Comments Off on Taking Care of the Truth: A Call for Collaborative, Community-Engaged Residential School Research
By Sean Carleton and Adina Williams, members of the Squamish Nation’s Yúusneẇas Project
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) released the executive summary of its final report 10 years ago, in June 2015. In the decade since, many Indigenous Nations have carried on the TRC’s work of putting truth before reconciliation and learning more about the residential school system and its ongoing legacy.
Following the Tkemlúps te Secwépemc First Nation’s 2021 announcement about the location of potential unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, many Nations have specifically taken up the TRC’s Calls to Action 71-76 about locating and honouring missing children and unmarked burials at former residential schools.
This work, which includes the use of Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) among other research practices and technologies, is not about proving anything to Canada or Canadians. Church and state records have already confirmed more than 4,000 Indigenous children died at residential schools across the country, and this part of the history is outlined in Volume 4 of the TRC’s final report. Instead, Nations are undertaking new work to continue the truth-finding and truth-telling processes needed to facilitate internal healing and justice for Survivors and communities.
“Multiculturalism finally no longer applies to Quebec! […] It’s a model that has always been harmful to Quebec,” claimed Minister of the French Language Jean-François Roberge in the salon rouge of the Quebec legislature on 28 May 2025. On that day, Quebec’s National Assembly passed Bill 84: An Act Respecting National Integration, a controversial law introduced by the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) government. Spearheaded by Roberge, the bill establishes a new integration framework aimed at preserving Quebec’s French language and cultural identity by shifting further away from Canada’s multicultural immigration model. Two parties that, at one time or another, have claimed to be on the left voted on the bill that Wednesday morning. They landed on opposite sides of the ledger. The Parti Québecois (PQ), arguably a social democratic party for a significant part of its existence, voted with the CAQ, while the younger and more unambiguously leftist Québec solidaire (QS) voted against the bill.[1] As we will come to recognize, these opposing responses underscore a deep ideological split within Quebec’s nationalist Left—one increasingly defined by the immigration question. In this particular case, Bill 84 can be used as a lens to reveal how two progressive parties—the PQ and QS—have grown apart (with the PQ making a sharp departure from leftist politics), especially when considering the hot topic of immigration in Quebec. By retracing their respective historical progressions, we are able to understand how nationalism in Quebec can be used both as a tool for exclusion or a foundation for solidarity and inclusion along cultural lines.
Founded in 1968, the Parti Québécois emerged out of the Quiet Revolution and the growing support for Quebec sovereignty. It was initially a party of the left, combining social democracy with cultural nationalism. André Bernard outlines how “during the time of its first mandate, from 1976 to 1981, the PQ government followed typical practices that other social-democratic maintained during that same era.” Furthermore, Bernard notes, “most PQ members during the seventies called themselves social-democrats. René Lévesque, their leader, often defined himself as such and supported social-democratic resolutions.” [2] The PQ’s first electoral victory in 1976 marked the beginning of a government that emphasized francophone empowerment but also advocated progressive measures such as the integration of newcomers. As Martin Pâquet explains, PQ policies in the 1970s were grounded in the theory of “Autant de façons d’être Québécois” (Many ways to be Quebecois) — a pluralist ideology that recognized diverse cultural contributions within a common national identity.[3] Immigration rapidly diversified under the PQ: by 1980, immigrants from the Maghreb, Latin America, and Southeast Asia made up 53% of Quebec’s immigration intake, compared to 27% in 1973.[4] This increased acceptance of allophone immigrants reflected a deliberate policy of openness in early PQ policy. Under the PQ in the 70’s there was a much more even playing field for all potential immigrants, francophones and allophones alike. Gérald Godin, former PQ Minister of Immigration (and, interestingly, October Crisis detainee), embodied this inclusive vision. He hoped Quebec would become “ a global model, a homeland where a brotherhood between diverse peoples will have been achieved.”[5] Godin’s efforts to regularize the status of 10,000 undocumented Haitians in 1981 (despite pressures from the federal government) further confirmed this progressive stance.[6]
Gérald Godin, 1969. Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.
This button is from Nancy’s political button “archive.” She first wore it in the 1990s when groups attempted to ban books from libraries, including Lesléa Newman’s classic children’s book Heather Has Two Mommies.
On July 10, the Alberta government introduced new standards for school libraries “to ensure school library materials are age-appropriate.” The ministerial order responds to a group of parents who raised concerns about sexual acts, drug and alcohol use, derogatory language, and self-harm in coming-of-age-books available in school libraries in May. The government launched a survey that asked who should be responsible for determining whether books containing sexually explicit material are age appropriate; the options included librarians, teachers, school officials, students, and parents.
