not come as a surprise.  Approaches to teaching and learning, such as John Bigg’s SOLO taxonomy, emphasize the importance of understanding foundational concepts before higher order thinking can take place.  Popular culture serves as an easy way to establish these concepts by capitalizing on students’ everyday experience.

Music can be used to teach about the past in at least seven overlapping ways (feel free to add other categories and examples in the comments section):

1) Trivia and basic facts:  Although I am not a hockey fan, thanks to the Tragically Hip, I don’t think that I will ever forget that Bill Barilko went missing after he scored the goal that won the Toronto Maple Leafs the Stanley Cup.  The Leaf’s didn’t win another, until 1962, the year he discovered.  Boney M’s Rasputin is another song full of biographical detail about Grigori Rasputin, adviser to Czar Nicolas II.

2) Commemoration of Events:  U2’s or John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Sunday Bloody Sunday can be used to teach about the 1972 killing of civil rights protestors by British soldiers in Derry, Ireland.

3) As a Primary Source: Songs like Pete Seeger’s Bring ‘Em Home, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Universal Soldier, and Edwin Starr’s War (originally recorded by the Temptations) serve as useful primary sources to introduce people to the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

4) Commemoration of Historical Processes: Neil Young’s Pocahontas is useful for beginning discussions about the European colonization of North America and dispossession of the continent’s Aboriginal people.

5) Change over time: Although it’s a rather simple song, Istanbul (not Constantinople), (first recorded in 1953 but perhaps now better known by its cover by They Might Be Giants) can be used to illustrate how the meaning of places change over time.

6) Teaching Oral Traditions: Organizations like Mariposa in the Schools emphasize the importance of oral cultural traditions in the school system.  Their music program emphasizes themes such as migration and cultural interaction as well as the development of specific types of music such as folk and the blues.

7) Telling Alternative Narratives: On the eve of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 it is worth noting Stan Rogers’s efforts to tell some of the lesser known stories of the war.  One of Rogers’s better known songs about 1812, MacDonnell on the Heights, tells the story of a valiant major who met his death during the battle of Queenston Heights but whose legacy languished because of General Isaac Brock’s legacy (Brock, incidentally, died at the beginning of the battle with which he is most frequently associated).  For more on Stan Rogers and the relationship between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ history see Nick Baxter-Moore’s article “Recording the War of 1812: Stan Rogers’ (Un)sung Heros.”

We have to be careful not to over-emphasize what music can teach us.  Music – particularly folk music – often instills romantic notions of the past and tempts us to create simple and somewhat singular narratives about the past.  Like all primary and secondary sources, music needs to be critically evaluated.  But as a tool through which historical events and concepts can be introduced, it serves as a bridge between students’ everyday experiences and the past.

Dartmouth Hall

Inequitable funding for band-operated schools in many First Nations communities has created a crisis.  Despite education being a treaty right for many First Nations, the panel notes that “fewer than half of First Nation youth graduate from high school, compared to close to 80 per cent of other Canadian children, and some 70 per cent do not have a post secondary degree or diploma.”

As an historian of the eighteenth century studying Aboriginal engagement with European forms of higher education, these numbers startled me. In much of my research these figures are reversed.

In both Quebec and Ontario, First Nation communities were some of the first to develop community-based schools.  Even before European settlers had developed schools in many of their communities, Huron-Wendat, Abenaki, and Mohawk people were instructing their youth in formalized school settings. Although this subject is deeply imbedded in Canada’s colonial history, examining First Nation interaction with European forms of education in the period before residential schools helps us to better understand the challenges faced by communities in determining how to educate their youth.

Eighteenth-century First Nations people, like their European neighbours, saw education as a useful tool to maintain their communities as European populations increased around them. In Jeune-Lorette, a Huron-Wendat village near Quebec City, the community maintained many aspects of their language and culture as French farms expanded around them. They also achieved a literacy rate in French of about 20% by the 1790s. This was average for francophone communities in the St. Lawrence Valley at the time, but it was significantly higher than the literacy rate for the French farmers living around the Huron-Wendat village (about 3%).

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Jesuits heavily influenced this community. As French Jesuit influence diminished following the British conquest of New France, community-centred education became a prominent part of Jeune-Lorette’s identity. Unlike neighbouring francophone communities, who did not develop schools until the late-1820s and 1830s, the Huron-Wendat established a community-run day school taught by a member of their community. The Abenaki at Odenak did so as well a few years later.

These two schools had high attendance rates.  Mathieu Chaurette’s research on First Nation day schools along the St. Lawrence River during this period demonstrates that at Jeune-Lorette, almost all of the community’s children attended school at one point or another during the 1790s and early 1800s. The school also attracted students from neighbouring Mi’kmaq, Wulstukwuik, Abenaki, Haudenosaunee and Algonquin communities. Fewer students attended the school at Odenak (attendance was between 20% and 30%). Importantly, however, this rate of attendance was similar to the proportion of francophone children who attended school at the time.

Access to higher education was important in establishing both of these schools. The teachers at these schools were from the community and had attended Dartmouth College in the 1770s and 1780s. The teacher at Odenak, Francois Annance, attended Dartmouth for a number of years but did not finish his studies before returning to his community. We know much more about the teacher at Jeune-Lorette, Sawantanan (Louis Vincent, Dartmouth class of 1781). He was one of the few Aboriginal people to graduate from a colonial college during the eighteenth century. In addition to his native Huron-Wendat tongue, he was fluent in French, English, Mohawk and Wabanaki languages. Before returning to Jeune-Lorette he also taught school among the Mohawk on the Bay of Quinte (modern-day Tyendinaga). Annance and Sawantanan were two of over forty students from the St. Lawrence Valley who attended Dartmouth College, or its predecessor, Moor’s Indian Charity School, between 1770 and 1850.

