Active History

Canada and the Right to Food

March 28, 2013 No Comments

Olivier de Schutter

By David Webster

“More lies from Amnesty International!” screamed a headline in a Kenyan newspaper, back in the 1990s. When assailed for their human rights records, the unimaginative response of many governments has been to attack the messenger. If Amnesty International criticizes a repressive regime, the regime tends to shout back that Amnesty is being unfair, dishonest, and even imperialist.

That’s a pattern now being followed by a regime that doesn’t like to think of itself as repressive: the government of Canada.

Ottawa failed in its bid to win a UN Security Council seat in 2010, mostly through its own poor planning and clumsy lurches away from rights-promoting policies. Ever since then, the Harper government has taken a perverse pleasure in attacking the United Nations as a dictators’ club at worst, a gang of dictator-coddlers at best.

So it was odd to see the vitriol hurled at the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, when he visited Canada last year as part of his normal duties. On March 4, de Schutter released his report on Canada as part of this year’s UN Human Rights Council preparations. The Canadian government response, once again, was to attack the messenger and deny that Canada had anything to learn on human rights. In other words, the response was much the same as the response normally given by repressive regimes, from Syria to Cuba. Continue reading →

The 300th Anniversary of the Treaty of Utrecht and the Generosity of Governments

March 27, 2013 1 Comment

By Gregory Kennedy

I know what you are thinking. Not another commemoration of some dusty old treaty or some gruesome colonial war! Still, since both Thomas Mulcair and Thomas Peace called our attention to the 250^th Anniversary of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 , it seems only fair that the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 should get its due. Continue reading →

Strangely ahistoric sensibilities at the American Museum of Natural History

March 26, 2013 3 Comments

Design of the American Museum of Natural history, 1911

By Jon Weier

When you visit New York City in late January you find yourself avoiding some of the activities that would characterize a spring or summer visit. Strolls in Central Park, though beautiful, lose some of their allure on a windy and cold afternoon. Walking from Midtown to the Lower East Side for dinner is no longer worth the effort. And visiting the Saturday morning farmer’s market at Union Square takes commitment. What a cold Saturday afternoon does lend itself to, especially for historians like myself, is visiting the American Museum of Natural History. Lucky for me, my wife agreed to go with me.

My favourite museums had always been ones which were willing to use different materials and tools, and draw from a broad variety of disciplines to tell the history of a country, a region, a people, or a theme. Three museums that come to mind are the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg, the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria and the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, all of which tell interesting and complicated histories well, while respecting those whose history they explore. While I wasn’t expecting that exact experience at the American Museum of Natural History, I was expecting something more than the very simplistic, exploitative and static history that we encountered. Continue reading →

History Wars: Terms of debate

March 25, 2013 7 Comments

By Thomas Peace

Last month, Terry Glavin wrote a syndicated op-ed piece that appeared in The Ottawa Citizen and Vancouver’s The Province, delivering a strongly worded dismissal of the historical profession in Canada. Historians and others have responded elsewhere to his indictment of the profession (see here, here and here). Today, I want to respond to the broader ideas that inform his argument.

Glavin’s essay mostly parrots a series of arguments that have been lobbed at historians since the profession began to change its focus in the 1970s and 1980s. These ideas are quite resilient. Despite their regular application (mostly in the media), his accusations are neither fair nor reflective of current historical practice and broader professional interpretations of Canada’s past. More importantly, their use is a distraction from the key issues at stake. Continue reading →

Connecting African Diasporic Peoples Through Documentary Film and Storytelling

March 21, 2013 1 Comment

By Michele A. Johnson, Funke Aladejebi & Francesca D’Amico

On February 4^th a group of academics, students and community members came together to explore the intersection of the past and the present in making African identities in the Americas. The “Contemporary Griot” event, organized by the Performing Diaspora project, combined a public lecture, documentary screenings, discussions and performances. As you will read below, the event was a profoundly moving experience for many of the undergraduate students in attendance.

