As I reflected on these two news items I was struck by their differences in tone.  In New York City, the discovery of this ship seems to have sparked significant interest (especially given the global significance of the site).  The New York Times followed up on this with an interactive summary of other archaeological finds in the city.  In Toronto, the tone was quite different.  First, there was debate about the merits of historical designation of private property.  But more concerning was Adam Vaughan’s critical point that only four people work in the City’s Heritage Preservation Services department. [editors note (July 27 2010): there are actually 14 people currently employed at Historical Preservation Services see the comments section below for more information]

Without getting into the important differences between New York City and Toronto (and there are many), these two stories challenged me to take a look at the government departments overseeing historical preservation in each city.  The differences in how each city handles heritage preservation is striking and perhaps reflects why Toronto frequently suffers from a mythical reputation of being without history and culture while New York City thrives in both.

Toronto’s lack of history, heritage and culture is, of course, a myth; but the question that these stories raise for me is whether that myth thrives in the city’s municipal structure.

Take a quick peek at New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission.  What you will find is a separate government commission overseen by 11 commissioners.  The commission must consist of 3 architects, 1 historian, a city planner or landscape architect, a realtor and 1 representative from each of the city’s five boroughs.  The commission has four departments, runs a grant program and co-ordinates environmental review.  It has a relatively balanced number of designated historic districts in each of the five boroughs.

Now let’s look at Toronto’s Heritage Preservation Services.  Instead of having four departments, the service only has four employees.  The service is overseen by the Heritage Preservation Board which is comprised of 7 city-council appointed members, 3 city-councillors, and the chairs of Toronto’s four Community Preservation Panels.  The presence of professionals working in history, architecture or city-planning is not mandated.  For the most part research and archaeology are contracted out rather than dealt with internally.   Finally, although Toronto is half the physical size of New York and has one less district, its designated historic districts are clustered around the downtown core; only five historical areas (of 30) fall outside of Toronto/East York.

The minimal support for Heritage Preservation Services in Toronto (4 staff members for 8,000 properties [editors note: there are 14 employees.  See the comments section below]) relative to New York City is not just a function of New York being much older.  It is more a symptom of the type of history that the city has chosen to remember.  Historic preservation in Toronto is centred on the 19^th and early-20^th centuries.  Toronto’s history is significantly broader than this.  The city has a deep history of Aboriginal migration and settlement, the 18th-century French fur trade, as well as important mid-to-late-twentieth century developments – all of which are important and inscribed on the urban landscape.

This somewhat narrow focus has had some serious consequences for how the past is remembered.   Take the Parsons Site, for example.  This pre-contact Iroquoian village neighbouring Jane/Finch, Black Creek Pioneer Village, York University and (now) the Archives of Ontario has been the subject of numerous archaeological studies since the 1950s.  Since the 1960s efforts have been made to commemorate the site.  These efforts ultimately failed and today the site is occupied by a hydro-corridor, an apartment building, and a gas pipeline.  Along with Black Creek Pioneer Village, the community at Jane/Finch, and York University, the landscape and built heritage tells more than 500 years of human history in the region.  None of this is apparent to local residents or visitors and the area is seldom seen as a place of cultural and historical value.

Imagine how Northwest Toronto might have developed if heritage preservation were to have had a more developed structure – perhaps something similar to New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission – which included the input of professionals and citizens.  With greater professional involvement and more human resources Toronto might have a deeper sense of its history.  Instead of having been more-or-less destroyed, a site like the Parons site could have been a public park, a focal point for future urban planning, or even a museum representing pre-contact Aboriginal history and culture.  Demonstrating the way that Aboriginal peoples, immigrants and urban and suburban development have shaped our physical space can help to encourage Torontonians in thinking about their past and the way Toronto has developed.

The fact of the matter is that Toronto, and many other cities, has hidden treasures like the ship that was found underneath the World Trade Centre.  They are scattered beneath our feet, behind our walls, and sometimes immediately apparent without our knowing it.  Many people, groups, other municipal agencies and corporations (such as Heritage Toronto and Archaeological Services Inc) do a great job at revealing these places and their importance to us.

The municipal government, however, should be leading the way.  A strong well-developed and supported municipal heritage preservation program not only preserves the city’s historical and cultural heritage, but also creates greater pride and engagement with civic issues, builds a desire to explore a broader range of neighbourhoods and urban spaces, and helps to foster a deeper sense of the dynamics of a city’s history.

***Two important side notes should be made here:

First, in 1997 Toronto found a boat of its own underneath the city floor during the construction of the Air Canada Centre.  The discovery of the Commodore Jarvis became the subject of Michael Redhill’s novel Consolation.  More information (with pictures and maps) can be found on pages 44-47 of “The Archaeological Master Plan of the Central Waterfront.”

Second, Heritage Toronto was created by the city and has a role in heritage preservation in Toronto.  Its structure bears closer resemblance to New York’s Landmarks Preservation Board.  It is, however, more of an advisory body.  Its mission is to celebrate, interpret, and advocate “for our cultural, architectural, archaeological and natural heritage.”  Although mandated through they city, much of its work is supported by donation.

South of Queen Street During CLC Protest (Picture by Author)

This post is a continuation of yesterday’s post by Christine McLaughlin, which looked at the moral economy of the G20 crowds.

