By Christopher Moore This post was originally published on Christopher Moore’s History News Late in 2011, before Attawapiskat and Idle No More were as newsy as they are now, CBC Radio’s Ideas presented my radio documentary “George MacMartin’s Big Canoe Trip,” an exploration of how the James Bay Treaty was made in 1905. The radio-doc draws on the diary of… Read more »
By Sean Graham On December 14, 2012, a man forced his way into an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut and killed 26 people. In a scene re-played far too often, that unspeakable horror led to a fresh round of debate over the reasons for why the United States suffers from gun violence at such a disproportionate rate when compared to… Read more »
By Glen Coulthard The post was originally published on Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Much has been said recently in the media about the relationship between the inspiring expression of Indigenous resurgent activity at the core of the #IdleNoMore movement and the heightened decade of Native activism that led Canada to establish the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) in… Read more »
By Andrew Watson and Thomas Peace After reading comment after uninformed comment, both online and in the media, ActiveHistory.ca decided to compile a short list of books written by historians that address the issues being discussed by the Idle No More movement. Click on a link below to read a brief summary of the book. Peggy Blair, Lament for a… Read more »
By Tobold Rollo [This post first appeared on Tobold Rollo’s website.] As Chief Theresa Spence continues her hunger strike, her request that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the Governor General meet with Chiefs to discuss treaties has many Canadians wondering what relevance treaties could possibly hold today. Anticipating this uncertainty, I wrote a pamphlet with the Mohawk scholar, Taiaiake Alfred,… Read more »
By Christopher Grafos I should have written this article a long time ago. Selfishly, I have remained vaguely apathetic towards Greek politics in anticipation that the negative publicity and connotations of the Greek state and people would quickly dissipate. My assumption was wrong and now I realize that as an aspiring academic, I am, and have been, derelict. My doctoral… Read more »
2014 marks the 100th Anniversary of the start of the First World War. It was the world’s first global conflict and it affected every level of society. Over 500 high school students from Victoria High School are remembered in the Great War Roll of Honour; the first woman officially in the Royal Canadian Navy was a ‘nursing sister’ from Bruce… Read more »
This past Remembrance Day, historian Ian McKay gave a lecture titled “What’s Wrong With Flanders Fields.” He argues that Remembrance Day in general and the poem in particular have been conscripted as part of what he calls the “right-wing militarization of Canadian society.” McKay delivered the talk to the Queen’s University Institute for Lifelong Learning on November 11, 2012. You… Read more »
By Ian Mosby Walking out of the subway into Yonge Station in Toronto recently, I was confronted with poster after poster bearing some strange, slightly off-putting questions about McDonald’s. These included, in big bold letters, messages like: “Is the meat fake?” “Are there eyeballs put in your meat?” Or, “Are McNuggets made from processed pink sludge?” In the end, it… Read more »
By Jay Young Change to Old Age Security emerged as a controversial element of the Harper Conservatives’ last federal budget. Much speculation had been brewing in the months leading up to the budget’s introduction in March of this year, when federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced its details in the House of Commons as part of C-38, his government’s omnibus… Read more »
