Active History

New Directions in Public History

November 9, 2015 5 Comments

By Kaleigh Bradley

What is public history? I remember being asked this question on my first day in the “Intro to Public History” M.A. seminar at Carleton University. I knew why I wanted to study Public History (please give me a job in history?), but I found myself struggling to define it on the spot. I quickly learned that public history is not just doing history for the public outside of academia, although this is part of what it is.

Source: Public History Ryan Gosling.

Public history is about the ways in which history is created, contested, disseminated, and presented to us all. It’s a way of practicing history, but it’s also a field of study in itself. Public history forces us to think about notions of authority and power, identity, collective memory, audience(s), and narrative. Usually, public history is practiced in traditional sites like museums, archives, and memorials, but it can also be found in more subtle places in every day life; it’s the narrative in your grandmother’s carefully crafted photo album, the oral histories that we hear from elders, the nationalistic tone in a political ad, the historical video game we play, and the erasure and absence of histories in a quickly-gentrifying neighbourhood.

At last month’s Active History Conference, I attended a panel on the Future of Public History programs in Canada. In this panel were representatives from Public History (PH) programs and employers from government institutions. It was interesting to have employers, students, and representatives from programs all in the same room. What emerged was an interesting discussion about what students are being taught, what employers want, and what employers think about PH programs and their graduates.

Why do students need to specialize in public history? This post will explore this question and will discuss what history departments across Canada are up to, what employers want, and what public history programs offer. This might be helpful for undergraduate students thinking of specializing in public history, or for high school students who are thinking about post-secondary education in history.

Continue reading →

The “Canadian Revolution,” the Early American Republic, and … Slavery?

November 7, 2015 No Comments

As part of our partnership with the new early Canadian history blog Borealia, we’ll be posting highlights from that website here every Saturday in November.

By Maxime Dagenais

caroline-rmg We all know the story of the Upper and Lower Canadian Rebellions: we know about the patriotes of Lower Canada and the reformers of Upper Canada; we know about the victories and defeats, expulsions and executions; we know about the social, political, and economic implications in Canada, and their consequences on our history. In general, in Canada, we view the Rebellions as an important Canadian event. However, the Rebellions were also an American event, with major consequences in the United States.

In this post, I will briefly explain the research that I am currently conducting as a postdoctoral fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and how my time in Philadelphia has changed the overall aim of my project.

Whether they wanted it or not, Americans were dragged into this conflict. In the wake of the failed 1837 Canadian Rebellions, several rebel leaders sought refuge in American border towns like Burlington and Watertown, where they sought assistance from Americans. They met with local leaders and politicians and travelled to major cities such as Boston and Philadelphia seeking financial and military support. Though they failed to secure the assistance of the Federal government—which even sent troops to the border to ensure “American neutrality”—they had more success at the local level. Throughout Michigan, Vermont, and New York, Americans living in the borderland expressed sympathy for the Canadian rebels and joined secret societies, known as Hunter’s Lodges. By the thousands, they pledged to free Canada from the yoke of British imperialism and assist the rebels in a “Canadian Revolution.”

The Rebellions were especially important since they coincided with a momentous period in American history. [Read More]

Canada’s Conversation on Cultural Genocide

November 6, 2015 4 Comments

By Cynthia Dawn Roy

The shocking final conclusion of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was that the residential school system was an act of “cultural genocide”. Aboriginal activists and organizations have stressed the importance of keeping TRC issues as part of a national conversation. This post will summarize various trends in Canada’s conversation on cultural genocide throughout June 2015.

The conversation began in earnest after Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin said Canada attempted “cultural genocide” against the aboriginal peoples five days before the TRC report was released.[1] Until this point, the term cultural genocide was only used by certain academics and radical activists. The next day, Sinclair told Canada’s CBC that he agreed with the Chief Justice’s declaration.[2] In an interview with the Ottawa Citizen, former Prime Minister Paul Martin also stated that Canada’s attempt to assimilate aboriginals amounted to cultural genocide, and that Canadians should waste no time in taking concrete actions to improve relations with First Nations.[3] The use of the term by these three esteemed Canadians paved the way for the TRC to state cultural genocide as its main conclusion.

