Active History

“Working on the Water, Fighting for the Land”: A New Comic Book about Colonialism, Capitalism, and Indigenous Labour History

March 20, 2015 2 Comments

By Sean Carleton

In the fall of 2013, Active History.ca featured a blog post by the Graphic History Collective announcing the start of the Graphic History Project, an online series of short, accessible, and free historical comic books. In addition to outlining the aims and aspirations of the Graphic History Project, the post publicized the release of the first comic book in the series, about the Knights of Labor in Canada.

Twelve comics and a year and a half later, the Graphic History Collective (GHC) is pleased to announce that the final comic book of the Graphic History Project – Working on the Water, Fighting for the Land: Indigenous Labour on Burrard Inlet – is now available online for free until the end of April. The comic book is illustrated and written by Tania Willard (Secwepemc Nation) with co-authors Robin Folvik and Sean Carleton (Graphic History Collective). Working on the Water, Fighting for the Land focuses on Indigenous peoples’ responses to the coming of colonialism and capitalism to Burrard Inlet, which connects the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) Coast Salish First Nations in what is today known as Vancouver, British Columbia. Continue reading →

New Paper: Memory Politics: Ottawa’s Monument to the Victims of Communism

March 17, 2015 2 Comments

ActiveHistory.ca is pleased to announce the publication of Gregor Kranjc’s new paper: “Memory Politics: Ottawa’s Monument to the Victims of Communism.”

Know that evil comes in many forms and seems to reinvent itself – Nazism, Marxist-Leninism, today, terrorism – they all have one thing in common: The destruction, the end, of human liberty.

Ideologies that promise utopias lead to the opposite, hell on earth. That’s why […] this monument […] reminds us of the names the stories of those lost to one of the deadliest ideological plagues ever spread, to communism.

The year is 2014, not 1954, and the speaker is the Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, not Senator Joseph McCarthy. These phrases denouncing Communism and celebrating Canada’s commitment to freedom, democracy and justice were extolled in a 20-minute speech at a 250$-per plate fundraising event in Toronto for the building of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism on 30 May 2014. Harper’s speech had in fact very little to do with the actual monument proposed for Ottawa or the historical record of communism, beyond denouncing it as an abomination alongside fascism that “snuffed out the lights and lives of freedom, democracy and justice”. It did have a lot to say about conservatives winning the Cold War (and standing on the shoulders of the “giants” U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Thatcher), about the apologetic and weak-kneed stance towards Communist regimes by successive Liberal governments (although he never mentioned the party by name), and about the large numbers of Canadians (approximately one-quarter in Harper’s estimates) who trace their origins to current or former Communist countries. [Read More]

Editors Note: In addition to our group blog, 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 are great starting points for the type of paper we publish. With a current readership of more than 20,000 visits per month we can assure that you will find an interested audience through our site. For more information visit our Papers Section or contact papers@activehistory.ca. All of our papers are peer reviewed to ensure that they are accurate and up-to-date.

The .tp country domain name, 1997-2015: In memoriam

March 16, 2015 4 Comments

http://freedom.tp

By David Webster

The internet deleted its first virtual country this month. It wasn’t that bad: Timor-Leste is now a real country, and doesn’t need its original internet domain name any longer. But the .tp top-level country domain name (ccTLD, in the lingo) has a story to tell as it ends its 18-year history.

In 1997, the former Portuguese colony of Timor-Leste (East Timor) was nearing the final years of its struggle for independence from a brutal Indonesian military occupation that had started in 1975. Using a hosting service in Ireland, a contact address for the most famous Timorese political prisoner, and a clever tactic to squat on an unclaimed county code, activists launched the top-level domain .tp and its first site, freedom.tp.

It was a period when all countries and territories had recently been assigned two-letter codes, alongside the .com and .org domain suffixes. Most of these are familiar – .ca for Canada, .id for Indonesia, .ie for Ireland, and so on. In 1997, many country domain names were unclaimed. Among them was .tp, reserved for Portuguese Timor (Timor Português).