Understanding how these communities, and others, engaged with European forms of education before the creation of residential schools is critical to reforming structures of schooling in First Nation communities. Reserve schools did not just follow residential schools; they also preceded the residential school system. Observing how communities chose to engage with these structures before education was imposed on them is instructive in providing models for successful forms of education.

Studying First Nation education during this crucial period in Canada’s colonial past teaches us lessons about the role of government and outside organizations (churches in the past, big business today) in shaping education policies in First Nation communities. We should be wary of outsiders wishing to directly influence the direction and nature of First Nation education. More often than nought, outsider input into First Nations education has failed.

Sometimes this failure has been for the good. In Jeune-Lorette, Sawantanan ignored Dartmouth’s goals of promoting Protestantism and “civilization.” Instead of introducing a curriculum that sought to completely assimilate his community to the culture of their New England neighbours, Sawantanan began selectively teaching concrete skills – such as literacy in both French and English – that allowed his community to reinforce its claim to territory around Quebec City. At the same time as the Huron-Wendat established their school, the community began petitioning for long-held rights to the seigneury of Sillery and for access to traditional resources. Education was seen as a tool that could benefit the community, but it sought to achieve goals that were far outside of Dartmouth College’s desired outcomes.

More commonly, though, influence from government and other outsider organizations have hindered First Nations communities. Chaurette’s work has demonstrated that education can be divisive and that community initiatives could be smothered or co-opted by political and religious authorities. For the powers at the time (the Catholic church and colonial state), education had to be controlled in an attempt to make sovereign First Nations subject to European control. The impact of this sort of interference was magnified and expanded as residential schools became more prominent through the nineteenth century.

The history of these schools also illustrates that education is not a panacea solution to all social problems. As much as education could be used as a tool for self-governance and greater autonomy, it also led to considerable cultural erosion. As Chaurette has emphasized, the curriculum in these schools shared many similarities with their French neighbours. French, and sometimes even English, was often the language of instruction. These schools fuelled processes of linguistic and cultural change that had begun with the arrival of Jesuit missionaries at the beginning of the 17^th century.

Education is not neutral, nor is it universally beneficial or corrosive. It is important to understand the complex relationship many First Nations have had with non-indigenous systems of education. “Schools used to be used as weapons,” Manitoba Treaty Commissioner James Wilson recently told the Montreal Gazette, “If schools are seen in any way as a means of assimilation, communities will opt out.”

Understanding the early history of how some First Nation communities opted into European structures of education before residential schools is important. It teaches us about the nuances of Aboriginal engagement with European forms of education.  It also demonstrates the creative strategies that communities used when confronted with European colonialism, and the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches they took.

The National Panel on First Nation Elementary and Secondary Education seeks only to make suggestions, rather than impose “solutions,” leaving it up to First Nations’ governance structures to determine what types of education will best serve their communities. Scott Haldane, the panel’s chair, told the Globe and Mail that “[w]hat we’re hoping is that perhaps we can make some recommendations that would allow some other regions of the country to develop their own institutions that make sense for them.”

This is what occurred at the end of the eighteenth century in Jeune-Lorette and Odenak. First Nation communities selectively embraced European-style schooling in an effort to provide stability in the face of a rapidly changing colonial environment.  European forms of education were modified by the community to meet their specific needs.

For more on the challenges and proposed solutions currently facing First Nation communities:

• Assembly of First Nations’ Education Policy and Research Documents
• Michael Mendelson, Improving Education on Reserves: A First Nations Education Authority Act (Caledon Institute for Social Policy, June 2008).

For more on First Nation engagement with European-style education during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see:

• Colin Calloway, The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 2010).
• Mathieu Chaurette, “Les Premieres &Ecoles Autochtones au Quebec: Progression, Opposition et Luttes de Pouvoir, 1792-1853″ (MA, UQAM, 2011).
• Hope MacLean, “A Positive Experiment in Aboriginal Education: The Methodist Ojibwa Day School in Upper Canada, 1824-1833,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, vol. 22, no 1 (2002), 23-63.
• Jean-Pierre Sawaya, “Les Amérindiens domicilies et le protestantisme au XVIIIe siecle: Eleazar Wheelock et le Dartmouth College,“ Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’education, vol. 22 (Fall 2010), 18-38.
• Thomas Peace, “Two Conquests: Aboriginal Experiences of the Fall of New France and Acadia,” (PhD, York University, 2011), chapter 7. For a summary of the relevant sections of this chapter see “European Education/Aboriginal Activism: Cultural Metissage in the Late-Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries” a paper I gave at the 2009 annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association.

“Places possess a marked capacity for triggering acts of self-reflection, inspiring thoughts about who one presently is, or memories of who one used to be, or musings on who one might become… When places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind, to the roving imagination, and where the latter may lead is anybody’s guess.” – Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 107.

Just as I read these words last week, the Toronto Star disclosed municipal plans to close three of the City of Toronto’s ten museums.  Montgomery’s Inn, Gibson House and the Zion School House – museums outside of the downtown core and closely allied with the Etobicoke and North York Historical societies – are on the chopping block due to municipal cutbacks.  This decision builds on the recently announced closure of the Air and Space Museum at Downsview Park, one of a few other museums in the north end of the city.

In an age of austerity, as Sean Kheraj noted last week, all public institutions supporting culture and heritage are vulnerable. But these cuts do not just reflect cutbacks in the culture and heritage sectors. In a city already bereft of recognized historical sites outside of the downtown core, this municipal decision reinforces urban and suburban differences in how Toronto’s past is told. If places have the power to shape our self-perception and how we situate ourselves in the world, as Basso and others have suggested, how has the uneven distribution of historical places influenced the culture and politics of Canada’s largest city?

Take a look at this map.  On it, I have coded Toronto’s proposed and existing heritage conservation districts in green, municipal museums in blue, and the three museums slated for closure with red pushpins.  Notice the centralized distribution of sites deemed worthy of preservation.  Most are located in the pre-1998 City of Toronto and few are located in the other former boroughs of Metro Toronto.  Historic properties are similarly distributed. Within the boundary outlined on the map lie 12,258 of Toronto’s 13,660 heritage properties (about 90%).  What emerges is a gap in historical interpretation.  One part of the city is steeped in officially sanctioned historic sites; in the other part, the past is almost entirely absent from the city’s landscape.

View Toronto Museums in a larger map

Now take a look at another map. This map reflects voting patterns in Toronto’s 2010 mayoral election.  A similar image emerges.  People living in the historic core of the city voted one way; people living on its periphery voted another.

Although there are lots of reasons that account for this similarity (interestingly household income does not seem to be a factor), I would like to suggest that perhaps some of these differences have emerged because of the way that the past has been used and not used to construct a sense of place in Toronto.  Recognizing historic sites has an important role in protecting architecture, determining the design of new buildings and shaping the city’s network of parks and roads.  In other words, it helps to determine how urban residents live and go about their daily tasks in their city’s spaces.  Historic places also build connections to those people who lived in these places before, establishing patterns of continuity and discontinuity with the past that shape our outlook for the future.  In the core of Toronto, I wonder whether the more prominent presence of the past helps to foster a greater sense of collective identity and corporate welfare than elsewhere in the city.

The differences in how the past has been interpreted in urban and suburban Toronto stem from the city’s development.  Historic Toronto was where the city slowly took birth.  It had the highest population, better infrastructure and was more heavily industrialized and developed.  As it expanded, it consumed agricultural areas that were less dense and more easily developed.  For many, these were empty spaces whose history remained to be written.

This interpretation, though, reflects a particularly pernicious view of the past, which – as social historians have emphasized for the past couple of decades – excludes just as much as it explains.  Neither the historical downtown nor ahistorical suburb was developed from pristine forest or abandoned farmland.  The space that comprises Toronto today is one with many stories.  In every part of the city, there is a physical legacy of an Aboriginal presence, the arrival of non-Aboriginal farmers, the building of industry and lives of workers, and the process of urban development.  Sites like the Parson’s site along the Black Creek, aircraft manufacturing at Downsview airfield, and the development of highway 401 shaped how people conceived of the spaces around them in the north end of the city.

In the core of the city, though, this story has been better displayed in public spaces and official commemoration, building a stronger sense of civic identity and community.  Outside of the core, the tale of change over time and urban evolution remains silent.  There are few spaces beyond the perimeter of the downtown core that encourage people to consider the city’s diverse pasts and the experiences of those people who lived there before.  Isolated from the contexts of the past, people in these places are left to build different forms of community, less anchored to place and the lessons of the past.  In Toronto, and many other cities, inscription of the past onto the urban landscape has been used to build different places and different visions of urban identity.

The closure of these museums exacerbates these differences and creates a larger chasm between the everyday experiences of those living in Toronto’s core and those living elsewhere.  Equally as important, though, these closures encompass the three museums most closely identified with local historical societies for the former boroughs of Etobicoke and North York.  If successful, the result of these closures will be a further simplified public telling of Toronto’s past as a historical urban core and an ahistorical suburban periphery.

Toronto historians have voiced their opposition to these cuts in an open letter to Toronto’s city council.  You can voice your opposition to the proposed cuts by signing a petition.  Also, you can visit Zion School House during the next Approaching the Past workshop (Secret Lives, Affective Learning: Using Drama to Teach History) on November 29^th.  Click here to RSVP.

For most professional historians the debate between ‘non-national’ social and cultural history and ‘national’ political and economic history has subsided.  In Canada, it reached its peak with the publishing of York University history professor J.L. Granatstein’s Who Killed Canadian History, but by the mid-2000s the debate had begun to abate as the principal figures concerned with the rising importance of social and cultural history began to retire.  “The battle has been won!” declared Christopher Dummitt in his provocative essay “After Inclusiveness.”  Citing a 2007 study in the American Historical Association’s magazine Perspectives, Dummitt observes that the three largest historiographical fields are now social, women’s, gender and cultural history.  For Dummitt and many other historians working in universities “the battle between social and political history has lost any of the intensity it once possessed.”

Last week’s article in Le Devoir suggests that this is a premature conclusion.  In Dummitt’s words: “the public is not with the professors.”  It is this disconnect on which the History Wars are being reignited.  The piece in Le Devoir is the most recent volley in a public political campaign to return to a narrowly focused vision of Canada’s (political and economic) past.  As Dummitt so clearly outlines, as the historical profession re-oriented and re-tooled, the public was left behind.  The chasm between the profession and the public has helped make the past a contested public space.

