Deer steaks or venison are nearly indistinguishable from other forms of red meat. Photo from Wikipedia Commons.

by Mike Commito

On December 21st 2011, the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters tweeted a link to a National Post article, “Wild Game Meat not Welcome at Ontario Food Banks,” which reported that a Lanark, Ontario food bank had decided to reject donations of wild game meat. The post piqued my interest for several reasons. First, while the economy has improved since the onset of the recession three years ago, data reveals that food bank usage is still high. Food Banks Canada recently released a report entitled “Hunger Count 2011” in which it revealed that 700,000 Canadians – roughly 2% of our population – rely on food banks every month. The holidays can be a particular stressful and trying time for families and individuals in need, so the timing of the food bank’s decision was curious. Second, as an environmental historian and an avid hunter, the issue raises some intriguing concerns for me about how our society views the consumption of wild game meat.

The Lanark decision was backed by Food Banks Canada, which had recommended that Ontario food banks should reject any meat neither raised in captivity nor killed in a provincially-licensed abattoir. However, in previous years, groups such as the Safari Club International have donated deer steaks and ground venison during the holiday season. While club members kill the animals, the meat is always cut, wrapped and frozen by a provincially licensed butcher.

This was the first time a food bank rejected the Safari Club’s donation. Opponents of the decision argue that wild game meat is the most organic meat available to Canadians. Provincial legislation dictates that individuals cannot distribute meat unless the animal was killed and processed in a government-licensed abattoir. Yet, in years past, Ontario food banks have turned a blind eye to the legislation and openly accepted the donations. The Lanark decision marks a departure from other provincial food banks in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, many of which actively campaign for donations of wild game.

On the other side of the border, naturalist Jackson Landers of Virginia has suggested that Canada geese in New York should be hunted in order to control the population and help feed the poor. He began to push this idea after New York City officials in 2010 rounded up 150,000 geese, poisoned them and dumped the carcasses in a landfill as a population control measure. Imagine how many tables these geese would have enriched; instead, these animals were treated like garbage.

Historically, Canada is a country that was built on the consumption of wild meat. Subsistence hunting has been an integral part of First Nations culture, but it was also significant for our nation’s European settlers. When domestic meat products were unavailable, game meat served as an alternative protein source that was both readily available and easily transportable. With the development of the railway and more advanced refrigeration techniques since the late nineteenth century, many Canadians began to consume less wild game meat, although it was still significant to many communities and groups across the country. As historian Gerald Killan has demonstrated, wild game meat continued to be important during times of crisis. During World War I, the Superintendent of Algonquin Provincial Park, George W. Bartlett, arranged to have a significant number of deer culled from the park in order to alleviate the wartime meat shortage.

While certain methods of hunting have come under scrutiny in recent years – most notably the cancellation of the Ontario spring bear hunt in 1999 – statistics show that hunting is on the rise with younger generations. Nonetheless, many Canadians are still against the sport and its obvious by-product, wild game meat.

As the sole hunter in my family, I experienced this type of opposition following my first successful duck-hunting trip on Manitoulin Island in fall 2009. After bringing the duck in one night from the barbecue while the rest of my family dined on an alternative dish, my parents and sister were repulsed by what was on my plate. Not only did they believe the duck was emanating an offensive odour, but they were also put off by the reality that I had killed and butchered the birds myself.

My family held no qualms with the process that their poultry had gone through to arrive in our household. I tried to convince them that they were missing out on an opportunity to consume fresh and organic meat, but my efforts were dashed as they all staunchly refused to sample my cuisine. Today where the pitfalls of genetically modified food are readily accessible and the mistreatment of farm animals are well documented, it is no wonder that organic food is increasing in popularity. For example, this past summer, some of my colleagues from York University produced a video for the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE) that detailed their efforts in butchering four lambs acquired from Kawartha Ecological Growers.

As my family’s refusal of my dinner offerings illustrates, many people still do not connect wild game meat as organic. My dissertation chronicles the history of black bear hunting and management practices in Ontario. Yet I believe that I also have a duty as an environmental historian to educate the public on the benefits of safe and careful hunting.