On social media, the premier defended the May announcement that the government would present new rules stating that “parents are right to be upset.” She is again invoking parental rights to defend government policies that target 2SLGBTQ+ youth, restrict access sex ed, and community resources for queer youth. Active History is reposting our May 2024 article on community education and sex ed in Alberta that responded to anti-trans legislation that also included a requirement that parents opt-in to lessons on sexually education, sexual orientation, and sexual health. We encourage readers to reflect on the themes of parental control over youth’s access to education on bodies, relationships, and sex in the original article in light of these recent events in Alberta.
Peter Fortna’s The Fort McKay Métis Nation: A Community History presents a compelling and community-centered account of one of northern Alberta’s long-standing yet often overlooked Métis communities. The book offers a significant contribution to both Indigenous history and the growing field of community-engaged scholarship. Beyond a regional study, Fortna’s work reflects how communities assert identity, maintain continuity, and navigate evolving relationships with the land, the state, and industry.
A defining strength of Fortna’s monograph is its rootedness in the community’s own voice and experience, grounded in respectful collaboration. Rather than writing about the Fort McKay Métis Nation (FMMN), he worked with them. Having the full support of the community, Fortna’s work was reviewed and partially funded by the FMMN itself. As Fortna highlights in his introduction, earlier iterations of this work drew on oral histories and interviews, family genealogies, land-use documents and reports, newspaper articles, and correspondence between community members and various organizational bodies to marshal historical evidence that Fort McKay’s Métis population holds section 35 rights under the Constitution. This research was initially undertaken to support Fort McKay’s legal claim to consultation rights and formed part of a larger submission that resulted in the Alberta government recognizing the FMMN’s “credible assertion” as rights-holders under section 35 in 2020. Fortna’s monograph expands on that work, turning evidence assembled for legal purposes into a deeper historical account of Métis identity, continuity, and community authority.
This post is part of our series of Essays on the Future of Knowledge Mobilization and Public History Online.
I didn’t expect to get into public history. I’ve been lucky enough to find an unconventional path into it, almost accidentally, from a strange multimedia project to online writing to books and teaching and now a wide enough variety of projects that I’m able to make my living doing it. But I’ve never had a clear plan. My work is incredibly rewarding and I find it endlessly fascinating, but my day-to-day is usually a chaotic scramble of deadlines and unanswered emails, so I don’t often get a chance to stop and take a step back to wrap my head around my work and my approach. Thankfully, last year Active History invited me to take part in a workshop about “The Future of Knowledge Mobilization and Public History Online.” It was a wonderful two days, bringing together historians from across the country and giving me the chance to take that step back and try to articulate my own experiences.
In his case for “steering a middle course” on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the history classroom, written partially as response to earlierpieces by each of us, Mark Humphries makes a number of points with which we agree. First among those points of agreement are the value of a historical education and the skills that such an education develops in students. We agree, also, that a certain media literacy and technological capacity are important skills not just for our students but for us as historians, too – and that developing those skills can be an important pedagogical goal in our classrooms. We disagree, however, with a number of Humphries’s other arguments in favour of the AI middle course, and finding those disagreements both significant and worthy of reply, we want to further the discussion here.
Among Humphries’s key arguments is one about relevance: to reject AI is to “retreat into a purist position that is likely to make us irrelevant” in the ongoing discussion about AI implementation, he claims. But to reject AI is not to ignore it, and neither is it to vacate the field of discussion. We have no interest whatsoever in pretending that AI doesn’t exist, as Humphries implies that we do. On the contrary, from a place of intense concern for how AI might warp our discipline (not to mention our world more generally), and diminish the intellectual development of us and our students alike, our position is critical rather than ignorant.
There is something unsettling about Humphries’ arguments for relevance. He seems to suggest that only by falling in line behind the ascendant power of AI can historians have any effect whatsoever in the classroom. Resistance is futile. “This is the world in which we and our students must live. So how can we simultaneously reject AI while also claiming to prepare students to live, work, and think critically in such a world?” Humphries asks. We don’t agree that teachers’ ability to reach their students is dependent on the use of the technology du jour. (Neither do we accept that this is the world in which we must live, but more on that later). Both of us attended university after the take-off of personal computers and the Internet and had professors who integrated those technologies minimally – or not at all – in their teaching. In our own experiences as students, the use or non-use of technology had absolutely no correlation with the quality of instruction. We strongly suspect that this observation rings true to many readers. Universities offer students a wide-range of pedagogical approaches that may or may not inform their future paths. Some professors are embracing AI, while others are rejecting it. But surely even AI optimists can recognize the value to students in this pedagogical diversity.
This is the final post in a three-part series about socialism at McGill in the 1930s.
