Active History

Time for a Change: Historical Perspective on the Washington Redskins Name and Logo Controversy

August 23, 2013 2 Comments

Washington Redskins logo. Source: Wikipedia.

ActiveHistory.ca is on a two-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in early September. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our favourite and most popular blog posts from this site over the past year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers!

The following post was originally featured on April 10 2013.

By Mike Commito

Baseball season has just begun and NHL hockey is entering its final push before the playoffs begin at the end of the month. However, in recent months the attention has remained on the NFL’s Washington Redskins. Not because of their valiant post-season effort that ended with a horrific knee injury to their talented and budding young quarterback, but because of the team’s name and logo. The controversy over the team’s racist name and emblem is not new and is part of a much longer narrative of how professional sports teams have appropriated Aboriginal imagery and how First Nations have been depicted in derogatory or racist ways.

The National Congress of American Indians estimates that fewer than 1,000 schools (secondary and collegiate) still use derogatory Aboriginal imagery and logos in their sports programs. While this figure represents an overall decrease of about two-thirds in the past fifty years, this number is still far too high. Moreover, many of these relics that still exist are most visibly seen at the professional level where they continue to perpetuate the misrepresentation of Aboriginal peoples. Continue reading →

Tap Dancing and Murder – in a Grade Seven Classroom

August 22, 2013 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on June 20 2013.

By Merle Massie

“My tap dancing just isn’t good enough,” she wrote. She: my daughter’s high school English teacher. Tap dancing: teaching (to pubescent, smartmouth, intelligent, tired kids at the end of June in rural Saskatchewan). “I remember a staff meeting conversation from some point where you were willing to come in and talk with students.” What’s the topic, Mrs. J? Reconstructing Past Lives.

Excellent. That is EXACTLY what historians do, right? So I set off to find out if I could tap dance for teenagers. Just for a couple of hours. After all, I tap dance for University students on a regular basis. How hard can it be?

Amid recent media controversy about the conservative federal government looking to choreograph the tap dancing of Canadian history (see here and here), I was curious to find out just what a typical Canadian grade seven student already knew. Continue reading →

Speak, Recipe: Reading Cookbooks as Life Stories

August 21, 2013 1 Comment

The following post was originally featured on August 23 2012. It was also published in modified form as “Cookbook culture; A personal history in grease stains and pencil marks” in the Globe and Mail on September 29 2012.

By Ian Mosby

As a historian of food and nutrition, I’ve amassed a substantial collection of cookbooks, old and new, over the years. But one cookbook I often find myself coming back to amidst the hundred plus dusty volumes cluttering my office is a 1930 edition of the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Meals Tested, Tasted and Approved: Favorite Recipes and Menus From Our Kitchens to Yours. I purchased it for $12 from a Toronto vintage shop and consider it one of my favourite purchases to date.

On the surface, at least, the cookbook seems unremarkable. Good Housekeeping cookbooks from the period are common enough, and like many others in my collection it’s well worn and smells vaguely of mildew and decades-old flour. Its spine is broken and held together with clear tape. Its pages are stuffed with dozens of handwritten recipes on cards as well as a number of others cut from newspapers and magazines. These include a fading recipe for Dandelion Wine written in pencil on a piece of scrap paper and a Campbell’s Soup can label with a recipe for Oven Glazed Chicken. In other words, it’s a cookbook like hundreds of others that could be found in kitchen cupboards in households across the country, and my personal collection includes its own fair share of similarly well-worn, well-loved volumes.

But what makes this particular cookbook remarkable – to me at least – is the inscription in the front cover left by its original owner, Jean Stephenson.[1] Continue reading →

A building by any other name: The politics of renaming and commemoration

August 20, 2013 1 Comment

Lester B. Pearson Building, Ottawa. Photo: “Ottawa Canada May 2010 – Sussex Drive East 21” by Douglas Sprott. Flickr Creative Commons.

The following post was originally featured on April 2 2013.

