Exploiting a legacy: John Peters Humphrey and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

This is the second of a two-part series to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948. The first part appeared on this site previously.

Jennifer Tunnicliffe

On December 10, Canada will take part in celebrations of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). On its website, the federal government claims that “Canada has been a consistently strong voice for the protection of human rights”, starting with its “central role in the drafting” of the UDHR in 1948, and continuing with its work at the UN today. [1] Given the reality of Canada’s resistance to the UDHR, how has the Canadian government worked to reconcile this history with the image it promotes of Canada as an historic advocate for international human rights?

The answer comes largely through the experiences of one Canadian: John Peters Humphrey. Humphrey is remembered for his role in helping to draft the UDHR, yet in doing so he was working for the UN and not representing Canada, so the repurposing of his legacy to serve a national mythology around human rights is deeply problematic.

Continue reading

75 Years of Human Rights: How to Mark This Year?

      No Comments on 75 Years of Human Rights: How to Mark This Year?

Eleanor Roosevelt with a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1949. FDR Presidential Library & Museum – Photograph NPX 64-165.

This is the first of a two-part series to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The second post will appear on this site tomorrow.

Jennifer Tunnicliffe

This year marks an important anniversary for the United Nations. Seventy-five years ago, on December 10, 1948, member states of the newly formed organization adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the first international “human rights” instrument. In asserting that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, the UDHR reflected a new universal language of rights and freedoms. As stated in its preamble, the goal of the document was to act as a “common standard of achievement” for the promotion of and respect for the rights it outlined, and to secure their “universal and effective recognition and observance.” In its thirty articles, it sets out a list of civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights that deserve protection in order to ensure the “inherent dignity of all members of the human family.”[1]

The adoption of the UDHR was a remarkable achievement and it continues to form the basis of international human rights law. According to the UN, since its proclamation seventy-five years ago, the Declaration has been translated into more than five hundred languages, has inspired more than seventy global and regional human rights treaties, and helps to guide the work of the UN today.[2]

Many histories of the UDHR highlight its “unanimous” adoption by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948, presenting it as an important moment of consensus in which members states of the UN recognized human rights as the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world. This emphasis on consensus, however, belies the lack of representation at the United Nations at the time for people still under colonial rule. It also ignores the fact that eight of fifty-eight states abstained from supporting the UDHR that day, and obscures the intense debates that took place over the form, wording, and substance of the instrument.[3] “Human rights” – how they were conceived, how they ought to be articulated in law, which rights should take precedence, and the degree to which they could be implemented – were deeply contested in 1948.

Continue reading

A Century of Petroleum Extraction at Norman Wells

      No Comments on A Century of Petroleum Extraction at Norman Wells

Map of the five Sahtú communities and the Sahtú Settlement Area as defined in the Sahtú Dene and Métis Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement (1993). Map by Dave Blaine, NAIT.

[Editor’s note: We have slightly altered the original text because our website does not yet support Dene orthographies. For a .pdf version of this post in which Dene words and place names are displayed correctly, click here.]

Petroleum Histories Project Team

Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories is the site of the first oil and gas operation in the Canadian North and one of the earliest in the country. The Norman Wells oil field has almost continuously produced oil since 1920, making it also one of Canada’s longest operating petroleum production sites.

The conventional history of Norman Wells focuses on the prospectors and geologists who claim to have discovered the oil and the engineers and corporation that developed the installation at Norman Wells. It is a history that draws on the records of colonial archives and is measured in barrels of oil, profits for shareholders, and royalties for the federal government.

Sahtú Dene and Métis have been little more than a footnote in conventional histories of Norman Wells, if we are mentioned at all. Our people and our stories are absent from corporate and state archives; we have been overlooked and erased.

Courtesy of NWT Archives/©Imperial Oil Limited/N-1979-049: 0002.

The history of Norman Wells looks quite different when it is told from our perspective, the perspective of Sahtú Dene and Métis. Our experiences and knowledge are rooted in the land and preserved through story. In this post, we centre the voices and perspectives of our people. Industry and government narratives have been left for the footnotes. Continue reading

Thinking Historically About Disability at the Ontario School for the Blind, 1903-1917

This is the third entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here.

Harrison Dressler

“ALL THE EVIDENCE DEMANDED,” read an article published in the Toronto Globe on February 2, 1917. Written by two former students—R.F. Henderson and Byron G. Derbyshire—the article alerted the Canadian public about an investigation into the Ontario School for the Blind (OSB), then as now, a residential school for blind people located in Brantford, Ontario. Roughly one year prior, Derbyshire had organized a counter-offensive against the OSB, collecting signatures from forty-two students before sending three letters to the Department of Education, documenting allegations of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.

Commissioner Norman B. Gash entered the OSB in May 1916, where he soon accumulated over one-thousand pages of first-person testimony: evidence that no longer exists, either lost, forgotten, or destroyed. On February 12, 1917, Commissioner Gash delivered the resulting report to the Department of Education. But the protesters’ allegations of sexual abuse were conspicuously absent, and their complaints of malnutrition were seriously downplayed.

Continue reading

Disability Activism – What’s Old is News

      No Comments on Disability Activism – What’s Old is News

By Sean Graham

I talk with Dustin Galer, author of Beryl: The Making of a Disability Activist. We talk about Beryl Potter’s entry into activism, how the 1970s public debates influenced her campaigns, and the financial challenges faced by disability activists. We also chat about Beryl Potter’s personality and public encounters, her television program, and how many of the challenges she fought against persist in 2023. For further context, be sure to visit some of the activist organizations that continue to push for disability rights and accessibility.

