Accountability for the Roman Catholic Church’s Role in the Residential School System: Urgent Actions Needed Immediately

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By Carling Beninger

Trigger Warning: This article discusses the residential school system and the Roman Catholic Church. The National Residential School Crisis Line is 1-866-925-4419.

In the 1880s, the Canadian federal government created the residential school system in an attempt to assimilate Indigenous children and destroy their Indigenous culture and traditions through cultural genocide. Residential schools were run by Christian churches, with the Roman Catholic Church operating 60% of the institutions. The last residential school closed in 1996.

Indigenous children who attended these institutions were forcibly taken from their families and communities and faced horrible living conditions, trauma, and abuse. Many Indigenous children were subjected to physical and sexual abuse. In 2008 Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for Canada’s role in the residential school system and recognized that “the consequences of the Indian Residential Schools policy were profoundly negative and that this policy has had a lasting and damaging impact on Aboriginal culture, heritage and language.” In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), held from 2008-2015, released its final report that included 94 Calls to Action, which included several calls directed towards the churches. To date, only 10 of the TRC Calls to Action have been completed.

The Roman Catholic Church’s response to its role in the residential school system continues to be harmfully insufficient. TRC Call to Action 58 calls for the Pope to apologize, which has yet to occur. The Roman Catholic Church continues to withhold archival records that it was legally required to provide to the TRC. Additionally, Roman Catholic entities, comprised of 47 Catholic defendants, did not paid full compensation as was determined by the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), a comprehensive response to the residential school legacy that included compensation to survivors, establishment of the TRC, and commemoration and healing initiatives. Continue reading →

Anti-Racism and Archival Description Work

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by Krista McCracken

In May as part of the Archives Association of Ontario conference I was able to participate in a workshop on Anti-Oppressive Description and Re-Description Workshop. Facilitated by Aaron Hope, Catherine Falls, Renee Saucier, and Danielle Robichaud, this workshop discussed records which contain racist, sexist or other discriminatory content and potential ways archivists can call out problematic materials in archives.

I’m really grateful for the space this workshop provided to dig into archival challenges and share ongoing work around re-description. In archival practice typically archival materials are only described once. This means that records researchers encounter may have been described decades ago by a staff member. Language changes and how we interact with and interpret records can also change. Archival re-description has become a more common practice.

Likewise, there has been a growing practice of archivists calling out racism in their records and acknowledging the potential harm of historical racist language. This sometimes looks like including content warnings about racial slurs, notes about blackface, or similar contextual notes. It can also look like new descriptive notes or new titles being added to existing records, to fill in contextual information that may have been missing from the original description. For example, records that were labeled as “John Smith and Wife” may have a new description added reading “John Smith and Jane Smith.”  Continue reading →

Remember/Resist/Redraw #30: Intergenerational Resistance in Vancouver’s Chinatown

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The Graphic History Collective recently released RRR #30 by erica hiroko isomura and Kaitlyn Fung that highlights intergenerational resistance and community organizing in Vancouver’s Chinatown. In particular, the poster emphasizes the role of women in preventing the building of a freeway through the community in the 1960s as well as ongoing efforts to resist displacement and gentrification.

We hope that Remember | Resist | Redraw encourages people to critically examine history in ways that can fuel our radical imaginations and support struggles for social change. Learn more about how you can support the project on our website, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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History Slam 182: Shelter

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By Sean Graham

Shelter has its World Premiere tonight as part of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival. If you’re in Ontario, you can buy tickets to the virtual screening here.

In the decade following the Second World War, the population of Toronto doubled, in large part because of a steady influx of immigrants. By 1971, the population doubled again to over 2 million, causing the city to expand geographically as the agricultural fields that surrounded the downtown core became part of the urban sprawl. Central to this was the expansion of the subway, near which developers to built high-rises, thus allowing more people to live within walking distance of mass transit. With immigrants from around the world looking for housing on arrival in Canada, these communities were diverse and held up as examples of Canada’s multiculturalism policy put forth by the Pierre Trudeau government.

