Runnymede Branch Public Library ca. 1930 (City of Toronto Archives)

On Tuesday, September 14^th the Toronto Public Library (TPL) will kick off its 6 part History Matters lecture series.  As you might have guessed from the title, the idea for the series was inspired by what’s been going on over the past couple years with the folks at Active History – both at the blog and the 2008 conference.  My goal for organizing the series with the library was to encourage the development of community and exchange between active Toronto historians and the broader Toronto community.

The idea to use a public history lecture series for building these connections came from my own experiences as a first time university lecturer.  After spending 6 years working towards my doctorate, in my relatively tiny little field of nuclear history and my even tinier corner of that particular history, I felt a little disconnected from why it is that history matters.  My dissertation was about the role of activist-oriented physicians and scientists in the American anti-nuclear movement, but while writing it I always had this nagging feeling that maybe my life would have more meaning if I was doing what these activists were doing, rather than writing about them – at what felt like a turtle’s pace.  When I started regularly lecturing to undergraduate students – about the history of medicine and the history of science – I was energized.  It was immediately clear to me why it is that history matters – not only the finessed (and sometimes inaccessible) historical arguments that academic historians love to make, but stories about the past.  For me, active history has come to mean using what happened in the past to inspire people to look outside themselves and their small corner of the world, to develop empathy for their fellow human beings, and to learn from both the good and the bad that has been done in the past.  Since my students over the years seemed to get a lot out of learning about history and because lots of the people in the public places where I wrote most of my thesis seemed interested in the history I was studying, I figured the patrons of the TPL might also enjoy learning more about history from some really cool Toronto historians.  It also helped that the TPL has the largest public library system in Canada and a staff that is totally committed to developing interesting and engaging programming for library patrons across the city!

The theme of the series is Toronto history and will begin with a talk by Stuart Henderson at the Yorkville Branch, where he’ll discuss the history of hippies in the surrounding neighbourhood.  Subsequent talks will be given by the eminent Canadian labour historian, Craig Heron, Active History.ca’s own Jay Young, Susanna Miranda, Jennifer Bonnell, Megan Davies, and David Reville.  The talks cover a wide range of historical subjects, including the history of booze, the Toronto Transit Commission, Portuguese cleaning women, homelessness in the Don Valley, and the impact of deinstitutionalization on Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood.  The TPL did its best to have the location of each talk correspond with the topic.

See the full speakers list, with titles, dates, and times below.  If you’re in the Toronto area, I hope you’ll consider coming out to some of the talks.  With the exception of Henderson’s talk, which will take place at 2pm, all of them are scheduled in the evening.  ActiveHistory.ca plans to record and post these lectures on the website so those not able to attend the talks will still be able to hear them later on.  I would also appreciate people posting the program listing far and wide to help with marketing efforts.

Editor’s note: ActiveHistory.ca is happy to provide web support to anyone who wishes to start a History Matters lecture series in their own locale.  Please contact us at info@activehistory.ca if you are interested.

The Toronto Public Library Presents: Programs for the constantly curious…

History Matters

Connect with Toronto historians at these lively lectures showcasing current research on Toronto’s past and discover some of the surprising ways history matters to everyone in our city today.

Making the Scene in 1960s Yorkville
Stuart Henderson
Tues. Sept. 14, 2 pm
Yorkville Branch
22 Yorkville Ave. 416-393-7660

I’ll Drink to That: Booze in Hogtown
Craig Heron
Tues. Sept. 28, 7 pm
Annette Street Branch
145 Annette St. 416-393-7692

A Public Technology: The Building of Toronto’s Yonge Street Subway
Jay Young
Thurs. Oct. 14, 7 pm
Beaches Branch
2161 Queen St. E. 416-393-7703

Isolating Undesirables: Prisons, Pollution and Homelessness in Toronto’s Don River Valley, 1860-1932
Jennifer Bonnell
Thurs. Oct. 14, 7 pm
Bendale Branch
1515 Danforth Rd. 416-396-8910

