To assist those affected by the disasters in Japan, Google is undertaking a really interesting project. Part of this project is the creation of a collaborative website called Mirai e no Kioku, which gives Japanese people and survivors the opportunity to post and share photographs, videos, and memories related to places as they were prior to the disasters of March 2011 (media and website only available in Japanese). Another interesting aspect that non-Japanese speaking people can participate in is a re-visualization project initiated by Google, which offers users a chance to re-experience places through archived street view footage of affected areas. The site uses Streetview data to populate an archived digital landscape for the user. The interactive map of Japan allows users to choose either a before or after street view of several locations across the country (note some areas are archived more thoroughly than others). In the About section of the website, places such as Ishinomaki, Onagawa, and and Soma are identified as areas that were significantly affected. Users can explore these regions while navigating virtually along roads and highways, slipping back and forth through time with before and after views.

Memories for the Future Streetview Map

The Memories for the Future project along with the interactive map, are two great examples of how collaborative technologies can serve local communities in archiving and recalling private and collective memory(ies) following traumatic events. In an effort to promote healing, users participating in Mirai e no Kioku website can archive and share private memories of places, people, and experiences through cultural media – literally chronicling their ‘memories for the future.’ Google maintains that “seeing the street-level imagery of the affected areas puts the plight of these communities into perspective” and that this project “ensures that the memories of the disaster remain relevant and tangible for future generations.” Despite users being physically separated from the ‘real’ places they seek to revisit in the Streetview maps through their computer screens, there is something to be said about re-visualizing past places. Some people, such as myself, doubt the ability and ‘authenticity’ of revisiting and recreating past places through augmented reality. While I won’t get into this debate here, I wonder if we can truly revisit the recent past through digital projects such as the Streetview archive? What if you are not a stranger to the past, and what if the virtual places you seek to revisit are familiar?

The Memories for the Future project is similar to the Arcade Fire website The Wilderness Downtown created for their music video “We Used to Wait.” The user enters the street address of his or her childhood home and the site will use Streetview and Google maps data to populate an interactive music video. While listening to “We Used to Wait” you can re-visualize your childhood neighbourhood as it exists today. Drawing on notions of nostalgia, both the song and the video are re-narrated through the experience of the user. Similarly, users of the Memories for the Future website are given a chance to revisit (albeit visually) familiar places before they were destroyed, and through this process, users can create their own narratives of place. I can also get a sense of the damage by using the before and after views. Although I am not personally affected, the sense of destruction becomes very real and I am saddened while viewing homes missing from the spaces they once occupied. Buildings and homes disappear with the click of my mouse, and the sites they used to occupy transform into disorienting and chaotic digital landscapes.

Before March 2011 Earthquake: Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, ©Google Image Data, July 2011.

After March 2011 Earthquake: Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, ©Google Image Data, July 2011.

In terms of living memory, digital landscapes can offer individuals the opportunity to recall memory of places that no longer exist. Lost places and childhood homes cannot be re-experienced entirely; taking into account sensory experiences involving sounds, smells, and touch remind us that there are limits to revisiting past places. Memories cannot be re-experienced. But through sight there is the ability to recall, something that is significant when taking into account that for the Japanese who lost their homes, their personal items and ‘sense of place’ were altered or destroyed. Memories for the Future demonstrates how collaborative new media and digital landscape projects have something to offer individuals, communities, and heritage groups when it comes to archiving visual components of past places. These digital initiatives also raise some interesting questions about memory, archiving Google data, and placemaking through public collaboration.