Responses to the National Post article ranged from insightful to misguided. Some believed that the Lanark decision came from senior government officials eager to continue promoting an anti-gun and anti-hunting agenda. For example, one individual disagreed that wild game meat is more organic than domestically-raised protein, and even suggested that moose and deer contain more mercury and dioxin than their bovine counterparts. To my knowledge, no studies have been undertaken that prove ungulates such as deer contain more toxins than farm animals. But, as game animals are not inspected, wild meat enthusiasts should always be mindful of the parasites and bacteria that these animals could carry. This means that extra care should always be taken to ensure that wild game meat is cooked properly and thoroughly.

It is important that we make informed decisions about where our food comes from and how it is processed. While some may disagree with the opinions I hold about the value of subsistence hunting, it is an important part of our heritage. With more and more people making conscious decisions to obtain organic and cruelty-free protein, it is time to start reconsidering the value of wild game meat. This does not necessarily mean that everyone should take up hunting, but Canadians should keep an open mind to the idea of consuming wild game meat, be it duck or venison.

Mike Commito is a second-year PhD student at McMaster University. His dissertation, tentatively titled ”Orphaned Cubs and Responsible Hunters: Conflicting Values and the Management of Black Bears in Ontario, 1900-2000″ focuses on the development of black bear hunting policy and management strategies in Ontario. He is interested in how various groups in the province such as biologists, policy-makers and the lay public viewed bears and how this perspective has changed over time.

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The Programming Historian

Depending on your vantage point, we have a looming opportunity – or a looming problem. Historical digital sources have reached a scale where they defy conventional analysis and now call out for computational analysis. The Internet Archive alone has 2.9 million texts, there are 2.6 million pages of historical newspapers archived at the Chronicling America site of the US Library of Congress, the McCord Museum at McGill University has over 80,000 historical photographs, and Google Books has now digitized fifteen million books out of their total goal of 130 million. Archives are increasingly committed to preserving cultural heritage materials in digital, rather than more traditional analog, forms. This is perhaps best exemplified in Canada by digitization priorities at Library and Archives Canada. The amount of accessible digital information continues to grow daily, making digital humanities projects increasingly feasible, and for that matter, necessary.

In this post, I will do two things. Firstly, I will give a sense of how much information is out there, and make the case for why Canadian historians need to start thinking about it. Secondly, I will introduce readers to the Programming Historian, a wonderful resources that at least puts you on the right track to a programming frame of mind.

TMI?

Too much information? (Photo of FEMA Publications Warehouse, WikiMedia Commons - http://bit.ly/zjmlYc

Information overload is not new. People have long worried about the impact of too much information. In the 16th century, the German priest Martin Luther decried that the “multitude of books [were] a great evil,” in the 19th century Edgar Allan Poe bemoaned that “[t]he enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age,” and as recently as 1970, American historian Lewis Mumford lamented that “the overproduction of books will bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance.” The rise of born-digital sources must thus be seen in this continuous context of hand wringing around the expansion and rise of information.

Despite the frustrations of microfilm for today’s historians, as well as the pitfalls of separating the wheat from the chaff amongst rising numbers of modern sources, historians have undoubtedly benefitted from these technical developments. This is perhaps disproportionately for those engaged in social and cultural pursuits. Historians will profit meaningfully from born-digital sources. These, however, do present added – albeit surmountable – challenges due to their scope and production processes. Sources do not always have attributable or reliable authorship, are often undated, but in aggregate can give a sense of the zeitgeist of a time.

Library of Congress (Photo from WikiMedia Commons - http://bit.ly/ArU8YZ)

Storage price is falling. For example, James Gleick [in his book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood] estimates that the Library of Congress collection is around 10TB (although the LOC itself claims around 200TB). These would previously have been unimaginable figures; I can now pick up 10TB of data storage for under a thousand dollars. Born-digital collections are larger, of course: the LOC’s digital collection is 254TB, larger than their print holdings, and the Internet Archive now has 3 Petabytes (PB) of information, growing at 12TB/month! In Canada, LAC has about 4TB of federal government web information and 7TB in its own internet archive. Information is also being preserved through programs such as the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s September 11th Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (focusing on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita), and, as of writing, the #Occupy archive. Online content is curated and preserved en masse: photographs, news reports, blog posts, and now tweets. These complement more traditional efforts at collecting and preserving oral histories and personal recollections, which are then geo-tagged, transcribed, and placed online.

