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

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

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

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 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

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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 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

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

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 1st 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

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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

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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 →

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

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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

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By Katharine Rollwagen

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

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 →

Digital History isn’t for everyone

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By Thomas Peace

Most of the work that we do here at ActiveHistory.ca is what I have called elsewhere, passive history. Though there are a number of important exceptions (such as the History Matters lecture series, Approaching the Past, community and institutional partnerships), we generally take a ‘field of dreams approach’ to our online content.  If we post it, readers will come. This has been a successful strategy. Since our beginning in April 2009, the website’s readership has continued to grow (now averaging about 15,000 unique visitors a month).

Active History as an idea, however, is broader than the online forum we have created. At its core, an Active History approach to studying the past seeks to be socially transformative and publically engaging. To accomplish these goals, it is important for our work to resonate both online and in the material world (meatspace for those of you familiar with cyber-jargon). In order to be successful Active Historians, then, we need to understand how these two worlds are connected and what possibilities and pitfalls exist when we share our work in one or the other space.

Digital History isn’t for everyone. Continue reading →

Want to Review a Book for ActiveHistory.ca?

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You can review this interesting and quirky read about the history of the donut in Canada.

Enjoy reading about the experiences of people who lived in the past?  Love learning about the history of places that mean something to you? ActiveHistory.ca is looking for people outside of the academic history community to review history books for us.

Are you not an academic and a regular visitor to our site? Great! Consider writing a book review for us. You will receive a complimentary copy of your book and your review will be added to our book review section. We will set you up with a book that matches your interests or professional expertise.

Or how about this book about the history of the Canadian Rangers by P. Whitney Lackenbauer?

Or how about this book about the history of the Canadian Rangers?

We hope to provide a new perspective on history books not regularly found in academic journals. This approach has been interesting so far, with some excellent reviews of recently published books on Canadian history. Check out Emily Beliveau’s review of Charles Wilkin’s A Wild Ride: A History of the Northwest Mounted Police, 1863-1904, Ruthann LaBlance’s post on Dale Barbour’s Winnipeg Beach: Leisure and Courtship in a Resort Town, 1900–1967, and Kayla Jonas Galvin’s piece on Neil White’s Company Towns: Corporate Order and Community.

 

If you would like to review a book for ActiveHistory.ca, and you are not currently a graduate student or professor in a history department, please contact our book review editor Kaleigh Bradley at bookreviews@activehistory.ca. Tells us a little about yourself and what type of history you are interested in. Happy reading!

 

 

Ten Other Things You Might Not Have Known About 20th-Century Aboriginal History in Canada.

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By Sean Kheraj

2013-07-17 10.53.17

Ian Mosby’s research on nutritional experiments on Aboriginal people in the 1940s and 1950s featured on cover of Toronto Star.

If there was a weekly prize for active historians in Canada, Ian Mosby would have been last week’s winner. Canadian national news media (including print, radio, television, and web) prominently featured Dr. Mosby’s recently published Histoire Sociale/Social History article, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952.”

This paper originated from some documents Mosby found at Library and Archives Canada while working on his dissertation. He discovered evidence of a little-known federal government program of nutritional experiments on starving Aboriginal people. Nutrition scientists conducted a series of experiments on malnourished Aboriginal children and adults for a period between 1942 and 1952. The federal government did not seek informed consent from the more than 1,000 residential school children from provinces across the country who were unwittingly included in this biomedical research.

When news of the publication hit Twitter, national news media outlets quickly picked up on the story and profiled Mosby’s work in numerous publications and broadcasts. Here are a few examples: