(Research) notes from three small islands

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Alban Bargain-Villéger

Lorient Tourisme – the island of Groix, France.

Geography is nothing other than history in space, and history is geography over time.                   Élisée Reclus, L’Homme et la terre (1905)[1]

The other day it occurred to me that, in my two and a half years as contributor for Active History, I haven’t once written about my research. The reason for this probably is that the world and the past are both busy places, which is a problem historians want to have. So far, I’ve used Active History as a platform for addressing current events, or as a “workshop” (to paraphrase François Furet[2]) for old, stillborn projects, like “History for Children?” or “Travels With Caroline.” Perhaps the reason it has taken me so long to write about my current research project is that the more one knows a topic, the more challenging it becomes to summarize it. On the other hand, writing clearly and accessibly about one’s work—without using too much jargon and engaging in complex context analyses—is an art that should be compulsive for historians.

Still, putting this post together was a protracted process. The first difficulty I faced stemmed from the nature of my work, which ranges quite a bit across space and time. My project consists of a comparison of the cultural, political, and social changes and continuities that occurred in the three islands of Arran, Borkum, and Groix—located off the coasts of Scotland, Germany, and France, respectively—between 1848 and 1945. In writing about this topic, the main questions have been “where to start?” and, of course, “who cares? Though crudely put, the latter question is legitimate. But before I explain why comparing three small islands matters, I propose to provide more details about my project.

The nineteenth century is often considered the age of nation-building, when several territorial entities (including Canada) developed elaborate narratives based on more or less invented traditions.[3] Continue reading →

History: Contemporary Poland’s Battlefield

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By Marie-Dominique Asselin
Translated from HistoireEngagée.ca by Thomas Peace

Pro-European Union Demonstration in Warsaw, 7 May 2016. Photo by Marie-Dominique Asselin.

Last April, when speaking about the war in Syria, White House Communications Director Sean Spicer made a poorly framed comparison between the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and Adolf Hitler. For Spicer, Assad’s use of chemical weapons was far worse than that conducted by the German leader because – according to the White House Press Secretary – Hitler had not turned these weapons on his own people. Assad’s actions, from Spicer’s perspective, were far worse because of the innocence of the attack’s victims. Implicit in this statement was the suggestion that the Jews murdered by the Nazi regime were not innocent and that Zyklon B – the gas used at Auschwitz-Birkenau was not a chemical weapon.[1]

At the same time, Front National presidential candidate Marine Le Pen refused to admit French responsibility for the July 1942 mass arrest of Jews in Paris, holding them in the Vélodrome d’Hiver before their transfer to German concentration camps. From Le Pen’s perspective, this event occurred while France was under German occupation, and therefore the French could not be held responsible.

Although much of the public found these examples shocking, they are increasingly being expressed within populist discourses. For some years now it has become more common to see politicians trivialize the Holocaust and attempt to reshape its history. Newspapers here and abroad have found great pleasure in calling attention to these gaffes, exposing the prejudices and ignorance of the western political class. Despite all, in North America and Western Europe, their comments rarely have an effect on national politics in the countries concerned.

In Poland, the country where the German Nazis killed most of the six million Jews, the trivialisation of the Holocaust has reached unprecedented proportions. Since its election in October 2015, the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) has adopted specific policies on the history of the Holocaust. Polish institutions, such as the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), which is controlled by the ruling political party, distort historical facts about Polish involvement in Nazi atrocities. These policies seek to influence Polish thought, fashioning a specific vision of the country’s past. PiS wishes to leave behind relatively long standing historical truths, such as Polish Catholic collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust, in favour of a myth where Poles – themselves victims of the Nazis – did all they could to save the Jews.