Historical Headline of the Week

Rhianna Schmiunk and Michelle Ghoussoub, “Air Canada Makes Changes After Passengers with Disabilities Share ‘Dehumanizing’ Experiences.’ CBC News, November 9, 2023.

Continue reading

Food Insecurity in the North – What’s Old is News

      No Comments on Food Insecurity in the North – What’s Old is News

By Sean Graham

I’m joined by Kristin Burnett and Travis Hay, authors of Plundering the North: A History of Settler Colonialism, Corporate Welfare, and Food Insecurity. We discuss the geographic parameters of the ‘North,’ the challenges faced by northern communities, and the origins of food insecurity. We also chat about the colonial structures that have created the problem, how communities are trying to challenge these systems, and the resulting political and economic implications.

Historical Headline of the Week

U.N. Reviews High Food Insecurity Rates in Canada’s Northern Territories,” APTN News, August 31, 2023.

Continue reading

National Queer and Trans+ Community History Conference

      No Comments on National Queer and Trans+ Community History Conference

 

The National Queer and Trans+ Community History Conference will take place at MacEwan University May 3-4, 2024 in Edmonton, Alberta.

The conference is designed to bring together 2SLGBTQ+ community members, non-profit organizations, heritage professionals, historians, academics, emerging scholars, and students who have an interest in documenting, preserving, and celebrating diverse and intersectional queer and trans+ histories in Canada.

We welcome submissions for presentation proposals from 2SLGBTQ+ community and grassroots organizers, non-profit organizations, researchers and students, heritage and archivist professionals, and government or policy makers working on any aspect of queer and trans+ histories in Canada.

The National Queer and Trans+ Community History Conference is supported by MacEwan University, MacEwan Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity, Egale Canada, The ArQuives, The LGBT Purge Fund, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, The Chair in Transgender Studies, ActiveHistory.ca, National Trust for Canada, Edmonton Queer History Project, and Stollery Charitable Foundation.

For further information please see the link to the Call for Presentations

https://www.edmontonqueerhistoryproject.ca/news-events

Voices from the Rental Crisis

      No Comments on Voices from the Rental Crisis

I think it is about time that our City Council and our Provincial Government did something about all these evictions that are going on, and all these terrible rent increases… I think we should have some action from the people we elected to give us some protection and a right to live in some security and dignity, instead of being kicked around like so many of us are.

–single father Victor* in a letter to Vancouver City Council, January 1974.

Daniel Ross

We bring our world with us into the archives. I’ve been reminded of this over the last week, as I commute across Vancouver to spend my days reading letters from tenants like Victor. This city is ground zero for Canada’s housing crisis, with the highest rents, lowest vacancy rate, and smallest proportion of affordable units in the country. My daily trip to the municipal archives brings home the profound housing inequalities that define the Canadian city in 2023, uncomfortably juxtaposing new condo towers with emergency housing in tents and beige portables, and luxury SUVs with people experiencing homelessness and distress. I take those images and that discomfort with me to the research room.

Voices from the past remind me that crises of housing affordability and access are not bugs but a feature of Canada’s profit-oriented rental housing market. Or, as housing researcher Ricardo Tranjan put it in the Walrus this year, for tenants “Canada’s ‘housing crisis’ is a permanent state of affairs”. Victor was just one of thousands of Vancouver renters who in the late 1960s and 1970s spoke out against evictions without cause, excessive rent increases, and their lack of a political voice. Continue reading

Chaotic ’35 Campaign – What’s Old is News

      No Comments on Chaotic ’35 Campaign – What’s Old is News

By Sean Graham

I talk with David MacKenzie, author of King and Chaos: The 1935 Canadian General Election. We talk about the value of studying elections in history, the economic conditions leading into the election, and the fractured political environment at the time. We also discuss the leadership of R.B. Bennett, William Lyon Mackenzie King, J.S. Woodsworth, and William Aberhart, how foreign policy influenced the campaign, and the election’s legacy.

Historical Headline of the Week

Michael Gates, “History Hunter: Martha Black – Yukon Lady Parliamentarian,” Yukon News, April 16, 2023.

Continue reading

Entering The Jagged Landscape of History: Can We Teach Our Students to Apply Historical Thinking Skills?

Paul McGuire

This is the second entry in a monthly series on Thinking Historically. See the Introduction here.

Researchers continue to write about the value and importance of teaching Historical Thinking Concepts (HTC). There is a near consensus on the importance of moving from a transmission approach to teaching history to one that focuses on inquiry.  This ongoing discussion has been shaped by the works of several researchers including Sam Wineburg who wrote, “the essence of achieving mature historical thought rests precisely on our ability to navigate the jagged landscape of history, to traverse the terrain that lies between the poles of familiarity with and distance from the past.” (Wineburg, 1999, p. 490)

Wineburg’s challenge to history teachers, written over twenty years ago, is to take students on a journey to a foreign land – his jagged landscape of history. While the research supports this aspirational goal, is it possible to do this in the classroom? There is no question that teaching historical thinking concepts offer a new way to engage students in the study of history, but no one really writes about how to do this.

Continue reading