By Andrew Nurse On May 16, a Montpelier Descendants Committee (MDC) press release announced that “The Montpelier Foundation’s board of directors voted to welcome eleven new members from a list […] advanced by the […] MDC.” The release described the decision as “momentous.” This decision reversed a short-lived but important controversy in American public history. The Montpelier Foundation (TMF) administers… Read more »
By Andrew Nurse On April 26, 2022, Harvard University announced “that it will spend $100 million” as part of a plan to address what it’s president called “profoundly immoral” practices in the university’s past.[1] At issue is Harvard’s relationship to slavery, racism and colonialism. Harvard is not the first university to grapple with a deeply problematic past, but its response… Read more »
Katrina Bjornstad and Erin Isaac Hear, Here is a postmodern heritage project that began in La Crosse, Wisconsin in 2015 with the aim to make hidden histories visible in public space. Based in part on Shawn Micallef, James Roussel, and Gabe Sawhney’s [murmur] project, the concept behind Hear, Here is simple: within a particular community, project organizers post an orange sign… Read more »
In the early 1970s, a one and a half story log structure was relocated from the Munsee-Delaware Nation to Ska-Nah-Doht or Longwoods Conservation Area. By this time, the building was well over one hundred and twenty years old and had provided a home for many generations of two families of the Munsee-Delaware community. The Logan home, built in the mid-1800s,… Read more »
By James Cullingham As a veteran educator, documentary filmmaker and journalist it’s been a welcome challenge to take on something new. Two Dead White Men – DC Scott, Jacques Soustelle and the Failure of Indigenous Policy (Seneca Press) is my first book. Two Dead White Men… explores the careers and legacies of Duncan Campbell Scott and Jacques Soustelle. Scott (1862-1947)… Read more »
By Denisa Popa In Gerhard Herzberg: An Illustrious Life in Science, Boris Stoicheff recalls the amusing way in which Herzberg found out he had received the Nobel Prize. On November 2nd, 1971, as Herzberg was seated on a train waiting to leave Leningrad station, the Secretary of the Soviet Academy of Science ran up to his cabin and informed him… Read more »
Denisa Popa From 1948 until his retirement in 1994, Dr. Gerhard Herzberg conducted ground-breaking research at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). As his close friend and biographer Boris Stoicheff has noted, Herzberg’s early period at the NRC– culminating in his Nobel win in 1971 — were truly “the golden years” of his career.[1] Recognizing the essential nature of… Read more »
By Louis Reed-Wood and Erin Isaac In October 2021, three former University of Saskatchewan history nerds met up in Ottawa, Ontario to answer the call of destiny (or something like it…). We’d come to the outskirts of Ottawa to sleuth around the Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum — a museum we three (Hannah Cooley, Louis Reed-Wood, and Erin Isaac, now… Read more »
By Erin Isaac The Battle on the Plains of Abraham, on 13 September 1759, is heavily commemorated on Québec’s physical landscape. From the streets, buildings, and shops named for the French and British military men who fought that day, to the monuments that dot the city’s historic neighbourhoods, and commemorative panels or plaques at the Plains of Abraham, it’s hard… Read more »
By James Cullingham This autumn marks a significant milestone in the history of filmmaking about Indigenous – settler relations in Canada. As Long As The Rivers Flow, the documentary series about Indigenous resilience that launched Tamarack Productions, was released in September 1991. As Long As The Rivers Flow was among the first national collaborations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous documentarians in… Read more »