Canada’s Conservative government is leading the charge.  The first clear inklings of the government’s desire to shape Canadians’ understanding of their past was well laid out in the discussions following the release of the Discover Canada guide.  But the Conservative vision of Canada’s past has been building over the course of the decade.  In 2000, Jason Kenney, the minister under whom the Discover Canada guide was released, laid out the vision of his future government: “A country which does not know from whence it came,” Kenney stated, “is a country that has no direction for the future.”  The speech from which this line came makes direct reference to the History Wars’ terms of engagement as laid out in Who Killed Canadian History.  A decade later at a National Forum on Canadian History, Kenney was more explicit.  There he lamented that many Canadian historians place too much emphasis on social history, oppression and injustice in their work.  Stephen Harper was less direct but equally focused in a speech celebrating his five years as Prime Minister: “You cannot build a united country by burying and rewriting its history” – a subtle attack at the historians responsible for the historiographical shifts during the 1990s.  This was reiterated during the most recent election campaign when the Conservatives called for a restoration and renewal of Canada’s historical memory.  The clear implication in these statements is that the government is not satisfied with the current historical narrative.  In their view, it is critical for Canadians to return to a historiographical golden age.

Over the past five years, the arguments that fuelled the History Wars have continued in some of Canada’s most important corridors of power.  Despite a handful of laudable apologies (Residential Schools and the Chinese Head Tax), and recognizing Quebec as a nation, the Conservative government usually draws on (a narrow vision of) the past in order to edify The Nation or their party.  In 2009 the Prime Minister famously quipped that unlike so many other members of the G20, Canada has no history of colonialism.  Ignoring much of Canada’s past interaction with First Nations, he claimed that Canada “has all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them.”  More recently, the Prime Minister took aim at his predecessors, claiming to be the best travelled PM in our country’s history – a remark that was quickly corrected by the Liberal Party.  Most recently the addition of ‘royal’ to some components of the Canadian Forces – a move that has been condemned by historians on both sides of the History Wars – has been seen as an attempt to re-inscribe the monarchy into Canada’s past.

Rather than focusing on the factual merits of these statements, it is more important to emphasize the place this perspective seeks to occupy in the popular understanding of the past.   There is no room for an alternative narrative in this vision of the past.  From this perspective, Canada has only one uncomplicated past.  Framing Canadian history in this way means that the past cannot be questioned.  Whether intentional or not, this serves as an assault on critical engagement and it is an oversimplification of the work of professional historians.

Few (good) social and cultural historians ignore the political, economic, or national context in which their research is situated.  Many of the celebrated works in these fields demonstrate how these approaches are interconnected.  In adding these fields to historical practice, new stories – particularly related to women, First Nations, and immigrants – have emerged and become part of Canada’s popularly recognized past.  As Christopher Dummitt has emphasized, the resolution of the History Wars among professional historians has in fact helped lay the ground work – though not completely – for a re-invigorated revisiting of Canada’s political and economic history.

Despite a familiarity with the History Wars, though, few historians have engaged with its new political incarnation.  A handful have openly criticized the government’s depiction of the past in the Discover Canada guide (for a summary see our post on the guide or hear Ian McKay’s podcast), but for the most part the profession has been silent.  Last week’s article in Le Devoir demonstrates that the debate continues.  It is being fought in a different venue and requires a different set of tools than those used a decade ago.  But, in a profession with an increasing focus on public and community engagement, it is important for historians – on either side of the first History Wars debate – to enter into the fray.  The Conservative desire to restructure Canada’s past suggests the stakes have never been higher.

If you have an everyday place that has helped you to engage with the past more deeply or more critically, send an e-mail to tspeace[at]gmail.com and I will add it to this post.

Place: East Dundas and the Desjardins Canal – Hamilton, ON
What about this place opened your eyes to the past: For a short time, before the railway boomed, the Desjardins Canal brought ships from Lake Ontario into Dundas Ontario.  Today, the canal has silted up and the space has become a wetland known as Cootes’ Paradise.  The canal, and the trails around it, tells much of this community’s history.  The canal ends where one of Ontario’s first roads begins (built on a well-established Aboriginal portage between Lakes Ontario, Erie and St. Clair).  The community was well situated to be one of Ontario’s key transit points and a booming industrial hub.  Instead, however, it developed into a small town and is a (relatively) small suburb of the City of Hamilton.  In a province dominated by large cities, the canal, and Dundas itself, is a good reminder of the failed promises of the past.  It challenges us to think about the environmental, technological, social and cultural reasons why this community did not develop like its much larger eastern neighbours.

Place: Blue Beach – Hantsport, NS
What about this place opened your eyes to the past: There are many rocky beaches in Nova Scotia, and it can be fascinating to dig amongst those rocks to find different ‘gems’ – seashells of all shapes and sizes, and many types of stones like agate, amethyst and quartz.  What is even more fascinating, but not always visible right away, is finding layers of shale, or some other stone, and seeing within those layers the imprint of an ancient creature which has been solidified in that stone for millions of years.  It’s a history that goes back well beyond any human impact, a time when nature itself was the only influence.  People can look at these fossils and layers of rock to determine various things about the past, like what a particular climate was like and for how long.  Humans have come up with many ways of recording the past, but nothing seems to record the past so concretely as something that has been solidified in stone for such a long time.  And although they do not have specific details that come with them, these stone records can provide a lot of information about the earth’s past, how it evolved into what it is today, and how it may change in the future.