By Kaitlin Wainwright

Recently, I was lamenting the challenges historians face in the form of changing names of various government organizations in Canada: The Canada Food Board, the Health League of Canada, and Board of Broadcast Governors are now the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, the Canadian Public Health Association, and the CRTC respectively. Researching the past often means paying attention to changes in name and in meaning. It is almost like stepping into a foreign country.

Renaming government organizations and buildings to fulfill a change in mandate – be it political or administrative – is not a new trend, though the current government seems to be doing more of it with less resistance from Canadians. The Toronto Star recently published an article discussing the Government of Canada’s decision to rename various government offices in Ontario and Quebec as part of the efforts to commemorate the bicentennial of the War of 1812. Continue reading →

Carnivorous Walrus as Country Food

August 19, 2013 No Comments

The following post was originally featured on April 30 2013.

By Liza Piper

In November 1948, long-time northerner L.A. Learmonth, engaged in archaeological work near Fort Ross, sent word to the RCMP detachment at Cambridge Bay (Iqaluktuuttiaq) that sixteen Inuit had fallen terribly ill at Creswell Bay on Somerset Island in the summer. Nine of the sixteen had died. At the time of writing, the remaining seven were still seriously ill. Continue reading →

Remixing the Canadian Narrative: Hip Hop as Public History

August 14, 2013 1 Comment

Toronto Rappers Maestro (left), Michie Mee (right)

By Francesca D’Amico

In 1991, Toronto rapper Maestro reminded Canadians that, “we live in this place with racism called C-A-N-A-D-A. I’m watching it decay everyday. We got to hurdle the system, cause hate penetrates multiculturalism.”[1] Referencing the 1990 Oka Crisis, Maestro’s lyrics suggested that Canada’s language of tolerance of diversity was hypocritical and reflected an unequal treatment of racialized people. Over the course of Hip Hop’s history in Canada, practitioners like Maestro have used the culture to re-imagine Canadian history, confront their own sense of exclusion, create a narrative of belonging to the Canadian state, and problematize the state project of multiculturalism. On June 1^st 2013, Performing Diaspora, a flagship project of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples, explored Canadian Hip Hop’s engagement with the Canadian narrative in a one-day public history conference at York University.

Performing Diaspora 2013: The History of Urban Music in Toronto, a landmark academic conference and act of community engagement, brought together the work of budding Canadian Hip Hop scholars, legendary African Canadian Hip Hop artists (Maestro, Michie Mee, Dan-e-o, Motion & Minbender), music producers (Chris Jackson), radio and television personalities (DJ Mel Boogie, DJ X, Master T), journalists (Dalton Higgins & Del Cowie) and fans. The conference was intended to highlight the histories and developments of Hip Hop in Canada, problematize the term ‘Urban Music’ as a discourse that homogenizes and ghettoizes black Canadian music, and discuss the challenges posed by the Canadian Music industry and how it has envisioned, and at times problematically failed to imagine and incorporate Hip Hop as part of its broader popular culture. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Twenty-Seven: Heather Murray and LGBT History

August 12, 2013 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

This Friday, Capital Pride kicks off its ten days of festivities in Ottawa. With film showings, pub nights, and, of course, the parade, the event seems to get bigger and garner more attention each year. This growth has been mirrored in the historical literature on LGBT communities. Over the past couple of years, Active History has contributed to this with a number of terrific articles on LGBT history. These include Mathieu Brulé’s examination of the history of pride, Donald W. McLeod’s look at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, and Krista McCraken’s recent study of LGBT advocacy in the United Church.

One of the works that has pushed the historiography further by taking a different look at LGBT history is Heather Murray’s Not in this Family: Gays and the Meaning of Kinship in Postwar North America. In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Professor Murray about concepts of family, evolving notions of sexuality, and questions of community. We also chat about the idea of private as public and public as political.
Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Twenty-Six: The Black Panthers in Saskatchewan

August 7, 2013 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

I often say that Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan is one of my favourite cities in the country – in part because of the way it has capitalized on Al Capone and the possibility that the legendary Chicago gangster conducted business in the city in the 1920s and 1930s. This is perhaps best exemplified at the Moose Jaw tunnels tour that takes visitors through a day in the life of a bootlegger.

