“American Commune”: two views of a documentary about the 1970s counterculture

May 6, 2013

By Colin Coates and Daniel Ross “The rise and fall of America’s largest socialist utopian experiment” -Program blurb from the 2013 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival This post, inspired by the documentary film American Commune (2013) by Rena Mundo Croshere and Nadine Mundo, takes two different looks at the history of a 1970s countercultural [...]

Read the full article →

History Slam Episode Twenty-Two: Madeleine Kloske

May 3, 2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download By Sean Graham On Wednesday night there was a screening of four documentary films as part of Northern Scene in Ottawa. The evening’s feature film was Dan Sokolowski’s Degrees Northand it was preceded by three shorts: Andrew Connors’ Come Back Little Star, Daniel Janke’s Finding Milton, and Lulu [...]

Read the full article →

From Exploration to Climate Change: Northern History in the Anthropocene

May 2, 2013

By Tina Adcock I groaned when I saw the headline. “Google Street View braves Canadian Arctic to chart little-known territory,” it read. “Iqaluit mapping expedition sees Google staff hike along remote city’s snow-covered trails and risk wrath of polar bears.” Even the writers and editors at the Guardian aren’t immune to the occasional bout of [...]

Read the full article →

History Slam Episode Twenty-One: Marketplace at Northern Scene

May 2, 2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download By Sean Graham For the first four days of Northern Scene, the Panorama Room at the National Arts Centre was transformed into a marketplace featuring some of the region’s top artists. In this episode of the History Slam I talk with three of those artists about their work [...]

Read the full article →

Picturing uranium, producing art: A.Y. Jackson’s Port Radium collection

May 1, 2013

By Carmella Gray-Cosgrove In November 2012, as newspapers reported, an “all-but-forgotten” painting by A.Y. Jackson, “Radium Mine” (1938), emerged from the private collection of a prolific prospector. The painting went to auction, selling for an astounding $643,500, and, fleetingly, popular news sources grazed the surface of a subterranean history that disrupts the very bedrock of [...]

Read the full article →

History Slam Episode Twenty: The Nantuck Brothers and Justice

May 1, 2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download By Sean Graham In August 1899, Dawson and Jim Nantack were executed in Dawson City, Yukon for the murder of two prospectors. On November 4, 2010, their remains were uncovered by a backhoe operator during construction of a sewage treatment plant. The discovery led to a renewed interest [...]

Read the full article →

Carnivorous Walrus as Country Food

April 30, 2013

By Liza Piper In November 1948, long-time northerner L.A. Learmonth, engaged in archaeological work near Fort Ross, sent word to the RCMP detachment at Cambridge Bay (Iqaluktuuttiaq) that sixteen Inuit had fallen terribly ill at Creswell Bay on Somerset Island in the summer. Nine of the sixteen had died.  At the time of writing, the [...]

Read the full article →

History Slam Episode Nineteen: The Dorset Seen Exhibit

April 30, 2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download By Sean Graham Last Friday night in Ottawa, buses traversed the city as part of an art gallery crawl. The unofficial launch of Northern Scene, Swarm allowed art fans to view 15 different exhibits around the national capital region, with the event being capped off by a series [...]

Read the full article →

The Need for Speedy History in the Post-War Canadian North

April 29, 2013

By Ken Coates and Bill Morrison Things change – but rarely as fast and comprehensively as in the Canadian North. As late as the 1950s, most Indigenous people in the territorial and provincial North lived off the land, traveling seasonally to fish, hunt, trap and gather.  The hand of Ottawa had just begun to be [...]

Read the full article →

History Slam Episode Eighteeen: Tom McSorley on Nanook of the North and Grub-Stake

April 29, 2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download By Sean Graham As we kick off Northern History Week, we thought it would be fun to go back and look at some of the earliest films depicting life in northern Canada. In this episode of the History Slam podcast, I chat with Tom McSorley of the Canadian [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →