Crystal Gail Fraser and Jess Dunkin In this post, we discuss Indian residential and day schools. Please take care as you read. If you are a Survivor or intergenerational Survivor of residential or day school and you need help, there’s a free 24-hour support line. Call 1-800-695-4419. Additional resources are available here.
The cover art for the How I Survived Podcast was designed by pipikwan pêhtâkwan based on a wall hanging made for the project by Agnes Kuptana.
On October 22, during the first snowstorm of the season, we launched How I Survived, a podcast about recreation at northern residential and day schools, at the Explorer Hotel in Sǫǫ́mbak’è (Yellowknife, Northwest Territories). Given the weather, we were pleasantly surprised at the 30-odd people who came to learn about the podcast and celebrate its release. After almost seven years working on this project, it truly felt like an accomplishment to bring this work to the public.
The How I Survived Podcast grew out of a research project of the same name. Initiated in 2018 by the NWT Recreation and Parks Association (NWTRPA) in collaboration with Crystal Gail Fraser at the University of Alberta and guided by an advisory committee of Survivors and intergenerational Survivors, the research project was a response to a recognized need for more education about residential and day schooling generally and the place of recreation within this system specifically. We understand recreation to include a variety of creative, physical, social, and intellectual activities including, but not limited to music, art, sports, games, crafts, reading, and Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. How I Survived was also envisioned as a way to further truth and reconciliation in this country, and engage with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action.
It’s part of the craft of writing: a “killer quote” that powerfully demonstrates the point the author is trying to make. Taken from a primary source, it can become the most quoted part of the secondary piece in which it appears. And when loosed from its moorings to the publication that contextualizes it, the quote is carried into the murkier waters of online venues and social media platforms where it is transformed from illustration into soundbite. This is bad enough, but what happens if a quotation was inaccurate to begin with?
In researching the origins of the “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969,” I encountered a quote nearly everywhere I looked. Responding to criticisms of the White Paper, Pierre Trudeau reportedly said:
“We’ll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want.”
Did the prime minister really say that? I had no idea, so I set out to track down the original source, eventually tracing it to a passage in a book:
In a television interview in March 1970, Trudeau left little doubt as to how he felt history would unfold if Indians rejected the White Paper. “We are not forcing anyone to do anything,” he said. “We’ll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want.”[1]
In Part 1 of this series, I provided a historical overview of Canada’s sex work legislation. In Part 2, I compared The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act, or Bill C-36 (2014), with its predecessor, Bill C-49 (1985), ultimately arguing that both Bills are nearly identical. Now, for the final article of this series, I assert a need for change. I outline the historical and contemporary consequences of Bill C-49 and C-36 and why Canada’s sex work legislation must change.
To fully understand the consequences of the parallels between Bills C- 36 and C- 49, I need to talk about Indigenous women. Indigenous women, cis and trans, are overrepresented in Canada’s outdoor sex trade.[1]
Sean Graham is joined by Bonnie Robichaud, author of It Should be Easy to Fix. They discuss the timeline of her Supreme Court case calling for justice, her reaction to the case taking so long, and having other women reach out to her throughout the process. We also chat about the decisions leading to the Supreme Court case, the problem with non-disclosure agreements, and her advice for anyone going through a similar circumstance.
The COVID-19 pandemic tested healthcare systems worldwide and pushed many of them to the breaking point. Canadians experienced the pandemic in diverse ways depending on where and how they lived, from single-family dwellings with converted virtual workspaces to long-term-care facilities with rigorous lock-down policies or First Nations reserves with inconsistent access to potable water, but in some cases, local leaders who took public health matters into their own hands. Canadians with pre-existing health conditions faced new obstacles, and pandemic circumstances altered the regular rhythms of accessing healthcare services, leaving many Canadians delaying appointments or waiting for surgeries. These pandemic conditions exposed how deeply healthcare decisions are entangled with other public services, from education to transportation, housing and institutionalized long-term care, responses to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or the panoply of services combatting poverty.
Dyck’s academic home is the history of medicine, and for nearly 25 years, she has been studying the history of mental health services, including care in the community and psychopharmaceutical experimentation, examining how these changes in psychiatric care have intersected with Medicare and related political reforms. Clifford is an environmental historian who studied infectious disease and the urban water supply in nineteenth-century London. In 2020, when the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic became apparent, we put our regional and temporal differences aside and focused on documenting the historic pandemic quickly unfolding before us.