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Brendan Hughes

Northern Ireland experienced three decades of violent conflict until the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Many of perpetrators never faced justice and some of these individuals have been brought into the political system as a part of the peace deal. This past creates multiple tensions in the present and leaves significant questions about how the judicial system should approach the numerous unsolved murders. Historians and those interested in truth and reconciliation have their own desires to better understand this past.  Why did so many otherwise normal individuals become involved in mass murder? Can a greater knowledge of the individual motivation of IRA members help us better understand these kinds of conflicts in the future? All this leads to significant tensions between the desires of victims’ families for justice  and the demands of a political settlement and power sharing agreement that might fall apart if too many reformed political leaders are brought up on charges. An academic project to record oral histories with living IRA members, which were then to be locked away at the archives in Boston College until the interviewee passed away, has brought these tensions between the demands of justice and a search for historical understanding into the news. The Belfast Project for Boston College preformed the interviews with republicans for five years beginning in 2001. Last year, after details from the late Brenden Hughes interviews were published, the Police Service of Northern Ireland began court proceedings in the United States requesting access to the remaining interviews.

An appeals court in the United States will now have to decide between the demands for justice and the value of this kind of historical project, which might become impossible in the future if academics cannot find a way to deposit transcripts beyond the reach of a subpoena. The issues are further complicated, as some suggest these interview transcripts might confirm Gerry Adams’ role in some of the violent attacks and potentially could lead to criminal charges for the current President of Sinn Féin (something Adams denies). Beyond the legal implications, this could damage Adam’s political career, as he claims he was never a part of the IRA. This creates a very difficult situation for the American appeals courts, as their decision might lead to a potential political crisis in Norther Ireland. Academics and journalists will now have the opportunity to intervene in the court case and make arguments that the importance of creating this kind of historical archive outweighs the demands of justice for the unsolved crimes from the troubles. Are they right? Does our quest to better understand the past supersede the rights of all of the victims?

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Overall, what stood out from these talks was the need for recent graduates to expand their scope of what it means to be an historian. As most are well aware, tenure track positions are no longer as viable, but what must be made even clearer are that the opportunities that do exist should not be conceived as some sort of consolation prize. It was said that historians need to begin to think about where they fit in outside of the university and know that it is not simply enough to say that field is “public history,” if the expectation is that “public history” means a position in a museum. Budget cuts and a glut of applicants may mean that these opportunities are limited as well. Instead, historians need to begin to conceive as to how their skills and knowledge may fit into any other number of areas, including (but certainly not limited to) government, non-government organizations, journalism, and consulting.

While the AHA may have focused on the lack of opportunities in traditional areas of employment, the AHA also spent a significant portion of this year’s proceedings devoted to the opportunities available in the field of digital history.

As an emerging field, digital history remains hard to define, and many willingly admit to knowing little about the subfield. Writing of his experience at the AHA THATcamp on digital humanities, Jonathan Rees wrote in his blog More or Less Bunk:

The folks in Digital Humanities aren’t exactly sure what precisely it is that their subfield does and willingly admit it. My quick intro suggests to me that there are interesting DH [digital humanities] projects that involve putting stuff up on the web (sometimes to do new things with it that you wouldn’t get to see otherwise and sometimes so that more people can do the same kind of things with the same data); new digital tools being developed to do new things; and new digital tools to do the same thing everyone else already does, but better.

Rees wrote his comments not as a critique, but as an honest observation of the evolving nature of the field. He goes on to describe that as a professor it is these new tools, used in conjunction with the traditional tools and teaching the traditional skills of the humanities, that excite him as a teacher.

While the AHA certainly did not solve the problem of underemployment, it is at least refreshing to see the organization’s members voice their concerns and begin to discuss solutions, both for the issue of employment, but also in how this may alter teaching and career advice provided to students in the field. In addition, it is also hopeful to see the embrace of new technologies that will surely come to define the field. Again, the issue of digital humanities focused not only the tools themselves, but how best to use these tools in the classroom and how to teach the students who will be the architects of these tools in the future.

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Conference Poster

The conference Looking Back, Moving Forward: War Resisters in North America took place at Steelworkers Hall in Toronto, Ontario, on Friday September 23 and Saturday September 24, 2011. The gathering addressed the plight of American war resisters who fled to Canada from 2004 to the present by providing a historical context for the roots of war resistance in North America. The conference also demanded action on the part of the Government of Canada to respect immigration and refugee law in Canada by rescinding Operational Bulletin 202 and to grant sanctuary to all American war resisters who fled to Canada during the “war on terror”. “This is of more than historical interest,” said Tom Riley, a Vietnam War resister and activist in the War Resisters Support Campaign. “It’s about learning from the past so we can support resistance today and in the future.”