In the following weeks, the phrase escalated from obscurity to common Canadian jargon. Both Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard and Opposition leader Tom Mulcair also labeled Canada’s assimilation policies cultural genocide. The sudden wide-spread acceptance of the term signifies a shift in Canadian thinking towards aboriginal issues. Educators and activists like Kahente Horn-Miller and Jim Daschukbelieve the acceptance of this phrase is empowering. Horn-Miller, an assistant professor at Carleton University, avoided the term in the classroom for fear of being perceived as a radical. Hearing Justice Sinclair use the term cultural genocide at the release of the TRC report filled her with hope, “because now I can call it what it is.”[4] Likewise, Jim Daschuk, author of Clearing the Plains, said he didn’t use the term in his book because he thought the public wasn’t ready to accept it, but he has used the phrase in most of the 50 talks he’s given in the last year.[5] Continue reading →

What about the People? Place, Memory, and Industrial Pollution in Sudbury

November 5, 2015 5 Comments

By Stacey Zembrzycki

A view of the slag storage area, from Gutcher Street in Gatchell, circa 1970. Anonymous local photographer.

A view of the slag storage area, from Gutcher Street in Gatchell, ca. 1970. Anonymous local photographer.

Much of the industrial ruins resulting from nearly 130 years of nickel mining in Sudbury, Ontario, are now hidden from plain sight, camouflaged under a successful re-greening program that has led to the planting of over nine million trees, and the clean-up of many area lakes and thousands of hectares of soil. And yet, despite this invisibility, vestiges of the industrial past continue to exist and do harm. “Making connections where they are hard to trace,” as Ann Laura Stoler reminds us, “is not designed to settle scores but rather to recognize that these are unfinished histories, not of victimized pasts but consequential histories that open to differential futures.”[1] Understanding the visible and invisible tolls that heavy industry has taken on residents’ bodies requires a willingness to explore these unfinished histories, a subject that is deeply implicated in an Environment Canada investigation in the region.

On October 8, 2015, Sudbury’s local media received an anonymous email stating that Environment Canada and the RCMP had spent the day “raiding” the headquarters of Vale (formerly Inco Limited) in Copper Cliff, a small nickel mining community just west of Sudbury, searching for files that pertained to a 2012 federal investigation into alleged Fisheries Act violations.[2] Nearly three weeks later, details about this investigation became public, revealing that the local mining company has been accused of allowing industrial effluents to leach into a number of local waterways since at least 1997, and perhaps even going as far back as 1963. The CBC reported that the Environment Canada warrant “accuses the company of allowing ‘acutely lethal’ seepage from the smelter waste piles into water frequented by fish, and of knowing about the leakage for years.” As an oral and public historian actively engaged in a SSHRC-funded project entitled Mining Immigrant Bodies: A Multi-Ethnic Oral History of Industry, Environment, and Health in the Sudbury Region, which examines the “inescapable ecological” relationships that have been forged between Sudburians and the landscape since the postwar period, I have spent the last year listening to stories that intersect in important ways to this latest investigation.[3] Continue reading →

Is The Big Shift History?

November 4, 2015 1 Comment

By Colin Coates

bigshift Recently, in teaching my first-year Canadian Studies course, I have used Bricker and Ibbitson’s The Big Shift as one of the required readings. It is an accessible account of current Canadian politics, and it has the advantage of having a strong (or at least a strongly argued) thesis. Few readers can finish the book without knowing precisely what the authors are arguing. Bricker and Ibbitson contend that a major, inexorable shift is underway in Canada due to enhanced migration flows into the country and within it, and Western Canada, particularly Alberta, will play key roles in the new Canada.

The old-style (i.e. post-1960s) “Laurentian elites” have had their day. Their obsession with Québec, bilingualism and the fragility of Canada is passé, and they cannot come to terms with the new thrust of Canadian politics: business-oriented, low tax, confident, Pacific-oriented, suburban. The new governing coalition links Western Canadians and suburban immigrants. For the authors, Canada will become an increasingly Conservative (and socially conservative) country. While they never predicted that one party would forever have a lock on power, they did believe that Stephen Harper’s Conservatives would win re-election. Their study is based on detailed polling and a deep understanding of political intrigue in Ottawa.