Portuguese Timor had long ceased to be. The 1974 Carnation revolution in Portugal set the last European world empire’s colonies on the road to independence. That included Portuguese Timor, the eastern half of an island off the north coast of Australia, sharing its other half with an Indonesian province. The leading Timorese political party declared the country’s independence on November 28, 1975. On December 10, the Indonesian army invaded. The next 24 years spelled famine, death, and near-genocide as pro-independence fighters resisted Indonesian annexation. Continue reading →

Emotion and History: The Book of Negroes

March 12, 2015 1 Comment

By Andrew Nurse

What kinds of emotions does history call up? What purposes do emotions serve as part of historical understanding? The answer to the first question is simple: strong ones, at least to judge from the polemics that periodically polarize the work of professional historians or public discourse on the past. The second question is more difficult to address because emotions vary. What I find breathtaking or inspiring, someone else finds lacklustre or irrelevant. But, emotional reactions to history indicate something. At the very least they show how important the past is and how connected many people feel to it. After all, if the past were irrelevant, it would not garner strong emotion. Emotional connections to the past, I want to suggest, can do other things as well. They might allow — or, perhaps, even force — us to think about the past and its relationship to the present in challenging, different, and important ways. Continue reading →

Spoils of the War of 1812: Part III: Anishinaabe Aspirations

March 11, 2015 No Comments

By Alan Corbiere

This is the third part of a series of essays by Alan Corbiere focusing on Anishinaabe participation in the War of 1812.

Amédée Forestier, Signing of the Treaty of Ghent, Christmas Eve, 1814. No Anishinaabeg Present.

The Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe, Odawa, Potowatomi) have always revered the island of Michilimackinac, so much so that at the conclusion of the War of 1812, the Odawa tried to keep it in their possession. The Odawa suggested that the British negotiators offer the Americans a greater quantity of Anishinaabe land on the mainland as a price to keep Michilimackinac in the possession of the Anishinaabeg with trading access allowed to the British. We know that this did not happen but was it possible?

This is the third and final post in a series exploring this question. In January, I discussed the importance of Michilimackinac for Anishinaabe peoples and last month’s essay addressed British policy as it was explained to the Anishinaabeg in council. Today’s post focuses on the Anishinaabe reactions to the Treaty of Ghent, official news of which was sent to the Department of Indian Affairs on 12 March 1815 with instructions to “notify the same, in full council, to the Indian Warriors.”[1]

Continue reading →

Research is Getting a Bit More Open: Good News for Historical Research in Canada

March 9, 2015 1 Comment

A knowledge explosion!

By Ian Milligan

When we started up ActiveHistory.ca way back in 2009 (!), we did it with a pretty simple vision in mind: historians were producing good scholarship, but it was inaccessible. It was inaccessible for a few reasons: sometimes we don’t exactly write for a general audience (we’ve been guilty of dropping jargon around this site too, I know, but we try), and even if you wanted to read most of what we do, you’d have to pay. Books are a relative bargain – you can get an academic paperback for $20-35 dollars. Articles are not a good deal in comparison: one-offs are around $25. We figured a free website would be one way to reach people, and I think we’ve tapped into an audience here.

Well, maybe ActiveHistory.ca’s got some more competition on the block, thanks to a great new policy from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, or SSHRC. SSHRC’s the federal granting agency that helps support research in Canada: historians apply to it with our project ideas, and generally around one in five of us get good news. That sounds low, and alarmingly it’s dropping, but it’s high enough that your average historian employed full-time at a university can hold out some hope that they’ll get it. All that is to say: SSHRC has some power, because they give us money, and money speaks. Continue reading →

An (Ice) Bridge to the Past: Niagara Falls has Frozen

March 5, 2015 1 Comment

by Daniel Macfarlane [Originally published on the Otter]

Niagara Falls has frozen. Well, not really. The entire water flow of the famous Horseshoe Falls doesn’t actually freeze, despite ‘polar vortexes’ (more commonly known to most Canadians as ‘winter’). Water keeps flowing underneath the ice. The American Falls does occasionally dry up due to ice jams upstream (and this has happened once in recorded history to the Horseshoe Falls: see note [1]). Tourists are nonetheless flocking to see the gelid cataract – and some people are even climbing it!