As Sean Kheraj noted last week, many commentators seemed surprised about the police violence that gripped Toronto through the G20 weekend. Many of my contemporaries were surprised that Mayor David Miller and most of his counterparts (except for some subsequent rumblings from the provincial NDP and mayoral candidates) expressed their firm and complete support of police actions. “Figures,” many resignedly noted, “politicians always have to support the police.” (To be fair, it was a bit less surprising when the polling numbers were released) Well, no, they don’t, and a brief trip through Toronto’s 20th century past can show us two things: firstly, that police violence and arbitrary use of power has a long history in Toronto. More importantly, however, we see that citizen action can spur meaningful regulatory change. We can do something (for some hopefully helpful suggestions, along with a personal account of the G20, please scroll to the bottom of the post).

Let me preface this by noting that much of this is dedicated towards policing structures and some of their senior leadership. While there are certainly abuses by rank-and-file officers, many others are hard working, decent men and women – which I’ve had the pleasure of dealing with firsthand in my personal and professional life. The focus needs to be on structures rather than the individuals, although the latter certainly need to be held accountable.

Bainbridge was arrested by the Toronto police for his political beliefs, part of a broader strategy of silencing dissent throughout the war and interwar period. His son remembers that he even buried his copy of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, fearful of having anything seditious!

Sean Kheraj has documented some instances of police violence up until the turn of the 20th century; let’s add a few more vignettes to this tale (it will be far from exhaustive, I’m afraid, but hope it will give a bit of contextualization to the post-G20 discussion). Through the First World War, Toronto police were noted for their vigorous prosecution of individuals who held contradictory political views. In 1917, Toronto newspaper editor Isaac Bainbridge was raided by the Toronto police for possessing anti-conscription literature that dared suggest that the war was fought for territory rather than liberty, and that the ruling classes were responsible for the war as opposed to the working people of all countries. Through the 1930s, the Toronto police under former Brigadier General Denis Draper deployed its “Red Squad” to brutally suppress dissent and break up any public demonstrations that threatened the public order. Indeed, English would be the only allowed language at any radical public gathering (to ease police surveillance). Violators were arrested. Indeed, in a fascinating paper, Robert Oliver has argued that through the 1930s, “Spadina, Soho, Queen, Albert and Yonge streets became the new battlegrounds between the police and the Communists. While public meetings may have been crucial sites for party building, the suppression of them presented a greater propaganda opportunity.” [Robert Oliver, "Revolutionary Claims: Recalling the Politics of the Pavement in Toronto, 1928-1932," Great Lakes Geographer, 9 (2003)] For those of you not from Toronto, the G20 protests and events were centered around these very streets and intersections. The more times change, the more they stay the same.

Picket line violence in November 1973 at the Artistic Woodwork plant. (McMaster University Archives, Canadian Textile and Chemical Union collection, photo by Janice Acton)

It was not until the 1970s that serious calls appeared to challenge the power of Toronto’s police. At the 1973 Artistic Woodwork strike in North York, the Metropolitan Toronto police ended up arresting 108 picketers and strikers during an especially lengthy strike by an immigrant workforce supported by the broad Toronto New Left milieux. This saw widespread violence: police were brutally assaulting young men and women, removing their identification numbers, fabricating charges (most notably accusing 78-year-old temperance crusader and former CCF MPP William Temple of assaulting a police officer and of being publicly drunk, which stretched all credibility), and essentially rioting against a large picket line. Once a video of the violence became available to Toronto City Council, several councilors – led by future mayor Art Eggleton – actually called for the Metropolitan police to be recalled from the police line. Councillors such as Dan Heap, Dorothy Thomas and John Sewell also voiced their discomfort with police actions. Indeed, the police chief stormed out of one meeting after refusing to provide his surveillance tapes to the council. Not that things weren’t polarized even then, of course: North York City Council voted their support of the police just as Toronto Council voted their non-confidence. [This is the subject of my own research]

Police from Barrie marching off to arrest peaceful protestors moving from the courtyard of the TD Centre to the Novotel Hotel. One of the officers from the Barrie Police told us to "go home." We realized the irony about 30 seconds later, which in all honesty was probably a good thing.

Through the mid and late 1970s, attention increased towards police brutality, as discussed in Jeffrey Ian Ross’s Making News of Police Violence: A Comparative Study of Toronto and New York City. In October 1974, after a series of stories in the Globe and Mail, the province carried out a Royal Commission (the Morand Commission) on police brutality, which subsequently called for a complaints commissioner. On 26 August 1979, 35-year-old Jamaican immigrant Albert Johnson was shot dead by police. Conflicting police accounts and a coroners finding that the man was either crouching or kneeling when killed led some to speculate – as advanced by Johnson’s 9-year-old daughter – that police had forced him to kneel and shot him execution-style (as Christie Blatchford reported in the Toronto Star of 28 October 1980). Two constables were charged with manslaughter and acquitted, leading tto the formation of a defense committee, and Nathan Phillips Square became the site of many protests. This, as well as several other incidents, at least led to the creation of the Office of the Public Complaints Commissioner (OPCC) in 1981 and the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) in 1990; however flawed these institutions continue to be due to the use of former police investigators.

A moment of jarring contrast (Torontonians will note that these RCMP officers are pushing the crowd south, towards the G20 summit barrier).

