By Adam Coombs “Canadians have learned how to be strong because of our differences,” states a new draft version of Discover Canada, the study guide for Canada’s citizenship exam. This vision of Canada as a diverse and multicultural society is one that most Canadians embrace. However, for many on Canada’s far-right this vision of Canadian society is simply one more… Read more »
Katrina Ackerman and Whitney Wood High-level athletes who exercise or compete in a sport while pregnant constantly gain media attention. When Serena Williams recently announced that she was 20 weeks pregnant, people quickly crunched the numbers and discovered that she won the Australian Open while seven to eight weeks pregnant. Williams was celebrated for challenging the notion that the pregnant… Read more »
By Angie Wong and Travis Hay On the 12th of July, 2017, downtown Toronto was over-run with a sea of Irish flags and rowdy young white men.[1] More than 16,000 fans had flocked to the scene to witness the Mayweather-McGregor World Tour Press Conference, which promoted the upcoming boxing match between the undefeated African American champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. (widely… Read more »
When asked to assess Simcoe’s legacy in the province, Brant stated that Simcoe “has done a great deal for this province, he has changed the name of every place in it.”
In January, the Graphic History Collective (GHC) launched Remember | Resist | Redraw: A Radical History Poster Project to intervene in the Canada 150 conversation. Earlier this week we released Poster #08 by Jesse Thistle and Jerry Thistle. The poster beautifully illustrates the terror of the Battle of Batoche from the perspective of their Métis Kokum, Marianne Morrissette, née Ledoux…. Read more »
By Alan MacEachern You have likely seen the video from Canada Day of a Mi’kmaw ceremony in Halifax disrupted by what appears to be a curling foursome and spare. At one point, one of the young white men (the skip?) asks a young, apparently Indigenous woman, what is clearly a leading question: “Has this always been Mi’kmaw land?” She replies,… Read more »
By Steve Marti A memorial for missing and murdered Indigenous women in Halifax made headlines last week, largely because it was interrupted by a group of five men wearing matching shirts and carrying a red ensign. Smart-phone videos of the event show the five identifying themselves as members of the Proud Boys, a far-right men’s organization founded in 2016, and… Read more »
In January, the Graphic History Collective (GHC) launched Remember | Resist | Redraw: A Radical History Poster Project to intervene in the Canada 150 conversation. Earlier this month we released Poster #07 by Sean Carleton and Crystal Gail Fraser, which was published on Canada Day in conjunction with Idle No More’s Unsettling Canada: a Call to Action. The poster examines… Read more »
Canadian history is often perceived as dull, but I argue that Canada’s history has been made dull in order to obfuscate the diversity of experiences that were legislatively supposed to be outside the experience of the newly confederated Canada
By Claire L. Halstead Last Friday, I received an intriguing phone call. A woman had seen the recent piece on my Halifax Public Gardens Memory Project on the CBC evening news and she wanted to donate a framed photograph. Like any intrigued historian, I gratefully said yes. The photo, still in its original frame, is hand labeled “Public Gardens, Halifax,… Read more »
