Terry Fox: A Unifying Influence on Canada?

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This post is the second in a series of four marking the 35th anniversary of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope.

By Jenny Ellison

Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press

Just months before his death in June 1981, Fitness and Amateur Sport Canada (FAS) announced the first annual “Terry Fox Marathon of Hope Day.” A series of 10-kilometre runs in locations across Canada would “commemorate Terry’s great marathon achievement” and his “courage and unifying influence on our nation.” This announcement from FAS built on widespread national interest in commemorating Terry Fox. Letters poured into the offices of Ministry of Amateur Sport and Prime Ministers Office, calling for a national celebration in honour of Fox. In these letters Fox was described not only as a hero but also as a man who “joined Canada together at a time when” it “was growing farther and farther apart.”

Nationalism was a key part of the public conversation when Fox began his cross-Canada run on April 12, 1980. Six weeks later Quebecers would vote in a referendum on sovereignty-association. Even though 60 percent of voters in the province voted against transforming their relationship to Canada, the issue of Quebec separation loomed large in the minds of English Canadians. Commentators of the time described 1980 as a bleak year. For example, Globe and Mail editorialist John Fraser described Canada as a nation with fractures “as wide as they have every been.” And, in his in his 1981 Lament for a Nation-style polemical Canada Lost, Canada Found, journalist Peter Desbarats characterized this period as one with a “never-ending panorama of missed opportunities…and vast potentialities that never seem to be realized.” Terry Fox ran directly into this national malaise, a good news story at a time when Canada seemed to be in crisis.

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“What Next for WITH?”: A Scandalously Brief History of a Feminist Listerv

By Beth A. Robertson

In 1983, eminent historian of technology, Joan Rothschild wrote “the omission of the female affects how we know and what we know, and our very deepest beliefs and concerns about technology…” [1] Her words were one of many that began to challenge how women were strategically distanced from technology, science and empirical knowledge more broadly. Not one to leave revolution to chance, Joan Rothschild was also active in establishing a more prominent voice for women in the academic field of technological history. She briefly charts this development in the edited collection Machina Ex Dea. Here, Rothschild writes of the growing involvement of women in the Society for the History of Technology throughout the 1970s, as well as the founding of the special interest group Women in Technological History (WITH) in 1976. As Rothschild writes, WITH was formed with the aim of encouraging feminist analysis and research in the field of the history of technology. Although emerging from the American context, this feminist organization quickly gained an international membership, drawing scholars from Canada, Europe, Asia and beyond.  Continue reading

The Ideological Work of Commemoration

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By Jamie Swift

In the 1985 Argentinian film, The Official Story, one of the characters, a student, angrily proclaims that his country’s history textbooks had been “written by assassins.” Stories, as we know, vary considerably in the telling. The dominant narrative – to use the now shopworn term – tends to be recounted by the loudest voices. Hardly assassins. But often people with only a passing acquaintance with evidence.

So it is with the Official Story of Canada’s wars.

Just as the Harper government’s spasm of bellicose patriotic storytelling got underway with the centenary of the War of 1812, Governor General David Johnson came up with a curious claim. “When we study our history and the wars in which we fought, the wars overseas, it has been to purchase our freedom, our liberties.” [1]

Such bloodletting would, presumably, include such noble struggles in buying Canadian liberty as the Boer War, fought to ensure British mining companies gained access to South Africa’s vast gold deposits. Tellingly, the government recently added the South African war to Ottawa’s National War Memorial, ignoring the civilian death toll in concentration camps run by the British that far exceeded the number of actual Boer fighters killed in combat. Continue reading

Terry Fox Was an Activist

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This month, Active History is pleased to present a series of posts by Jenny Ellison marking the 35th anniversary of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope.

By Jenny Ellison

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Winnipeg Free Press

A few years ago, I made a visit to Library and Archives Canada to pull files about Terry Fox. In a folder labeled “Terry Fox Marathon of Hope Day” I found forty letters to Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Governor General Edward Schreyer and Minister of Sport Gerald Regan about the runner. Written during his lifetime and just after his death in June 1981, the letters were earnest, handwritten documentation of what most of us already know: many Canadians feel an emotional connection to Terry Fox.

I am a Terry Fox runner and have been, on and off, since I was a kid. Is there anything more Canadian than the annual fundraising runs for cancer research? Named one of the “greatest Canadians” in CBC’s 2004 TV show of the same name, and again in 2014, Fox is a go-to symbol in conversations about national heroes. But what else is there to say about him? What does studying his life add to our understanding of Canada today and in the past?
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“Setting Canadian History Right?: A Response to Ken Coates’ ‘Second Thoughts about Residential Schools’”

By Crystal Fraser and Ian Mosby

As two young historians of Canada’s notorious Indian Residential School System – one finishing her PhD, the other currently in his second postdoctoral fellowship – we were wary when we saw Ken Coates’ recent opinion piece in the Dorchester Review.[1] At a first glance, the title, in particular, had us worried: “Second Thoughts about Residential Schools” brought to mind Thomas Flanagan’s misguided monograph First Nations? Second ThoughtsThough deeply concerned at what lay ahead, Coates is an historian we both respect a great deal, so, from our computers in Alberta and Ontario, we read on.

The commentary itself was clearly written to spark a debate. Like many of the editorials that fill Canadian newspapers, it is written in a conversational style without footnotes or references and – more importantly – it attempts to challenge what Coates’ sees as hegemonic narratives characterizing the study of Indian residential schools. And given that the online version of the article (like every page on the Dorchester Review website) is flanked by quotes from David Frum proclaiming that the journal is “Setting Canadian history right,” the essay’s ambition to upend the sacred cows of the Canadian historical profession, itself, are immediately apparent.

Coates stresses that he has “struggled over the last thirty years to make sense of the impact of residential schools on Aboriginal people” and the essay is presented as a culmination of that “struggle.” To be sure, his is a piece about how academics might struggle with their own politics under the veil of objectivity and how that relates to the kinds of historical research we undertake. Another historian, one specializing in Indian residential schooling, might have more deeply probed, for instance, how Indigenous people have struggled with the long legacy and effects of Indian residential schools. Coates, though, begins in a decidedly personal place located well outside of Indigenous experiences: namely, memories of attending an Anglican summer camp located near the Carcross Residential School and spending a week in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, as “the guest of a Catholic research school” where “the rules and regulations almost turned [him] into a twelve-year-old Che Guevera by the time [he] left.”

This leads us to the two most problematic elements of Coates’ essay that, together, constitute the crux of his argument. [Read More]


 

ActiveHistory.ca is pleased to publish Crystal Fraser and Ian Mosby’s response to Ken Coates’s ‘Second Thoughts about Residential Schools’ as part of our Papers Section. ActiveHistory.ca strives to provide timely, well-written and thoroughly researched papers on a variety of history-related topics.  Expanded conference papers or short essays that introduce an upcoming book project or respond to current affairs are great starting points for the type of paper we publish. For more information visit our Papers Section or contact papers@activehistory.ca

Vaccines and the Environmental History of Medicine

By Liza Piper

Editor’s note: This post was originally published by The Otter and is the second in a series of posts edited by Tina Adcock considering the intersection between environmental history and the histories of science, technology, and medicine.

In recent weeks, stories with pro-vaccination and anti-vaccination sentiments have appeared prominently in the news. They address the measles cases that originated in Disneyland and the fears of a significant increase in measles cases in Ebola-affected nations, where the latter disease has disrupted vaccination programs. In the Disneyland cases, media reports have highlighted the role of parents who refused to vaccinate their children. This is, in part, a legacy of Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent research linking autism to the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine. These reports discuss the role unvaccinated children can play in diminishing herd immunity and spreading otherwise well-controlled “diseases of childhood” like measles, but including also mumps (see the NHL outbreaks from last year), rubella, and whooping cough. Continue reading

A Brief History of Vaccines in Colonial Africa

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By Jessica Pearson-Patel

As Ebola to ravage communities in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea, and as international health organizations fight to develop a vaccine that will conquer the epidemic, the history of vaccinations in Africa seems now to be more relevant than ever. The World Health Organization has recently come under fire for a discovery that WHO representatives deliberately held off on declaring the epidemic to be an international health emergency out of fear of that such a declaration “could anger the African countries involved, hurt their economies or interfere with the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.”[1] Indeed although Guinean health officials announced the Ebola outbreak in March of last year, it would not be until August that the WHO declared the epidemic to be an international public health emergency.[2]

If we take the press response to this discovery to be any indication, this revelation was a shocking one for those who trust that the physical well-being of Africans is and has been the number one driving force behind the development of public health infrastructure in Africa—including the development of vaccines and the expansion of campaigns against epidemic disease. The reality, however, is that these processes have always been shaped by broader political imperative—both colonial and international. Continue reading

Animal Matter: The Making of ‘Pure’ Bovine Vaccine at the Connaught Laboratories and Farm at the Turn of the Century

By Joanna Dean

Many of humanity’s most virulent diseases emerged from the fertile intersections of human and other animal bodies. Cures also crossed species barriers, and in the crossing carried a taint of their animal origins. The University of Toronto’s Connaught Laboratories and Farm produced bovine smallpox vaccine from calves infected with cowpox, as well as a variety of products from horses, such as tetanus and diphtheria antitoxins. Photographs disseminated by the laboratory suggest the power of the visual image in calming public fears and managing – even erasing – the animal origins of these biomedical products through an emphasis on hygiene and health.

As Katherine Arnup and Jennifer Keelan have shown for Canada – and Nadja Durbach for Britain – public anger and fear about compulsory smallpox vaccination emerged in a series of popular campaigns from the 1880s through to the 1920’s.[1] While most of the anger was aimed at the compulsory administration of vaccine – intervention of the state into the body of the child and the sanctity of the home – the movements also rejected the animality of the vaccine. On March 1, 1906, when Toronto Board of Education trustee Levee campaigned (5000 signatures in hand) against the compulsory vaccination of school children, he used the strongest possible language: children’s bodies, he said, should not be polluted with “animal matter.”[2] Continue reading

An Epidemic in Madness?

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By Mat Savelli & Erika Dyck

Contagious diseases are usually understood as physical illnesses, but the rather less orthodox idea of infectious mental diseases is worth considering. Historically, public health officials, immigration officers and well-meaning social reformers harnessed the language of madness, mental deficiency and mental illness to galvanize a popular response against the threats posed by such afflicted individuals to the larger body politic. Early 20th century reformers lobbied governments to stem the tide of feeblemindedness, arm themselves against the hereditary toxins evident in families ‘soaked’ with deficiency, or to segregate people whose feeblemindedness polluted an otherwise wholesome stock of superior humans. The language of mental disease and degeneration sat comfortably with the moralizing tones of public health officials who were keen to sanitize their communities by keeping mental illness out, through immigration restrictions, or marriage regulations, and some went further to treat this infectious possibility through institutionalization and even more overt eugenic measures such as sexual sterilization. Although we might now balk at the unsophisticated collusion of moral reform and the most basic science of heredity of the early 20th century, the spectre of madness as a contagious phenomenon has continued to evolve into a modern menace. Continue reading