Police brutality in Toronto is nothing new, nor is the use of police to suppress particular political messages. However, if there is any consolation, my impression is that many of the police excesses on the Sunday/Monday were motivated more by confusion and lack of effective leadership than any deliberate strategy of suppressing a particular message in favour of another (the case of the young Quebecer arrested on spurious ‘breach of the peace’ charges because she had an anarchist book and black clothing aside). Let’s hope that we can all learn from the recent and not-so-recent past, and help us all move forward as citizens. Only a small minority of police officers abuse their power – I’ve noticed that several have gone out of their way to be extremely polite lately – but let’s make sure they have the structures to enable them to do their jobs effectively, fairly, and constitutionally.

So with that, let me end with a call to action. Let’s help make history. During the G20 Summit and protests, I was witness to both the strange moments of seeing no police whatsoever (such as on Yonge street, hours after windows had been smashed) but also the over-policing of Sunday and Monday: random police ‘checkpoints’ (read: gaggles of police officers) set up at my local subway station in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood as well as at Queen’s Park station before a protest at police headquarters. Young men and women were zip-tied, searched, IDed and released without any charges evidently being leveled. What happened was inexcusable, and let this be one more voice adding to the calls for a public inquiry. Please consider donating to the Legal Defence Fund (set up through OPIRG York – the paypal is down but you can send a cheque the old fashioned way), affixing your name to a range of petitions, attend any local protests in your community, or by writing your MP or MPP (postage is free for the former). Even if you don’t believe in the specifics of G20 protests, it is my firm belief that we need to show that our rights of assembly and to be free from arbitrary detention need to be vigilantly defended at every turn. Again, as Torontonians in the past have demonstrated, we can make a difference – and we must.

These images were captured on 26 June 2010 at the G8 & G20 public rally and march. My thanks are due to Ed Dwyer of the Retirees' Chapter of CAW Local 222 and Ian Milligan for sharing photos with me.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a group of historians sought to rescue terms like “crowd,” “mob” and “riot” from the “condescension of posterity,” illustrating that crowd actions of the past were often more than the thoughtless acts of thugs and criminals.

The late British historian E.P. Thompson has undoubtedly made the greatest contribution here.  His 1971 “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” explores food riots in eighteenth-century England, suggesting there was indeed a well-thought purpose inspiring rioting English crowds.  Agitating against the free market ideology propagated in Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations, rioting crowds sought to protect their “moral economy,” rooted in a tradition of paternalism, protection of the poor, and a just price, from the turn to a profit-driven economic system underway in England at the time.

Some readers may wonder what eighteenth-century food riots have to do with twenty-first-century Toronto and the G20?  Very much, I would suggest.  Having attended the public rally and march that took place before the G20 Summit on 26 June 2010 in Toronto, I had great difficulty reconciling the media coverage of this event with what I witnessed from my position in the crowd.

The mainstream media largely focused on the ‘violence’ of the day, often through images of attacks against corporate and police symbols perpetrated by a very small few of the thousands who turned out.  Terms like “mob,” “riot,” and “thugs” were deployed frequently, often associated with protesters, brimming with negative connotations linked to vandalism and violence.

Silenced in all of this has been the peaceful message that an overwhelming majority of people who turned out sought to convey.  What I found most incredible about this event was the way in which such a large group of people – estimates range between 10,000 and 25,000 – representing a wide array of diverse, and sometimes contradictory interests,  joined together in an enormous display of solidarity.  Among this broad coalition of interests were people from the Canadian Labour Congress, Ontario Federation of Labour, Council of Canadians, Canadian Federation of Students, Greenpeace, Oxfam, No One is Illegal, Make Poverty History, socialist, communist and anarchist groups, to name just a few, along with concerned citizens unaffiliated with any single group.  Carrying messages of peace, social justice, environmental responsibility, human and animal rights, agitating against gross profit and exploitation, it would be difficult to reduce this crowd to a single ‘moral economy.’

One activist, speaking with Steven D’Souza of the CBC, nonetheless tried.  While allowing that the crowd gathered expressed a number of diverse messages, he suggested that they were perhaps united in their belief that the G8 and G20 are undemocratic or illegitimate organizations, that decisions affecting the world ought to be made in a global forum, where more than the wealthiest few nations are welcome to participate – democracy, after all, should be about more than allowing voice from the richest few.  This forum already exists in the United Nations, or what some have termed the G192. 

The UN is often limited by budgetary constrictions, but as some critics point out, estimates of the security costs alone incurred by hosting the G8 and G20 for a few days in Ontario are less than half of the entire UN’s annual budget.  Despite this, the oft-posed question by many in the media was not whether these meetings should take place, but rather whether they should take place outside of urban centres, with ‘world leaders’ isolated from citizens.

Images of smashed windows and burning cars no doubt feed fears of the need for protection from “thugs” who perpetrate violence.  And violence has certainly been a prevalent theme in the coverage of this G20 Summit, whether it was used to describe acts against property or people – yet surely it is important to distinguish between violence against people versus acts of vandalism.

Leading up to the G20 protests, I was told many times that I was crazy to go, that there would be riots, that the army would be there, and people were going to be hurt or killed.  Hadn’t I heard how many cops would be on site, and the weapons they might deploy against the crowd?  Police were certainly showcasing a range of weapons for crowd control leading up to the Summits, and telling people to stay away.

