Active History

Alternative Histories of Work and Labour: The Workers History Museum

March 26, 2016 No Comments

Active History is proud to present a video each week from New Directions in Active History. The conference took place at Huron University College on October 2-4, 2015 and brought together scholars, students, professionals and community members to discuss a wide range of topics pertaining to active history.

In this week’s video we hear from David Dean, a Professor of History at Carleton University, as he discusses alternative histories of work and labour in the national capital region. He primarily discusses the Workers’ History Museum in Ottawa, and how it focuses on some of the lost stories of unionized and non-unionized workers. Nicknamed “The Museum without Walls”, Dean discusses how they manage to function as a museum without a physical location. Much of their work is articulated through a powerful website, in which they display exhibits and research, as well as hosting historical walking tours through Ottawa. Dean also discusses the museum’s travelling exhibits, of which they have three or four that they are able to bring to schools, universities, heritage fairs, labour conferences, and many other events. Through this museum and their work, one of the goals is to increase public knowledge of labour unions and their history, attempting to battle the negative stereotypes surrounding the idea of unions. The most recent project in which the museum is engaged their Bank Street Project, which is developed around the historical stories related to work and business along Bank Street in Ottawa.

Work Always in Progress

March 24, 2016 No Comments

By Veronica Strong-Boag

All contributions to debates about a feminist future need a good dose of herstory. No one person or one group speaks for feminism in its entirety. That reality was not reflected earlier this month in the Globe and Mail’s choice of Maureen McTeer and her daughter, Catherine Clark, both white upper-middle-class women of a certain background, to answer the question “Is the Work of Feminism Finished?” The reprimand found in Septembre Anderson’s “Today’s feminist problem? Black women are still invisible,” to any such stunted version of feminism provided a salutary reminder of diverse, even conflicting, outlooks, even as it made white women rather than patriarchal and capitalist structures the enemy. The potential for a more nuanced response came from the far more diverse group featured in “How We Succeed.” None of this is new. In fact feminism has always been multivocal and diverse. This has been both its weakness and its strength. Individuals and groups commonly seize particular causes that touch their own lives most directly.

Canadian feminists have wrestled with how to speak with many voices since the 19^th century. Continue reading →

A Tribute to John Long

March 23, 2016 6 Comments

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.

Treaty 9 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.

Continue reading →

Celebrating Graphic Herstory

March 22, 2016 No Comments

The Graphic History Collective

It Ain’t Me Babe, the first comic book produced entirely by women (1970).

Historically, the comics industry has been male dominated, with male writers and male illustrators (working for companies owned by men) depicting women in stereotypically demeaning and derogatory ways. This is especially true of Golden Age comics in the 1940s and 1950s, with the possible exception of Wonder Woman in the United States and Nelvana of the Northern Lights in Canada.

By the 1970s, however, things had started to change. As second wave feminism emerged, writers in the U.S. like Sharon Rudahl and publications like Wimmen’s Comix and It Ain’t Me Babe challenged the exclusionary nature of the industry and created space for comics for women, by women, and about women. In Canada, a feminist group known as the Corrective Collective released their own project, a historical comic book: She Named It Canada Because That’s What It Was Called. When it was first published in 1971, She Named It Canada provided a critical – and quite radical – alternative feminist perspective on the establishment and development of colonial Canada. Continue reading →

Recognizing THEN/HiER

March 21, 2016 No Comments

By Tom Peace

I first encountered the History Education Network (THEN/HiER) in late 2009, when Jennifer Bonnell, the graduate student coordinator at the time, approached Active History about the potential for coordinating a workshop series in Toronto focused on teaching history. Over the intervening months we worked together towards the first in a series of events that brought together teachers, curators, professors and civil servants known as Approaching the Past. This was the beginning of a six-year partnership between Active History and THEN/HiER. At the end of the month, THEN/HiER’s mandate will draw to a close. I want to use this post to draw attention to our collaboration, some of its key moments, and the influence that Anne Marie Goodfellow, Jennifer Bonnell, Penney Clark and many others have had on ActiveHistory.ca and the Active History project more generally.

Logos Continue reading →

Lies, Damned Lies, and Peterborough

March 19, 2016 No Comments

This week’s video is a part of the Storytelling through Film, Graphic Art & Performance panel. Matthew Hayes, a PhD candidate at Trent University, explains two art projects that he undertook in the summer of 2014 in Peterborough, Ontario. Through these projects he sought to explore the persistence of the myth of objectivity. Along with another artist, Hayes displayed a series of 8 posters around Peterborough during an arts festival. The posters, drawn in black sharpie, were based on historical fact, but not entirely true. Hayes explains how his project met with some resistance by critics who felt that it was dishonest or misleading.

Although many of the posters were either taken down or destroyed by the elements, others remained and citizens posted photos of the installations on social media sites. Hayes explains that while he set out to explore the effects of the project, due to the ephemeral nature of the art, it was difficult to draw conclusions. However, he was able to speak with some members of the public. Through these conversations, he discovered that some knew the information was not entirely true, whereas others took the information as literal truth and even passed on the stories. This left Hayes asking the question of what made the posters believable and how their belief relates to the larger question of the myth of objectivity.