The purpose of the conference was to offer public education about an aspect of North American history – cross-border migration during times of conflict and war – that is increasingly under attack in Canadian political circles in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The conference deconstructed the role of citizenship, civil disobedience, and conscientious objection during times of war. Moreover, we tried to illuminate the relationship between the Canadian and the United States governments during times of war and what this means for the twenty-first century.

We did this from the vantage point of those who have resisted wars: the veterans, the draft resisters, the family members of resisters, and support campaigners.  There have been other gatherings in 2006 and 2010 and we wanted to keep the cross-border dialogue going. Politicians and pundits try to score points with the public by making fancy statements of indignation towards these, in Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Jason Kenney’s own words, “bogus refugees”.

War Resisters June 2008. Photo: WRSC

We provided a space for war resisters to tell their own stories and for Iraq war resisters a chance to tell the public what information the Immigration and Refugee Board refused to hear up until very recently with consecutive appeals court victories for Dean Walcott and Chris Vassey.

Since January 2004 and the arrival of Jeremy Hinzman – who came to Canada as a conscientious objector to the war in Iraq – the War Resisters Support Campaign has supported hundreds of American war resisters and has mobilized public opinion to support these war resisters (64 percent in 2008, Angus Reid) who refused to participate in the illegal and immoral war in Iraq. “So long as they have wars, there are going to be war resisters,” said Frank Showler, a conscientious objector to the Second World War. “That is the continued importance of this advocacy work.”

Panel Discussions

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The conference featured a variety of speakers – such as Iraq War veterans, war resisters from World War Two to the ‘war on ‘terror’, lawyers, human rights activists, and academics– on five panel discussions. There were also information booths, letter writing campaigns, and a continued determination to see the granting of some kind of sanctuary to American war resisters.

Friday 23 September 2011

Resisting Wars from WWII to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’

The first panel discussion – “Resisting Wars from WWII to ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’” featured Frank Showler, conscientious objector during World War Two; Lee Zaslofsky, military deserter from the Vietnam War; Bruce Beyer,  draft resister and member of the Buffalo Nine; Carl Mirra, Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm conscientious objector; and Jamine Aponte, war resister from Operation Iraq Freedom. The panel was moderated by Luke Stewart of Historians Against the War.

This panel discussion was design in order to demonstrate that there is a history of resisting war in both Canada and the United States.

Saturday 24 September 2011

Veteran Testimony

L-R: Michelle Robidoux, Chuck Wiley, Dean Walcott, Kim Rivera. Photo: Alex Lisman

This panel featured veterans of Operation Iraqi Freedom, including: Chuck Wiley, Dean Walcott, and Kimberly Rivera. By offering firsthand accounts by the war resisters themselves, we can gain a better understanding of how to stop future wars by educating the public about the importance of soldiers’ experiences and their decisions to stop participating in particular wars. Listening to the soldiers’ stories highlights the importance of solidarity work and building support structures. The panel was moderated by Michelle Robidoux of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

War Crimes and the Law of Conscientious Objection:
A North American Context

L-R: Lee Zaslofsky, Staughton Lynd, Michael Mandel, Jeremy Hinzman. Photo: James Swarts

This panel featured Staughton Lynd, radical historian and lawyer from the United States; Jeremy Hinzman, conscientious objector from Operation Iraqi Freedom and first war resister to come to Canada in January 2004; and Michael Mandel, international lawyer and professor at Osgoode Hall law school at York Unviersity. The panel discusses the law of conscientious objection in the United States and how Canada has shifted from a war resister haven during the Vietnam War to a war resister prosecutor in the fabled “war on terror”. The panel was moderated by Lee Zaslofsky of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

War Resistance and Canadian Immigration and Refugee Policy

L-R: Patricia Molloy, Alyssa Manning, Gloria Nafzinger, S.K. Hussan. Photo: James Swarts