But idealist that I am, I believed that I could trust in this crowd of protesters.  I believed that, like Thompson’s English crowds of the eighteenth century, they would not commit thoughtless acts of violence against their fellow people in a worthy tradition of popular protest.  And as it turned out, there were no serious injuries, although accusations of police brutality have certainly abounded in the aftermath of protests.

But my purpose here is not to focus on the violence of this event – there has been enough of that.  Instead, I’d like to share the main images I’ll take away from my G20 experience, those of thousands upon thousands of people gathered in peaceful protest, walking side-by-side in an incredible display of unity, harmony and festivity, calling for a fairer world.  And police pointing weapons at me, as early as when the peaceful protest passed the American consulate within minutes of leaving Queen’s Park.

But these weren’t the dominant images beamed across the world; only a few lines of many featured stories of the day were devoted to the large peaceful protest, setting up the ‘main’ story of riots, vandalism and violence.  Those who advocate more drastic measures say that peaceful protest doesn’t work, that something more sensational or extreme is required to carry a message – “propaganda of the deed,” so to speak.  Events as they were covered in the media during and after the G20 protests certainly seem to confirm that peaceful protest doesn’t work in this respect.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming focus on images of vandalism reinforce the collapsing of terms like “thug,” “riot,” and “protester,” associated with senseless acts on the part of a mindless “mob,” even though these images represent the actions of a very small minority.  The real “mob,” the great crowd of protesters, was indeed moved by thoughtful purposes – apparently just not those sensational enough to make headlines.

E.P. Thompson’s attempt to free the term “riot” from its negative connotations, to illustrate some of the positive aspects and purposes of popular protest, not only held resonance in eighteenth-century England; Thompson was also speaking to the political currents of twentieth-century England, believing that knowledge of the past could effect positive change in the present.  It seems we still have much to learn from him in twenty-first-century Canada.

Stay tuned for the next instalment in this series, where Ian Milligan will explore Toronto’s police presence.

Suggestions for further reading:

Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth, eds.  Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority

Bryan D. Palmer, E.P. Thompson: Objections and Oppositions

Bryan D. Palmer, The Making of E.P. Thompson: Marxism, Humanism, and History

E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.

Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, eds.  E.P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives

Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain

Today is the one-hundred and forty-third anniversary of Canada’s Confederation and the formal birth of the country’s federal political system.

And instead of waving the flag in a perfunctory fashion (yes, I know the Queen is visiting), I’d like to wave it in distress over the present dysfunction in our federal politics by briefly singling out four serious issues in the form of a short reading list.

This is not a review or even a formal examination of the sources mentioned by any means; rather, it is an attempt to share ideas and provoke debate on a day reserved for national reflection that is seldom used to actively further a collective discourse.

While some readers will perhaps favour more drastic structural and electoral changes, I would argue that it is worth considering a few subtle alterations before entertaining more ambitious renovations.

GOVERNOR GENERAL’S DISCLOSURE

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s suspension of Parliament in 2008 was widely perceived as an abuse of power. When he did it again the following year, it was considered an unprecedented breach of convention and provoked considerable protest across Canada.

Since both prorogations required the consent of Governor General Michaëlle Jean, many questioned her role in permitting them. However, as Lorne Sossin and Adam Dodek’s chapter in Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis (2009) details, the governor general is not obliged to “disclose” her reasoning and there is no public record of her conversation with Harper on either occasion.

Sossin and Dodek recommend adopting a fairly recent Australian precedent, whereby the governor general’s reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with a prime minister’s request (to suspend or dissolve parliament) are shared in a brief public letter. While this will not necessarily prevent similar abuses, it may empower the (unelected) governor general to make decisions without fear of incurring a contemporary reenactment of the so-called King/Byng Affair of 1925.

INCLUSIVE PARTY

Green Party leader Elizabeth May’s recent book, Losing Confidence (2009) highlights a number of parliamentary dysfunctions, including the fact that party leaders are selected almost exclusively by party members.

May suggests that parties should open their leadership elections to all Canadians, regardless of party affiliation. While any sitting MP (member of parliament) is technically able to conduct a leadership challenge if the caucus will entertain a vote — as Australia’s new prime minister, Julia Gillard did last week — May’s remedy takes into account the fact that parties do not generally tolerate such leadership challenges and will likely continue to hold extravagant leadership conventions outside of the caucus.

May also sees this as a means of encouraging more people to become involved in their political process.

LEAVE YOUR LEGACY OBSESSION BEHIND

Ron Graham’s Walrus (Jan/Feb 2010) essay, “The Stranger Within” follows the Liberal Party of Canada’s leadership struggle in the aftermath of Paul Martin Jr.’s fall, and his surprise succession by Stéphane Dion in 2006.

Graham explores how a handful of legacy-minded “kingmakers” have traditionally presided over party leader selection (excluding spontaneous selections like Dion). The most recent party brain-trust helped select Martin (himself the son of a three-time would-be Liberal leader), and handpicked Michael Ignatieff, the man who would replace Dion in 2008.

Dealing with legacy baggage is a problem that all parties encounter from time to time; however, it can seriously impair their ability to govern or hold the government to task in opposition.