Chronic Hunger, Chronic Terror: Agrarian Modernization and the Struggle for Sustainability in Guatemala, 1944-1980

March 18, 2016 No Comments

Editor’s Note: This was published on the NiCHE website earlier this week and is a part of a monthly series showing the work of the Sustainable Farm Systems project

By Patrick Chassé

Blessed with plentiful sunshine and rich soils, Guatemala exports large quantities of coffee, bananas, sugar and more to the United States, Canada, and Europe. Our grocery stores are stocked with fresh tropical produce, but few consumers are aware of the social and environmental costs of the food we consume. The immense productivity of Guatemala’s export sector is underwritten by deforestation, the heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers, and the exploitation of workers. Guatemala also has one of the highest rates of chronic malnutrition in the Americas: many rural Indigenous families subsist on a simple diet of corn and beans that lacks adequate protein and key vitamins. Though children often do not feel hungry their young bodies are maimed by inequality: they suffer from stunting and high rates of infant mortality. Yet Guatemalan peasants are astute farmers who, though often lacking education and financial means, are able to coax remarkable yields out of the meagre quantities of land at their disposal. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 1.86 percent of Guatemala’s population owns over 56 percent of the country’s arable land. Why do so many people go hungry in a land blessed with fertile soils, an extraordinary diversity of micro-climates and abundant rainfall? Continue reading →

21st Century Terrorism: Nothing New?

March 17, 2016 2 Comments

Alban Bargain-Villéger

1980 Bologna Railway Bombing. Getty Images

About a month after the November 13 shootings, I was lining up, along with hundreds of carefree visitors, in front of the Osiris exhibit at Paris’s Arab World Institute. The sun was out, children were playing on the steps of the building and, aside from the occasional military squad patrolling the area, it was hard to believe that this city had recently been hit by a series of brutal attacks. As I was waiting in the slowly advancing line, I began to wonder what I would do if a gang of masked gunmen were to show up. We were (according to Daesh) nothing but horrible miscreants on their way to admire Ancient Egyptian idols. Why was I suddenly feeling vulnerable? After all, the risk had always been there and, although the media had only recently begun to popularize the concept of “soft targets,” the use of violence on civilians in public places is nothing new. However, the media’s frequent recourse to World War Two as a benchmark in terms of violence has contributed to obscuring the various acts of terrorism that occurred during the Cold War era, the 1990s, and the 2000s.

Among the many approaches to the 2015 Paris attacks, few avoided the trap of Western exceptionalism – here I use “Western” for the sake of convenience, as that term does not describe a clearly defined reality. While the generally Eurocentric reactions to the January and November shootings have been pointed out on many occasions, the chronological nearsightedness of most of the media and of the powers-that-be has been largely ignored. The appearance of the French tricolour on the CN Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and other monuments in the wake of the shootings did not just reflect a geographical double standard, but also implied that some sort of world-historical event had occurred. Although the high death toll (130 victims) seemed to point to a return to a level of violence unseen since the Second World War, and although the terrorists’ recourse to suicide bombers signaled a change in the Jihadists’ tactics on the European continent, it would be premature to see that particular massacre as an epoch-making event. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Eighty: Human Rights Frameworks for Health and Why They Matter

March 16, 2016 No Comments

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

Yamin “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.

The great challenge in studying broad concepts in matters with very real world ramifications is that the writing can feel distant and cold. To alleviate this concern, Yamin incorporates case studies from her vast experience working in the field. By humanizing these seemingly abstract issues, Yamin is not only able to hook the reader but also establishes a narrative voice that guides the reader through the book.

At its best, Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity attacks the preconceptions and assumptions that have inhibited the implementation of a human rights framework for health. For instance, in the introduction Yamin cites the too-often-used phrase “there but the grace of God go I” in discussing a general apathy towards the issues on the part of those in privileged positions. By casting the inequalities in health and healthcare to divine providence, the real-world human decisions that have fostered and expanded inequality are easily dismissed or ignored. As a result, too many people unnecessarily suffer from indignity without intervention.

These inequalities are often the result of discrimination based on race, gender, and poverty – issues that are beyond the control of those that don’t have access to health. Many of Yamin’s examples are related to maternal health and mortality. From the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse perpetrated by the men in her life to losing multiple children to AIDS and malnourishment, Yamin outlines how one particular woman had been denied agency throughout her life for no other reason than she lived in an impoverished region. The decisions that led to that poverty were well beyond her control – often made on the other side of the world – and yet we too often believe the myth that we all reap what we sow.

Continue reading →

Golgotha?: D. Y. Cameron’s Flanders from Kemmel

March 15, 2016 1 Comment

By Laura Brandon

One of the aspects of war art that continues to surprise me is how personal it ultimately is. Any painting, however objectively representative of events it may purport to be, in it carries some measure of the artist’s subjective response to the incident, place, or person depicted. Furthermore, it is influenced by the artist’s personal circumstances and attitudes. David Young Cameron’s massive 1919 war landscape (physically and in terms of the scale of the view) Flanders from Kemmel is a case in point.[1] It is travelling across Canada at present after display in the exhibition Witness at the Canadian War Museum in the summer of 2014.[2]

David Young Cameron, Flanders from Kemmel, 1919. (Oil on canvas, 197.5 x 336 cm, Beaverbrook Collection of War Art, Canadian War Museum 19710261-0117.)

At first glance, the painting presents a misty, Impressionist-like scene. A cloud-filled sky makes up the bulk of the composition. Centring the composition is a small village. An arrangement of trees and hillside frame the wider panorama. I have always appreciated the artist’s technical proficiency in holding this wide-ranging composition together. But I never looked at it particularly closely until Canadian War Museum librarian Lara Andrews mentioned that she saw figures moving through the middle ground near the village – soldiers or refugees – she wasn’t sure. This led me to scrutinize the painting anew as a work of art and, also, to explore more fully the history behind it. Continue reading →

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