This panel featured Alyssa Manning, war resister lawyer from Parkdale Community Legal Services; Gloria Nafzinger, refugee coordinator with Amnesty International – Canada; and S.K. Hussan from No One Is Illegal – Toronto.  The panel discusses the implications of not just war resisters from the United States, but those seeking refuge from wars and the 21st century’s humanitarian struggles. This panel discussed government policy, the courts, deportation, and Canada’s downward slide in international humanitarian efforts and what we can do about it. The panel was moderated by Patricia Molloy of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

Building  a North American Antiwar Movement

Photo: James Swarts

The final panel discussion featured Michelle Robidoux of the War Resisters Support Campaign and Sid Lacombe of the Canadian Peace Alliance (speakers were unfortunately unable to make it from Afghans for Peace and Military Families Speak Out). The panel discussed the history of the Canadian antiwar movement and the cross-border relationships with United States peace groups and how to move forward in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The panel was moderated by Jesse McLaren of the War Resisters Support Campaign.

The gathering was able to raise $1422.02 for the War Resisters Support Campaign which will go towards continued legal support as well as to other forms of support the Campaign is able to provide.

The gathering was endorsed by: the War Resisters Support Campaign, Historians Against the War, Christian Peacemaker Teams – Canada, the Canadian Friends Service Committee (Quakers), the Canadian Auto Workers, the United Steelworkers Toronto Area Council, activehistory.ca, the Canadian Peace Alliance, the Toronto Coalition to Stop the War, Afghans for Peace, Conscience Canada, No One Is Illegal – Toronto, WPIRG, OPIRG-Toronto, Amnesty International, Military Families Speak Out, and OPIRG-York.

Luke Stewart is a member of Historians Against the War and is a Ph.D. Candidate in history at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Stewart was the main organizer of the conference.

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Jamie Oliver eating Bahn Mi in east end London, from Jamie's Great Britain. Screen shot from YouTube.

Jamie Oliver has made a name for himself as a celebrity chef who has sought to improve the way we eat.  Whether it be his instructional cooking or his fight to reform school cafeterias, Oliver has spent over a decade teaching us how to make food, and urging us to think more about it.

Some of his series have explored different national food cultures.  In Jamie’s Great Italian Escape, he tried to answer why Italy has a lower GDP than the United Kingdom, yet its people enjoy a healthier diet.  Oliver traveled across the USA in Jamie’s American Road Trip, while he showed us that despite outside stereotypes of a monotonous fast-food culture the country has a diverse number of cuisines based on its many different regions, histories, and people.

His newest show is called Jamie’s Great Britain, and its argument is a historical one: the foods that many Brits see as traditionally “British” weren’t always so.  The series is one example of connections between historical perspectives and food culture in popular media.

In the first episode, Oliver outlines the mission of the series.  “I want to scratch under the surface. I want to see what the modern day communities are like, whether they’re classic British (whatever that is) or the new waves of immigration,” he says.  The chef explains that he’s “not going to stop at the classic British dishes. I’m going to show you how centuries of foreign influences on our island have changed the whole landscape of what we eat and how we eat it. We’re like magpies. We love to sort of get little ideas or steal things.  Then what the British are brilliant at is making it our own.  At that is what I really love about British food.”

He offers an example in the apple pie: “We think its British? No way.  The whole concept of a pie came from the Egyptians.  The great British eating apple. Not British.  Came from western Asia.  And cinnamon. Not a single bit of that has ever come from Great Britain.  But you know what? It tastes so good, and it’s ours now.”

Jamie Oliver walking through east end London, from Jamie's Great Britain. Screen shot from YouTube.

The series’ first segment starts off in the east end of London, where he notes different immigrant groups arrived before continuing their journey outwards. As he walks through Whitecross Street Market, he describes an unspecified earlier era, “back in the day,” when the area was known as Squalor Street, filled with street vendors and the mixing of immigrant cultures.

“Food was always a representation of immigration.  You take something quintessentially British like Fish and Chips – it’s not English!  You know, it’s Jewish.  And that was two hundred years ago when the Jewish were coming through east London. Hundreds of years before that it was the French Protestants.  In more recent times, it was the Bangladeshis, the Italians.”

