By Hailey Baldock With a black coffin strapped to the top of their van and a fiery determination to scrap Canada’s abortion laws, the women of the 1970 Abortion Caravan knew they had to make a scene. And they did. Over the course of two weeks, the Caravan moved across the country from Vancouver to Ottawa, rallying supporters and drawing… Read more »
Hannah Roth Cooley Over roughly the last decade, settler Canadians and Americans have started to take note of Indigenous activist initiatives, thanks in large part to social media. Beginning with the explosion of #IdleNoMore in 2012, social media has become an important tool for circulating political messages and sharing cultural knowledge within and beyond Indigenous communities. Certainly, Indigenous Peoples advocating… Read more »
Gary Genosko As a cultural figure, the black fly is associated with Canadian folk singer and songwriter Wade Hemsworth who composed The Blackfly Song in 1949. Just as Hemsworth described the bloodthirsty fly’s ‘picking his bones’ while working on a survey crew in northern Ontario, the newspaper I discuss in this article promoted itself as having similar irritating attributes, but… Read more »
Kathleen McKenzie and Sean Carleton As the result of the news of unmarked graves being located at former residential schools across Canada, many people are finally reckoning with the history of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system. While school survivors and Indigenous communities are not surprised by the recent revelations, some Canadians have been shocked to learn of the high… Read more »
https://activehistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/History-Slam-164.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadBy Sean Graham In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Jane Griffith about the book Words Have a Past: The English Language, Colonialism, and the Newspapers of Indian Boarding Schools. We talk about why schools published newspapers, who the intended audiences were, and the information they did not include. We also discuss… Read more »
By Russ Chamberlayne The war fever has reached an acute stage. It has now attacked the poets. – “Pertinent and Impertinent,” Calgary Daily Herald, August 4th, 1914 Readers of ActiveHistory.ca may be surprised at the deeply emotional and mixed reactions to the opening of World War I in Canadian newspapers, and the forms they took. While many have described the… Read more »
ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our favourite and most popular blog posts from this site over the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers! The following post was originally featured on June 20 2013. By Merle Massie “My tap… Read more »
By Merle Massie “My tap dancing just isn’t good enough,” she wrote. She: my daughter’s high school English teacher. Tap dancing: teaching (to pubescent, smartmouth, intelligent, tired kids at the end of June in rural Saskatchewan). “I remember a staff meeting conversation from some point where you were willing to come in and talk with students.” What’s the topic, Mrs…. Read more »