While the housing boom created communities, the people behind the new developments created a community of their own. Many Toronto developers at this time were Jewish immigrants. Some had escaped anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia while others were Holocaust survivors and those experiences shaped their careers in real estate development as they actively sought to create welcoming, loving communities.

This is the subject of Ron Chapman’s terrific new documentary Shelter. Using first hand accounts, it explores the lived experiences of a prominent group of Toronto real estate developers. It discusses anti-Semitism in Canada and Toronto before delving into the backgrounds of the people who helped shape the city. These include harrowing details of surviving concentration camps and escaping Nazi forces in Poland, which serve as powerful context to their later careers in Toronto. As they tell their stories, the viewer can see how real life experiences influence careers and, perhaps just as importantly, one’s perception of their professional life. As real estate developer and Holocaust survivor Mendel Tenenbaum says in the film, “I think I had the best life. And I also think I had the worst life that anyone can have.”

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Ron Chapman about the film. We discuss the origins of the project, the decision to go into detail about anti-Semitism in Europe, and immigration following the Second World War. We also chat about the development of communities, how personal experience shapes professional pursuits, and multiculturalism in Toronto.

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Being a Professor is Just a Job

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David Calverley

I don’t want my comments to come across as insensitive or uncaring towards people struggling to get a university position. I attended the first CHA panel about precarity in the historical profession. I felt a lot of sympathy for those who outlined their anger and disappointment with either not obtaining a full-time academic position or the stress they felt as they worked to find academic employment. I’m also not criticizing the many valuable suggestions put forth by Steven High in his earlier article.

I’ve followed the discussions around academic employment—specifically the lack of opportunities—for many years. I’ve read numerous essays written by people who obtained their doctoral degrees, but can’t find a job in their field. These essays are often personal. So, in that spirit, I want to relate my experience with precarity and a lesson I learned twenty years ago: Being a professor is just a job.

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Black Identity and the Great War: History from the Bottom Up

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by Roger P Nason

About a dozen years ago, I began researching community identity. I was expanding on questions I asked as an historian and trained archivist who was studying the settlement of St. Andrews, New Brunswick (NB) after the American Revolution. While most tend to focus on military campaigns, political leaders, and elites, I wanted to figure out the identities and motivations of rank-and-file refugees who were fleeing the conflict. What compelled them to settle in this new colony?

I began asking these sorts of new questions and found myself exampling “history from the bottom up.”

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How a Belfast Immigrant to Canada Came to Testify Before the Undercover Policing Inquiry in the UK

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Ernie Tate and his truck, late 1950s.

Bryan D. Palmer

In the summer of 1955, Ernest (Ernie) Tate, a young immigrant from Belfast, wandered into the “Toronto Labour Bookstore” on Yonge Street north of Wellesley.

The proprietor of the bookshop was Ross Dowson, a founder of the small Canadian Trotskyist movement. It espoused the ideas of Marx and Lenin, but was critical of the Soviet Union and what Stalin had done as its leader from the 1920s until his death in 1953. Dowson introduced Tate to the idea of socialist revolution and the organizations that claimed they could bring it about.

Tate’s education, terminated in Belfast when he left school before the age of 14, now began in earnest in Toronto.

A quick study, Tate soon graduated at the top of his class, a seasoned Marxist, joining the small political current that would eventually become the League for Socialist Action (LSA). He then travelled to New York to work with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), and spent time at its educational centre in New Jersey, the Mountain Spring Camp, before coming back to Toronto.

When he wasn’t spray painting “Ban the Bomb” on a government-built Shelter near Ontario’s provincial legislature, Tate might be facing an “obstruction” charge arising out of a picket line scuffle. A lot of his time was taken up with organizing support for bodies like the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He also traveled the country, living out of a truck and selling revolutionary pamphlets and Marxist texts to pay for his meals.

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History Slam 181: Always Pack a Candle

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By Sean Graham

I’m one who believes that, at its core, history is about storytelling. Historians tell the stories of those who came before – and the best historians do so in a way that is both engaging and meaningful to the audience. For some, that has included telling their own stories and using their life experiences to illuminate larger trends and offer a window into specific times and places.