Another immigrant group to make the east end home is the Vietnamese, who came as refugees to Britain in large numbers during the Vietnam War.  Oliver chats with two workers at a food stall selling Bahn Mi.  The sandwich is a mix of Vietnamese ingredients like red chilis, cilantro, and pork shoulder in a French bread slathered in mayonnaise.  Oliver points out that it is also an artifact of history, a product of the French colonization of Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century.

Oliver is taking apart the popular myth that there is one authentic, static, British food culture.  His point about Fish and Chips shows such an intention.  This is a political exercise.  It repudiates a corresponding idea that thinks there are Brits who have a more traditional claim to Britishness, ie white Anglo Saxons, compared to more recent inhabitants of the island, many of whom are people of colour.   By underlining the ways in which Britain’s food culture is historically contingent and a constant process of evolution, he shows that its populace, also ever changing, mirrors this phenomena.

As Jamie’s Great Britain illustrates, food history is a fruitful historical subject.  Food, after all, has been essential to the survival and everyday experience of all people living in the past.  It has also served as a key aspect in the development of human culture: the signs, symbols, and practices that we use to understand the world around us.

These factors help to make food history a topic with much popular appeal.  Everyone eats.  And recently there has been a growing interest in food, whether it be the popularity of Food Network or farmers markets.  A number of popular history books, some of which have become New York Times best sellers, have catered to this interest by examining the history of specific foods or ingredients like cod, sugar, chocolate, bananas, coffee, oysters, and corn.  Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History (2002), for example, traces the culinary origins of the mineral and its importance to various cultures.

Even popular books about food without an explicitly historical dimension make arguments based on particular perceptions of the past.  Food historian and ActiveHistory.ca contributor Ian Mosby has shown this with Michael Pollan’s 2009 bestseller, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.  Pollan writes: “Don’t eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”  This rule is based on a nostalgic understanding of the past, of an earlier time before factories made food (despite the fact that Jello was invented in 1897, Mosby points out).

In Canada, food history is a growing field.  Lily Cho’s Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada (2010) looks at the role of Chinese immigrants within the Canadian restaurant industry and the ways in which such spaces have connected Chinese Canadians and people of other ethnic backgrounds.  The next few months will see the release of Edible Histories, Cultural Politics: Towards a Canadian Food History, a collection of chapters edited by Franca Iacovetta, Valerie J. Korinek, and Marlene Epp that is sure to continue this trend by exploring how food links to wider historical themes like religion, immigration, politics, gender, and science.  However, food has long had a subtle yet significant place in Canadian history books.  One only has to think of the importance of cod and wheat to the Staples Thesis of Canadian development, or the role of food shortages in the rebellions of 1837.

Oliver’s argument about the heterogeneity of British food culture would probably come as less of a surprise to people living in Canada, a country whose recent national identity has been built more explicitly around immigration and multiculturalism.  Our national food culture is also certainly one of evolution, ever changing with new developments in technology (for example, deep freezers), economy, and cultural influences.

With food, we can see how the quotidian things of our everyday lives are not timeless.  They have a history that appeals to wide audiences.  And as Jamie’s Great Britain shows, these histories can make more palatable a larger argument about the need for cultural acceptance.

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Bents grain elevator, January 10 2012. Photo by author.

by Merle Massie

A new and fashionable trend in tourism is invading rural regions of western Canada. SUV crossovers, front windows obscured by maps and cameras, are driving down gravel backroads, sweeping around correction line curves and screeching to a stop when a wide-eyed fox creeps across to its den in the culvert.

Are lazy Sunday drives, once the mainstay of 1950s nuclear families, making a comeback? Are the drivers frantically trying to find the way to an uncle’s farm they haven’t seen since childhood?

No. The latest tourism destination is the proverbial ‘empty’ Saskatchewan landscape itself. Or, more specifically, the landscape of places that used to exist, but are no longer there.

Welcome to the latest tourism craze: hunting for ghost towns.

