On March 2, the history community lost a major figure, great scholar, and terrific colleague when John Long passed away in North Bay, Ontario. Born in Brampton on December 18, 1948, Professor Long’s career as an educator and researcher took him across the country, but the Mushkegowuk people and Treaty 9 territory had a special place in his life and work.
As an undergraduate student, Long studied anthropology at the University of Waterloo before heading to North Bay for teachers’ college. Following his return to southern Ontario to obtain master and doctoral degrees in Education at the University of Toronto, he moved to Moose Factory where he taught and served as a principal in the community’s public schools. His educational career also included appointments as an advisor with the Mushkegowuk Council and as principal at Francine J. Wesley Secondary School in Kashechewan.
Nipissing University and North Bay have been Professor Long’s home since 2000, when he joined the faculty of the Faculty of Education to teach new generations of educators the lessons he had learned through his career. He was particularly pleased when Ontario required all teacher education programs to ensure that students were exposed to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit traditions, cultures, and perspectives.
In 2010, he published his groundbreaking book Treaty No. 9: Making the Agreement to Share the Land in Far Northern Ontario in 1905. The book shows how the government omitted and misrepresented central elements of the treaty in its conversations with the Mushkegowuk people. In its description of the book McGill-Queen’s Press says that that it “sets the record straight while illuminating the machinations and deceit behind treaty-making.” In a review, historian J.R. Miller writes “Dr. Long has done the First Nations of far northern Ontario an enormous service, and shows scholars of Native-newcomer relations how ethnohistory should be done.” Long’s research inspired award-winning filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s latest documentary – Trick or Treaty.
“Before I had my two children, I had a miscarriage.” This is how Alicia Yamin starts her new book Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity: Human Rights Frameworks for Health and Why They Matter. By introducing the book in such a personal manner, Yamin, the Policy Director of the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, prepares the reader for what is to follow. In interweaving personal stories, Yamin demonstrates how health should be situated as a human right and, in doing so, represents a major turning point in the struggle for dignity.