Over the past four years, Performing Diaspora has worked to showcase the experiences of Africans and their descendants in the Americas through performances, including art, dance, and music. This public history project has grown out of the major research project entitled “Slavery, Memory and Citizenship” which is housed in York University’s Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples. Among other things, Performing Diaspora explores the ways in which Africans understand “belonging” and “citizenship” in Africa and the African Diaspora. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode Fifteen: Placing Memory

March 20, 2013 1 Comment

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

By Sean Graham

Over the past few months, the City of Ottawa has started to make progress on its redevelopment of Lansdowne Park. The plans new condos, retail outlets, and major renovations to Frank Claire Stadium in order to welcome a CFL franchise to the capital next spring. The project has been hotly contested, however, with the Friends of Lansdowne taking the city to court over the city’s handling of the bidding process. With construction now underway, opponents see the site as a sign of government abuse and fiscal irresponsibility. For supporters of the plan, however, construction has transformed Lansdowne to a place that signifies progress and revitalization. Regardless of one’s position on the project, Lansdowne is the perfect example of how the meaning associated with places is constantly changing and being reinterpreted.

In this episode of the History Slam I talk with Jim Opp and John C. Walsh of Carleton University about their work Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada. What I found particularly interesting about the book was how the ideas and concepts are at work in our everyday lives – oftentimes without us being completely conscious of them. We touch on this in the episode and also chat about the meaning of place, the development of collective memory, and what it’s like to collaborate on a major project.

Sean Graham is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa where he is currently working on a project that examines the early years of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He has previously studied at Nipissing University, the University of the West Indies, and the University of Regina and like any red-blooded Canadian his ultimate dream is to be a curling champion while living on a diet of beer and poutine.

Toronto Public Library: A Century of Service to Canada’s Military Veterans, 1914-2014

March 19, 2013 No Comments

“Nurse and veteran sharing some good books” Image SBA-GRD-08-04-18-142 provided by Sunnybrook Archives, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.

By Khayla Buhler and Phil Gold

Next year we begin to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the beginning of World War I. At the same time we can also celebrate the centennial anniversary of services provided by the Toronto Public Library to Canada’s military veterans. In 1914, the Toronto Public Library’s (TPL) Board of Trustees established a system of services provided by staff from the High Park Branch to support the needs of military personnel at the Canadian National Exhibition training camp. With the end of World War One, TPL extended services from the CNE to the Toronto Military Orthopaedic Hospital, affectionately called The Christie Street Hospital.

During the early 1940s, the Department of Veterans Affairs began to realize the inadequacy of the Christie Street hospital, as it was unable to serve the needs of both the aging veterans of the First World War and those who were now returning from the battlefields of the Second World War. Alice Kilgour had donated the Sunnybrook Estate to the City of Toronto in 1928 for use as a public park in memory of her husband Major Joseph Kilgour. With the consent of the Kilgour family, in 1943 the City of Toronto transferred Sunnybrook Park to the Government of Canada for the purpose of building a hospital dedicated to the care of Canadian veterans. Continue reading →

Podcast: “Public Spectacles of Multiculturalism: Toronto Before Trudeau” by Franca Iacovetta

March 18, 2013 No Comments

Franca Iacovetta

Did Torontonians accept different ethnic cultures before the federal government initiated the road towards “official multiculturalism” during the early 1970s? If so, why? Where can we find examples?

Award-winning historian Franca Iacovetta explored these questions in front of a public audience at the Toronto Public Library’s Dufferin/St. Clair Branch on February 28^th as part of the 2013 History Matters lecture series. “Public Spectacles of Multiculturalism: Toronto Before Trudeau” examined the International Institute Movement of Toronto’s use of public spectacle and pageantry to promote cultural pluralism in a pre-multicultural Toronto. Her lecture – filled with fascinating photographs of dress, craftwork, food, and other aspects of ethnic culture – continued research she published in “Immigrant Gifts, Canadian Treasures, and Spectacles of Pluralism: The International Institute of Toronto in North American Context, 1950s-70s,” (Journal of American Ethnic History; Fall 2011). Iacovetta is currently working on a book on the subject.