What can we do about this conventional and especially born-digital deluge? There are no simple answers, but historians must begin to conceptualize new additions to their traditional research and pedagogical toolkits.

Where to Start: Programming

By the end of the Programming Historian, you'll have a basic know-how of Python and will be able to tackle projects requiring textual analysis.

One important thing we can do with this deluge of information is learn how to interact with digital information on a mass scale. Luckily, we have a tremendous resource available to us: The Programming Historian, by William Turkel and Alan MacEachern, hosted on the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) site. Why might you want to open up this free, open-access website book?

• If you were to try to deal with born-digital sources in a traditional manner, you would spend A LOT of time flicking through websites. Much of it hasn’t been curated, and realistically, you could not read every blog comment published on a given day in Canada, navigate the tweets, or so forth. For this, you will need computational analysis.
• The same holds true for the conventional array of information discussed above: if you want to use 2.6 million newspaper pages to their full potential, there must be a way to “distant read” it.
• Digital history is ‘hot.’ The American Historical Association, meeting right now, is full of panels and twitter has been afire with the field. Even if you do not necessarily see yourself using programming languages, it behooves you to be able to understand it.
• And, most importantly, it isn’t that hard, and it doesn’t take that much time. You could move through the whole guide in a weekend, or – better yet – break it into small chunks, spending 20-30 minutes here and there.
• Finally, I believe we’ll also have to equip the next generation of historians, as I’ve written about elsewhere on ActiveHistory.ca.

The Programming Historian is very straight forward, but by the end of it, you’ll be able to do the following:

• In an automated, systematic fashion, you will be able to take a website and extract all of the words from it for further analysis.
• Establish word frequency, similar to what a Wordle word cloud displays (the possibile utility of this is discussed elsewhere on this site). Indeed, you will be able to make your very own tag clouds!
• Move beyond word frequency to see the keyword-in-context – i.e. you see that the word ‘aboriginal’ appears a hundred times in a given site, so why not see where it has appeared. This enables you to move very quickly to the relevant information.
• Download and harvest information automatically. Say you find a large collection of a hundred websites. Rather than clicking repeatedly through each to download the information, a simple script can do it for you!

Conclusion (and a proviso about why we don’t all have to be programmers!)

Don’t be afraid. It’s New Years, so why not make it your resolution as a historian to figure out some of these very basic steps. It could make you a better historian, or in any case, will equip you to figure out what’s going on. In any case, it’s an additional tool in one’s toolkit. Unlike earlier social science histories of counting with computers in the 1970s (which did revolutionize areas of historical inquiry), it is important to remember that we can use broad analysis to find issues, but then move dynamically down into context.

That all said, historians will not all have to become programmers. Just as not all historians need a firm grasp of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), or a developed understanding of the methodological implications of community-based oral history, or in-depth engagement with cutting edge demographic models, not all historians have to approach their trade from a computational perspective. Nor should they. Computational history – to use only a few examples – does not replace close reading, traditional archival inquiry, or going into communities to uncover notions of collective memory or trauma. Indeed, computational historians will play a facilitative role and provide a broader reading context; yet there will still be historians, collecting relevant primary and secondary sources, analyzing and contextualizing them, situating them in convincing narratives or explanatory frameworks, and disseminating their findings to wider audiences.

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Heritage White Oak Tree in Cambridge

- Sergeant Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

While many of us may be familiar with the designation of built heritage properties under the Ontario Heritage Act, recently municipalities have been using the Ontario Heritage Act to designate individual trees as heritage trees.  Municipalities like Burlington, Pelham, Thorold, Cambridge, and most recently Brant, have designated individual trees under the Ontario Heritage Act.

First enacted in 1975, the Ontario Heritage Act enables municipalities to pass by-laws designating individual properties as having cultural heritage value through Part IV of the Act.  This designation provides some protection for the property from demolition, as well as regulates potential alterations to the property to maintain its heritage value.  Larger areas can be designated under Part V of the Act as Heritage Conservation Districts.

