Catastrophic Flooding: Manitoba’s Perennial Challenge

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Library and Archives Canada

This originally appeared on the Network in Canadian History and Environment [NiCHE] group blog, Nature’s Chroniclers. Shannon Stunden Bower’s given us permission to repost it here.

Southern Manitoba has flooded. Again. Given the large number of notable floods that have occurred in the past few years, this must be a surprise to precisely no one, environmental historian or otherwise. Traversed by both the Red and the Assiniboine, two large prairie rivers that come together at the heart of the city of Winnipeg, the region has a long and well-publicized history of high water.

Some of the earliest stories of the region tell of the devastation wrought by flooding. Indeed, the departure of a substantial number of early settlers is linked to a particularly devastating flood along the Red River. [1] There are also stories about deliberate efforts to ignore the flood risk. The transcontinental railway was built through flood-prone Winnipeg, despite expert advice to select a higher and drier alternate route. [2] Today, there’s a federal penitentiary at Stony Mountain, an area once employed as a refuge in times of high water. [3]

The thing about flooding in Manitoba is that sometimes it doesn’t happen, or doesn’t happen with sufficient severity to attract much notice. Sometimes the flooding is minor for years, even decades, at a time. It can be tempting to think that any period of diminished flooding is indicative of a trend that will certainly continue, effectively extinguishing the risk of severe flooding. So prisons and railways are built in ways that make sense in relation to other considerations. And then any subsequent flood can seem like water out of place, rather than the inevitable consequence of people on a floodplain. So check the ring dykes. Start up the sandbag-making machines. [4] And cue the nervous waiting by evacuated residents.
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Eating Animals: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

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Over the past few years, books like Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and documentaries like Food Inc. have increasingly challenged us to ask: How much do we really know about the “food” we buy and consume on a daily basis?

In his recent book, Eating Animals, an exposé on fishing and factory farming, Jonathan Safran Foer finds George Orwell’s famous words written in Animal Farm to be particularly apt: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Continue reading →

New Paper: Geoffrey Reaume on Psychiatric Patient Built Wall Tours at Toronto’s CAMH

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Professor Geoffrey Reaume of York University’s piece on the successful wall tours he has been running at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) appears on ActiveHistory.ca today. Professor Reaume’s piece previously appeared in the Active History theme issue of Left History and we are very happy to cross-publish it here.

The purpose of the wall tours described in this article is to remember the men and women asylum patients who built, lived, worked and died behind the last remaining structures that still exist on the grounds of the former Asylum for the Insane, Toronto. The tours first started with a conversation. In spring 2000, Heinz Klein, one of the organizers for the Psychiatric Survivor Pride Week events, and an activist whom I have known since 1993, asked me to give a talk about the history of people who lived in the Toronto Asylum for the upcoming annual event organized to celebrate the contributions of psychiatric survivors/consumers in our community.1 I was skeptical and said a lot of people had recently seen a play based on my research which did a better job than I could of speaking about patients’ lives. Heinz then suggested I could give a talk outside by the 19th century patient built wall at the present day Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), not far from where the play had been performed in April, 2000. As we continued to talk the idea of a wall tour came up, though I can’t remember who suggested it first. Instead of a stationary talk by the wall, the idea was to give talks all along the wall about patients’ lives where they lived. The wall would be the central site of multiple talks woven together by the common theme of describing a history of patients’ life and labour on this site. And so began the wall tours with the first one held on July 14, 2000, Mad Pride Day as it is now called. To my amazement and delight, about fifty people showed up for the first wall tour, a harbinger of things to come in the following years. [READ MORE]

Canadian Political Leaders, the Campaign Trail, and the “Ordinary Joe”

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As another federal election enters high gear, television screens and newspaper pages are filled with images of party leaders trying to show that they connect with ordinary Canadians.  Whether it be Stephen Harper riding an All-Terrain Vehicle or playing hockey with children, or Michael Ignatieff enjoying a hot dog at a popular Winnipeg restaurant, a key element of the campaign trail involves photo-ops of leaders doing things Canadians apparently do all the time.

The recent coverage reminded me of an article on Michael Ignatieff in the November 2009 issue of Toronto Life. “The Man Who Would Be PM” noted the Conservative Party strategy of negatively depicting the Liberal leader with the epithet “cosmopolitan”, a frame that the Conservatives have continued in election ads that imply Ignatieff’s years outside the country signal a lack of pride in Canada.  The article’s author questioned why Ignatieff was “trying to play the ordinary Joe card”, and argued Iggy would be a more successful politician if he underlined his exceptionalism rather than his similarities to Canadians.  The article then asked: when did Canadian politicians begin to depict themselves as ordinary Canadians, not elite members of society? The question made me think of three moments in Canada’s political past. Continue reading →

Modern slavery, environmental stress, and lingering international imperialism – unwinding the connections between intimately linked problems

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By Sali El-Sadig and Joel Krupa

There is a tendency in the social sciences to compartmentalize issues. In particular, the modern academic atmosphere in the social sciences and humanities has sliced and diced nearly every conceivable economic, social, cultural, and environmental topic into specialized categories, allocated it (or them) to the ostensibly ideal discipline, and subsequently dissected the topic at length. Too often, this lack of interdisciplinary focus has resulted in a lack of intellectual inquiry into the causative factors and intimate links behind various problems. In an increasingly seamlessly connected and globalized world, we continue to do this to our own peril – especially when analyzing interconnections between the important contemporary human rights issues of forced bondage/slavery, globalization, and environmental stress. Continue reading →

The Toronto Star’s Lackluster Coverage of the American Civil War Anniversary

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By Matthew Furrow

Let me tell you about a newspaper article I just read and what it taught me about history.