Place: Université Laval – Québec, QC
What about this place opened your eyes to the past: Although there are many wonderful historical sites in the area around Quebec City, it is the campus of Université Laval that helped me to best understand the history of New France.  From atop the campus residences, you can see why Quebec was chosen to be the centre of France’s seventeenth and eighteenth century colony.  At Quebec, Atlantic and Great Lakes geography meet.  To the east, the St. Lawrence widens and steep mountains rise as the river flows towards the ocean; to the west, the St. Lawrence narrows significantly and the landscape flattens and becomes more pastoral.  From this vantage point, it is not only possible to see the town’s strategic location, but also how it was suited to support most elements of the colony’s economy (fishing, trading and agriculture).

It should come as no surprise that the recent controversy over the renaming of a junior high school erupted in Nova Scotia.  On 22 June 2011, the Halifax Regional School Board voted unanimously to change the name of Cornwallis Junior High.  The school board was concerned about the legacy of Edward Cornwallis, the city’s founder, who in an effort to secure the town site placed a bounty on Mi’kmaq heads.  The board’s decision has caused considerable controversy and according to the media it seems that many people want the school’s name retained.  The changing of the school’s name, however, fits within a long history of name changes in Nova Scotia.  It presents a good opportunity to reflect on the diverse roots that make up Nova Scotia’s population and the province’s relationship with its past.  Renaming landmarks is a sign of a growing and evolving society that is in critical dialogue with its past.

Today, few places in Nova Scotia are known by their original names. The community known as Annapolis Royal was once called Port Royal by the French and Tecopsgig by the Mi’kmaq.  Truro was known as Cobequid and Wagobagitk.  Sydney had a plethora of names including Cibou, Riviere Denys, Dartmouth Harbour and Spanish Bay before it was named after Thomas Townshend, the first viscount of Sydney.  Halifax itself was renamed in 1749, replacing the Mi’kmaq name Chebucto with that of the presiding president of the British Board of Trade.  In each of these cases, place names have changed to reflect emerging social and political conditions – most recently the political and military domination of the British Empire.

Each change left a significant legacy.  Many people embrace the names brought by the British, but others continue to use the names from earlier eras.  Today, some Mi’kmaq residents still consider the province as Mi’kma’ki (the land of the Mi’kmaq), while for some Acadians it remains Acadie (the land of the Acadians).  These place names have roots that precede, or at least emerged contemporaneously with, Nova Scotia.  They have coexisted for centuries, with each, at various times, dominating how this large Atlantic peninsula and the places within it have been defined.  None of these definitions have completely disappeared.  The communities for whom they held meaning continue to exist.  The heritage of past place names haunts the debates of the present.

Two concepts of place lie at the heart of the tensions over the renaming of Cornwallis Junior High.  Most of us are familiar with one of the more-mainstream visions.  Halifax is one of Canada’s premier cities with a rich military and cultural history of which Canadians should be proud.  Edward Cornwallis bears much of the responsibility for building a successful European settlement on the shores of Chebucto Bay.  The other vision is less familiar.  In this vision, a Mi’kmaw fishing village (Chebucto) was overrun by European settlers, reducing their access to important marine resources and customary forms of subsistence.  When the Mi’kmaq resisted this intrusion, Edward Cornwallis placed a bounty on Mi’kmaq heads in an effort to re-inscribe the local landscape from a Mi’kmaq to British geography.

Historians and activists differ over what aspects of Cornwallis’s career were most important: the creation of Halifax or the reduction of Chebucto.  One group argues that Cornwallis’s scalping policy reflected European attitudes towards Aboriginal people and the tense climate of war in the mid-eighteenth century.  Although they caution that this policy should not be celebrated, Cornwallis deserves a prominent place in Nova Scotian history and its commemoration.  Place names and monuments in his honour serve as a good reminder of this important city founder and also of how the past is different from the present.

The other group, which is best represented by Mi’kmaw author and activist Daniel Paul, believe that the 1749 scalping policy amounts to ethnic cleansing.  This was a clear policy to push the Mi’kmaq off their land.  The scalping policy was the most obvious sign that the Mi’kmaq would have little say in the transition from Chebucto to Halifax and Mi’kma’ki to Nova Scotia.  In this context, Paul argues that Cornwallis’s name should be vanquished from the twenty-first century Nova Scotia landscape just as thoroughly as Cornwallis had sought to rid the Mi’kmaq from Halifax.

There is truth in both perspectives.  Cornwallis’s scalping policy mirrored similar European policies in both New England and New France.  But calling him a man of his time goes too far.  Just like you and me, Cornwallis had choices to make.  Some of Cornwallis’s contemporaries – particularly those affiliated with the Indian Department – took different approaches, choosing to negotiate with Aboriginal people rather than attack them.  Even the Board of Trade sought to rein-in Cornwallis’s approach to the Mi’kmaq because of its potential to create tensions with Aboriginal people further west.  The eighteenth-century British Empire was a heterogeneous entity, where imperial officials had considerable flexibility in the decisions that they made.