From March 2020 to the summer of 2023, we worked closely with colleagues in History and Community Health & Epidemiology and secured funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. We sought out research partners from front-line service providers throughout our home province of Saskatchewan. We conducted approximately 100 interviews with service providers and clients, tracked policy and news releases, including on social media platforms, and surveyed the population with the support of Mental Health Commission of Canada, to both archive and analyse the impact of the pandemic on health services.[1]
While our specific findings are limited to the province of Saskatchewan, several points warrant further reflection as we consider the impact of the pandemic on the healthcare system. The pandemic put tremendous pressure on the healthcare system, causing the system to crack in some acute ways, for example, as Intensive Care Units in the province reached capacity in the fall of 2021, and long-term-care facilities faced catastrophic outbreaks, but COVID-19 also revealed some remarkable strengths. Under pressure, some communities found ways to come together, setting aside ideological and organizational differences in order to prioritize public health services – including housing, food, and mental health – services that largely spill outside of Medicare’s direct influence, but whose services dramatically helped to reduce the pressure on hospital-based services. In fact, with the temporary injection of federal emergency funds during the early waves of the pandemic, some organizations managed to even more efficiently deliver services, albeit under considerable stress and duress. For example, in Saskatoon, the Food Bank, Fire Services, the Salvation Army, Prairie Harm Reduction, and the Friendship Inn came together overnight to share ideas, supplies, and human resources.
In an unprecedented effort to pivot services for some of the most vulnerable people in the community, a new consortium – Saskatoon Inter-Agency Response Committee (SIRC) – was born. With the urgency of the pandemic motivating decision makers, SIRC supported the shift to boxed and distanced food delivery that amounted to maintaining a meal schedule such that not a single meal was missed in the rapid transition to social distancing. Interviews with key leaders from these organizations suggested that the urgency of the pandemic changed the nature of front-line delivery models from one that required many meetings, consensus building, grant applications, and competition amongst organizations, to an organizational flow chart that mirrored a fire department. Instead of having to identify a fire, then apply for a grant to secure a truck and staff it with trained firefighters, the pandemic created a governing environment where frontline service providers could act decisively and cooperatively, and ultimately, efficiently.
While no one mourned the end of the pandemic, the circumstances helped to showcase some of the existing strengths within the Canadian healthcare landscape, and at the same time, it illustrated how dependent those services are on core funding. In a temporary moment when issues of poverty, houselessness, and mental illness became politicized as threats to everyone’s collective health and safety, service providers across the country stepped up to share resources, information, and later vaccines to promote better health outcomes.
Despite these successes however, the data collected from the pandemic suggest a general decline in overall well-being when it comes to mental health and addiction, food security, housing, and education. As vaccines took the edge off the worst infectious threats of the pandemic, a global recession and rising food costs coincided with a retraction of pandemic policies that provided core funding, creating or even worsening pre-pandemic conditions for many Canadians who had already struggled to secure primary care services and basic needs.
The successful rollout of the mass vaccine campaign in the first half of 2021 provides another example of the effectiveness of the Saskatchewan Health Authority during a prolonged crisis. Vaccine mandates, however, put public health officials under political pressure to weigh individual against collective concerns as the occasion tested public faith. Social pressure pushed these issues outside the bounds of clinical trials or Parliamentary debates and reminded us of the tremendous influence of social media in stimulating (mis)information about healthcare options in ways that added new grist to the ideological campaigns for and against public health care. The intense and rapid politicization of vaccines grafted onto ideological perspectives about the sanctity of publicly funded healthcare provisions. Questions of access, equity, transportability, and comprehensiveness, principles of the Canada Health Act, found direct application in the creation of vaccine passports and stimulated divisions about the meanings behind those terms.
The COVID-19 pandemic tested our services, resources, and emotional fortitude in unprecedented ways. The Saskatchewan and Canadian healthcare system withstood the pandemic and for the most part managed to provide essential care under the largest test it had faced in four decades. Yet the successes came at a cost. Residents living in long-term care facilities experienced a higher death rate and more severe restrictions, while people struggling with food and housing security, mental health and substance abuse faced new kinds of challenges accessing critical services. Surgical wait times lengthened, and healthcare staffing burnout reached an all-time high. Canadians now face a low point in our recent history regarding access to primary care, with pronounced gaps in rural and northern regions. Our healthcare infrastructure needs repair, and the damage caused by the pandemic has amplified calls for privatization and decentralization. Our research indicates that heeding these calls would be a mistake.