In recent years the definition of cultural heritage resources covered under the Ontario Heritage Act has been expanded to include not only the commonly understood Built Heritage Resources, defined as “one or more significant buildings (including fixtures or equipment located in or forming part of a building), structures, earthworks, monuments, installations, or remains that have cultural heritage value,” but also Cultural Heritage Landscapes.  Cultural Heritage Landscapes are defined as a “geographical area that human activity has modified and that has cultural heritage value.”  These areas can include “one or more groupings of individual heritage features, such as structures, spaces, archaeological sites, and natural elements, which together form a significant type of heritage form distinct from that of its constituent elements or parts…villages, parks, gardens, battlefields, mainstreets and neighbourhoods, cemeteries, trails, and industrial complexes of cultural heritage value.”  The addition of Cultural Heritage Landscapes as well as other amendments to the Ontario Heritage Act made in 2005, have included natural landscape features, such as trees, as integral parts of cultural heritage landscapes and built heritage properties that should be protected.

With these changes in the understanding of cultural heritage, municipalities began designating individual trees under the Ontario Heritage Act.  In 2008 the City of Cambridge passed a by-law to designate a 130 year-old White Oak tree under the Ontario Heritage Act.  This tree survived a disastrous flood of the Grand River in 1974.  Several one-hundred year old workers’ cottages in the vicinity of the tree had to be demolished after the ’74 flood, with the construction of a levee system along the banks of the Grand River and the raising of the grade of the land by five feet.  At that time John Kingswood, forester for the City of Cambridge, decided to save the then 100 year old White Oak Tree on the grounds.  He constructed a well around the tree and a system of drainage pipes to feed the tree’s root system.  Today the heritage designated White Oak tree is a center-piece of the Cambridge Sculpture Garden on the banks of the Grand River in downtown Cambridge.  At the time of its designation, Cambridge’s White Oak was only one of ten heritage designated trees in Ontario.

The most recent heritage designated tree in Ontario is a massive Black Walnut tree located in Brant County.  Estimated at more than 150 years old, the tree may have originally been planted as a cultivated nut-bearing tree on a country estate.

While there are few examples of preserved built heritage in Ontario dating back over 200 years, there are at least two heritage designated trees that have been standing for over 250 years.  Oakville has designated a 250-year old White Oak that was narrowly saved from being cut down for a road expansion project in 2006.  Nearby Burlington designated a 300 year-old White Oak, that for hundred of years appeared on surveyors’ maps as a significant landmark distinguishing borders like Brant’s Block, and the border between Burlington and Aldershot.

The designation of these trees and others in Ontario speaks to a growing realization that cultural heritage isn’t just about old buildings and quaint downtowns, but the preservation of diverse elements of our landscape, including natural heritage and trees, that capture our human history and the history of our environment.

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Pipeline route, Kbh3rd - Aquifer Map

Transborder pipelines are nothing new. There is a long history, forgive the pun, of such enterprises in North America. In fact, Canada has historically been a pipeline pioneer. Yet the Keystone XL project has attracted what is likely unprecedented environmental opposition for a transnational pipeline, including protests featuring celebrities and arrests outside of the White House. Perhaps this pipeline has become a potent symbol of wider dissatisfaction with our current petro-regimes and environmental approaches?

The Keystone project involves several different elements: the initial Keystone oil pipeline runs from Alberta to Illinois, in part utilizing existing pipelines, while the expansion (Keystone “XL”) entails extending pipeline all the way to Texas refineries and eventually the Gulf of Mexico (see adjoining map or see a more interactive map). Both lines will be able to move over around half a million barrels of oil per day. The original Keystone line is already finished, and the extension is expected to be completed in the next few years, provided that it receives the necessary agreement from the American government. This expansion phase, however, has been greeted by visible protest.

