How Do We Reflect on Our Past Without Knowing It?: YWCA Canada, Residential Schools, and Indian Hospitals

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Kristin Burnett and Shannon Stettner

Black and white photo of two teenage girls bent over a table, working with fabric.
Students Nora Arden, left, Dog Rib Indian, and Margaret Gordon, from Aklavik, cut out dress in Home Economics class at Sir John Franklin School, 1959. Credit: G. Lunney / Library and Archives Canada / PA-166313

On Wednesday December 11, 2024, YWCA Canada issued an apology, circulated to its members via email, for the organization’s role in supporting the Residential Schools and Indian Hospital systems in Canada. It was released under the headline “Reflecting on Our Past, Committing to Reconciliation: YWCA Canada’s Apology to Indigenous Communities | Les excuses de YWCA Canada envers les communautés autochtones.” YWCA Canada released the apology in response to a report we wrote for them in 2022 as contracted researchers. The apology included a link to their website with a content warning and another link to a 4-page summary report entitled “The Role of YWCA Canada in Canada’s Residential Schools and the ‘Indian Hospital’ System.” We did not write the summary report that reduced our detailed 85-page research report to little more than a single page of findings. However, YWCA Canada will make the full report available upon request (reconciliation@ywcacanada.ca). We encourage readers to request a copy, bringing it into the public domain.

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1921 Canadian Election – What’s Old is News

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By Sean Graham

This week, I talk with Barbara Messamore, author of Times of Transformation: The 1921 Canadian General Election about one of Canada’s turning point elections. We discuss the post-war economy’s, including tariffs, role in the campaign, how suffrage influenced the election, and the emergence of William Lyon Mackenzie King on the national stage. We also chat about whether the lauded ‘ballot question’ truly exists, how historians and political scientists can differ in their approach to elections, and the legacy of the 1921 campaign.

Historical Headline of the Week

Jamie Bradburn, “Canada’s first female MP and the federal election that changed Ontario,” TVO Today, September 23, 2019.

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Gender Diversity, Organizational Obliviousness, and Queering the Archive in Newfoundland and Labrador

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A Conversation with Sarah Worthman

Sarah Worthman is executive director of the NL Queer Research Initiative (NLQRI), a social science research collective based out of Newfoundland and Labrador. In February 2025, she sat down to talk with series editor Jess Wilton about her work on queer history in the province.

Jess Wilton: What type of work do you do at the NLQRI? 
Sarah Worthman: The bulk of our research has focused on creating a digital queer archive for Newfoundland and Labrador—the first ever. We also do a lot of different outreach events, including a recent Black History Month event where we are prioritizing Black Queer voices.

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Not Really a Field of Dreams: A Baseball Reading List  

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By Owen Griffiths and Andrew Nurse

Another baseball season upon us so it seems like a good time to revisit some of the best baseball books ever written.

No sport is as connected to — or immersed in — history as baseball and no sport can boast as powerful a lineup of literary figures. From Ring Lardner, Roger Angell, and Donald Hall to Jane Leavy, David Halberstram, and Michael Lewis, baseball has always featured an All-Star lineup of writers from various backgrounds.

One of the first baseball games in London, ON, 1877 Tecumseh (now Labatt) Park (Library and Archives Canada)

At its best, baseball history has never been just about the game. It has connected sport history to wider themes of social and cultural formation central to understanding the historical trajectories of communities large and small across Canada, the US, and the world.  

Why read baseball history? Because, we think, it has important and interesting things to say.

Baseball is also fundamentally argumentative. As the season begins, we thought we’d put out a list of our favourite baseball books, but you might think differently.

Feel free to contribute. Do you have a favourite? Or, more than one? History is often a search for missing pieces and untold stories. It is also about taking old stories and looking at them in new ways. Here, we offer a solid lineup but potentially with holes. Feel free to fill in the gaps and let us know why. Play ball!

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Twisted Truth: Understanding Robert Carney’s Legacy and Confronting the Dangers of Denialism

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By Sean Carleton, Crystal Gail Fraser, Jackson Pind

As the 2025 federal election campaign intensifies, some pundits are denigrating Robert Carney, father of Prime Minister Mark Carney, for his role in colonial education for Indigenous Peoples and his past comments defending residential schools.

Robert Carney died in 2009, but some writers—who have previously celebrated him for defending the Catholic Church and residential schooling—are now criticizing his prior comments in hopes they can damage Mark Carney’s political campaign.

Outlets involved in the residential school denialist movement—e.g. Western Standard, Rebel News, Woke Watch Canada etc.—have published articles trying to link Mark Carney, by association, to his father’s residential school denialism. Ironically, many of these pundits claim that residential school denialism does not exist. Yet, in the same breath, some are going so far as to speculate whether the Prime Minister himself might be a residential school denialist because he has said little about his father specifically or truth and reconciliation generally.

Many of the articles present facts about Robert Carney’s connections to schooling systems for Indigenous Peoples; however, they do so in misleading and dishonest ways that twists the complex truth about colonialism and schooling in Canada.  

Even broken clocks are right twice a day; that’s also a fact, but we don’t set our watches to them to tell the time, lest we be misled. 