The renaming of Cornwallis Junior High touches on the ambiguities of Nova Scotia’s eighteenth-century history and its many name changes.  Halifax was not created from a virgin forest.  It was built without Mi’kmaq consultation on land that the Mi’kmaq used regularly.  In deciding to rename Cornwallis Junior High, this decision reminds the Canadian public that the past has different meanings for different parts of the population.  For some Nova Scotians, Edward Cornwallis is a figure who should be celebrated; for others, he represents the erosion of their community’s autonomy and independence.  Our public institutions should accommodate these differences and challenge the public to consider how past decisions affected and shaped different parts of Canada’s population.  Some of Canada’s great moments brought about significant hardship for some people living in our country.  Our place names should not ignore this legacy.

Despite the success of Will and Kate’s recent visit, Canada is no longer defined solely by its British heritage.  Cornwallis Junior High should be renamed.  The Halifax Regional School Board’s decision fits into a long Nova Scotian tradition of changing names with evolving social and political conditions.  As Canadian society increasingly recognizes and listens to the diverse communities within our borders, some place names need to change.  As previous name changes have demonstrated, this does not mean that the past will be forgotten; rather name changes reflect a growing and evolving understanding of our past.  This is a sign of a healthy society; one that uses history to learn from the past rather than merely seeking glory from it.

For more information about Edward Cornwallis and the renaming of Cornwallis Junior High see:

The story has been covered in the National Post, The Coast, The Chronicle-Herald as well as over the radio and television waves.

Here’s a short list of historians who have written on some of the issues at stake:

John Grenier, The Far Reaches of Empire

Daniel N. Paul, We Were Not the Savages

Geoffrey Plank, An Unsettled Conquest

John G. Reid, Essays on Northeastern North America

William C. Wicken, Mi’kmaq Treaties on Trial

William C. Wicken, The Colonization of Mi’kmaw Memory and History, 1794-1928

The use of technology in the classroom – and often in research – is somewhat idiosyncratic.  It is often based more on the experience and comfort of the instructor, which is usually developed outside of the education system, rather than focused on the skills required by the students.  Wikipedia serves as a good example.  Some instructors tell their students to never use it, while others sing its praises as a useful and open way to learn general background information.  In some classes, students are taught to use internet resources such as Google Scholar and Internet Archive; while in others, they are sent to carry out library searches and told to limit their internet use.  All of this can result in students who are equipped with differing research skills and experiences.  More importantly, though, it can create a different set of student expectations about the goals of their university education.

This is made all the more complicated by the variety of resources available to students.  There is a wide array of computer programs like Zotero that help students with their citations.  Websites like Internet Archive, Worldcat, and WordReference.com have search windows that you can embed in your web browser, making internet searching that much easier.  A whole host of Google products, particularly Google Scholar and Google Books, have made searches for both primary and secondary source material considerably easier – so long as students know how to appropriately frame their search query.  And finally, an increasing number of open source database and mapping software makes it possible to manipulate data quickly and efficiently.  Jim Clifford has put together a concise introduction to some of these resources on his website.

These tools are increasingly becoming a part of how historians go about their work.  Unlike the ambitious counting projects of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, which used large and costly equipment, historians now have access to powerful software that can manipulate our source material in ways that were unfathomable even a decade ago.  Without having to manipulate or build your own software, commercial and open-source database, mapping, and network analysis programs are significantly easier to use and can often be more-or-less self-taught (or learned after a one or two day workshop).

Despite the diversity of ways that historians have put these technologies to work in their research, much of the discussion on technology and teaching has emphasized how it should be used to facilitate the students’ learning of course content rather than on developing the skills they require to research the past.  The Chronicle for Higher Education’s series, College 2.0, does an excellent job at summarizing the discussion so far, laying the parameters of this debate between those who ban technology from the classroom, those who embrace it, and those in-between.  The central message throughout these pieces, though, remains the same: the use of technology in itself does not make a good learning environment; rather the critical use of technology in the hands of a good teacher can have positive implications for student learning.

What this discussion on teaching and technology leaves out, however, is a broader reflection of when and where students should develop the technical skills that they will require to critically engage in future research projects.  Given the rising importance of these technologies to historical research, these skills need to be taught to our students in a much more organized fashion.  Rather than only being discussed at the level of pedagogy, technological change in history related fields needs to be addressed as part of a university’s and history department’s curriculum.

It is becoming increasingly important for future historians to know and understand the digital resources available to them.  Other disciplines have taken positive steps. In psychology, for example, students are trained in both statistics and some of its software, like SPSS, a well-known and very powerful piece of statistical software.  Honours students’ research are also often co-supervised by graduate students, allowing undergraduate students to conduct research using this software without taxing faculty resources and providing graduate students with experience of more one-on-one instruction and the opportunity to learn and explore better methods and research design.

Training students to use the technologies employed in their disciplines is increasingly being recognized as an important component to the education system.  The 2010 National Education Technology Plan in the United States, which is focused broadly on all levels of education, emphasized the important role of digital literacy in preparing students for future work environments:

“How we need to learn includes using the technology that professionals in various disciplines use. Professionals routinely use the Web and tools, such as wikis, blogs, and digital content for the research, collaboration, and communication demanded in their jobs. They gather data and analyze the data using inquiry and visualization tools. They use graphical and 3D modeling tools for design. For students, using these real-world tools creates learning opportunities that allow them to grapple with real-world problems…”

Unlike psychology, however, the wide variety of software and historiographical fields available to historians makes a singular type of history program difficult to implement.  Some history students may find GIS software helpful, others may benefit from a more advanced knowledge of spreadsheet and database programs, while others would prefer software that facilitates qualitative text analysis and optical character recognition.