Now, as a rural Saskatchewan resident, I have been in my fair share of abandoned buildings. Driving through our local area with my favourite tour guide (my father in law) is always a lesson in family and community history, as well as sundry tawdry or titillating stories. Lost diamonds, the great Saskatchewan Ruby Rush, and concealed murder weapons dot his childhood memories, each one tied firmly to place.

Within our rural municipality, we have not one, not two, but three ghost towns: the now-extinct villages of Marriott, Valley Center, and Bents. All three were on the same railway line and boasted elevators, stores, post offices, community halls, and schools. Each gave their rural residents a unique postal, and therefore individual, identity. “Where are you from?” “I am from Valley Center.” These villages are known primarily to their ‘inner circle’ of nearby residents who a) know where the town is (or used to be), and b) got their mail at that post office or went to that school when they were kids.

Picture of Marriot, SK, January 10 2012. Photo by author.

All a ghost town hunter needs is a vehicle, a camera, and a road map (preferably one with gravel roads as well as highways). The official definition of a ‘ghost town’ is a place that was once incorporated, but has since lost (or forfeited) its designation. But after that, it’s a crapshoot. There might be nothing, not even a sign to mark its existence, and a ghost town hunter wonders: am I in the right place? At another site, there might still be buildings or even a few people there, and probably a community hall. Mapmakers, after all, don’t have to drive out and check if a town still exists. Maybe all those ‘empty’ Saskatchewan spaces look better when there is a name marking human civilization – even if it was in the past.

Why are there so many ghost towns in Saskatchewan? At the height of its (first) boom in the early 20^th century, Saskatchewan was the third largest Canadian province by population, right behind Ontario and Quebec. Raw energy, outside investment in a booming real estate market, and the sheer sweat equity of hundreds of thousands of people immigrating to the ‘Last Best West’ to homestead or set up businesses created an unprecedented explosion of people and money. Villages popped up like mushrooms, every five miles along the branching tentacles of the rail lines.

Photo of Valley Center wagon, January 10 2012. Photo by author.

Over the course of the twentieth century, shifts in farm economics, mechanics, machinery, and government support for ‘efficient’ farms led to ever-increasing farm sizes and an ever-decreasing rural population. An improved road system to serve a mobile automotive population led to even more rural depopulation. Grain trucks took the place of wagons, hauling larger loads longer distances. By the 1960s, short line railways, once the mainstay of small towns, were ripped out.

Inexorably, the pull of larger centers and Alberta’s oil boom combined with farm consolidation. Rural depopulation was a long, slow bleed of the countryside, a vampiric draining of energy, money, and life. Ramshackle buildings on isolated farms and ghost towns, mere skeletons of their former glory, are all that remain.

Bents, SK. January 10 2012. Photo by author.

Yet, those skeletons, which were once testimony merely to a dying Saskatchewan, have been rejuvenated. There are at least six websites that reference Saskatchewan ghost towns, including Wikipedia, that fountain of knowledge, which has a list of 116 ghost towns across Saskatchewan – incomplete, but a good try nonetheless. Photography websites such as Panoramio and Flickr help amateur photographers show off creative ghost town shots.

One website in particular, http://biseenscene.com, has gone even further and created a ‘how-to’ guide to exploring Saskatchewan ghost towns. Get out a map, the website instructs, and pick a direction. It does not seem to matter much which way you drive from Saskatoon – although west and south will yield the most fruitful results. Don’t ask permission, it instructs. Just take your camera and your common sense and go.

As a rural landowner, I shudder at such instruction. You could be charged with trespassing, should someone choose to make an issue of your guddling around in their back forty. Yet, some towns welcome ghost town explorers. Recently, I was with a film crew from Saskatoon that visited Bents, Loverna, and Whitkow to create a mini-documentary on ghost towns for SaskTel’s MaxLocal On Demand channel. While I was leery at first about poking through the abandoned buildings, it was clear that Loverna area residents welcome, even anticipate, such visitors. Well-researched markers line the empty streets, one on each lot. The markers note all the businesses that once operated along the wind-swept almost-empty town.