As historians (two Indigenous, one settler) of schooling and colonialism, we have a responsibility to respond to this issue to guide public dialogue in productive ways.

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Absinthe – What’s Old is News

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By Sean Graham

This week, I talk with Nina Studer, author of The Hour of Absinthe: A Cultural History of France’s Most Notorious Drink. We talk about the drink’s origins, its cultural importance in France, and its consumption by French soldiers. We also chat about the class distinctions associated with the drink, how gender dynamics influenced its perception, and the absinthe’s an in France in 1915.

Historical Headline of the Week

Alice Fisher, “Return of the green fairy: once-notorious absinthe enjoys UK revival,” The Guardian, November 15, 2024.

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Canadian History in Entirely Precedented Times

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By Jacob Richard

“Show patriotism by supporting the Hudson’s Bay Company,” declares a recent letter to the editor in the Vancouver Sun. Lamenting the news that the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) is on the verge of financial collapse, the letter writer argues that there is “nothing more tragic to becoming the 51st state than to see the Hudson’s Bay close for good.” With the US-Canada trade war dominating headlines, if Canadians “really want to show their devoted patriotism and loyalty to our nation … then get down to your local Hudson’s Bay store.”

So, here we are in the middle of a North American trade war, and Canadians are being given a providential task. As the HBC puts one foot in the grave, it appears – for some – as though Canadians will have to resurrect this fallen icon themselves. But what do we owe this “Canadian” behemoth? Does a trade war justify our loyalty to aging imperial icons?

As Robert Engelbert recently argued for Active History, there is nothing really “unprecedented” about the trade war of today. Through tariffs, boycotts, threats, and even a few real invasions, Canada has always held firm with the United States.

The truth is, we are living in entirely precedented times. While the details may differ, poor Canada-US relations are a return to normalcy. It’s our recent cooperation that sticks out as novel, not this current souring of affairs.

Akin to Canada-US relations, the HBC and Indigenous peoples have also been cycling through periods of cooperation and antagonism for over 350 years. A legacy that, long and impactful, is worthy of our attention, especially with the eerily parallel re-introduction of bison back onto the Canadian plains.

Rather than give it life-support, maybe it’s time we say goodbye to the HBC. But before we do, let’s quickly look back at the former precedent of our bison.

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The right to remember the past: Opening Chinese immigration records in Canada’s national archives

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“C.I.30 certificate of Dere Mee Gim.” The Paper Trail collection, UBC Library Rare Books and Special Collections, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Courtesy of the Dar Woon Family. RBSC-ARC-1838-DO-0088.https://rbscarchives.library.ubc.ca/c-i-30-certificate-of-dere-mee-gim

June Chow

The right to know through Canada’s Access to Information Act and the right to personal privacy under the Privacy Act hang in perpetual balance at our national archives. In 2021, an ATIP request submitted to Library and Archives Canada (LAC) sought to open a set of historical government records that remained Restricted within its Chinese Immigration records series, namely, C.I. 44 forms and index cards. The 100th anniversary of the passing of the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act (formally, the Chinese Immigration Act, 1923) was fast approaching; members of the Chinese Canadian community were all too aware of how many memories of this past had already been lost through the generations. This post offers a detailed, firsthand account of how a community worked with its national archives to open racist government records needed to understand and confront this history. It shows how a community’s agency, self-determination, and right to remember its past can move an institution to action.

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Serafim ‘Joe’ Fortes – What’s Old is News

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Sean Graham talks with Ruby Smith Diaz, author of Searching for Serafim: The Life and Legacy of Serafim ‘Joe’ Fortes. They discuss Ruby’s introduction to Serafim’s story, how she went about researching the book, and some of the challenges she faced in the process. They also chat about how Ruby’s artistic background shaped the book’s structure, the importance of telling the whole story, and the impact the broader socio-cultural context had on his life.

Historical Headline of the Week

Ashley Moliere, “Vancouver’s first lifeguard Joe Fortes died 100 years ago. What can be learned from his legacy,” CBC, February 5, 2022.

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The Politics of Tariffs

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Workmen shank aluminum blooms at the Aluminum Company of Canada plantCredit: Ronny Jaques / National Film Board of Canada, Library and Archives, Canada, WRM2814.

Gilbert Gagné

This is the third post in a series on tariffs based on a roundtable organized at Bishop’s University in February 2025. Read the introduction by David Webster here and the first post by Heather McKeen-Edwards here. The second post by Gordon S. Baker appears here.

Everything seems to be about tariffs now; how exposed to potential US tariffs Canada is, and some of the implications and essential issues surrounding this. In terms of history, as Gordon Barker points out in the first post in this series, it used to be the norm that most industrial countries industrialized behind tariffs, and they were more sympathetic to trade liberalization once they felt they were ready to face outside competition. And as Heather McKeen-Edwards has very clearly pointed out, especially following the crash of 1929, increasing tariffs made the crisis even worse. There are calls to immediately renegotiate the free trade agreement with the United States. Yet, with a US administration disregarding the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) with threats of tariffs, this would make no sense.

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