This pipeline debacles speaks to many of the themes that I try to address in my research, which generally focuses on the history of transborder Canadian-American environmental issues. To this point, I’ve concentrated mainly on water (such as the St. Lawrence Seaway/Power Project and Niagara Falls), but there are many parallels between the history of transnational water and oil/gas pipelines projects. Earlier this year I began considering the history of Canadian-American transnational pipelines as a future research project (after a student queried the paucity of sources on such a topic). I found that little had been done from a historical perspective, aside of William Kilbourn’s book Pipeline; at about the same time, the public outcry about the Keystone XL grew, further piquing my interest.

Let’s take a crash course in pipeline history. In the 1850s, the first natural gas pipeline in Canada, and perhaps the world, stretched some fifteen miles to Trois Rivieries. The world’s first oil pipeline was built between Petrolia and Sarnia in the 1860s, and after Confederation a pipeline system was stretched around the Great Lakes region. Before the end of the 19^th century, Canada was already sending gas via pipeline into the U.S. (e.g. Detroit).

It was soon discovered that the western areas held far greater reserves, and their exploitation – and concomitant pipelines – took off in the 20^th century on both sides of the border. By the early Cold War, Canada and the United States had pipelines stretching across much of their respective countries. Technological advancements and further petro discoveries made the idea of the TransCanada pipeline feasible, and, in one of the great Canadian parliamentary controversies, legislation was passed in 1956 and the pipeline constructed in the following years. Since then, a vast network of transborder (state, province, and country) have proliferated in North America.

By chesapeakeclimate (8/22/11 uploaded by Ekabhishek)

But if the Keystone XL pipeline is just business as usual, why is there so much resistance? In past pipeline disputes (e.g. TransCanada pipeline) there was certainly vociferous opposition, but it generally had to do with sectional, regional, political, and nationalist concerns. Many of those issues are at play in the current debate, but more than in previous cases, detractors are focused on environmental repercussions (see, for example, a New York Times editorial). In particular, opponents point out that, on top of the damage of the construction phase itself, pipelines inevitably result in spills and encourage the continual exploration and exploitation of oil and gas resources with their concomitant destructive effects, such as greenhouse emissions and global warming. For more detail on the impact of the tar sands, see Andrew Nikiforuk’s Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent as well as the tar sands aerial photography by Louis Helbig).

American proponents argue that the pipeline will bring jobs and help the economy, and provide the U.S. with energy security. On top of environmental concerns, critics reply that the job boom will only be short-term, and that much of the oil will actually be exported outside of North America. The argument has been made that Canada is going to develop and sell oil anyway, and if the Americans don’t take the oil and the concomitant jobs, someone else will.

It is claimed that worries about leaks, including the potential threat to the Ogallala aquifer, are overblown. But leakage fears are justified. There have been many pipelines leaks and spills in past years – as Sean Kheraj has shown on his Nature’s Past blog in regard to Alberta spills – and perhaps the major 2010 Enbridge spill in Michigan (Enbridge also owns a transnational pipeline) is behind the increased resistance to the Keystone XL. And that is to say nothing of the horrendous BP Gulf oil spill.

The history of resource development suggests that we take heed of the law of unintended consequences. It also shows that, even with environmental assessments, public input forums, and other checks and balances, the state and industry will continue to create environmentally destructive megaprojects to exploit natural resources because there is money to be made. But the long-term sustainability of the ecosystem outweighs short-term profits, even from a selfish perspective (e.g. more money won’t do much good if we don’t have clean water to drink).

Canada has a dirty history when it comes to developing and exporting natural resources, from oil to asbestos. The Americans can choose not to take part in the Keystone XL project, but the reality is that both countries (and the developed world) are locked into patterns of fossil fuel dependency, and it is going to take a long time and a lot of effort to change. Unless fundamental structural transformations are made, the view that these sorts of things are going to happen anyway has a lot currency, both metaphorically and tangibly.

  Daniel Macfarlane is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at Carleton University. He is finishing a book, based on his doctoral dissertation, titled To the Heart of the Continent: The Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project. He is widely interested in Canadian-American environmental relations, and is also conducting research on the transborder manipulation of Niagara Falls and co-editing a collection on the history of Canadian-American water relations.

