Active History

A Useless Import? European Niqab Politics in Canada

March 25, 2015 1 Comment

By Aitana Guia

In 2012, the Canadian Government led by Conservative Stephen Harper approved a policy banning full veiling from citizenship ceremonies. Zunera Ishaq, who wears a niqab and was about to become Canadian citizen, decided to postpone her ceremony in order to ask the Federal Court whether the government policy was legal. In 2015, the Federal Court found the policy illegal and ordered the government to strike it down. Harper’s government has decided to appeal the decision instead.

Mr. Harper justified his position in a parliamentary debate on March 9, 2015: “We do not allow people to cover their faces during citizenship ceremonies. Why would Canadians, contrary to our own values, embrace a practice at that time that is not transparent, that is not open and frankly is rooted in a culture that is anti-women?” (You can watch it here)

While many women have made fun of the Prime Minister for telling them what they can or cannot wear in citizenship ceremonies (#DressCodePM) and arrogating for himself the power to decide what is anti-women, both the 2012 policy and the 2015 court challenge seem to be rather well thought out political positions.

John Ralston Saul articulately argued in A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada against dysfunctional and cowardly Canadian elites who continue to follow a broken European legacy and refuse to embrace the social and cultural complexity that colonial history and immigration have given Canada. Continue reading →

Five Simple Rules for Saving the Maritimes: The Regional Stereotype in the 21st Century

March 24, 2015 8 Comments

By Lachlan MacKinnon

The Maritimes are on the brink of catastrophic economic and demographic failure [1]. Our lack of entrepreneurial spirit, engrained sense of entitlement, conservatism, and folksy racism are major factors preventing us from joining in the prosperity enjoyed by our more enterprising cousins in the “have” provinces of Canada. Such are the problems enumerated in John Ibbitson’s recent Globe and Mail editorial. The “culture of defeatism,” proclaimed by Steven Harper in 2002, is apparently still alive and kicking on the east coast. Despite the popularity of this analytical framework, it is not borne out in the historical literature surrounding region and regionalism in the Maritimes. Nor are the commonly proposed solutions to the actual problems facing the region particularly novel or creative, including those enumerated within the much-lauded Ivany Report in Nova Scotia.

The regional stereotype of the staid and conservative Maritimes is not a recent phenomenon. Historian Ernie Forbes traces the lineage of this notion to 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner described the “frontier thesis” of American westward development. According to Turner, a profound sense of nationalism and a progressive liberal spirit was the result of continued expansion and settler colonialism in the American west. This concept was readily applied to the Canadian national narrative. Forbes writes: Continue reading →

Lazy Historians, Disengaged Academics, and Over Paid Professors?

March 23, 2015 36 Comments

By Thomas Peace

With thousands of Toronto-area teaching and research assistants out on strike as well as a very recent faculty strike at the University of Northern British Columbia, opinion-makers have begun to draw up proposed solutions for the ailments of higher education. Not surprisingly, given the frequent attention it draws, most have targeted tenured and tenure stream faculty members as the blight on the system that is making higher education unaffordable. Over the past few weeks all three of Canada’s major daily newspapers (click here for the Globe, here for the Star, and here for the National Post) explained to their readers through ‘news’ reports or op-ed pieces that the underlying causes of the dramatic rise in itinerant labour is a result of the declining number of full-time over-paid tenured and tenure-track faculty willing to teach.

This type of editorializing – either through the guise of news or through the op-ed pages – is misguided and sets us back from actually achieving workable solutions and robust learning environments in our universities and colleges. Not only does the approach ignore research like CAUT’s, whose annual almanac this year suggests that in six of Canada’s ten provinces, universities spend more money on non-academic staff than academic teaching staff (suggesting that any discussion of costs needs to include the expenses associated with administration, student experience and student life in addition to classroom practices), but more importantly, for the purposes of this post, these attacks on tenured and tenure-track faculty mischaracterize the good work academics (and the students in our classes) are actually up to.[1] Continue reading →

The Sugar Monster Feeds on the Navajo Nation

March 21, 2015 No Comments

Former Active History editor, Brittany Luby, an assistant professor of history at Laurentian University, was unable to attend this week’s annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH) in Washington, D.C. and asked if we could host a video of her presentation: “The Sugar Monster Feeds on the Navajo Nation: An Analysis of the Bodily and External Environment in Artistic and Medical Accounts of the Navajo (Diné) Diabetes Crisis”. Click here for more information about the conference. You can follow the proceedings on twitter through the #ASEH2015.