The pandemic temporarily created the political will to confront the relationship between health and poverty, recognizing for a moment that “we are all in this together”. The end of the pandemic, however, has signalled a return to pre-pandemic circumstances where poverty is a problem of tent cities, addictions, and racism; in short, issues that are isolated and othered, and above all, problems that do not generate the kind of political action that stimulates collective responsibility.
Further Reading:
Bagshaw, Sean M., Erika Dyck, Maya J. Goldenberg, Bev Holmes, Esyllt Jones, and Julia M. Wright. “The Humanities and Health Policy.” FACETS 9 (January 2024): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1139/facets-2023-0093.
Erika Dyck is a Canada Research Chair in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. Jim Clifford is an associate professor in the same department.
[1] Muhajarine, N., Dixon, J., Dyck, E., Clifford, J., Chassé, P., Gupta, S.D., Christopherson-Cote, C. and Team, R.R.S., 2023. Capturing and Documenting the Wider Health Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic Through the Remember Rebuild Saskatchewan Initiative: Protocol for a Mixed Methods Interdisciplinary Project. JMIR Research Protocols, 12(1), p.e46643
Sally de Quadros and Marie Arrington of ASP (Association for the Safety of Sex Workers). 1984. Richard Banner. City of Vancouver Archives. AM1675-S4-F40-: 2018-020.7166.
Last week, I provided an overview of sex work legislation in Canada- heavy-handedly hinting at its cyclical and unchanging nature. Today, I do much the same. I argue that Canada’s “new” sex work legislation is a regurgitation of the laws that have been in place since the 1980s.
This week I talk with Cristina Vatulescu, author of Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges. We talk about the Soviet archives that have been declassified over the past 20 years, how to approach newly available material, and how trustworthy the Soviet documents can be. We also discuss the individuals who were followed by the Soviet police as well as those who were creating the documents, how the material changes our understanding of the Soviet Union, and how historians can approach future declassifications.
“…Bill C-36…It’s a first in Canada…we make the buying of sex illegal. We target the predators…Bill C-36 has recognized that a lot of [prostitutes] are victims…If [prostitution] becomes an ‘industry,’ if this Bill doesn’t go through, we will have everything legal as of December 2014. Is that the Christmas present you want to give to your children?”[1]
In her interview with Dr. John Hull for the television show 100 Huntley Street, Joy Smith (former Member of Parliament representative for the Kildonan-St. Paul region in Manitoba) overzealously promotes Canada’s Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (the PCEPA or Bill C-36). The moralistic rhetoric found across Smith’s entire interview paints Bill C-36 nearly flawlessly. However, what struck me most was her claim that Bill C-36 was a “first” in Canada – simply because that’s not true.
In August 2024 representatives from multiple online history projects, universities, and public history institutions met in London to discuss key topics in online knowledge mobilization. Over the next several months attendees will publish essays reflecting on the topics we discussed. One, from Mack Penner, is already live. In the meantime, here are some open-access resources that intersect with workshop content.
I drew, when I was a kid. I drew goalies and traded them for hockey cards with guys in my class. I drew horses and gave them to girls, no exchange required. But as chapter books replaced pictures books, school drilled into me the hegemony of text. As I got older, because my drawing didn’t improve – and neither teachers nor I tried to improve it – my results seemed more and more childish. Like most people, I eventually stopped drawing altogether.
University’s deification of the written word confirmed the soundness of this decision. My chosen field of history seemed especially dedicated to turning innumerable scraps of text from the past into a single one in the present – ideally, one of 8-10,000 words, written for likeminded scholars, and containing the word “hegemony.” Although we have had movies for more than a century, photographs for two, and images for millennia, these were only occasionally to be used as sources, and generally as colour rather than play-by-play. And even when used as sources, it was assumed that they would not be communicated as such: their meaning was to be transmogrified into text. As was history itself.
Yet as a historian, I kept enjoying the relatively few historically-themed graphic novels that appeared.