The present success of the now united Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Party left their seven year-old amalgamated offspring, the Conservative Party of Canada, largely free from the influence of former leaders and to campaign on a blank slate. In fact, it has let them openly quarrel with former leaders associated with the new party.

The merger between the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress in 1961 that created the New Democratic Party is similar example.

In short, Graham’s article works to suggest that voters should not reward parties looking to coast on past achievements or stale solutions and ideas.

CIVILITY, DAMMIT

Mark Kingwell’s Walrus (March 2010) essay, “The Shout Doctrine” laments the deficit of wit, ideas, and civility in exchanges between MPs. Both obstructionism and increasingly partisan attacks have triggered a “race to the bottom” at the expense of governance and discourse, he says.

While this is to be somewhat expected and does play a role in parliamentary history (Sir John A. Macdonald’s behaviour comes to mind), Kingwell suggests that the longer this persists, the more damage it does to our political fabric and only increases the number of alienated voters.

This problem is more difficult than most but maybe there’s something to be said for writing your MP about their apparent inability to behave or play well with others. They don’t have to agree but they should at least attempt to get along.

POINTS OF DEPARTURE

The main reason I wanted to share a brief reading list and highlight a few problems was to encourage readers to do the same.

So, what do you think and what have you been reading about our federal political woes?

One last thing: Canada Day (or Dominion Day, until 1982) means different things to different peoples. Some celebrate a lot, others a little, while others do not — perhaps in light of different perspectives or strained relationships and the historical events from which they proceed. That’s a part of Canada’s history, too.

Still, July first is, at the very least, the belated inauguration of summer (for a northern nation) and the arrival of a cherished long weekend. So, wherever you are today and whatever you happen to be doing, enjoy.

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Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau QC (Photo by Tasha DiLoreto)

Since 1977, International Museum Day has taken place across the world on, or around, the 18th of May. This day is meant raise public awareness towards some of the daily challenges that museums face and allows members of the public a glimpse into the way a museum operates. Each year the International Council of Museums (ICOM) chooses a theme that it encourages participating museums to work with, and the theme for 2010 was Museums for Social Harmony. According to ICOM’s Theme Statement, museums “are in a position to address the urgent need for safeguarding cultural diversity and bio-diversity as the common heritage of humanity.”

As a student in the MA Public History program at the University of Western Ontario, I’m currently completing an internship in Gatineau, Quebec, at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC). I knew that the museum had some special plans for the day, and I thought it would be a great opportunity to see how the CMC planned to share some typical challenges faced by museums with the general public.

I think that one of the most important things that a museum can do is to facilitate open interaction between the public and museum professionals. I also think that it is the duty of a museum to make itself accessible to the public, and the CMC did an excellent job of this on International Museum Day. Although admission to the museum was not free, visitors had the opportunity to see, and participate in, many special activities that museum staff had prepared. In anticipation for their temporary Horse exhibition, visitors were able to see what an exhibit looks like while it is being constructed. Similarly to this, for visitors who entered Canada Hall and saw the replica of a Montreal jail cell, they were greeted by staff who had set up a large flat screen TV that cycled through photographs of the exhibit area being constructed. Some of these pictures revealed some important aspects of exhibit design, including the process of artifact selection, painting murals on the walls, and construction of a wooden door.

The CMC offered a number of special talks to the public, and the one that I heard was put on by the museum’s archives and library staff. The public was invited into the Canada Pacific Railway exhibit for a talk on how to search the museum’s library and collections online. The staff even had acquired an old gramophone with music on wax cylinders for the public to enjoy. The staff who presented the information on searching the museum’s databases were very knowledgeable and invited guests to ask any questions they could think of. Sure enough, many questions arose, from the preservation of nearly extinct Native American languages, to a simple query on how to navigate the database.

As a student and museum enthusiast, it was very interesting to watch the way that museum staff interacted with everyday people. Before the presentation began, I worried that the presenter would take on a condescending, or perhaps elitist, tone towards the general public in the room. I couldn’t have been more wrong! The material was presented in an easily accessible manner that anyone, regardless of education or preexisting knowledge, could understand. Not once were questions met with condescending answers, and I really think that this will contribute to a positive view of museums and museum staff. From my own experiences, it’s evident that the CMC did an excellent job of catering to their public, something that I think will contribute to lasting interest in the museum.

Tasha DiLoreto is a MA student in the Public History program at the University of Western Ontario, currently interning with the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, QC.

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Last week, the first event by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools was held in Winnipeg. In the same week, British Prime Minister David Cameron issued an apology on behalf of the British government for the “unjustified and unjustifiable” killings of thirteen people in Londonderry, Northern Ireland in 1972 – an event now famously known as Bloody Sunday. It was a monumental week as far as intended healing and reconciliation goes.

The announcements in London and Manitoba were worlds apart, geographically and politically, but they both follow on three decades worth of government apologies for everything from the Irish potato famine to the 18^th century slave trade. In Canada, the official apology in 1988 to the 22,000 Japanese Canadians who were forcibly relocated during the Second World War and whose property was confiscated and sold by the government marked the beginning of a period of requests from other groups, such as the Chinese, Ukranian and Italian communities, for official acknowledgment of state wrongdoing.