The popularity of ghost town hunting is increasing. At Bents, the hall, store, and grain elevator – complete with signs and artefacts – entices so many visitors that coffee mugs have been created that celebrate its ghostly existence. “I found it! Bents, SK” and “I (Heart) Bents”.

Come and see for yourself. I’ll show you the way. Or if you’re feeling adventurous, buy a map.

Photo of Bents general store, January 10 2012. Photo by author.

Photo of Bents cup, January 10 2012. Photo by author.

Merle Massie is a writer and historian, and a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Saskatchewan. She and her husband farm in the RM of Marriott in west-central Saskatchewan. Find her blog at: http://merlemassie.wordpress.com/.

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Notes prepared for Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s attendance at a Commonwealth conference in March 1961 summed up Canada’s position on Africa, noting that Canada had “no territories in Africa and no territorial ambitions.  It has no financial or commercial interests in the Congo sufficient to influence its judgment.  Canada – as anyone may verify by examining our record on this issue in the United Nations – has been and remains, relatively speaking, impartial” (p.148).  So, how did Canada end up with blue berets in the Congo?

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[We ask people outside of the academic history community to review books for this website. We hope this will provide a new perspective on history books not regularly found in academic journals. If you would like to review a book for ActiveHistory.ca, and you are not currently a graduate student or professor in a history department, please contact info@activehistory.ca.]

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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.

Deer steaks or venison are nearly indistinguishable from other forms of red meat. Photo from Wikipedia Commons.

by Mike Commito

On December 21st 2011, the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters tweeted a link to a National Post article, “Wild Game Meat not Welcome at Ontario Food Banks,” which reported that a Lanark, Ontario food bank had decided to reject donations of wild game meat. The post piqued my interest for several reasons. First, while the economy has improved since the onset of the recession three years ago, data reveals that food bank usage is still high. Food Banks Canada recently released a report entitled “Hunger Count 2011” in which it revealed that 700,000 Canadians – roughly 2% of our population – rely on food banks every month. The holidays can be a particular stressful and trying time for families and individuals in need, so the timing of the food bank’s decision was curious. Second, as an environmental historian and an avid hunter, the issue raises some intriguing concerns for me about how our society views the consumption of wild game meat.

The Lanark decision was backed by Food Banks Canada, which had recommended that Ontario food banks should reject any meat neither raised in captivity nor killed in a provincially-licensed abattoir. However, in previous years, groups such as the Safari Club International have donated deer steaks and ground venison during the holiday season. While club members kill the animals, the meat is always cut, wrapped and frozen by a provincially licensed butcher.

This was the first time a food bank rejected the Safari Club’s donation. Opponents of the decision argue that wild game meat is the most organic meat available to Canadians. Provincial legislation dictates that individuals cannot distribute meat unless the animal was killed and processed in a government-licensed abattoir. Yet, in years past, Ontario food banks have turned a blind eye to the legislation and openly accepted the donations. The Lanark decision marks a departure from other provincial food banks in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, many of which actively campaign for donations of wild game.

On the other side of the border, naturalist Jackson Landers of Virginia has suggested that Canada geese in New York should be hunted in order to control the population and help feed the poor. He began to push this idea after New York City officials in 2010 rounded up 150,000 geese, poisoned them and dumped the carcasses in a landfill as a population control measure. Imagine how many tables these geese would have enriched; instead, these animals were treated like garbage.

Historically, Canada is a country that was built on the consumption of wild meat. Subsistence hunting has been an integral part of First Nations culture, but it was also significant for our nation’s European settlers. When domestic meat products were unavailable, game meat served as an alternative protein source that was both readily available and easily transportable. With the development of the railway and more advanced refrigeration techniques since the late nineteenth century, many Canadians began to consume less wild game meat, although it was still significant to many communities and groups across the country. As historian Gerald Killan has demonstrated, wild game meat continued to be important during times of crisis. During World War I, the Superintendent of Algonquin Provincial Park, George W. Bartlett, arranged to have a significant number of deer culled from the park in order to alleviate the wartime meat shortage.

