Of History and Headlines: Reflections of an Accidental Public Historian

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By Ian Mosby

When I first heard Alvin Dixon’s voice I was driving along Dupont Avenue in Toronto with my partner, Laural, and our three-month-old son, Oscar. Dixon was talking to Rick MacInnes-Rae, who was filling in as the co-host of the CBC Radio show As It Happens. The interview was about Dixon’s experience at the Alberni Indian residential school (AIRS) where he had unwittingly been part of a recently uncovered nutrition experiment conducted by the federal government during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

VanSun

In addition to describing his memories of the experiment – in impressive and accurate detail – Dixon talked in a jarringly blunt manner about hunger and about the horrors of life in that notorious institution on the west coast of Vancouver Island. “It was totally inadequate food a lot of the time,” Dixon told MacInnes-Rae. “I remember all of us kids having to steal fruit, steal carrots and potatoes so that we could roast potatoes somewhere off site on a fire and eat them – because we were never full when we left the dining room table.”

Dixon had long suspected that something had been done to them at the school. “As early as 20 years ago,” Dixon told MacInnes-Rae, “I heard that there were these experiments from former students who worked in the kitchens.” And when asked what it said to him that his federal government was willing to do this, Dixon responded that it affirmed what he’d always believed: “That the federal government and most Canadians don’t give a shit what happens with us as First Nations people. They’re on our stolen lands, our holy lands and they’re not going to be happy until they have it all. They were trying to eliminate us. So that’s not surprising.”

By the end of the interview I was in tears – something that would happen with increasing frequency over the coming months as I met, corresponded with, and listened to the stories of survivors of these experiments and of Canada’s Indian residential school system more generally. While I’m still not sure what I expected to happen after I published my research on these experiments, I don’t think anything could have prepared me for how profoundly the strength, courage, and anger of survivors like Dixon would change my life and my perspective on what it meant to be an (active) historian. Continue reading →

The Value of Thinking Big: Experimenting with Pedestrian Space in Toronto, 1970s and 2014

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By Daniel Ross

Beaches International Jazz Festival

Beaches International Jazz Festival

In cities across Canada, citizens are emerging from their winter hibernation to a spring and summer season packed with street festivals, concerts, and other special events. In Toronto alone there are hundreds each year, from Salsa on St. Clair to Pride to the literary Word on the Street, and on summer weekends it’s hard to walk more than a few blocks downtown without stumbling across a city block crowded with vendors, beer gardens, and band shells. But despite our eagerness to get out and celebrate warm weather, cities like Toronto have always had a love/hate relationship with street closures. This is evident in city hall’s lukewarm response to a recent proposal—Open Streets—to close Bloor Street for a few Sundays this summer.

Ciclovia in Bogota. Photo courtesy of Mike's Bogota Blog

Ciclovia in Bogota. Photo courtesy of Mike’s Bogota Blog

In this post I take a look at that plan in light of the project that really started the whole discussion about closing downtown streets in Toronto: the Yonge Street pedestrian mall of the early 1970s. Can the story of the mall help us understand today’s debates over street closures? I’d argue that, among other lessons, it should warn us to think big when we consider the creation of pedestrian space: half-measures tend to create their own problems, and play into the hands of those opposed to repurposing streets. Continue reading →

Video: Thomas Kuehn – “Ottoman Hero or Frontier Villain? Ahmed Feyzi Pasha (1839-1915)”

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The last talk of the SFU History Department’s Heroes and Villains series featured historian Thomas Kuehn‘s reflections on Ahmed Feyzi Pasha. This high-ranking Ottoman bureaucrat and military officer was highly influential in terms of shaping Ottoman policy in strategically important borderlands of the empire in Arabia and present-day Iraq between the mid 1880s and his retirement in 1908. Arguably, he was one of the great imperial pro-consuls of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But unlike his contemporaries Sir Evelyn Baring (Great Britain), General Joseph Gallieni (France), and Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman (Russia), Ahmed Feyzi has received little, if any, scholarly attention.

Kuehn’s lecture here sheds light on Ahmed Feyzi’s highly contradictory record as an administrator and military man by focusing on his three terms as governor-general of Ottoman Yemen, by far the most notorious trouble spot of the late Ottoman Empire, where he served longer than any other high-level Ottoman official: On one hand, his skills as a diplomat and negotiator and his talent as a military commander kept local opposition to Ottoman rule at bay for years and were instrumental in crushing two large-scale uprisings that brought Ottoman rule in Yemen to the brink of collapse. While these actions earned Ahmed Feyzi the admiration of both the Ottoman central government and foreign observers, he was widely known to run a money extortion network of relatives, Ottoman officials, and local elites that systematically overtaxed local residents on a massive scale and seriously undermined the legitimacy of Ottoman rule in southwest Arabia. His success in leading counter-insurgency operations in Yemen and his superior knowledge of local affairs allowed Ahmed Feyzi to make himself indispensable to his superiors in Istanbul and to shield his cronies from prosecution until his patron Sultan Abdulhamid II himself lost power in 1908.