This essay seeks to reveal the methods the Polish government is currently using to remove Jewish experiences of the Holocaust from national memory. Three principal themes emerge. First, we look at how the legal system is being modified to censure historians and researchers who work on subjects related to the Holocaust. Second, we examine how PiS uses its control over public institutions to reframe this narrative. Finally, we look at how the Polish government displaces narratives that accord Jews a central place in the history of the Holocaust, and instead put the emphasis on the role of Polish Catholic heroes in saving Jews from Nazi atrocities. Though seemingly separate, when taken together, these three themes reflect the political outlook and agenda of the PiS. Continue reading →

Remember / Resist / Redraw #07: John A. Macdonald’s Role in Residential Schooling

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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 John A. Macdonald’s role as the architect of Indian Residential Schools and Indigenous genocide. While the poster was completed months ago, it answers Matthew Hayday’s recent Active History post in which he questions whether Sir Hector-Louis Langevin was really the architect of residential schools.

We hope that Remember | Resist | Redraw encourages people to critically examine history in ways that can fuel our radical imaginations and support struggles for radical change in 2017 and beyond. Learn more about how you can support the project on our website, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

***

Killing the Indian in the Child: John A. Macdonald’s Role in Residential Schooling

 Poster by Sean Carleton

 Introduction by Crystal Gail Fraser Continue reading →

Why so dull Canada? Deconstructing Children’s Books on Confederation

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By Samantha Cutrara

The final blog post in the series of deconstructing children’s books representing the historic space of pre- and post-1867 is on Confederation itself: What books are available for children on Confederation? Do these books connect with other events that happened at this time, like the themes addressed earlier in this series: residential schools, the fight for women’s rights, or the importation of labour for the railroad?

What does the history of Confederation as told through books for children tell us about the meta-narratives that many people hold about the “birth” of Canada?

Like my previous research, I began with a library search, and unsurprisingly, Confederation was easy to find. I didn’t have to be creative about my search criteria or word choice. I typed in “Confederation,” specified books for children and youth, and waited to see what came up. This search easily produced 26 results, 20 of which were actually books on Canadian Confederation. Like books I found on the railway, these books were often part of a series of books and had some very creative titles, such as Confederation, Confederation, Confederation, and Confederation. Continue reading →

A Walk down Memory Lane: A Public Engagement Project about the Halifax Public Gardens

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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, N.S. Christmas Day, 1934” and depicts one of the Gardens’ snow-covered treed “allées”. The picture had been given to her daughter over twenty years ago by the girl’s great aunt, who herself had found the picture at a rummage sale in Campbell River, B.C. The mystery starts here. Did this photo belong to someone from Campbell River who once visited Halifax and took the photo as a memento, or did the picture find its way across the country after belonging to a Haligonian with a fondness for the Halifax Public Gardens? The new visual turn in historical studies would at least encourage us to recognise that the photographer evidently considered the Public Gardens, with its fresh snow, as a space worthy of visiting on Christmas Day and capturing on film. Everything else about the picture was, and remains, a mystery.

This photograph is the latest submission I have received for my Heart of Halifax Memory Project which officially launched on June 10th at the Halifax Public Gardens 150th birthday bash. Despite some popular confusion with “Canada 150”, this year also marks the sesquicentennial of the Halifax Public Gardens. Within this “150” context (and with my admitted love for spatial history), I began thinking about how the Public Gardens have been situated in the middle of the city for over 150 years. Instead of being concerned with how the Public Gardens “came to be”, I wanted to explore the changing ways the public utilised and engaged with the Gardens since its founding. The project, funded by the Suellen Murray Educational Bursary, is a study of public engagement. Continue reading →

Red Crosses and White Cotton: Memory and Meaning in First World War Quilts

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By Rebecca Beausaert

Braemar Women’s Institute Autograph Quilt, Woodstock Museum National Historic Site, 2005.22.01. All photos by the author.

It is a cold, wintry Wednesday afternoon in January 1917. Half a dozen women of varied ages are seated around a large quilt frame set up in the sitting room of a rural farmhouse in Oxford County, Ontario. Some work quietly, their thoughts running to domestic tasks set aside to be here. A few cannot help but think about their sons and brothers serving overseas. Others chat quietly with their neighbour about the price of flour or the latest news from the Western Front. All bend their heads over the canvas of white cotton directly before them, their fingers deftly moving needles trailing red cotton thread in and out of the fabric. Each tiny, careful stitch helps turn their collective project into an intricate quilt; each quilt completed and auctioned off raises money for their war charity work. Scenes like this, repeated in numerous communities across the country, were an integral part of First World War Canada.