“Working on the Water, Fighting for the Land”: A New Comic Book about Colonialism, Capitalism, and Indigenous Labour History

March 20, 2015 2 Comments

By Sean Carleton

In the fall of 2013, Active History.ca featured a blog post by the Graphic History Collective announcing the start of the Graphic History Project, an online series of short, accessible, and free historical comic books. In addition to outlining the aims and aspirations of the Graphic History Project, the post publicized the release of the first comic book in the series, about the Knights of Labor in Canada.

Twelve comics and a year and a half later, the Graphic History Collective (GHC) is pleased to announce that the final comic book of the Graphic History Project – Working on the Water, Fighting for the Land: Indigenous Labour on Burrard Inlet – is now available online for free until the end of April. The comic book is illustrated and written by Tania Willard (Secwepemc Nation) with co-authors Robin Folvik and Sean Carleton (Graphic History Collective). Working on the Water, Fighting for the Land focuses on Indigenous peoples’ responses to the coming of colonialism and capitalism to Burrard Inlet, which connects the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) Coast Salish First Nations in what is today known as Vancouver, British Columbia. Continue reading →

New Paper: Memory Politics: Ottawa’s Monument to the Victims of Communism

March 17, 2015 2 Comments

ActiveHistory.ca is pleased to announce the publication of Gregor Kranjc’s new paper: “Memory Politics: Ottawa’s Monument to the Victims of Communism.”

Know that evil comes in many forms and seems to reinvent itself – Nazism, Marxist-Leninism, today, terrorism – they all have one thing in common: The destruction, the end, of human liberty.

Ideologies that promise utopias lead to the opposite, hell on earth. That’s why […] this monument […] reminds us of the names the stories of those lost to one of the deadliest ideological plagues ever spread, to communism.

The year is 2014, not 1954, and the speaker is the Conservative Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, not Senator Joseph McCarthy. These phrases denouncing Communism and celebrating Canada’s commitment to freedom, democracy and justice were extolled in a 20-minute speech at a 250$-per plate fundraising event in Toronto for the building of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism on 30 May 2014. Harper’s speech had in fact very little to do with the actual monument proposed for Ottawa or the historical record of communism, beyond denouncing it as an abomination alongside fascism that “snuffed out the lights and lives of freedom, democracy and justice”. It did have a lot to say about conservatives winning the Cold War (and standing on the shoulders of the “giants” U.S. President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Thatcher), about the apologetic and weak-kneed stance towards Communist regimes by successive Liberal governments (although he never mentioned the party by name), and about the large numbers of Canadians (approximately one-quarter in Harper’s estimates) who trace their origins to current or former Communist countries. [Read More]

Editors Note: In addition to our group blog, ActiveHistory.ca strives to provide timely, well-written and thoroughly researched papers on a variety of history-related topics. Expanded conference papers or short essays that introduce an upcoming book project are great starting points for the type of paper we publish. With a current readership of more than 20,000 visits per month we can assure that you will find an interested audience through our site. For more information visit our Papers Section or contact papers@activehistory.ca. All of our papers are peer reviewed to ensure that they are accurate and up-to-date.

The .tp country domain name, 1997-2015: In memoriam

March 16, 2015 4 Comments

http://freedom.tp

By David Webster

The internet deleted its first virtual country this month. It wasn’t that bad: Timor-Leste is now a real country, and doesn’t need its original internet domain name any longer. But the .tp top-level country domain name (ccTLD, in the lingo) has a story to tell as it ends its 18-year history.

In 1997, the former Portuguese colony of Timor-Leste (East Timor) was nearing the final years of its struggle for independence from a brutal Indonesian military occupation that had started in 1975. Using a hosting service in Ireland, a contact address for the most famous Timorese political prisoner, and a clever tactic to squat on an unclaimed county code, activists launched the top-level domain .tp and its first site, freedom.tp.