Keeping the City Clean: Portuguese Women in Toronto’s Cleaning Industry, 1970-1990
Susana Miranda
Thurs. Oct. 21, 7 pm
Bloor/Gladstone Branch
1101 Bloor St. W. 416-393-7674

Locating Parkdale’s Mad History: Back Wards to Back Streets, 1980-2010
Megan Davies and David Reville
Thurs. Nov. 4, 7 pm
Parkdale Branch
1303 Queen St. W. 416-393-7686

Organized by the Toronto Public Library, with the assistance of Dr. Lisa Rumiel, SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, McMaster University

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For those in the Calgary listening area, the broadcasts can be heard each weekday morning on CJSW 90.9 FM, for everyone else each episode will be made available by online podcasts posted at www.cjsw.com. For those interested in contributing, the series producers are still open to submissions for unfilled dates. Ideas can be submitted to Producer Joe Burima at todayincanadianhistory@cjsw.com.

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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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What has characterized this particular war has been its brutalization of civilians, including, women and children. Women and girls are routinely subjected to mutilation and repeated gang rapes. In fact, no other feature has characterized this war more than the prevalence of rape. It is estimated that throughout the Congo, approximately half a million women have been subjected to sexual violence of the most brutal sort during an over decade long war. The DCR has been called the most dangerous place in the world for women.

Martial rape is, of course, not without precedence. Historically there are many recorded incidences of the use of rape in war. The twentieth century alone has numerous examples that include the rape of women in Nanking, China by Japanese troops in 1937-38 and the rape of German women by advancing Red Army soldiers at the end of the Second World War, to the mid 1990s, which saw the use of rape as a weapon against the women of both Rwanda and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Rape is more than a by-product of war, it used to further the destruction and disgrace of an enemy.   Within the Congo itself, its use was common during the Belgian colonial period where women were used to reward soldiers. But this history does not excuse its present day use, or explain its particular brand of viciousness in today’s Congo.

The scope and the nature of the atrocities occurring in the Congo once again raises questions as to how the rest of the global community responds to Africa. While the world has committed itself to addressing the issue of AIDS in Africa by spending billions of dollars each year on the treatment and prevention of the disease, at the same time it has chosen to either ignore or has mishandled some of the roots causes of the problem, including the prevalence of rape. Since 2006, the Government of Canada has spent over $15 million in rape prevention in the Congo, but criticisms abound that most of these funds have been squandered on bureaucratic overhead and misguided public awareness campaigns and that they have failed to reach Congolese women in need of safe havens, aftercare and justice.

Rape in many African nations is a major human rights issue rooted in persistent gender inequalities. Even in countries at peace, the prevalence of rape is dumbfounding. South Africa has one of the highest incidences of rape in the entire world. A study conducted in the nation last year by the Medical Research Council found that one in four men admitted to rape. Most disturbing is that many of the victims are children due to a persistent myth that sex with a virgin will cure a man of the HIV virus. What results is a whole new generation of HIV positive girls and women. AIDS adds just another sad dimension to the long term trauma of rape.

The world has its reasons for ignoring the brutalization of hundreds of thousands of women in the Congo. First, rape is an uncomfortable topic. The issue forces us to confront sexual violence and deviance of the worst kind. It is especially difficult when its victims are children. Secondly, while there are incidences of men being raped, especially in conflict zones such as the Congo, for the most part the victims are female. Issues affecting women are often the last to be discussed when dealing with international affairs. Women are often rendered powerless and silent in the affairs of men. Finally, to denounce mass rapes is to require action of the world. Once governments acknowledge the scope of human rights abuses being perpetrated in Congo, they are no longer absolved from intervention, and intervention in Africa is the one thing that the international community can agree it does not want.

How we respond to the epidemic of AIDS in Africa will be determined by how we respond to rape. These two issues cannot be separated. No matter how uncomfortable, rape is a topic that must be added to the agenda if we are at all committed to addressing issues of global security and global health.

For more information on the Congo, please see:

Human Rights Watch www.hrw.org

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A recent BBC news report highlights some of the key issues in a decades-long debate over heli-skiing in the European Alps. First experimented with in British Columbia’s interior mountain ranges in the 1960s, heli-skiing entails using helicopters in lieu of chairlifts to shuttle small, guided groups of skiers to the top of otherwise difficult-to-access, and thus untracked mountain slopes.