Successive federal governments dismissed these claims however in 2006, the Conservative government made an official apology and provided redress to Chinese Canadians, or their surviving spouses, who paid a head tax to come to Canada between 1885 and 1947 while establishing Community Historical Recognition Program and National Historical Program “to commemorate and educate Canadians about the historical experiences and contributions of ethno-cultural communities affected by wartime measures and immigration restrictions that were applied in Canada.”

There is significant debate about the value of state apologies and state-sponsored efforts at reconciliation. Works such as The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa that discuss the post-Apartheid experience critique such efforts where they feed into government attempts to gain legitimacy.

I confess to being of two minds about the politics of apology. As a historian, I question the politicized nature of government apologies and the authenticity and integrity of their intentions. Did Brian Mulroney apologize to Japanese Canadians because he really felt that what happened was wrong? Or did he just want people to vote for him (and for Free Trade)? On a personal level, I also struggle with the impact of government apologies on the community involved. My grandfather was a fisherman in Tofino (on the west coast of Vancouver Island) when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour. His boat was taken by the Canadian government. My father, who was 2 years old at the time, and his parents were interned. One of my uncles was born in a camp. Another uncle later became very active in the campaign for redress. And yet growing up, my father never spoke to me of the experience.

I vividly recall being at a friend’s cottage and having her dad say to me, “is your family affected by redress?” I had no idea what he was talking about. It turns out we were and that, ironically, my parents used the compensation to fix our house, literally putting a new roof over our heads, and then taking my brothers and I on our first trip to Vancouver Island. For years, however, I remained ambivalent about the value of political apologies. I did not feel that the government was honestly apologetic in its intents and I resented the suggestion that because an apology had been issued, a wrong was corrected. In 2007, the Canadian author and poet, Roy Miki, wrote a book called Redress: Inside the Japanese Call for Justice (2007). In the introduction he gave voice to some of my reservations: “In a strange twist, and one that haunted me in subsequent years…Art (his brother and a leader in the redress campaign) could see himself as a “Canadian” because he had become the “Japanese Canadian” named in the redress settlement.” Until reading Miki’s book, I had been reluctant to see any benefits to the apology. As I read on however, it dawned on me that the value of the apology was not in the words themselves but in having a forum in which history could be made known, debated, and incorporated into the national conscience. If there is a lesson to be learned from the Japanese Canadian experience, it is that open forums are necessary so that people can speak. Apologies and money are insufficient. That is happening in Winnipeg. It is not clear whether it will happen in the case of Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

As the undertakings in London and Winnipeg reveal, more than ever the global media is providing an important forum for raising awareness so that what happens in one part of the world reverberates in others. When an apology is issued in England or when reconciliation begins in Canada, news of such undertakings now have the potential to reach an international audience and to effect international change. Governor General Michaëlle Jean’s declaration that it is necessary to talk about history to “break the wall of indifference” can reverberate with meaning far beyond Canada.

Laura Madokoro is a PhD candidate in history at the University of British Columbia.  She studies twentieth century global migration with a special focus on political refugees in Asia and the Commonwealth in the post-1945 period.

For another post on government apologies on ActiveHistory.ca see Teresa Iacobelli‘s Acts of Contrition: Rethinking the Purpose and Effect of Government Apologies, posted in February 2010.

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But how can the conventional printed book, which privileges the sense of sight in the form of black text printed on a white page, facilitate an argument that urges us to reconsider the importance of humans’ varied senses?

Parr, in collaboration with new media designer Jon van der Veen, has taken up this challenge with Megaprojects New Media, a series of online exhibits that “parallel” the text contained in her book.  A short introduction by van der Veen precedes each of the book’s chapters and informs the reader of the diverse media available on the website.

The use of new digital media to promote a published book’s goal of a more “sensuous history” inevitably contains some dilemmas. The most obvious issue is that digital media – similar to conventional print – also prioritizes sight (along with sound) at the expense of touch, taste, and smell.  Indeed, a majority of exhibits on the Megaprojects website still cater primarily to sight and sound through the many maps, oral interviews, songs, photographs, and other sources found on the website.

Yet one of the most unique exhibits on the site is a series of virtual walking tours that use oral evidence from local people to reconstruct the “lostscape” of Iroquois, Ontario before the St. Lawrence Seaway project flooded much of the old town in the early 1950s.  Although this technique still relies upon sight and sound, the locals’ descriptions, historic photographs, and maps allows the listener-viewer of the exhibit to imagine what the town may have been like in multi-sensorial terms.  The tastes, smells, and touches of old Iroquois as remembered by locals emerge as visitors journey through space and back in time.

The Megaprojects-Sensing Changes project illustrates the opportunities that digital media offers to conventional print publication.  In what other ways are historians using digital media to augment more traditional methods of (re)presenting the past?  What are its challenges? What are its possibilities for the future?

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On Wednesday 14 April, the United States of America’s Library of Congress (LOC) announced a deal with the popular social networking service, Twitter, to archive all public messages on the site right down to the first “tweet” from @jack (Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder) on 21 March 2006, at 3:50 PM.

Response to the news can generally be described as positive and set “Library of Congress” as a top trend for the remainder of the week. Considering that the site has evolved into one of the most efficient means of spreading information (even by Internet standards) such enthusiasm is understandable.