The solution, I think, is to build the teaching of technical skills into the university curriculum by aligning the skills that are taught in individual courses.  Part of this involves the development of an expertise and emphasis in the digital humanities (a goal which many universities have embraced), but also an emphasis on more traditional and effective forms of teaching, such as challenging students to apply their learning in a variety of different settings.

Here’s one way that this could play out:  First, along with basic library skills, a more advanced session on digital literacy (for academic purposes) could be implemented in first year history courses.  Second, assignments could introduce students to major online collections of primary documents and how to put them to best use.  Third, alongside more traditional assignments, courses could encourage students to develop a familiarity with digital publishing through tools like wikis and blogs.  Fourth, online academic standards could be agreed upon at the departmental level, ensuring that students receive a consistent message about the validity of various types of online resources.  What is the status of Wikipedia, or even of this blog post, in the classroom?  Finally, students should be encouraged to use technology to facilitate their research.  This could be as simple as suggesting that they use Google Earth (which would help build a foundation for future use of more complicated GIS software) or some of the more advanced functions of Microsoft Excel (which could get them thinking about databases).

These are just a handful of ways that digital literacy could be taught through an undergraduate history curriculum.  With what tool kit do you think history undergraduates should leave their history programs?  Should digital literacy be seen as similar to other forms of academic literacy, such as developing reading, research and citation skills?

Like the university’s more traditional focus on developing these skills, digital literacy is quickly becoming a critical component to studying the liberal arts and humanities.  As technological change creates new ways of accessing and analyzing primary and secondary sources, new sets of skills and expectations are required for both students and teachers.  The printing press revolutionized learning by making literacy a critical component to one’s education.  The microchip has made a similar impact, requiring that students develop a new type of literacy which equips them with the necessary skills to benefit from these new technologies.

This piece has been cross-posted on the new blog Teaching the Past, jointly run by The History Education Network and ActiveHistory.ca.  Check the blog out for posts on topics similar to this one.  Special thanks to Ian Milligan, Jim Clifford and Amanda Williams for thier insight on this topic.

Over this past summer and fall the York Woods branch of the Toronto Public Library has been engaging with seniors and high school students to create the Black Creek Living History project. This project aims to tell the story of my neighbourhood through its people and resources. By giving voice to the everyday stories from this community this history-based website helps to demonstrate why thousands of people have chosen to call Jane-Finch/York University home and reinforces the sense of community in this neighbourhood.

At the heart of this project are interviews with local seniors conducted by high school students. The interviews tell the story of the community’s transformation from a small agricultural community to one of the most culturally diverse neighbourhoods in Toronto. The people being interviewed describe migrating to the community from elsewhere in Canada and around the world, the growth of suburban Toronto and public housing, the important role that green space played in drawing people to the community, and the impact of the growth of York University (one of Canada’s largest universities) in their backyard.

In addition to the oral histories, the library ran three guest lectures and a bus tour on the history of northwest Toronto. In the videos available on the website Wendy Rowney, the interpretive co-ordinator at Black Creek Pioneer Village, discusses the 19th century history of the area. Jay Todd, director of Park Management at Downsview Park, discusses the development of Downsview, Ontario which grew in the 20th century due to the creation of a military base and airplane factory in the neighbourhood. Finally, Barbara Myrvold, a specialist on local history at the library, shares some of the library’s resources and practices of the local historian.

Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of this online resource is the collection of photographs detailing the rapid transformation of this neighbourhood. Within a decade and a half the area was transformed from an agricultural space to a suburban space with a growing university nearby. Although perhaps more dramatic and significant than in many other areas, the photos tell the story of suburban growth; its themes played out similarly throughout urban North America.

But where suburbs tend to disrupt the connections to the past through the landscape, the Black Creek Living History project does an excellent job at demonstrating the deep and continuous history of this neighbourhood. The project reminds us that today’s borders and boundaries, often determined by urban planners in the 1960s and 1970s, were once seen as important points of connection. It serves as a good reminder that the way in which we engage with everyday places changes over time based on community and planning decisions.

The Black Creek Living History project is a great example of how community history can be told over the internet. Projects like this provide the opportunity to engage community members in creating the site’s content, the flexibility to present information in a variety of formats, and present your community’s past to a broad audience. Perhaps most importantly though, they creates a resource that can challenge us to think more deeply about where we live and the way past decisions have shaped how we go about our daily tasks and our sense of community.

Francis displaying his artwork

Over the past five years I have spent many Friday afternoons with Francis and the Club at L’Arche Daybreak in Richmond Hill.  Daybreak is a community that focuses on sharing life with people with different gifts and abilities; at its heart are men and women with intellectual disabilities.  On Friday afternoons at the Club, a program for retirees, we often gather around the television screen to look at old community photographs.  The members of the Club tell me stories about their past experiences, and I annotate the images in a digital database with the names of the people in the picture and the stories associated with them.

In the early days, we only planned to include a handful of people in this project.  Our intention was to keep the group and the stories manageable.  But as soon as we gathered for our first session, Francis wanted to join.  With over eight decades under his belt, we welcomed his enthusiasm and interest.  Francis had stories of playing sports and working in the town where he grew up before he came to live at Daybreak, as well as many memories of the nearly four decades he lived in the community.