It is well known that on the home front, women and girls were also mobilized for war, many going above and beyond their usual duties to contribute to the war effort in any way they knew how. For most, this occurred through the accomplishment of traditionally-feminine domestic tasks. Untold numbers of female volunteers spent thousands of hours rolling bandages, knitting socks, sewing blankets, canning preserves, and constructing care packages to send overseas to soldiers and displaced civilians. Like so much of women’s unpaid labour, however, war work was often dismissed for being “recreational” in nature.[1] While most of these hand-crafted items have long since been used and disappeared, surviving fundraising quilts continue to serve as tangible remnants of how Canadian women used their domestic skills to contribute to the war effort.

Historic quilts are popular collector’s items for their complicated designs and exquisite craftsmanship, and the war’s centenary has sparked an interest in quilts as communicators of personal stories.[2] A handful of such quilts can be found in museums in Oxford County, a largely rural and agricultural region in southwestern Ontario. Two in particular, the Braemar Women’s Institute Autograph Quilt and the Wolverton Red Cross Quilt, were recently included in a travelling museum exhibit in 2015. The exhibit, which paid homage to wartime voluntarism in Oxford, was one of 100 events planned as part of a five-year long commemoration project called “Oxford Remembers: Oxford’s Own.” Each event explores an aspect of Oxford’s wartime experience, in the hopes of expanding current understandings of how rural and agrarian Canadians participated in the war effort.

Continue reading →

kiskisiwin – remembering: Challenging Indigenous Erasure in Canada’s Public History Displays

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By Jesse Thistle

The short film kiskisiwin – remembering is an intervention in the mythic pioneer fables Canadians tell themselves at public history sites to justify colonial settlement while delegitimizing Indigenous claims to their own ancestral lands on Turtle Island. The logic goes something like this: if nothing or no one existed here before settlement, then it is okay that settler-Canadians exist here now.

This kind of thinking is called terra nullius, Latin for empty land, and it is rampant in many public history sites in Canada. The text below outlines how I, along with Dr. Martha Stiegman and Dr. Anders Sandberg, used film and text to challenge this interpretation at Black Creek Pioneer Village. The materials we produced provide references to learn more about how these sites impacted me as an Indigenous person, as well as the lives of other Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.

Kiskisiwin from Doug Woods on Vimeo. Continue reading →

Contesting Canada Day : A Tradition of Engagement, Challenges and Change

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Department of Canadian Heritage

Matthew Hayday

“For God’s sakes won’t you listen? What have we got to celebrate? I don’t like what has happened over the last 500 years or 125 years.”[i]

No, that’s not a typo, and it’s not a quote that comes from the media coverage of protest against this year’s Canada 150 celebrations, although it certainly has the same feel. I came across this quote while working on new research this past week. It comes from Chief Georges Erasmus, who at the time was head of the Assembly of First Nations. He was commenting on plans for Canada 125 celebrations to be held in 1992 (and the possible, but ultimately abandoned, Canadian celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the Americas). It is striking how history repeats itself, and also disheartening to note the slow pace of change on key problems facing this country.

July 1st marks the 150th anniversary of the day that the British North America Act came into effect in 1867. I will be Ottawa, among the anticipated half million people in the crowds around Parliament Hill. Since the late-1950s Ottawa has been a major destination for those who want to celebrate the anniversary of Confederation, first as Dominion Day, and then as Canada Day, as it was renamed by a private member’s bill in July 1982 (in a parliamentary maneouvre that still arouses the ire of die-hard Dominion Day defenders).

Alongside the crowds who seek to celebrate on Canada Day, and throughout this year, there is also a vocal contingent who oppose these events. Active History has posted other thoughtful commentaries about the contestation of Canada 150 this year. What I would like to suggest in this post is that such contestation of national days and major anniversaries is part and parcel of how Canada marks its political anniversaries. It always has been the case. Moreover, as I have written elsewhere, I think that this kind of vigorous engagement with these celebrations or commemorations, whether through protest or through participation, is both a good and a necessary process. Continue reading →

Ten Resources to Contextualize Archives and Archival Labour

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An office in the Dominion Archives of Canada, Sussex Street, Ottawa, Ontario

An office in the Dominion Archives of Canada, circa 1910. Source: Library and Archives Canada, C-034009.

