Allyson Stevenson In 1962, at seven months of age, Robert Doucette, the former President of the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan, was removed from his home in the northern Saskatchewan community of Buffalo Narrows. He explained: “it was the priest that took me, the priest told social services my mother wasn’t fit, she was too young. She was 16 or 17, and they… Read more »
If you’ve visited a community museum anywhere in Ontario, chances are you will recognize many of the artifacts featured in this online exhibition, all of which are from Halton Region Heritage Services’ collection. In their early years, historical societies and community museums collected a relatively standardized and not particularly diverse set of pioneer and Victorian wares with abandon, which have… Read more »
Adam Coombs Polemics by disgruntled academic outsiders have recently become a remarkably popular genre of writing. In the United States The Atlantic has published pieces discussing the “problems” of safe space and political correctness on campus, while in Canada we have Ron Srigley in The Walrus and Ted Rhodes in the Calgary Herald disparaging Canadian universities for their supposed embrace of… Read more »
By Samantha Cutrara This academic year I’ll be writing a series of blog posts for Active History focused on history education in Canada. In these posts, I’ll be outlining the Canadian History and Social Studies curricula for each province and identifying some possible opportunities for collaboration between historians/archivists and teachers in elementary and secondary schools. As I mentioned in my… Read more »
Janis Thiessen Government advertising for the sesquicentennial of Confederation began in 2013, “aimed at increasing Canadians’ knowledge and pride in Canada’s history and heritage.” The federal government promoted licensing agreements for commercial use of the “Canada 150” logo. A number of businesses in Canada took the opportunity to promote their products by connecting them to Canadian nationalism and Canadian history… Read more »
Edward Dunsworth The Thanksgiving season is often seized upon by farmworkers and activists to highlight agricultural workers’ contributions to society and the precarious conditions that so often characterize their work and life. In both Canada and the United States, farm labour activists have riffed on a popular motif which recognizes farmers, modifying it to some variation of: “Got Food? Thank… Read more »
Michael Akladios Census Canada estimated earlier this year that the proportion of Arabic speakers in Canada is projected to increase 200 per cent by 2036. Yet, the study of immigration and ethnicity in North America tends to ignore Middle Eastern immigrants. The region remains in the Western imaginary as an ahistorical and hermeneutically sealed zone.[1] However, one would be hard-pressed… Read more »
By Carling Beninger Given the recent debate in Canada about the commemoration of historical figures involved in the Indian residential school (IRS) system, including calls to remove names of historical figures from schools or buildings, it is important also to recognize the necessity of commemorating IRS sites. Acknowledging the legacy of the IRS system at school sites will not only… Read more »
Remember / Resist / Redraw #10: Remembering the 75th Anniversary of Japanese Canadian Internment In January, the Graphic History Collective (GHC) launched Remember | Resist | Redraw: A Radical History Poster Project, a year-long artistic intervention in the Canada 150 conversation. Earlier this month we released Poster #10 by Chris Robertson and Lorene Oikawa, which points out that Canada 150… Read more »
David Blocker Editors Note: This is the second post in a two-part series on the history of NDP leadership conventions. The first post in the series can be read here. Today’s post continues an examination of past NDP leadership conventions as a means of looking for historical trends within the NDP leadership races. The two posts in this series aim to… Read more »