Ahmed Feyzi’s career is full of dramatic episodes: for example, his power struggle with a chief investigator sent from Istanbul in 1892 or his five-day camel ride across the Arabian Desert in 1905 when he was rushed from southern Iraq to Yemen in order to assume command of Ottoman military forces at the most dire moment of the 1904-06 uprising. Looking at Ahmed Feyzi, the Ottoman “empire builder and hero,” and Ahmed Feyzi, the “frontier villain,” allows us to bring to life a little known but nevertheless crucial chapter of Middle East history in the age of high imperialism. Ahmed Feyzi in many ways embodies the dilemmas of the late Ottoman Empire that still possessed the capabilities to expand but at the same time undermined the possibilities for its continued existence.

History Slam Episode Thirty-Eight: Senate Reform with James McHugh

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By Sean Graham

Red Chamber

The ‘Red Chamber.’ Photo from www.sen.parl.gc.ca

On Friday, the Supreme Court is expected to make a ruling on whether the government can proceed with Senate reform without amending the Constitution. The decision has been a long time coming for Stephen Harper, who has expressed a strong desire to reform the Senate since he was first elected in 2006. The issue of Senate reform has been a particularly prominent issue in the past year – from the spending scandals to Justin Trudeau kicking Liberal senators out of the caucus to Conservative senators refusing to fully support the elections reform bill. The Supreme Court’s decision Friday will fundamentally shape this government’s efforts to reform the Senate moving forward. (Jonathan McQuarrie addressed the issue of Senate reform in this piece back in October)
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Bringing Labour History Alive Through Photos & Film

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Image D-01635 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives

Image D-01635 courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives

By Erica Landrock

 Over the past two and a half years, I’ve been working to produce a three part history series about Working People and labour history in British Columbia for BC’s non-profit broadcaster, Knowledge Network.  When my team and I began the project back in 2011, it seemed like a straightforward and easily manageable task. How hard could it be to produce a series without filming anything? Choose the stories, write the scripts, select images, edit and voila! Easy. Or so it seemed. We quickly learned there was a very fine balance between making the stories accessible and engaging for an audience, while still telling a true account of history.

The origination of the series came about in a very organic fashion. Jack Munro, a well known British Columbia labour figure was watching Knowledge Network one evening when another documentary I was involved with Edge of the World: BC’s Early Years came on the air. He liked the approach and easy access to history and thought why couldn’t we have something like that but about labour and working people? At the time, Jack was the chair for the Labour Heritage Centre, an organization that helps to bring a voice to the province’s working people. Jack contacted Rudy Buttignol, CEO of Knowledge Network, to see how one would go about getting a series like this made. Not realizing this suggestion was going to spark over two years of work, the idea was a hit and a call went out for proposals to BC’s independent filmmaking community. My team was selected and by the fall of 2011 we were underway. Continue reading →

“And bold and adventurous amazons they were”: Colonial encounters with LGBT Indigenous people in the Pacific Northwest fur-trade

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By Eric Wright

An earlier version of post originally appeared on the author’s blog Actually History. 

In 1814, an Irish fur-trader in the employ of the Northwest Company by the name of Ross Cox was conducting business with Indigenous people near present day Spokane, Washington when he encountered, in his eyes, a remarkable individual.  In his journal under the titillating heading of  “A Curious Account of a Hermaphroditic Chief”, Cox described this person as,

A remarkable being.  The Indians allege he belongs to the epicene gender.  He wears a woman’s dress, overloaded with a profusion of beads, thimbles and small shells; add to which, the upper part of the face and the manner of wearing the hair are quite feminine; but these appearances are more than counterbalanced by a rough beard, and a masculine tone of voice.

Cox’s encounter with this “hermaphrodite chief” is just one of several known interactions between male fur-traders and people who are often referred to today as “third gendered” in the 18th and 19th century fur-trade in the Pacific Northwest.  People of a “third gender” in North American Indigenous societies were men and women whose gendered work roles, styles of dress, and behaviours did not accord in some degree to what was expected of someone of their biological sex.  Today, they might identify as a “transgendered person” or perhaps “intersexed.”  In terms of sexual orientation, third gendered people could be attracted to members of the same sex, but not necessarily.  Of course, it does not really make sense to speak literally of “same-sex” attraction within a non-dualistic gender/sex system.