But this is not the only connection between Chicago and Saskatchewan. Only weeks before his death, famed Black Panther Fred Hampton gave a speech at the Regina Campus of the University of Saskatchewan – now the University of Regina. The visit was met by mixed emotions in the community and highlighted the commonalities between the civil rights struggles of African Americans in the United States and First Nations in Canada.
Continue reading →

Open-Letter calling for the release of all relevant documents related to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

August 6, 2013 1 Comment

Last week Adele Perry, a historian at the University of Manitoba, spearheaded an open-letter by historians in Canada calling on the Government of Canada to ensure the release of all records related to residential schools and the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The letter builds on similar letters and demonstrations by First Nations communities, librarians, archivists and museum workers. Over the weekend, it was circulated by e-mail (see signatures below) and we have now uploaded it to change.org in order to include additional names. Click the link if you would like to be included as a signatory.

To:

Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada
Bernard Valcourt, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development
Shelly Glover, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada needs full and timely access to archival records related to the administration and activities of residential schools. The work of the Commission depends on having access to all relevant records held in federal repositories.

As people who study and teach about the past historians realize the importance of archives and the important role they play in scholarship, education, and public debate. I join other historians in calling for the release of all relevant records so that the Commission may, in particular, fulfill its goals related to promoting awareness and public education about residential schools and the creation of a historical record to be made accessible to the public.

The expedited release of these records is required for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada to fulfill its mandate by 2014. As historians, we urge the federal government to release the necessary documents and allow the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to do the important work it was created to do.

Sincerely,

Adele Perry, University of Manitoba

Thomas Peace, Acadia University

Veronica Strong-Boag, University of British Columbia

Mary Jane McCallum, University of Winnipeg

Karen Dubinsky, Queen’s University

Jarvis Brownlie, University of Manitoba

Angus McLaren, University of Victoria

Sherry Farrell Racette, University of Manitoba

Gillian Poulter, Acadia University

Jennifer Bonnell, McMaster University

Tom Nesmith, University of Manitoba

Jim Clifford, University of Saskatchewan

Dan Rueck, York University

Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo

Donald Fyson, Université Laval

Colin Coates, York University

Sneja Gunew, University of British Columbia

ADD YOUR NAME ON CHANGE.ORG

Attention Loblaws Shoppers: Economic nationalism for sale in Canada’s retail history

July 30, 2013 2 Comments

By Katharine Rollwagen

Loblaw Groceterias Limited, store No. 1, 2923 Dundas St. W., Toronto, Ontario, ca. 1919. Postcard. Source: Wikipedia Commons

On July 15, 2013, the chairman of Loblaw, Canada’s largest supermarket retailer, announced the company’s purchase of Shoppers Drug Mart, the largest pharmacy chain in the country. The merger of two of Canada’s most recognizable retail brands was quickly hailed as a mega-deal that will create a “homegrown juggernaut” – a $12.4 billion acquisition that positions the merged company to compete with the growing tide of American-owned competitors such as Walmart and Target. It also keeps Shoppers Drug Mart out of the hands of other American suitors such as Walgreens (as commentators noted here).

As a historian, news of the deal and the rhetoric of economic nationalism that followed brought to mind another merger that reshaped the Canadian retail landscape more than 60 years ago. The marriage in 1952 between Canadian retailer Simpsons and the American department store Sears, Roebuck and Company was justified at the time as an attempt to compete with Canada’s largest retailer – Eaton’s, which garnered nearly as much of the retail market in Canada in the 1930s as Walmart does in the United States today.[1] However, despite Eaton’s dominant size in the Canadian market, it was the American company, Sears, that some of those involved in the deal feared would be seen as the enemy of Canadian enterprise. Continue reading →

Last »