By Benjamin Hoy On March 26, 2020, news reports circulated across Canada and the United States that President Donald Trump was considering deploying more than a thousand military personnel near the Canada-US border. The decision seemed baffling to many. Who President Trump hoped to protect Americans from was not altogether clear. Within a few days of the proposal going public,… Read more »
Amy Woodson-Boulton As someone interested in the history of museums, I have thought for a long time about how we can use the objects in museums’ collections along with their archives to enrich our understanding of both. Recently I have been studying how ideas about art and the discipline of anthropology shaped the reception, display, and interpretation of Indigenous material… Read more »
Krista Barclay As I entered Edinburgh’s New Calton Burial Ground in the fall of 2018, I was struck by the placard on the front gate advertising ‘tombs with a view’ – the view from the cemetery’s perch on Calton Hill really was spectacular. I was visiting the site as part of my dissertation research on the families formed by Indigenous… Read more »
Mitch Case “Everyone has the right to feel good about who they are, and for us, with all that we have been through since the coming of the visitors to our island, this place given to us by the creator – it’s been a long time that we have not felt that way, but everyone, and there is no exception… Read more »
By Allyson Stevenson[1] When I began this blog on January 29th, I had just returned to my office at the University of Regina after speaking about my research on an inspiring panel of powerful First Nations women leaders in Treaty 4 territory that included Chief Lynn Acoose, Chief Roberta Soo-Oye Waste, Dr. Priscilla Settee, and Dakota Elder Diane McKay. “The… Read more »
Last month, the Graphic History Collective released Remember/Resist/Redraw poster #22 by Lianne Charlie and Siku Allooloo. Through the lens of Allooloo’s family story, the poster (which is based on a photo of Allooloo’s grandparents) looks at the history of Inuit relocation. Between the 1920s and 1960s, Canadian officials relocated Inuit families to the high arctic as a means to establish… Read more »
Matthew McRae The City of Winnipeg recently tore down the Thomas Scott Memorial Orange Hall, located in the city’s historic Exchange District. News coverage about the demolition has focused a lot on the loss of architectural heritage. This is important, but it’s only one part of the story. There’s also the story of who the building is named after: Thomas… Read more »
By Catherine Murton Stoehr There is a hard disconnect between the actual treaties that the Mi’kmaq, Great Lakes Nations, and Metis forced through strength of arms and today’s “reconciliation moment.” And it is this: no Indigenous person in the history of this place ever wanted large numbers of non-Indigenous Canadians to live here. Not out of dislike or insularity but… Read more »
Sarah Rotz, Daniel Rück, and Sean Carleton On February 7, militarized RCMP arrested and removed Wet’suwet’en land defenders from their unceded territories, triggering demonstrations and blockades across the country. With large parts of the country’s rail traffic at a standstill, and shipping vessels unable to move goods, people are seeing that peaceful civil disobedience can #ShutDownCanada. As solidarity actions spread,… Read more »
We like to think that the abuses of the past might have been avoided if only decision makers and the public had known about them. In these cases, the information was available, and change did not come.