I find it enjoyable to use this book in teaching at Glendon College, York University’s bilingual campus. Continue reading →

Vicarious Trauma: Collecting the Herd

November 3, 2015 3 Comments

By Jesse Thistle

Author’s Preface

“Vicarious Trauma: Collecting the Herd” is written in a first-person narrative style in line with Indigenous ways of knowing and disseminating knowledge, as seen in the works of Campbell (1974), Koebel (2007), and Devine (2010), among other Métis scholars, writers, and activists.

This piece opens with oral testimony from a Cree-Métis Elder Rose (pseudonym) recording during the SSHRC project “Tracing Métis History through Archives, Artefacts, Oral Histories, and Landscapes: Bison Brigades, Farming Families, and Road Allowance People,” and is one among hundreds of oral testimonies collected by me, Dr. Carolyn Podruchny, Yvonne Richer-Morrissette, and Blanche Morrissette during the summer of 2013. The tone and content of the interview has been kept in its original form, with some adjustments in style to make it readable in narrative form. Using a writing technique similar to anthropologist Paul Farmer’s article, “On Suffering and Structural Violence: A View from Below,” (2009) wherein he shares personal stories from Haitians who suffered trauma from state violence and grinding poverty, “Vicarious Trauma” similarly centers on impactful biography to reveal a deeper understanding of Indigenous history and research on historical trauma. This work demonstrates how researching historical trauma can adversely affect Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars alike.

The title “Collecting the Herd,” speaks to the decolonizing of Indigenous history implicit in the hearing of, documenting, making sense of, and healing of historical trauma within Indigenous populations. The listening of such traumatic narratives has been called the “hearing of the truth,” as it is known within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Residential School Survivor testimonies, but it certainly extends to unrecorded Indigenous histories, forgotten by orthodox Canadian history (Weiss, 2015). Moreover, the work of collecting oral history and attempting to heal through cultural reclamation (burning of sage, ceremony with ancestors—the bison skull, and the “re-righting” of history, referred in this piece as “collecting of the bison herd”), is a reversal of the Christianization of Indigenous peoples, deployed by church and state over the last four hundred years. This process was known historically as “collecting the [sheep] flock.” In reabsorbing Indigenous “souls” into the bison herd away from Christianity, the decolonization of history can take place.

Marcee for reading

Continue reading →

The Demise of the One Child Policy, a complicated political tale

November 2, 2015 No Comments

A Chinese family with one child having a little picnic at Beihai Park in Beijing (Uploaded to Wikipedia by Daniel Case)

By Mirela David

The Chinese government announced on October 29 it is now allowing all married couples the birth of two children effectively ending 35 years of one the most controversial population control policies in the world: the One Child Policy. The demise of this much reviled population policy comes after the 2014 relaxation of the One Child Policy, which allowed two children for parents without siblings, failed to materialize in higher birthrates. This recent announcement, however, does not signal a major advancement for women’s rights in China and there is not indication that the government will end the promotion of eugenics now that parents can choose to have two children.

The latest economic woes, stock market instability, a slower economic growth than in previous years, coupled with long standing concerns about the aging population, the pressure on the social security system and the shrinking labor force has prompted the demise of this policy. Ironically the staggering population growth was seen as a danger to socialism in the early 70s, and later on in the late 70s an impediment to China’s economic growth. Now that the population growth has slowed down, the Chinese government wants to make sure its supply of cheap labor does not dwindle, since its grandiose constructions projects and manufacturing economy rely heavily on the extraction of labor power of undocumented migrant workers.

