The following upcoming events may be of interest to our readers (click on ‘continue reading’ below for full descriptions):

1) PSYCHIATRIC SURVIVOR ARCHIVES, TORONTO (PSAT) FOURTH ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING SATURDAY, JULY 3, 2010 from 1-5 PM

2) Approaching the Past: A series connecting people teaching history – Ruth Sandwell keynote speaker

3) Active History lunch at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association – Montreal, May 30

4) Sean Mills, Karen Dubinsky, and David Austin book launch – Montreal, May 31

5) Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre (CIHC): Afternoon of History and Heritage in Brantford – June 12th

6) Digest of this week’s blog posts

7) Write for us! We are currently looking for more people interested in writing blog posts on Active History

If you have something to announce to the Active History community please contact info (at) activehistory.ca.

There will be no announcements next week.

1)  PSYCHIATRIC SURVIVOR ARCHIVES, TORONTO (PSAT) FOURTH ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING SATURDAY, JULY 3, 2010 from 1-5 PM at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/U of T – OISE 252 BLOOR STREET WEST, 8th FLOOR, ROOM 105 (atop the St. George subway station)
Psychiatric survivors/consumers/current/former patients and allies are welcome to attend PSAT’s AGM to hear a report on past activities, discuss future directions and elect board members for the year ahead. This meeting is wheelchair accessible. Refreshments will be available.

2) On Wednesday June 16th (7-9 pm) we will be jointly hosting “Approaching the Past: A series connecting people teaching history” at Black Creek Pioneer Village.  This will be the first of a number of evening events open to anyone with an interest in teaching history, particularly teachers, academics, and public historians.  Ruth Sandwell will be the inaugural speaker.  She will be speaking on “History is a Verb: Using Historical Sources to Teach Canadian Rural History.”  The event is free but we need participants to RSVP by June 4th.  For more information or to RSVP please contact Jennifer Bonnell at jennifer.bonnell@utoronto.ca or approachingthepast@gmail.com.

3) The Active History group will be meeting on Sunday May 30 at 12:30 in Henry F. Hall rm 427 at Concordia University during the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association.  This group is planning on becoming an affiliated group of the CHA and serves a forum to discuss the broader ideas and projects related to Active History.  Lunch will be served and all are welcome.  Please contact info@activehistory.ca if you would like to make a presentation.

4) Sean Mills, Karen Dubinsky and David Austin will be launching their books The Empire Within, Babies without Borders, You don’t play with Revolution during the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association.  The launch is being held at Concordia’s School of Community and Public Affairs (2149 MacKay Street in Montreal) at 3:30 on May 31.

5)  The Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre is hosting an afternoon of history and heritage on June 12th.  Presentations include “Historic Mills in the Grand River Watershed” by Warren Stauch, “Adaptive Re-use of industrial buildings in the Grand River Valley” by Dr. Karen Dearlove, and a round table discussion of ‘place and history’.  The event is being held between 12:30 and 5 p.m. at Laurier at Brantfor Odeon Theatre, Rm OD110, 50 Market Street, Brantford.  For more information please contact 519-732-1000 or info@canadianindustrialheritage.org.

6) This week in the AH blogosphere:

- Tom Peace: Conversation, Contradiction and Conflict in the Historical Present

- Alix Green: ‘Tell me the story’: Thinking with History, Policy, and the Goldberg Rule

- Mike Green: The Politics of Textbooks: How Texas wants to Educate the Nation

- Colin Tyner: Re-membrering a Lakeside Landscape in Japan

7)  The ActiveHistory.ca team is looking for more contributors for our collaborative blog on how history and historians actively engage communities and contribute to current debates.  This blog has a growing readership – last month we had over 2,000 distinct visitors – and it provides potential contributors the opportunity to reach a wider audience. If you’re interested in contributing, please read more to find out what we’re looking for!  If you are interested see our call for bloggers and contact info@activehistory.ca. We look forward to hearing from you!

The following upcoming events may be of interest to our readers (click on ‘continue reading’ below for full descriptions):

1)  Approaching the Past: A series connecting people teaching history – Ruth Sandwell keynote speaker

2) Active History lunch at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association – Montreal, May 30

3) Sean Mills, Karen Dubinsky, and David Austin book launch – Montreal, May 31

4) Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre (CIHC): Afternoon of History and Heritage in Brantford – June 12th

5) Digest of this week’s blog posts

If you have something to announce to the Active History community please contact info (at) activehistory.ca.

1)  On Wednesday June 16th (7-9 pm) we will be jointly hosting “Approaching the Past: A series connecting people teaching history” at Black Creek Pioneer Village.  This will be the first of a number of evening events open to anyone with an interest in teaching history, particularly teachers, academics, and public historians.  Ruth Sandwell will be the inaugural speaker.  She will be speaking on “History is a Verb: Using Historical Sources to Teach Canadian Rural History.”  The event is free but we need participants to RSVP by May 28th.  For more information or to RSVP please contact Jennifer Bonnell at jennifer.bonnell@utoronto.ca or approachingthepast@gmail.com.

2) The Active History group will be meeting on Sunday May 30 at 12:30 in Henry F. Hall rm 427 at Concordia University during the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association.  This group is planning on becoming an affiliated group of the CHA and serves a forum to discuss the broader ideas and projects related to Active History.  Lunch will be served and all are welcome.  Please contact info@activehistory.ca if you would like to make a presentation.

3) Sean Mills, Karen Dubinsky and David Austin will be launching their books The Empire Within, Babies without Borders, You don’t play with Revolution during the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association.  The launch is being held at Concordia’s School of Community and Public Affairs (2149 MacKay Street in Montreal) at 3:30 on May 31.