In Part II of “A Town Called Asbestos”, Dr. Jessica Van Horssen continues her survey of the history of asbestos in Quebec by examining the first asbestos industry boom between 1914 and 1939. The outbreak of war in Europe and the advent of aerial bombing in urban areas created a new market for the inflammable mineral. In the years after the war, asbestos found its way into a number of industrial products as both a flame retardant and as insulation. This growth in demand led to an expansion of mining activities and the establishment of large, multi-national asbestos mining corporations.

Viewers should also visit the website for Asbestos, QC: The Graphic Novel to further explore Dr. Van Horssen’s work on this topic.

Visit the full EHTV website at: http://niche-canada.org/ehtv

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In 1956, Britain and France shocked the world by launching a surprise invasion of Egypt. Ostensibly aimed at curtailing the recent outbreak of conflict along the Israeli border, the military action was in reality a cover for the Anglo-French occupation of the Suez Canal and threatened to destabilize the precarious status quo of the Cold War international community.

For Canada, the Suez Crisis presented a particularly worrying state of affairs as it jeopardized the relationship between its two most important allies. On one side of the Atlantic, Washington was enraged by what it viewed as reckless British aggression, whilst on the other side, London felt betrayed by the lack of support it received from the United States. Ottawa found itself stuck somewhere in the middle.

Continue Reading

Aside from the military battles and national ramifications of the war, historians and activists are also working to address larger questions around the war and its impact. What were the consequences for aboriginals both during and after the conflict? What about those who refused to fight, on either the British or American side? How did regional, cultural and linguistic differences affect experiences of the war and did they reinforce or conflict with so-called “national” narratives centred on nation building? Can we, in fact, speak of “The War of 1812” or should we instead be considering the many “wars” experienced by those involved or swept up in the tumult of the period? How does a consideration of broader experiences of the conflict affect Canadian communities today? Further, how does considering these questions change the way the history of the conflict is taught, both in schools and in other educational settings such as historic sites and museums? Are these broader questions reflected in these settings and in the broader teaching of history?

In the spirit of these questions, the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) Active History Working Group and its partner, www.activehistory.ca, is organizing a public workshop to be held during this year’s CHA annual meeting which, though affiliated with the meeting, seeks to reach out to the surrounding community hosting the association – Kitchener-Waterloo. It will engage historians, activists, educators and the general public on a topic that is both timely and of local interest. We invite submissions for panels, round tables and workshop participants on the following themes:

• 1812 in the classroom and beyond. This could include considerations of teaching practices and tools (new media, historic sites, film etc.) as well as discussion on how the teaching of the war might be improved;
• the politics of inclusion/exclusion/identity in past and current commemorations of 1812;
• broader implications of the war; beyond the stories of combatants, what was at stake for aboriginal groups on both sides of the conflict? How were local communities and regions affected by the war? Beyond national narratives, what is the legacy of the War of 1812?

Please send a brief, 150-200 word abstract of your proposed topic of discussion/presentation and how it relates to any of the above themes, as well as a brief CV to the Working Group Co-Coordinator at trepaj@yorku.ca by October 3, 2011.

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Fort York National Historic Site is hosting the talk “Dying to Vote in Canada in the Middle East” by award-winning essayist and novelist John Ralston Saul and Professor Thabit Abdullah (Professor of History, York University).  They will they engage each other and the audience in a discussion of the current state of democracy in Canada, and our nation’s role in encouraging democratic movements in other countries.  The talk will be held on Monday May 30th, 2011 at 7:00 pm.  Admission Price: $10 ($8.85 + HST).  Please R.S.V.P. to 416-392-6907 x 221 or fortyork@toronto.ca for more information.

Also at Fort York on Monday June 20th is the launch of the new book Reshaping Toronto’s Waterfront (UTP Press, June 2011.)  ActiveHistory.ca will have more details about this event closer to the date.