Still, the LOC’s initial announcement carried little description of the archive itself or the conditions of access. As hype matured into curiosity, the LOC released a short FAQ to follow-up on questions from the public two weeks later.

Let’s break it down:

Archive Description

• the archive was a gift
• it includes all public messages (but excludes “private account information” and “deleted tweets”)
• it excludes links or pictures (such as short URLs and location based services like Foursquare)
• tweets are made available to researchers approximately half a year after their publication

Archive Direction

• “…Library…[to work] with academic research communities to explore issues related to researcher access”
• “…serve as a helpful case study [in the development of] policies for research use…”
• “…Library…will not try to reproduce [Twitter's] functionality”
• “…interested in offering collections of tweets…” related to current events

Archive Access

The FAQ identifies access issues as a priority but does not elaborate on conditions. Shortly after its release Martha Anderson (director of the LOC’s National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program) told Randall Stross of the New York Times that “[t]he library plans to dole out its access…only to…qualified researchers” due to privacy concerns.

However, exactly what “qualifications” means is unclear. Hopefully the LOC will further clarify this and elaborate on their overall archive strategy as it develops over the coming months.

HOW USEFUL IS IT?

While it is perhaps too early to properly assess just how useful such an archive might be, it is difficult to dismiss its potential value to the historical community as a source of contemporary cultural commentary in future. It is thus less a question of whether or not researchers will use the archive but how.

Overall, the LOC’s interest indicates that the still infant networking service may indeed have a staying power beyond others within the same rapidly evolving medium with a notoriously fleeting attention span. This may set a powerful precedent and persuade us to reevaluate otherwise “everyday” content on the Internet as well as reflect on new roles for archives.

On the other hand, it would take very little for Twitter to incorporate a more advanced, research-ready option into their existing search. Some researchers are already using Twitter for their own purposes without a formal archive structure or support beyond the platform itself. This does not dismiss the significance of the LOC’s decision to build and maintain an archive at considerable expense and effort, but it does suggest that not all prospective researchers need it.

For now, the only safe conclusion here is that Twitter has become socially significant enough to merit an archive at a publicly funded institution — which is not only unprecedented for a four-year-old start-up but also somewhat prophetic for researchers and the historical community in general.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

What do you think about the LOC’s efforts to collect and collate messages on Twitter (now estimated at over 15 billion)?

Do you agree with the Washington Post‘s Monica Hesse that this an important example of history from the bottom up?

Are you a Twitter user?

Do you have any privacy concerns about your content? And if so, will the collection of public messages alter how you use the network?

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At the end of April, I began a four-month internship at the Oil Museum of Canada. One of my major research projects involves examining primary source documents to gain a better understanding about the events of 1862, when Canada’s first oil gushers erupted from over thirty wells in Oil Springs, Ontario. I have discovered some interesting comparisons between accounts of those first oil gushers and the recent oil spill disaster (a British Petroleum rig exploded on April 20th, killing eleven men and causing an enormous leak into the Gulf of Mexico; thousands of barrels a day continue to spew into open waters, as containment efforts have proven inadequate to respond to the crisis.)

The juxtaposition between mid-nineteenth century perspectives on oil gushers, and modern reactions to the current oil spill crisis, is quite striking. After the first oil gusher in Canada was struck on January 16th, 1862, it became a hot topic in newspapers across the province, including the Toronto Globe, the London Free Press, the Hamilton Times, and the Sarnia Observer. Newspapers described these oil gushers loftily and optimistically, commenting on the fortunes that would be earned by the wells’ owners and the splendid potential of Canada’s new resource. The London Free Press ran a column on February 6th, 1862, “The Oil Wells in Enniskillen” (the township where Oil Springs is situated) which described the scene when the oil initially spouted from the well:

… shooting up a column of oil some 20 feet into the air…. hundreds of barrels of oil were flowing around the well, over the road and into the creek…. the waste was [eventually] stayed; but not until eighty or one hundred thousand gallons of oil were lost! I measured the depth of oil on the creek in many places, and found a varying deposit of from three to four inches, just as pure as when it flowed from the well.

Visitors flocked from throughout the province to witness the flowing wells for themselves: the London Free Press reported on January 30th, 1862, that “upwards of 2,000 persons have already been to see for themselves the wonderful oil well in Enniskillen.”

The extent to which attitudes have changed is astounding. Undoubtedly, they stem from an increased understanding of the impact that oil spills have on the environment. The Toronto Globe suggested on August 27th, 1861, “The oil comes to the surface in many places… Whether the fish like or dislike this natural addition to their aqua pura is not reported. Perhaps they use it for medicinal purposes, as dogs sometimes eat grass, and cows a few leaves of hemlock when out of condition.”

The only danger associated with oil was the potential for devastating explosions; its negative impact on the environment was not a concern to the nineteenth-century mentality. The main worry was the amount of money that was being lost by the oil that flowed into creeks, rivers and lakes from the flowing wells. The Sarnia Observer article mentioned above stated specifically that “one hundred thousand gallons of oil were lost.”

Journalists, politicians, oil workers, and environmentalists commenting on the BP oil spill are not focusing on the revenue that is being lost by the oil that gushes into the ocean. The main monetary concern in the coverage I have listened to is how much will eventually be spent to clean up the mess. Times have certainly changed!