4)  The Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre is hosting an afternoon of history and heritage on June 12th.  Presentations include “Historic Mills in the Grand River Watershed” by Warren Stauch, “Adaptive Re-use of industrial buildings in the Grand River Valley” by Dr. Karen Dearlove, and a round table discussion of ‘place and history’.  The event is being held between 12:30 and 5 p.m. at Laurier at Brantfor Odeon Theatre, Rm OD110, 50 Market Street, Brantford.  For more information please contact 519-732-1000 or info@canadianindustrialheritage.org.

5) This week in the AH blogosphere:

- Jay Young and Ian Milligan, Walking History: Jane’s Walk in Toronto and Vancouver

- Adam Crymble, A Class Project for the People

- Lani Russwurm, History Variations

- Karlee Sapoznik, Bill C-268, Human Trafficking and Slavery in Canada

Today Foreign Ministers from the ‘Friends of Haiti Group’ are meeting with Jean-Max Bellerive, Haiti’s Prime Minister, and UN officials in Montreal to discuss both the current situation in Haiti and longer term plans for the country’s stabilization and reconstruction. As they discuss Haiti’s future, it is important for them to also consider Haiti’s past.

Over the past two weeks, some aspects of Haitian history have been addressed in the media. With the exception of Pat Robertson’s attempt to evangelize through fire and brimstone, many of these explanations of how Haiti came to be mired in poverty had merit. They range from harsh reparations to former French slaveholders after the successful Haitian Revolution, rampant deforestation, US occupation during the middle of the twentieth century, to the brutal dictatorships of Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier.

This history has been used to explain Haiti’s poverty and why it is important to help as the nation is rebuilt. Within these snapshots of history, however, Haiti is typically envisioned as heading in a downward direction; its exercises in self government depicted as failures.

Although some discussions of Haiti’s history have delved into the deeper roots of the country’s troubles, many have primarily focused on its governance. Both the BBC‘s and CBC’s web histories of Haiti, for example, devote half of their discussion to the Duvaliers and the ousting of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. With the exception of a much better contextualized article in the Guardian, few of these reports emphasize the role that the predecessors of the leaders meeting today played in bringing about Haitian instability and poverty (France and the United States are two principal ‘friends’).

If Haiti is going to change for the better after this disaster, international leaders need to pay attention to the role that foreign involvement in Haiti has played in bringing about the current situation, and work together with Haitians towards a sustainable form of involvement that does not replicate the mistakes or deliberate interventions of the past.

One way to do this is by focusing on histories of the past that actually discuss the Haitian people, and not just how they were affected by outside forces. There have been a handful of discussions since the earthquake that have balanced the challenges that Haitians have faced with their resilience in dealing with them. TV Ontario’s The Agenda featured a rich discussion which both contextualizes the current situation in Haiti and lays out a framework for reconstruction. Last Tuesday, CBC’s The Current interviewed Rebecca Solnit. Her recent book A Paradise Built in Hell profiles five disasters during the 20^th century and how the people affected responded to them. Her argument, that when faced with disasters, people tend to work together for the common good while elites tend to work towards maintaining their own control, provides a critical lesson for Haiti’s leadership if that society is going to be built differently in the coming years. Karen Dubinsky, a historian at Queen’s University, was also interviewed by The Current. She uses her research on Operation Peter Pan, which removed children from Cuba in the early 1960s, to caution foreign governments and individuals from the temptation to adopt children out of disaster zones like Haiti. Most directly, Allen Wells, a historian of the Caribbean, has argued for a reshaping of Haiti’s history in order to focus more on the resilience of the people.

One group is already putting this into action. This past weekend a petition was created by the centre international de recherche sur les esclavages (CIRESC) in France and York University’s Harriet Tubman Institute. Highlighting past damage caused by foreign interests, the authors call for the participants at today’s ‘Friends of Haiti’ meeting to discuss the creation of an international plan, managed and directed by Haitians, for the development of the country’s education infrastructure.

There is already a model in place for building this type of infrastructure in Haiti. The work of Partners in Health takes a community focus to health care in Haiti. It is based on empowering Haitian community health workers to focus on the underlying causes of disease. At the organization’s core is the idea that sustainable health care begins with assessing the root cause of disease in a community, and taking holistic approaches to its eradication. This successful model of health care was started by Paul Farmer, an American doctor, who combined what he learned from medical school with his graduate training in anthropology.

Historians can do something similar to Partners in Health. Rather than writing histories that merely focuses on how the past shapes present conditions, historians can also focus on how individuals and communities shape and transform these conditions. Words from Jocelyn Létourneau’s History for the Future best encapsulate this idea: “historians must strive to open the future as wide as possible.”

The ‘friends of Haiti’ would be wise to focus on models like the CIRESC-Tubman proposal. Learning from the lessons of heavy foreign involvement and Haitian resilience, international comparisons, and the more recent successes of Partners in Health, can help to shape longer-term reconstruction programs that will help put Haiti on more stable footing.

Want to learn more about Haiti’s history? Here are three book suggestions:

Matthew Smith, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Cécile Accilien, Jessica Adams and Elmide Méléance, (eds.), Revolutionary Freedoms: A History of Survival, Strength and Imagination in Haiti, (Coconut Creek, FL: Caribbean Studies Press, 2006).

Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Haiti: The Breached Citadel, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989).

Special thanks to Nadine Hunt, Dan Bullard and my colleagues at ActiveHistory.ca for their suggestions and feedback while drafting this post.