Click here to listen to a podcast of the talk.

The next talk in the 2013 History Matters series takes place at the Maria A. Shchuka Branch of the Toronto Public Library on March 27th from 6:30-8pm. PhD candidate Funké Aladejebi (York University) will relate the compelling story of how black organizations in Toronto used education to combat racism by making connections to “Africa” and adapting the language of Black Power to a Canadian experience. Click here for more information on this and other talks in the series.

The Politics of Place: Local History and the Megaproject

March 14, 2013 1 Comment

By Pete Anderson

Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environment, and the Everyday, 1953-2003
Joy Parr
University of British Columbia Press
Paperback, 304 pages, $32.95

Sensing_Changes_300
Just as all politics can be viewed as local, so, too, can history. Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003 (UBC Press, 2010) explores local reactions to a series of “megaprojects,” with a focus on how the residents and workers involved adapted to changing environments, technologies, and everyday experiences often outside of their control. Through seven diverse episodes—ranging from the creation of CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick, the building of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in eastern Ontario, the flooding of the Arrow Lakes in British Columbia, three aspects of Canada’s nuclear program, and the local and provincial response to the e.coli outbreak in Walkerton, Ontario in 2001—Parr seeks to reclaim the vital importance of local, embodied experience in historical research and writing, and, by extension, in political and policy decision-making processes.

Each story in Sensing Changes is accompanied by an online “new media” package prepared by Jon van der Veen (see http://megaprojects.uwo.ca), which also includes an additional section on Asbestos, Quebec). The episodic nature of the work allows for a more casual reading, as each event is self-contained and can be easily read in a sitting, though the multi-media package is not as well integrated into the work as it could be. Nonetheless, the oral histories that inform the text and the accompanying multimedia package provide Parr’s narrative with a sense of place not always found in purely textual sources and narratives. It also shows the importance of taking local stories seriously and of policy makers being aware of the effects that their decisions have on the well-being, habits, and lived experience of individuals and communities.

While Parr introduces her intellectual predecessors from a host of disciplines and a number of tightly defined academic words in her introduction, three closely related concepts stand out as important for understanding her book as a whole: “embodied knowledge”; habitat; and the local. Embodied knowledge refers to the fact that as physical beings our “minds are embodied,” and that “doing can organize knowing: that logic can be founded in practice” (8). Parr argues that we come to know our world not only through abstract thought, but also by acting in and upon our environments. Our actions are possible because we have bodies that exist in the physical world and are capable of knowing that world through our sensory perceptions. The human body, then, becomes the fundamental archive of historical experience that is researchable through written and oral accounts of lived experience. Continue reading →

“A Proud Canadian” or a Canadian too proud? Understanding Stompin’ Tom’s nationalism

March 12, 2013 12 Comments

Image from Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant (http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=60)

By Kaitlin Wainwright

Last Wednesday, Canada lost its “national troubadour”, an “icon”, and “one of [its] most prolific and well-known country and folk singers”; a man who ranked 13th in CBC’s The Greatest Canadian list. Stompin’ Tom Connors is credited with writing three hundred songs, many of which are loudly and proudly Canadian. Upon his death, online tributes poured in from the CBC, politicians of all stripes, and even Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s fake Twitter account. NDP Members of Parliament paid tribute to Stompin’ Tom outside the House of Commons with their rendition of “Bud the Spud”. The Globe and Mail suggested that the mainstream media “patronized him as a novelty singer” and questioned whether he was given enough attention during his life. Everyone seemed to have a different story of their experience with Stompin’ Tom, but they were all general positive and “pro-Canadian”.

Let me tell you my Stompin’ Tom story: I grew up in a non-musical family. My earliest experience of his music was when I was twenty, in a second-year Canadian history course, where Big Joe Mufferaw and the NFB’s Log Drivers’ Waltz were used as part of lessons on logging. The lens that I was given to look at him through was one of myth and memory, and the building of nationhood. I never made an emotional connection with his music, and in his death my recollection of his life’s work is maybe, therefore, more easily critical in nature. Continue reading →

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