In this short article, I shed light on a few of these moments of encounter that have not been lost to history.  As we might expect, some interactions followed the standard script of colonialism – male fur-traders heaped disdain and sometimes violence upon third gender Indigenous people.  These interactions resulted from an ideological context of imperialism in which Indigenous people were doubly stigmatized – once for being Indigenous and once for being third gendered.  Yet there were notable exceptions to a pattern of violence, like that of Ross Cox narrated above.  In these cases, European male fur-traders not only tolerated third gendered Indigenous people; they showed them a degree of respect in their writings and interactions.  Accounting for the respectful nature of some interactions in this period proves a much more difficult task.

Continue reading →

How Does History Help Explain Bitcoins?

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By Jonathan McQuarrie

Lately, Bitcoins have received considerable attention from the media. The recent failure of the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox exchange, where users could exchange their Bitcoins for national currencies, sparked particular concern. The website managed to lose some 850,000 Bitcoins, which at the time were valued at approximately $400 million. For the last month, proponents of Bitcoins, such as Coinbase founder Fred Ehrasam, have been in damage control mode. Despite the recent bad headlines, they argue, the fundamental technological principles behind Bitcoins are sound. They are fond of noting that during the early days of the internet (back in the dimly remembered 1990s), start-ups and failures abounded. They scoff at naysayers like Warren Buffett, arguing that he does not understand the technology behind Bitcoins.

The system behind Bitcoins is indeed complex, but here is my simplified understanding. The origins go back to a 2008 article by ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ (widely believed to be a pseudonym), where s/he outlined the development of a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system.’ The basic goal is to create a system of exchange where two users can spend Bitcoins with values determined and security protected by other users. When two people make an exchange using Bitcoins, their exchange generates a publicly recorded transaction, designed to ensure that a person does not try to spend the same Bitcoin twice. The public transaction has an associated hash (generated by the cryptographic hash function SHA-2), which presents a mathematical challenge. Users called miners verify the transaction by providing a proof for the mathematical challenge. The hash also provides a means for the miner to demonstrate that their computer resources solved the challenge. The miner adds the verified transaction, called a block, to a chain of blocks that extends back to the beginning of Bitcoins, and receives a portion of the fee charged to the people making the transaction in exchange for their work to create blocks.  Miners are also able to create new Bitcoins as a reward for their work in extending the transaction block chains—as the chain is extended, more Bitcoins are issued, though the speed at which this occurs decreases as more Bitcoins enter the system. Decreasing speed is designed to ensure that they remain scarce, which is a fundamental element of almost any currency. Calling people who create transaction blocks ‘miners’ emphasizes the scarcity of currency – deliberately evoking connections to gold (that most recognizable of specie) and impressing that in order to get wealth, one must work.

As the ‘mining’ metaphor suggests, historical analogies have been used for explaining Bitcoin’s potentials and shortcomings. Continue reading →

Old Conflicts in a New Century: The Problems of Prairie Grain Transportation

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From Wikipedia

From Wikipedia

By Laura Larsen

Few Canadians missed the news stories of grain piling up on the prairies and denunciations of the system’s failures. The Federal government’s recent announcement of financial penalties for the railways is the latest act in a long running problem facing western Canadian grain farmers: how to economically get their grain to market when long stretches of prairie and three mountain ranges stand between them and the ocean ports that export about seventy per cent of western Canada’s grain.

Economically exporting prairie grain is a complicated relationship between farmers, elevator companies, railways, and port terminals all of whom have conflicting interests which have been a wellspring of conflict since Confederation.  Canada consistently produces around twenty per cent of the world’s tradable grain. While many other countries grow grain, only Argentina, Australia, the United States, and Ukraine regularly produce domestic surpluses which can be exported.  Competition among these nations for their place in the international grain market is fierce. Like all bulk commodities, grain’s cost rises with transportation distance.  All of western Canada’s competitors are much closer to deep water ports for their grain exports.  When grain is not moving off the prairies it means unhappy customers, lost sales, and Canadian farmers who are not getting paid. Continue reading →

Memory and the Built Landscape: Edmonton’s Architectural Heritage Website

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ScreenshotBy Tim O’Grady

When you think of important events in your life, chances are you associate them with physical places. Whether it is your childhood home, a former school, or a family cottage or favourite vacation spot, the connection between memory and place is intangible, though very real. People are connected to the buildings in their city. They have lived their lives in and around them, and many of these structures hold a special place in their personal narratives.

Memory and Landscape

Defining memory can be difficult. For the purposes of this post, I will follow the definition provided by John Bodnar, who states that public (or collective) memory is not simply a time dimension between past and present, but is the interpretation of reality. Peter Burke describes five ways in which memory is transmitted: oral traditions, written documents, still or moving pictures, actions (dance, craft etc.), and space. Randall Mason in his article “Fixing Historic Preservation” argues historic preservation is the cultivation of society’s collective memory, and believes historic fabric, such as buildings, is essential to sustaining memory. To support this, he quotes sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who said “it is the spatial image alone that, by reason of its stability, gives us an illusion of not having changed through time and of retrieving the past in the present.” Continue reading →