While certain methods of hunting have come under scrutiny in recent years – most notably the cancellation of the Ontario spring bear hunt in 1999 – statistics show that hunting is on the rise with younger generations. Nonetheless, many Canadians are still against the sport and its obvious by-product, wild game meat.

As the sole hunter in my family, I experienced this type of opposition following my first successful duck-hunting trip on Manitoulin Island in fall 2009. After bringing the duck in one night from the barbecue while the rest of my family dined on an alternative dish, my parents and sister were repulsed by what was on my plate. Not only did they believe the duck was emanating an offensive odour, but they were also put off by the reality that I had killed and butchered the birds myself.

My family held no qualms with the process that their poultry had gone through to arrive in our household. I tried to convince them that they were missing out on an opportunity to consume fresh and organic meat, but my efforts were dashed as they all staunchly refused to sample my cuisine. Today where the pitfalls of genetically modified food are readily accessible and the mistreatment of farm animals are well documented, it is no wonder that organic food is increasing in popularity. For example, this past summer, some of my colleagues from York University produced a video for the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) that detailed their efforts in butchering four lambs acquired from Kawartha Ecological Growers.

As my family’s refusal of my dinner offerings illustrates, many people still do not connect wild game meat as organic. My dissertation chronicles the history of black bear hunting and management practices in Ontario. Yet I believe that I also have a duty as an environmental historian to educate the public on the benefits of safe and careful hunting.

Responses to the National Post article ranged from insightful to misguided. Some believed that the Lanark decision came from senior government officials eager to continue promoting an anti-gun and anti-hunting agenda. For example, one individual disagreed that wild game meat is more organic than domestically-raised protein, and even suggested that moose and deer contain more mercury and dioxin than their bovine counterparts. To my knowledge, no studies have been undertaken that prove ungulates such as deer contain more toxins than farm animals. But, as game animals are not inspected, wild meat enthusiasts should always be mindful of the parasites and bacteria that these animals could carry. This means that extra care should always be taken to ensure that wild game meat is cooked properly and thoroughly.

It is important that we make informed decisions about where our food comes from and how it is processed. While some may disagree with the opinions I hold about the value of subsistence hunting, it is an important part of our heritage. With more and more people making conscious decisions to obtain organic and cruelty-free protein, it is time to start reconsidering the value of wild game meat. This does not necessarily mean that everyone should take up hunting, but Canadians should keep an open mind to the idea of consuming wild game meat, be it duck or venison.

Mike Commito is a second-year PhD student at McMaster University. His dissertation, tentatively titled ”Orphaned Cubs and Responsible Hunters: Conflicting Values and the Management of Black Bears in Ontario, 1900-2000″ focuses on the development of black bear hunting policy and management strategies in Ontario. He is interested in how various groups in the province such as biologists, policy-makers and the lay public viewed bears and how this perspective has changed over time.

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Canadian history section of Chapters bookstore, North London, Ontario, May 2010.

ActiveHistory.ca is happy to announce its first paper of 2012: “A Polyphony of Synthesizers: Why Every Historian of Canada Should Write a History of Canada,” by Alan MacEachern.

Here is Alan’s introductory blurb:

The following was my contribution to a 2010 Canadian Historical Association roundtable, “So What IS the Story? Exploring Fragmentation and Synthesis in Current Canadian Historiography.” In it, I tried to a) graphically illustrate the marginalization of Canadian historical scholarship, b) argue why demography is likely only to make this problem worse, and c) suggest a response. All in under 1400 words. As far as I know, only one person was at all convinced, let alone inspired, by my presentation: me. It got me thinking about how one might go about writing a history of Canada that would necessarily cover the entire country from the beginning to the 21^st century, that would treat Canada in global terms, and that would be relevant. Last month, I published a very, very early outline of such a history, “A Little Essay on Big.” In an uncharacteristic fit of confidence, I’ve dusted off my presentation and asked ActiveHistory.ca if they’d like it, largely unchanged. I welcome your thoughts.

You can read Alan’s paper here.

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