Active History

The Need for Speedy History in the Post-War Canadian North

August 27, 2013 No Comments

495px-Spring_in_the_Canadian_Arctic

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 29 2013.

By Ken Coates and Bill Morrison

Things change – but rarely as fast and comprehensively as in the Canadian North. As late as the 1950s, most Indigenous people in the territorial and provincial North lived off the land, traveling seasonally to fish, hunt, trap and gather. The hand of Ottawa had just begun to be felt, gently in the case of Mother’s Allowance, firmly with removing children to residential schools, and more aggressively with the relocation of indigenous people to government-built reserve communities. Continue reading →

Municipal Conflicts of Interest in Canada, Old and New

August 26, 2013 1 Comment

The following post was originally featured on December 4 2012.

By Daniel Ross

He was a controversial mayor from the start. An unabashed populist, he rallied support during his campaigns by promising to cut taxes and reduce waste at city hall. As a result, he won an impressive share of the popular vote. He never denied having links to the city’s business and development community—he ran a successful business himself—and his policies certainly reflected that. From early on, accusations of bending the rules shadowed his career. But it was a legal challenge from an ordinary citizen alleging a conflict of interest that led to him losing his job.

Rob Ford and William Hawrelak. Sources: City of Toronto; City of Edmonton Archives, EA-10-1600

That man’s name was William Hawrelak, mayor of Edmonton from 1951-59, 1963-65, and 1974-75. His story is remarkable, and not just because of its superficial similarities to that of recently deposed Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Few Canadian politicians have managed to combine success and failure as dramatically as he did in his 30-year career in public office. But in another way, his tale, like Ford’s, is nothing new. Concern over politicians using public office for private benefit has often dogged local politics in Canada, and one result has been strict conflict of interest law.

In this post I’d like to take a look at Rob Ford’s removal from office in light of a short history of municipal conflict of interest in Canada. It turns out there is nothing unprecedented about the penalty he faces, or the populist way he and his supporters have responded to his removal. Continue reading →

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

August 23, 2013 2 Comments

Washington Redskins logo. Source: Wikipedia.

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

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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 →

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