ActiveHistory.ca is also pleased to announce the launch of the new book Sunnybrook Hospital: Our Veterans’ Legacy of Care, a Photographic Journey Through the Decades.  The book published by Dundurn Group Press captures the history of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. Edited by a team led by Dr. Peeter Poldre, the book, Sunnybrook Hospital Our Veteran’s Legacy of Care, a Photographic Journey Through the Decades, chronicles the contributions of the dedicated health care professionals, staff, volunteers and veterans whose tireless efforts have made the hospital what it has become today. Together they have established internationally recognized standards of excellence in patient care, teaching and research. This legacy honours in perpetuity those service men and women, past and present, who put heir lives on the line to protect our freedom.

Sunnybrook: Our Veteran’s Legacy of Care is available for purchase in the gift shops at Sunnybrook, Chapters/Indigo book stores, Amazon.ca and online through Dundurn Press.  For more information Please contact: Phil Gold, Archivist Sunnybrook Archives, Room KB117 Sunnybrook Health Science Centre, 2075 Bayview Avenue Toronto, Ontario M4N 3M5, 416-480-6100 ext 2571 or sbarchives@sunnybrook.ca.

Chiefswood from the Grand River

August is laughing across the sky,
Laughing while paddle, canoe and I,
Drift, drift,
Where the hills uplift
On either side of the current swift.

- “The Song my Paddle Sings,” E. Pauline Johnson

From Brantford’s downtown the Grand River meanders lazily, coming back on itself through a large ox-box, before reaching the tiny community of Newport.  Just past Newport the south shore of the Grand River forms the boundary of the Six Nations reserve.  From Newport the Grand River next flows through the town of Onondaga, and just a few kilometers past that, the river flows past a large white house on a hill.  This is Chiefswood.

George Henry Martin Johnson, a Mohawk chief, constructed the house from1853 to 1856 using walnut trees from the surrounding area, as a present for his English-born wife, Emily Susanna Howells.  The impressive home has two “front doors” – one facing the river welcoming those traveling by canoe, and another facing the road.  These two doors are key to the original function of Chiefswood and its significance today.  George Johnson’s family and Chiefswood represented a bridge between the two worlds of the Six Nations, and white settlers and authorities.

George Johnson’s grand-father Jacob was born in the Six Nations’ traditional territory in Upper New York State.  After the American Revolution and the destruction of Six Nations’ villages, Jacob followed Joseph Brant to the Haldimand Tract, the land on either side of the Grand River granted to the Six Nations’ by the British Crown in recognition of their loyalty during the American Revolution and in compensation for their lost lands.   George Johnson’s father, John “Smoke” Johnson, was born in the Haldimand Tract just outside of what would become Brantford.  Smoke Johnson fought in support of the British in the War of 1812, and became an influential figure in both the Six Nations’ community as well as neighbouring white settler communities.  Like his father, George Johnson also acted as an intermediary between the Six Nations’ and white settlers and authorities.  Fluent in Mohawk and English George worked as an interpreter for the Anglican mission on the reserve and later for the British Government.  With his marriage to English-born Emily Howells, George and his family bridged the two worlds.

Chiefswood was a physical bridge between the two worlds.  Here members of the Six Nations landed their canoes to visit and seek assistance or advice from Chief George Johnson.  Here also white settlers and government representatives stopped from their travels on the road to meet with George Johnson and gain his valuable services as a diplomat and interpreter between the two communities.

Pauline Johnson

Chiefswood is also significant as the birthplace and childhood home of E. Pauline Johnson.  Pauline Johnson came to fame across Canada, the United States and England as a writer and performer in the late nineteenth and  early twentieth century.  Pauline Johnson was proud of her Six Nations’ heritage proclaiming, “My aim, my joy, my pride, is to sing the glories of my own people.”  Yet Pauline was aware of her mixed heritage and her ability to bridge the two worlds through her art.  During her stage performances Pauline would alternate between her “native” dress of buckskin and bear-tooth, and fashionable “English” dress.  Pauline retired from the stage to Vancouver, and died in 1913 from cancer.  Her ashes were buried in Stanley Park where a monument to her still stands today.

Chiefswood still stands today as a testament to the Johnson family and their roles as intermediaries between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cultures and communities.  Recognized as a National Historic Site since 1953,  Chiefswood has operated as a museum since 1997.  While the site was damaged by water from frozen pipes last winter, it will soon open again soon to share its unique history as a bridge between two worlds.

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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]