Although this lucrative industry flourished in western North America’s wide open spaces, it also faces growing opposition, primarily over environmental concerns such as air pollution and other threats to fragile alpine ecosystems. In one recent controversy, however, opponents of a contentious heli-ski proposal voiced their concerns over potential conflicts between mechanized recreation and cultural heritage values in the region surrounding British Columbia’s highest mountain, Mount Waddington. As human demands on Canada’s natural spaces increase, such convergences of ecological and heritage concerns are likely to become a more common, and perhaps more effective, environmental strategy.

1926 Vancouver Province article about a mountaineering expedition to Mount Waddington

Soon after mountaineers began visiting Mount Waddington in the 1920s, the first calls were made to have this superlative landscape protected within a national park.   While mountaineers had successfully led similar campaigns such as at Garibaldi Park north of Vancouver, the remote and desolate Mount Waddington landscape was largely ignored by government officials. Over the next eight decades mountaineering parties from around the world continued to visit the region’s massive icefields and near-vertical spires, often likened to the “aiguilles” surrounding France’s celebrated Chamonix valley.

Never ceasing completely, park advocacy was renewed in  2007 in response to a proposed 350,000 hectare heli-ski tenure by Knight Inlet Heli Sports. For perspective, this is more than one hundred times larger than Whistler-Blackcomb, North America’s largest ski resort.

The proposal seemed consistent with the province’s ambitious tourism policies, but opponents argued that the constant presence of helicopters would compromise the wilderness experience of backcountry skiers and mountaineers, who themselves represented a substantial sector of the region’s economy. Don Serl, perhaps the region’s foremost alpinist of the past thirty years, raised concerns that “the new proposal is a massive breach of the standards of behaviour that have evolved to their present state over 80 years since the Mundays first set off to find and explore the Range.”

Opposition continued to mount even as the tenure was awarded, eventually succeeding in having the decision partially reversed. The area surrounding Mount Waddington was removed from the tenure and certain provisions were included to minimize helicopter-mountaineer contact. In so doing, long-standing (and environmentally sensitive) human interests surrounding a remote, geological wonder were acknowledged, and a non-mechanized zone was established around this globally significant mountaineering destination.

The Knight Inlet Heli-ski controversy is symptomatic of the development free-for-all that has been going on for years in the British Columbia backcountry. The initial tenure proposal’s massive area was far larger than necessary, in fact too large to service without fuel caches. Elsewhere, ever-growing heli-ski tenures dwarf older operations, and there has been a fire-sale for hydro rights to the province’s rivers. Such policies betray an alarming zeal to develop our seemingly empty and inexhaustible wilderness.

Insightful as it was at the time, W.L. Mackenzie King’s oft-repeated aphorism that “if some countries have too much history, we have too much geography” is no longer an apt description of our country.

As our natural landscapes become increasingly contested spaces, human interests need not trump environmental concerns. The Mount Waddington controversy reminds us that even in Canada’s most remote corners there is often an under-appreciated depth to past relationships with the land. Creating awareness of cultural heritage in “wilderness” areas, rather than compromising their environmental integrity, can add new layers of meaning and value.

Taking seriously the common viewpoint that our backcountry is our backyard can make us more appreciative of our wide-open spaces, and more willing to pursue and protect land-use practices that enrich our lives without compromising our natural environment.

Jeff Slack is a 2^nd-year master’s student in the history department, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George. His thesis examines the “rediscovery” of the Coast Mountains, 1858-1939. As an outlet for his sometimes excessive interest in all things “mountain,” he recently began blogging at mountainnerd.wordpress.com/

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Earth Day drew much of its early enthusiasm from university campuses.  Fittingly, then, NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and Environment) today published short “research snapshots” of five New Scholars who research the relationship between nature and the Canadian past.   The writings address the question of what they have learned during their research and how their research impacts current environmental concerns.  The feature contains a forward by Alan MacEachern, professor of history at the University of Western Ontario.

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