Dana Johnson is a student in the University of Western Ontario’s Public History program. In addition to contributing here at Activehistory.ca, she has her own blog at http://danajohnsonhist.blogspot.com/.

Jay in Toronto:

“Garrison Creek: Exploring Its Natural and Cultural History”, a walk led by city council candidate Karen Sun, traced the path of one of Toronto’s enigmatic long-lost rivers.  The creek, an important element in the city’s development during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was buried by the city in the 1880s amid public health concerns.  At the time, inhabitants upstream used the creek as an open sewer, dumping refuse and leading those living downstream to demand the city bury the creek.

The most fascinating part of the walk was how the tour literally unearthed the creek within the walking group’s consciousness.  In an earlier post, I remarked how recent media attention linking Toronto’s leaking watermains to the city’s infrastructure history suggested that a sense of the history of public works emerges when its use is disrupted.  The Garrison Creek trek indicates that a walk along the path of buried infrastructure – drawing on all of our senses – is another way in which we recognize the tunnels, pipes, and past below us.  After learning the creek’s course at the start of the walk, one participant asked “is that why our basements are so wet”?  The most poignant moment of the walk occurred in Bickford Park, when walkers could see, hear, and smell the creek through its sewer grates.  “I thought it was a dead animal,” remarked one woman after smelling the creek’s pungent odour.

The tour began at the foot of Christie Pits, site of not only Toronto’s first gravel pit for road construction but also a 1933 anti-Semitic riot recently commemorated with a Heritage Toronto plaque.  Multiple layers of history intersect through specific spaces, which is one of the many reasons why walking draws out the diverse histories of place.

Overlay of 1880 York County Atlas with contemporary satellite image illustrates Garrison Creek's impact on urban greenspace

The walk also uncovered the impacts that the creek had on the city’s built environment.  For example, much of downtown Toronto lacks green space, but the walk illustrated how development challenges imposed by the creek’s path led to the creation of a string of parks that follows the buried creek.  And while most of the city built before World War Two conforms to a grid pattern, we experienced how the creek broke this pattern at certain locales, as illustrated through such curvilinear roads as Crawford and Niagara Streets.

We ended our hike at Fort York, where the creek once ran into Lake Ontario and provided drinking water to the garrison.  The Fort – now surrounded by rising condominiums of green and blue glass, a spider web of railroad tracks, and one contentious elevated expressway – was a fitting place to end; it once again demonstrated that the history of urban development cannot be separated from its natural history.

Ian in Vancouver:

"Labour History in the Downtown Eastside" walking leader Am Johal

On the other end of the country, I was able to attend a Jane’s Walk in Vancouver: “Labour History in the Downtown Eastside.” Led by local community activist Am Johal, the walk took us through and around one of Canada’s most economically depressed areas. This, however, can overshadow a rich historical heritage of working people. Am combined narratives of local and oral history from his work with work by Derek Hayes (Reading the Riot Act) and Bill Waiser (All Hell Can’t Stop Us: The On-To-Ottawa Trek and Regina Riot). It was great to see the melding of professional and local history in producing a rich and vibrant walk and talk. It must be noted that I knew very little of this local history before stepping out onto the walk, so this was all very new to me!

We began on the Main St. overpass over the rail tracks leading into downtown Vancouver. It was here that Am told the story of how Great Depression-era workers established unions in their relief camps, culminating in a large march and the infamous On-to-Ottawa trek, which was tragically stopped in Regina. The memory of this event is still alive in the community and will be commemorated with a plaque on June 6^th when another On-to-Ottawa trek will launch from the same site. The marchers, to be joined by two surviving members of the original 1935 event, are set to push for a national housing strategy.

We then passed near the site of the Battle of Ballantyne Pier, where longshoremen at Vancouver’s port are planning to establish a public art project to commemorate the battle, another example of how the community continues to engage with the past. While walking, we discussed the varying narratives of the Frank Rogers shooting – the community narrative, which prevails among residents today, as opposed to the narrative of the heavy-handed Vancouver police who shot Rogers. A darker side of the history came up as well: the anti-Asian riots of the early 20^th century, where many trade unionists and working people assailed Chinese and Japanese immigrants for their low-wage position in the labour market and occasionally acting as strikebreakers.

From there we moved through Oppenheimer Park, former home of the Japanese-Canadian baseball team the Asahi Tigers and site of International Workers of the World rallies. In the core of the downtown east side itself, we learned about the single-residency hotels (SRO), home to many lower income residents today, and how they developed out of working people’s historic need for temporary accommodation while in Vancouver on leave or on lay-off from their jobs in shipping or forestry.

Finally, we ended with the story of the Downtown East Side Residents Association, which brought a form of bottom-up rank-and-file unionism to the community. The name itself, I learned, was consciously chosen to erase the stigma of the former community name, ‘Skid Row.’ Even today the Association is strong, and has made the area a hub of organizing and resistance to megaprojects such as the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. Standing at the corner of Main and Hastings, I realized the value of such a poignant walk, tying the historical struggles of working people into the neighbourhood as it is today. When people think of the Downtown East Side, they think of extreme poverty and drug use. This narrative, while true in many respects, needs to be contextualized and can be seen as part of a broader narrative of working people’s fights, struggles, and historical existence.

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