That is certainly the case with Marion McKinnon Crook‘s new book Always Pack a Candle: A Nurse in the Cariboo-Chilcotin. The book follows Marion in her first job after graduating university as a travelling nurse in northern British Columbia. Responsible for a 9,300-square kilometre area, Crook had to travel between communities, often navigating treacherous roads and struggling against a health system that allowed too many people to fall through the cracks. In telling her story, Crook highlights how she learned that she didn’t know everything, how she found systemic injustice, and how she managed her relationship with the provincial bureaucracy. A writer with many fiction titles to her name, Crook effectively employs a literary style that kept me engaged though the entire memoir.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Marion McKinnon Crook about the book. We talk about her motivation for telling her story, her background in nursing, and the practical challenges of public health work. We also chat about the realities of working in such a vast area, systemic injustice in the health system, and what the challenges of dealing with skeptics of medical advancements in the 1960s can tell us about today.

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The Local Spaces of National Museums

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by Carly Ciufo

Thomas is right: Community is a tricky concept.

I want to talk about finding community at the national level. It’s neither quite as small as a family unit nor as large as some broader cosmopolitan imagining of shared humanity, but it is nevertheless a crucial element of museum building in the twenty-first century. Community is an especially tricky thing if national museums are assumed to be too big to pay attention to the local surroundings where they are built.

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“I am totally shocked that something of this sort could happen in Canada”: Vancouver’s Gastown Riot Fifty Years Later

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Undercover Vancouver police officers arresting a “long hair.” Vancouver Police Museum & Archives P00881.

Michael Boudreau

Fifty years ago, on Saturday, 7 August 1971, Vancouver’s Gastown district erupted into chaos as police, some on horse-back and many wielding batons, waded into a throng of “hippies” who had gathered for the Gastown Smoke-In & Street Jamboree. Approximately 2000 people attended the Smoke-In to call for the legalization of marijuana. According to the Georgia Straight, Vancouver’s first “underground” newspaper, the Smoke-In was intended to be a “peaceful…, and joyous high-energy event aimed at making the marijuana laws irrelevant.”[i] Many of the young people who had attended the Jamboree also did so to publicly denounce “Operation Dustpan” which the Vancouver police had launched in July. The focus of Operation Dustpan was Gastown, the so-called “soft-drug capital” of Canada, and the “long hairs” (hippies) who called it home. This was an effort by the police to clean up the city’s drug and hippie problem. But critics argued that Operation Dustpan, and the arrests for drug possession and loitering that resulted from it, amounted to police harassment and intimidation. While the Smoke-In did not immediately lead to a reform of Canada’s drug laws (that would have to wait until 2018, when cannabis was legalized), it was an important moment in the debate over the efficacy of criminalizing weed. Moreover, some of the police tactics that were used to suppress this “riot” are still utilized by some police forces, despite calls, then and now, for their curtailment, if not elimination.

Gastown was named after Gassy Jack Deighton who opened Vancouver’s first saloon in the late 1860s. It is located in the city’s downtown core (bordered by Water, Alexander, Powell, and Carrall streets) and in the late 1960s and early 1970s Gastown was home to an eclectic mix of restaurants and bars that catered to middle-class residents and tourists, alongside “freak bars” (the Alcazar) and groovy stores like Junior Jelly Beans for Jeans. Gastown attracted some of Canada’s “disaffected” youth who had travelled to the west coast in search of new experiences and employment. While some may have found Gastown to be culturally vibrant, many soon joined the ranks of the unemployed, homeless, and marginalized (including Indigenous peoples) who struggled to eke out a living in Gastown. The area remains a trendy tourism destination, while still grappling with poverty, which is most evident a few blocks away in the Downtown Eastside.

In the years immediately prior to the Gastown riot, young people had staged demonstrations against what they believed to be the “growing power of Fascism” in Vancouver. Continue reading →