Tag Archives: Indigenous History

Old Tomorrow’s Bicentennial: Don’t Think Motivation, Think Law

By James Daschuk Ok, first things first: I do not hate John A. Macdonald. At the risk of maddening some colleagues out there, I am wary of trying to contort huge historical events and consequences into how they apply to a single individual’s psychological makeup, political vision or personal ambition. As a self-professed environmental historian, I have even joked with… Read more »

The Nation-State is not what we think it is: Teaching Canadian History from a non-national perspective

By Thomas Peace At the beginning of November I was asked to join a panel entitled “No One is International” as part of Huron College’s Centre for Global Studies‘s symposium “Critically Engaging: Global Awareness in the Academy.” As I considered the panel’s title, and the broader purpose for the conference (to critically engage with the meaning of “internationalization” for the college),… Read more »

MacChe? Kingston prepares for the Macdonald Bicentennial

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Karen Dubinsky I live in downtown Kingston, Ontario. Two doors away from me are two sweet old white ladies. They live in John A. Macdonald’s boyhood home where, according to one of the two plaques outside, he spent his “character forming” years. When I first moved to this street I noticed that during relevant occasions (Macdonald’s birthday and Canada Day),… Read more »

Jean Baptiste Assiginack: The Starling aka Blackbird

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By Alan Corbiere This post marks the third in a series of essays – posted the second Wednesday of each month – by Alan Corbiere focusing on Anishinaabeg participation in the War of 1812.  On the morning of October 5, 1861, 96 year old Odaawaa Chief Jean Baptiste Assiginack of the Biipiigwenh (Sparrowhawk) clan rose from his slumber and got… Read more »

Mookomaanish: The Damn Knife (Odaawaa Chief and Warrior)

By Alan Corbiere This post marks the second in a series of essays – posted the second Wednesday of each month – by Alan Corbiere focusing on Anishinaabeg participation in the War of 1812.  At the commencement of the War of 1812, the British were not totally certain that the Western Confederacy (including the Anishinaabeg: Ojibwe, Odaawaa and Potowatomi) would… Read more »

Anishnaabeg in the War of 1812: More than Tecumseh and his Indians

By Alan Corbiere This post marks the first in a series of essays – posted the second Wednesday of each month – by Alan Corbiere focusing on Anishinaabeg participation in the War of 1812. A modified version of these posts originally appeared in the July 2012 edition of the Ojibway Cultural Foundation newsletter. It is well known that the Anishinaabeg… Read more »

History Education in Canada without Historical Thinking? A worrisome prospect

By Heather E. McGregor Recently Peter Seixas announced that the Historical Thinking Project (the Project) was denied ongoing funding by the Department of Canadian Heritage. This change was said to be because the purposes of the Project do not coincide with, as quoted from The Canada History Fund, “projects that celebrate key milestones and people who have helped shape our… Read more »

An Unsettling Prairie History: A Review of James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains

By Kevin Plummer “Those Reserve Indians are in a deplorable state of destitution, they receive from the Indian Department just enough food to keep soul and body together, they are all but naked, many of them barefooted,” Lawrence Clarke wrote in 1880 of near-starvation Cree around Fort Carlton. “Should sickness break out among them in their present weakly state,” the… Read more »

Indigenous History in the Classroom: Four Principles, Four Questions

By Carolyn Podruchny  Is teaching Indigenous history any different than teaching other histories? This question was posed to organizers of a day-long Teaching History Symposium on history, heritage, and education for Toronto area public school teachers, heritage experts, graduate students, and faculty members in the History Department at York University.[1] Rather than providing an answer, I suggest more questions to… Read more »

Reuben Gold Thwaites and The Jesuit Relations: 100 Years

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By Kathryn Magee Labelle Reuben Gold Thwaites died in 1913, the same year of the final publication of his seventy-two volume The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610-1791. One hundred years later they are still a valuable and widely circulated edited collection. These transcribed reports and letters from French Jesuit… Read more »