It was a period when all countries and territories had recently been assigned two-letter codes, alongside the .com and .org domain suffixes. Most of these are familiar – .ca for Canada, .id for Indonesia, .ie for Ireland, and so on. In 1997, many country domain names were unclaimed. Among them was .tp, reserved for Portuguese Timor (Timor Português).

Portuguese Timor had long ceased to be. The 1974 Carnation revolution in Portugal set the last European world empire’s colonies on the road to independence. That included Portuguese Timor, the eastern half of an island off the north coast of Australia, sharing its other half with an Indonesian province. The leading Timorese political party declared the country’s independence on November 28, 1975. On December 10, the Indonesian army invaded. The next 24 years spelled famine, death, and near-genocide as pro-independence fighters resisted Indonesian annexation. Continue reading →

Emotion and History: The Book of Negroes

March 12, 2015 1 Comment

By Andrew Nurse

What kinds of emotions does history call up? What purposes do emotions serve as part of historical understanding? The answer to the first question is simple: strong ones, at least to judge from the polemics that periodically polarize the work of professional historians or public discourse on the past. The second question is more difficult to address because emotions vary. What I find breathtaking or inspiring, someone else finds lacklustre or irrelevant. But, emotional reactions to history indicate something. At the very least they show how important the past is and how connected many people feel to it. After all, if the past were irrelevant, it would not garner strong emotion. Emotional connections to the past, I want to suggest, can do other things as well. They might allow — or, perhaps, even force — us to think about the past and its relationship to the present in challenging, different, and important ways. Continue reading →

Spoils of the War of 1812: Part III: Anishinaabe Aspirations

March 11, 2015 No Comments

By Alan Corbiere

This is the third part of a series of essays by Alan Corbiere focusing on Anishinaabe participation in the War of 1812.

Amédée Forestier, Signing of the Treaty of Ghent, Christmas Eve, 1814. No Anishinaabeg Present.

The Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe, Odawa, Potowatomi) have always revered the island of Michilimackinac, so much so that at the conclusion of the War of 1812, the Odawa tried to keep it in their possession. The Odawa suggested that the British negotiators offer the Americans a greater quantity of Anishinaabe land on the mainland as a price to keep Michilimackinac in the possession of the Anishinaabeg with trading access allowed to the British. We know that this did not happen but was it possible?

This is the third and final post in a series exploring this question. In January, I discussed the importance of Michilimackinac for Anishinaabe peoples and last month’s essay addressed British policy as it was explained to the Anishinaabeg in council. Today’s post focuses on the Anishinaabe reactions to the Treaty of Ghent, official news of which was sent to the Department of Indian Affairs on 12 March 1815 with instructions to “notify the same, in full council, to the Indian Warriors.”[1]

Continue reading →

Research is Getting a Bit More Open: Good News for Historical Research in Canada

March 9, 2015 1 Comment

A knowledge explosion!

By Ian Milligan

When we started up ActiveHistory.ca way back in 2009 (!), we did it with a pretty simple vision in mind: historians were producing good scholarship, but it was inaccessible. It was inaccessible for a few reasons: sometimes we don’t exactly write for a general audience (we’ve been guilty of dropping jargon around this site too, I know, but we try), and even if you wanted to read most of what we do, you’d have to pay. Books are a relative bargain – you can get an academic paperback for $20-35 dollars. Articles are not a good deal in comparison: one-offs are around $25. We figured a free website would be one way to reach people, and I think we’ve tapped into an audience here.

Well, maybe ActiveHistory.ca’s got some more competition on the block, thanks to a great new policy from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, or SSHRC. SSHRC’s the federal granting agency that helps support research in Canada: historians apply to it with our project ideas, and generally around one in five of us get good news. That sounds low, and alarmingly it’s dropping, but it’s high enough that your average historian employed full-time at a university can hold out some hope that they’ll get it. All that is to say: SSHRC has some power, because they give us money, and money speaks. Continue reading →

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