As a historian whose principal focus is finishing a dissertation on Aboriginal experiences of the British Conquest of New France in the 18^th century, I cherish these afternoons of simple sharing and story-telling.  There is no need for detailed notes, no theoretical frameworks and no deadlines; only stories of old friends, happy and sad memories, and the odd hair-raising adventure.

Often as we moved through the pictures, Francis would stop us, saying “Hey!  That’s me!” and then proceed to tell us a story about his friend Andy, who moved to Bracebridge, or his bowling league, delivering meals on wheels, or growing up with his family.  Through his stories I learned about the history of Daybreak, many of the characters who have lived there (and there are some characters), and what it was like to grow up in the 20^th century with an intellectual disability.

But these are not the most important things that Francis and the Club have taught me as a historian.  Through my experiences with Francis I have come to discover the important place that the past plays in the lives of individuals and communities.  Francis was not a man of letters and literature and initially it was not apparent that this project would appeal to him.  But I soon discovered that he had a clear sense of the past and where he fit into it.  His stories, and those he told about his friends, family, and communities, have taught me much about the history of 20^th-century Ontario and what it means to be a historian.

When I compare my daily work on my dissertation with these bi-weekly visits to the Club, I can’t help but feel that there is a disconnection between the two.  In one, I spend most of my time drawing together, sorting and evaluating textual documents; in the other, I learn and record the oral stories and values held by the elders at L’Arche Daybreak.  Reflecting on this difference reminds me about the way that the work of historians shapes and engages with these stories and values, and the importance of understanding how they influence people and communities living today.

Slowly over the past five years, knowing Francis has shaped how I approach the past and how I conduct my research.  He helped me to become more attentive to the stories that people tell, more open to hearing stories from people from a broad range of backgrounds and abilities, and the importance of open-ended story-telling to the historian’s craft.  I learned a lot from him and he will be sadly missed at our gatherings on Friday afternoons.

In my MA I had the opportunity to participate in Saint Mary’s University’s archaeological field school at Grand Pré National Historic Site.   The field school introduced me to a new way of understanding the eighteenth century.  Not only did it offer an intimate relationship with the period’s material culture and an active way of learning about the past, but the Grand Pré program was also integrated into the park’s public programming.  Not only did we dig, but we also engaged the park’s visitors in what we were doing.  We explained the process, and told stories about what we found as we showed the artefacts to the public.

The field school sparked my interest in archaeology; a few years later I was back at it again, this time as part of the public archaeology program at Fortress Louisbourg National Historic Site.  The principal difference between the program at Louisbourg and the one run by St. Mary’s is that instead of anthropology and history student-workers, Louisbourg’s program is focused more on directly engaging the public in the work of archaeologists.  People from a variety of occupational backgrounds, historians and non-historians alike, and from all over North America come to Louisbourg to peel back the earth’s surface and take a peek inside.  Like the work at Grand Pré, participants learn, dig and share what they are doing with the public.

The way that both of these programs engage with the public was both surprising and challenging.  Unlike the practice of public history, where the focus is primarily on disseminating the work of historians through non-academic and more passive mediums (often museums and historical walks), the Grand Pré field school and Louisbourg Public Archaeology Program draw the public into the research process.  For the historian, the equivalent of this level of interaction would be extending an invitation to the public into the archives with us.

To a certain extent many historians already do this.  Oral historians and historians working with specific communities, for example, have long structured their research around collaborative methods which draw interviewees and community members into the research process.  Rarely, however, are these community members full partners in the research process, nor is the focus of these projects broadening people’s exposure to the actual work of historians.

Louisbourg Public Archaeology Program

Similarly, historians who teach often engage students with the practice of history.  But even here, the focus is often more on dissemination of historical research than integration of students into the research process.

Is there a role for the public in historical research?  Is it possible to have a public history program similar to Louisbourg’s Public Archaeology Program, where members of the public could work alongside professional historians?  There are, of course, some major differences between the work of historians and archaeologists.  Archaeologists often work in public spaces where their work can easily be observed; historians usually work in gated archives where even the best known remain obscure to the public.  But this difference makes programs similar to archaeological field schools and public archaeology programs all the more important.  Imagine a place – outside of the classroom – which offered people the chance to engage with primary and secondary texts, develop their own lines of analysis, and discuss aspects of interpretation with the experts who work behind the scenes in determining the stories that are told in our museums, historic sites, and monographs.

Photo by Skeezix1000

The immigration museum at Pier 21 in Halifax provides a glimpse into what this type of public history can look like.  The museum’s research department is located within the museum and is focused on providing additional information for those interested in Pier 21 and Canadian immigration; they are also active in acquiring stories and materials related to the museum’s mandate.  Much like the archaeologists running the programs at Grand Pré and Louisbourg, the research staff at Pier 21 engage the public on a broader and more active level.  According to their website, they “offer reference services to anyone who visits, e-mails, calls or writes. We conduct oral history interviews, scan materials, collect stories, deliver educational workshops and work with countless partners on book, film and research projects.”

Approaching the public in this way reduces the separation between public and academic pursuits of the past.  It demystifies the work that historians and archaeologists do, while also engaging non-historians in some of the more challenging and rigorous aspects of studying the past.  Most of all it emphasizes the varying role that historians and archaeologists have both as teachers of past events and also as teachers of methodology and best practices.