To encourage further engagement of the issues presented throughout the archives theme week we have compiled ten resources to contextualize archival practice, archival labour, and the work archivists do.

There are many colleagues both within Canadian archives and beyond who have been writing and speaking about the challenges of counteracting the ‘why isn’t it already digitized’ question, directly confronting the erasure of archival labour in popular and academic discourse, and discussing the responsibility for archivists to confront our own failures to care for the legacies of marginalized communities and the overwhelming whiteness of our profession.

Rather than repeat the words of others, we would encourage Active History readers to follow the work of Melissa Adams, Michelle Caswell, Marika Cifor, Jarrett M. Drake, Raymond Frogner, Anne Gilliland, Rebecca Goldman, Myron Groover, Verne Harris, Bergis Jules, Analú López, Jesse Loyer, Mark Matienzo, Allison Mills, Tara Robertson, Nick Ruest, Rebecka Sheffield, Ariel Schudson, Ed Summers, Eira Tansey, Kate Theimer, Samantha Thompson, Stacie Williams and Sam Winn.

As a starting point the resources listed below provide insight into the archival profession and showcase some of the scholarly work being done by archival professionals. This list is in no particular order and is by no means conclusive. We encourage readers to add their own resource suggestions in the comment section. Continue reading →

Collaboration between archivists and historians: finding a middle ground

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Anna St.Onge [i]

Let’s begin with a story

One afternoon, a few years ago, one of our student assistants called me up from the back processing area to answer a patron question.

“How can I help you?” I asked.

“I’m looking for a diary written by a woman who emigrated from Hungary to Toronto in 1954.”

I quickly ran through my mental rolodex of the over 600 archival fonds held by the university, not all of which I’m familiar with, trying to drill down to the the most likely source of such a record. I kept drawing a blank. I asked for more details: did the patron have a name for this woman? Had someone suggested the diary was held in this archives? Had they read about the diary in an article, book or film? What citational breadcrumbs had led them to our door?

“Oh! No. No one told me it was here. That’s the primary source that I want to study. I want to read a diary written by a woman who immigrated from Hungary to Toronto in 1954.”

And so began another rich conversation about the nature of archives, the survival of records, and how to use archival discovery tools to track down primary sources.[ii]

This post is about archival pathfinding and cross-pollination across the disciplines of archives and history. It is about finding space to cultivate collaborative opportunities but also how archivists and historians can meet each other halfway as we go about our work.

Pathfinding

Working in the archives inevitably means that you (and your holdings) end up disappointing patrons, many of whom are historians by training and inclination. Every archival institution operates slightly differently and what may work in an university archives may not work in an institution like Library Archives Canada, or, a local historical society. Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz have successfully argued that archives and records operate as “dynamic technologies of rule which actually create the histories and social realities they ostensibly only describe.” Archival records shape the institutions that hold and manage them. Archivists as a profession are the result of generational shifts of values, practice and prioritization. It’s the McLuhanesque proverb that we make our tools and then our tools remake us.

Over the years, I’ve learned to see my role with researchers as one of a pathfinder. As we have seen in the posts by Danielle Robichaud and Roger Gillis, the access tools used by archivists (print finding aids, file inventories, records schedules, descriptive databases, aggregators of descriptive data) are not comprehensive in their scope and are a product of the peculiarities of individuals – many of whom are, with increasing frequency, contract archivists under time constraints to process and complete finding aids- or indeed multiple generations of archivists building up strata of interpretations and workarounds over time. And as Sara Janes and Jennifer Weymark have so ably demonstrated, archivists can only lead paths through the collections they have available to them. Our tools are often improvised and not well resourced, and even the most knowledgeable pathfinder is limited by their biases and worldview. Continue reading →