On a personal level urban couples who might have wanted more than one child now have an opportunity to act on that desire, easing the onus on their existing child to care for the aging parents and grandparents. In a culture where respect for the elders is inculcated as part of traditional Confucian values, the state pensions insufficient to care for the needs of the elders, there was much worry about the burden that would mean for the current generation of children, who have grown spoiled during childhood, earning the nickname of little emperors or dragon children. The only child has generally been the center of attention lavished by both parents and often two sets of grandparents. Continue reading →

Halloween and the Commodification of Indians

October 31, 2015 No Comments

By Benjamin Hoy

“The other braves thought it was wrong, that the chief was blessed with an arrow so long,” Chief Long Arrow and Pocahottie, Dreamgirl 2015-2016 Costume Collection Catalogue, p. 14

Each year numerous calls go out encouraging the public to choose respectful Halloween costumes. No more redface, faux headdresses, plastic tomahawks, or war paint. Newspapers run articles attempting to defeather Halloween, denounce the sexualized Indian maiden costumes, and highlight the problems created by using ceremonial objects such as headdresses in disrespectful ways. From buzzfeed videos to John Oliver’s How is this still a thing?, the breadth of outreach is extensive.

The calls go out and each year we are treated with the same stories. University teams dress up like Cowboys and Indians and sororities and fraternities host Consquistabros and Navajos themed parties. Massacred Indian costumes compete with black-faced cheerleaders and drug using Mexicans. Apologies, sensitivity training, and public relations measures follow.

A year passes and history seems to repeat itself. More apologies. More public relations. With the tens of thousands of Halloween costumes out there, why does offensive costuming persist?

Apathy, ignorance of the issues at stake, and a desire for controversy provide partial answers. Solving this problem, however, requires a much broader focus than is often provided by the media. This is not a one day problem and it is not a problem divorced from its historical context. Continue reading →

Justin Trudeau’s “New Deal” for Cities

October 30, 2015 No Comments

Bret Edwards

Justin Trudeau speaks to municipal leaders in June 2015. Liberal.ca

Cities played a key role in Canada’s recent federal election. New seats were available in many urban and suburban areas of the country after the House of Commons expanded to reflect recent population shifts and increases. Political parties also devoted large chunks of their platforms to cities in an effort to woo these voters. In some cases, their maneuverings began even before the campaign. In June, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau spoke at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities Conference, promising a “New Deal” for cities and communities. Declaring that municipalities “still don’t have the resources they need to deliver the services that citizens expect”, Trudeau acknowledged that the federal government should be “held to its responsibilities, financial and otherwise” at the municipal level. During the election, he doubled down on this commitment by vowing to run budget deficits in his first three years and invest $125 billion over ten years in building and upgrading urban infrastructure.

In the wake of the Liberal victory, public attention has quickly returned to Trudeau’s New Deal program. “How will you help Toronto, Mr. Trudeau?”, asked Marcus Gee in the Globe and Mail days after the election. In Calgary, the Herald ran a similar piece called “What a Liberal government means for Calgary”. And in the Toronto Star, Royson James argued that by making urban issues such a large part of his campaign, Trudeau has now put himself in a position where he would neglect cities at his own peril. “Cities…were good to Trudeau this election,” he wrote. “They’ll be expecting the Liberals to reciprocate the love.”

Reading these and other recent stories, one gets a sense from their language and tone that many Canadians see the federal government as a natural partner for cities that should be counted on to reliably support municipal needs over time. But historically this has not been true. Continue reading →

Trudeaumania Redux: Like Father, Like Son?

October 29, 2015 3 Comments

by Christo Aivalis

Less than two weeks ago, Justin Trudeau led a small parliamentary contingent from a distant third to majority government, overcoming an image of aloofness and style before substance. He stands poised to rule Canada for at least the next four years, carrying in the footsteps of his father Pierre, who stormed to victory nearly 50 years ago in a 1968 wave of Trudeaumania. Both father and son came about for similar reasons, namely that the public and punditry saw them as young, ambitious, and sexy arbiters of change. Indeed, both men have been sexualized in the media, sold as ‘pretty boys,’ after whom young women swoon.

While nearly every major news source has written comparative pieces of the two, I wish to focus on how both men, as per the Gramscian concept of passive revolution, were and are forces for the status quo. We can do this by examining their common motivations for reform, as well as the effect such manoeuvers had on the left and the New Democratic Party.

During their ascents to power, both Justin and Pierre emphasized the desire for new ideas and motivations that characterized the swinging 1960s and the post-crisis 2010s. In this desire to project change, Justin and Pierre combine both positive and negative rationales and language in their calls for reform. Continue reading →

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