Apparently, this week marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the American Civil War. (The war started because southern forces fired the first shot, although it’s not clear why). This is a “Big Deal,” at least to certain major American newspapers. The Washington Post has set up Twitter accounts so I can follow the words of Abraham Lincoln and an obscure military leader named Anderson. (Apparently, 150 years ago, someone was shooting mortars at him, or near him, anyway.) The New York Times has created a Facebook page for the Civil War, as has the state of Virginia.

History is being brought alive to those who care about it: geeky couch-potatoes (people who watch “reruns of Ken Burns’ documentary”) and weird people who like to dress up in costume (performing “battle re-enactments”). For the rest of us, these projects should be seen as kind of interesting, but also kind of silly (what if General Lee, gleeful traitor to his country, tweeted about it? LOL!). Continue reading →

Stories of Exile: Movie Review of “The Queen and I”

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Sarvestani (left) and Pahlavi (right) both live in exile following the Iranian Revolution

The Queen and I (2008), directed and produced by Swedish-Iranian filmmaker Nahid Persson Sarvestani, follows the former Empress of Iran, Farah Pahlavi and Sarvestani as they discuss their life stories following the 1979 Iranian Revolution. These two women are unlikely confidants; Sarvestani is a former communist who participated in the Revolution in her youth; Pahlavi is the widow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. The documentary draws you in right from the beginning.

In 1979, the Iranian monarchy (the Pahlavi dynasty) was overthrown and was replaced by an Islamic Republic led by Ayattolah Ruholla Khomeini. The royal family chose to flee Iran and Farah Pahlavi lives in exile to this day. Following the revolution, Khomeini was quick to silence those who did not support his regime. Like the royal family, Sarvestani and her family struggled following the revolution. They were targeted as communists and escaped the country in order to survive. They eventually made it to Sweden after living underground for several years. Continue reading →

New Paper: Matthew Hayday on “The History of the Recent”

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Professor Matthew Hayday of the University of Guelph has written an evocative piece on some of the joys and potential pitfalls of engaging living activists in historical research. His piece, “The History of the Recent: Reflections on Social Movement History, Research Methods and the Rapid Passage of Time,” is a useful read for anybody interested in the connections between oral history, professional historians, social movements, and activists.

In mid-March, I learned that ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in New York, Spiers was a key figure in a number of Toronto’s gay liberation organizations in the 1970s, including The Body Politic collective and Toronto Gay Action. I had been trying to track Spiers down because he was one of the principal authors of “We Demand!,” arguably one of the first major political manifestos of the Canadian gay liberation movement, which was presented at the first Pride rally on Parliament Hill in 1971. A conference honouring the 40th anniversary of this event is being held this summer at Simon Fraser University. I was trying to secure permission to reprint this document in a module on gay and lesbian history that I was developing for Nelson’s Visions Canadian history reader. Spiers did grant permission to reprint the manifesto, which will (hopefully) soon be part of a number of Canadian students’ history undergraduate education. [READ MORE]

Using Word Clouds to Quickly See the Political Past

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The 1933 CCF Regina Manifesto (all images produced by Wordle.net)

With politicians out on the hustings, what better time than to go through the old political speeches, manifestos, and platforms. Using Wordle, we can throw them up and look at word clouds. They’re not just pretty, but they can let us see the evolution of political thought and what words were capturing Canadians. They also let us see what things remain the same: most Throne Speeches over the last 15 years are nearly identical, stressing ‘government,’ ‘Canada,’ ‘Canadians, ‘etc. But we can see discontinuities: the 1933 Regina Manifesto, for example, contrasted with contemporary NDP promises and platforms (‘family’ and ‘home’). Reading all the documents might be preferable, but this is quick (it takes a minute to produce the picture at left) and has great possibilities for dealing with large quantities of information. Continue reading →

Upcoming Approaching the Past Workshop: Teaching the War of 1812

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The next Approaching the Past workshop will be held on Wednesday April 27th at 7:oo pm at Toronto’s historic Fort York.  The theme of this workshop is “Teaching the War of 1812,” and will feature a tour of Fort York and two short presentations by Karen Dearlove and Carolyn King.  Karen will be discussing the upcoming Ontario Visual Heritage Project “Rural Raids and Divided Loyalties: Southwestern Ontario and the War of 1812.” Carolyn’s presentation will focus on including Aboriginal perspectives in teaching the War of 1812.

Approaching the Past is a workshop series that brings together teachers working in middle and high schools, universities and museums to discuss teaching history.  Approaching the Past is organized by The History Education Network (THEN/HIER) and ActiveHistory.ca.

Please RSVP Samantha Cutrara at rsvp.approachingthepast@gmail.com by April 21 to attend.