Elevated view of Horseshoe Falls in Winter 2013. Daniel Macfarlane

Wind can send large chunks of ice from Lake Erie down the Niagara River. Ice jams at the base of the waterfalls form what are known as “ice bridges.” In the 19th century these congealed water spans became an occasion for festivities, as the two Niagara Falls communities on either side of the international border would use them for transnational ice parties. Talk about having a drink on the rocks! Continue reading →

Sexing Up Canada’s First World War

March 3, 2015 1 Comment

By Zachary Abram

VD Poster 1 Canadian cultural memory of the First World War is conspicuously asexual considering Canadians had among the highest rates for venereal disease in the British Expeditionary Force, with an infection rate that reached as high as 28.7%. [1] Anyone with a passing interest in the First World War is familiar with Trench Foot and its symptoms are synonymous with the squalor of trench warfare. Yet, only 74,711 cases of Trench Foot were treated during the entire war.[2] Venereal Disease accounted for 416,891 hospital admissions in the British Army.[3] A soldier was five times more likely to be admitted to hospital for syphilis and gonorrhea but in the popular imagination it is Trench Foot that persists. There is a reticence, perhaps the result of inherited Victorian prudery or the unwillingness to “sully the reputations” of the war dead, to discuss soldiers’ sex lives. As a result, discussions of the First World War tend to elide the bedroom in favour of the trench. Continue reading →

Moral Goodness and Venereal Disease: Sexual Health Education in Ontario

March 2, 2015 3 Comments

By Krista McCracken

Pure Girl Is Waiting Somewhere Poster. 1922. American Social Health Association

The Ontario government recently announced significant changes to the health and physical education curriculum in Ontario schools. This revision includes updating the outdated sexual health education curriculum that hasn’t been changed since 1998. The previous curriculum was designed in an era before text messages, smart phones, and the social media.

Very similar to the curriculum changes proposed in 2010 the recent updated sexual education program includes instruction on consent, the risks of posting sexual material online, sexting, gender identity, and mental health. Copies of the complete revised elementary and secondary health physical education curriculum can be found here and here. The Ontario government has also released parent guides which highlight the changes to the sexual health instruction. So far these changes have been protested, praised, and dissected. Since its introduction Ontario’s sexual health instruction has often been a point of controversy and has repeatedly been revised to reflect a changing society and changing conceptions of relationships, sexuality, and morals.

Sexual health education in Ontario has a long standing history and has been incorporated into classroom instruction long before it was formalized in written curriculum documents. The movement to support the creation of sexual health education programs began in the early 1900s, often with organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union promoting social hygiene. The earliest forms of sexual health education emphasized the dangers of sexual activity and was strongly linked to concepts of goodness and sin. Continue reading →

Film Friday: Tilco Striker

February 27, 2015 1 Comment

Active History is pleased to present our first Film Friday. If you have created a film about history and are interested in screening it on our site, drop us a line.

By Matthew Hayes

In the middle of winter in 1965, women workers at a plastics factory in Peterborough, Ontario went on strike. The Tilco strikers were fighting against unacceptable treatment – harassment and pitifully low wages – from management. I originally made this short film as an entry to OPSEU Local 365’s contest celebrating Trent University’s 50th anniversary. The contest called for creative entries that highlighted the role of organized labour. The film is based on Joan Sangster’s 2004 article “”We No Longer Respect the Law”: The Tilco Strike, Labour Injunctions, and the State”, from Labour/Le Travail. Continue reading →

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