Raffaella Cerenzia
1930s McGill was a small, tight-knit place. Only 3,000 or so students roamed the university’s campus. They were taught by a short roster of professors; the Department of Economics and Political Science numbered just six in the early thirties. In this intimate setting, “One got to know one’s classmates and teachers fairly easily.”[1]The McGill You Knew, a collection of McGill memories, is replete with stories of casual and friendly student-professor interactions, many of which took place outside of the classroom or even off campus.[2] In such an environment, professors were likely to know their more vocal students’ political leanings. Economics professor Stephen Leacock, a known Conservative, once told one of his socialist students not to write an assigned essay “because, he said with a Leacockian grin, his ulcers acted up at the thought of having to read it.”[3]
In this context, it’s easy to imagine that individual professors had the ability to influence or shape their students’ political philosophies. It’s also quite hard to imagine that when socialism cropped up among students and staff, the two cohorts operated independently. Certainly, McGill’s top administrators found it entirely plausible, or even definite, that McGill’s handful of socialist professors were propagating their beliefs among the student population. Professors Eugene Forsey and Frank Scott were considered the ringleaders, poisoning lectures and students with their socialist propagandizing.[4] Throughout the 1930s, McGill’s administrators returned repeatedly to the question of whether radical professors were converting students to their ideology. While evidence suggests that these professors did influence at least a handful of their students, it also indicates that administrative fears were rather overblown. In fact, it seems that the professors’ greatest impact was made outside the classroom, among students who were already involved with socialism to some extent.
McGill professors Eugene Forsey and F.R. Scott. Library and Archives Canada; McGill University Archives.
This is the second post in a three-part series about socialism at McGill in the 1930s.
Raffaella Cerenzia
As the 1930s unfolded, the soaring unemployment and general miseries of the Great Depression breathed new life into the Canadian left. Socialism began to take root in federal politics, a process exemplified by the founding of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) in 1932. As an institution that catered to elites, McGill University was in many ways protected from the worst the Depression had to offer. Even so, the tensions playing out across Canada could be found on McGill’s campus. Balancing the books was a consuming struggle for the decade’s administrators, and they remained preoccupied with keeping socialist influences on campus in check. Throughout the 1930s, McGill’s handful of socialist students and professors were active and vocal. Early in the decade, socialist students printed a CCF-aligned publication. Socialist professors engaged repeatedly in public newspaper debates and lectures. Both groups’ activities drew significant public attention. For McGill’s governors and donors, who were largely drawn from the ranks of Montreal’s business elite, this was a source of great consternation and outcry.[1] Protecting McGill against this perceived threat to its reputation became a major preoccupation for the university’s leadership during the Great Depression.
McGill’s principalship was no steadying force amid the turmoil. From 1930 to 1941, the position passed hands four times. For the two years when there was no principal at all, the chancellor, Sir Edward Beatty, took the reins instead. All of the head administrators wanted to protect McGill’s reputation and preserve academic freedom, but each defined those concepts in very different terms. The principals’ reactions to socialist professors thus flip-flopped throughout the decade, passing from unhappy acceptance to active support, and then to active resistance. As the principalship rapidly rotated, Chancellor Beatty remained a stable, influential, and decidedly anti-socialist presence.
Edward Beatty in his office at the headquarters of the Canadian Pacific Railway (Montreal), where he served as president, 1919. Image: Queens University Archives.
This is the first post in a three-part series about socialism at McGill in the 1930s.
Raffaella Cerenzia
Tick tock, tick tock. “Time to wake up!” In January 1933, deep in the midst of the Great Depression, a new student publication announced its arrival on McGill University’s campus. The paper was the production of McGill’s Labour Club, to which all of its editors belonged. Featuring eight to twelve pages of serious and satirical leftist social commentary, The Alarm Clock professed itself to be a “means of expression… for the best thought of students on Canadian economics and politics.” The editors explicitly aligned themselves with the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the democratic socialist political party that had been founded the year before.[1]
The first issue of The Alarm Clock, January 1933. McGill University Archives.
Contributions to the paper were diverse. One reporter hit the streets to collect quotes from unemployed men, compiled to emphasize the humiliation and misery of their situation. A multi-page exposé reported that a nearby municipal homeless shelter gave its guests inadequate meals and vermin-infested beds. The charges were based on the experience of three Alarm Clock reporters, who had “dressed for the occasion” and passed a night incognito in the shelter. McGill professors and faculty members contributed articles promoting the CCF and explaining the meaning of “technocracy,” while another column rebutted common objections to socialism.[1]
Some columns were less informative and more biting. One, pithily entitled “Sage Sayings,” simply quoted wealthy businessmen on the Great Depression: “We bankers are all hopeful of a silver lining,” said the president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce. The editors indulged in the occasional quip—Henry Ford’s upbeat statement that “If this period… must be spoken of as a period of depression, it is far and away the finest depression we have ever had” was preceded by a note that “when better depressions are made Mr. Ford will make them”—but the quotes were not generally accompanied by any response or analysis.[2] Nestled between articles on inescapable unemployment and crushing poverty, they needed none.
This week I talk with Mary Frances Phillips, author of Black Panther Woman: The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins. We talk about the process of writing a historical biography of a living person, tracking down new archival sources, and how Ericka Huggins ended up in prison. We also chat about COINTELPRO plots and how Ericka ended up in prison, her spiritual journey and self-car in prison, and how her story serves as an example for other activists.
