Cranes

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This is part of an ongoing series of reflections from the Manitoulin Island Summer Historical Institute (MISHI)

By Philip Girard

During MISHI 2019 I stayed in Gore Bay and drove to M’Chigeeng each day. While making the drive on the first day, and every day thereafter, I noticed a half-dozen large stork-like birds in a meadow along the way. I slowed down and was able to identify them as sandhill cranes from their noticeable red cap.

A sandhill crane

These birds I knew from my youth, when I would occasionally see them flying over our farm in Kent County, southwestern Ontario. There was no mistaking them since, aside from blue herons, they were the largest bird to be seen in our skies. I seldom got to see them up close because they did not remain in our area, which was heavily cultivated and did not offer suitable nesting sites. Certainly I was never as close to them as those days going back and forth to M’Chigeeng, when I would sometimes stop the car and get out to watch them.

The Crane Doodem from the Great Peace of Montreal, 1701.

From Heidi Bohaker and Al Corbiere’s work I knew that the crane doodem was often to be found on colonial-era documents, and that Anishinaabe leaders were often drawn from the crane clan. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode 141: Golda

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By Sean Graham

Golda will begin its theatrical run at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema in Toronto on January 3. You can watch the trailer here and find showtimes here.

In March, 1969, a then 70-year old Golda Meir came out of retirement to serve as Israeli Prime Minister following the sudden death of Levi Eshkol. The country’s first female Prime Minister, Meir was dubbed the ‘Iron Lady’ of the Middle East. During her five years in office, Israel experienced several events that continue to influence public opinion and policy, including the Munich Massacre during the 1972 Olympics and the Yom Kippur War in October 1974. As a Canadian historian, I haven’t read extensively about Meir’s tenure, but whenever it has come up, it has generally been presented in a positive light. It was only recently that I learned that her legacy has been the subject of much debate.

That’s why I was so intrigued by the new documentary Golda, which explores Meir’s life and career. Starting with previously unseen footage from a mid-1970s television interview, the film delves into Meir’s political ambitions, worldview, and approach to the major issues she confronted during her time as Prime Minister. In doing so, it provides ample space for both her critics and supporters to present their rather divergent perspectives on her time in office. Making effective use of archival footage and contemporary interviews, the film allows the viewer to come to their own conclusions about Meir while situating her, her detractors, and her allies within the context of the time. What is most striking about the film is the lengths it goes to humanize all its characters. It is not interested in lauding or demonizing, but rather telling the story of this contentious period from a human perspective.

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Udi Nir, one of the directors of Golda. We talk about the film’s point of view, the discovery of the previously unseen footage, and collecting first-hand accounts. We also chat about Meir’s legacy and the very different reactions of audiences in Israel and the United States.

Continue reading →

Staging History

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By Craig Heron

Historians have become increasingly attuned to the role of performance in history. Many of us have written about the pomp and pageantry of the powerful, the theatre of the high courts, the processions of urban respectability, the rituals of resistance among the poor and powerless. We have been much more reticent, however, about using theatre to present the history that engages us. The theatrical world is full of historical dramas, but rarely have historians penned them. We mostly keep our distance from the pageants of historical re-enactment and the quieter role-playing of costumed staff in historic houses or forts. Recently, I made a leap into writing short plays as part of a public-history project that I’m involved in, and I’d like to share some observations about the process of doing history through theatre.

Holly Kirkconnell and Ginny Thomson in The Labour of Little Of Little Ones

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Tenth Anniversary Repost – The Police Records of a Bath Raid Found-In: Excluded from Bill C-66

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Active History is celebrating its tenth anniversary! As part of our anniversary celebrations we are sharing glimpses of how Active History developed and showcasing our favourite and most popular posts from the past ten years. Today is our last re-post and we’re looking back at 2018.

In 2018 we launched the Beyond the Lecture series (still open to submissions!) and we published two open access ebooks, Confronting Canadian Migration History and Beyond The Lecture: Innovations in Teaching Canadian History. Also in 2018, Sean Graham launched the new History Chats podcast channel which features a number of fantastic recorded talks. In 2018 also we hosted a number of series including: Plains Injustice, The Spanish Flu,and Lost Stories. 

It was tough picking a post to reshare from 2018 – there were a number of really great, thoughtful, and timely posts. We ultimately decided on re-sharing Tom Hooper’s “The Police Records of a Bath Raid Found-In: Excluded from Bill C-66.”

Tom Hooper

For more than 25 years, Ron Rosenes* has been an activist on issues related to HIV/AIDS. In 2007, he was given the Canadian AIDS Society Leadership Award. In 2012, Carleton University awarded him an honorary doctorate. He is a member of the Order of Canada.

Despite this impressive resume of advocacy, the Toronto Police Service has a file on him. In the late evening of February 5th, 1981, he was sitting alone in his room at the Romans II Health and Recreation Spa, one of the city’s gay bathhouses. 200 police raided the Romans and three other similar establishments, arresting 306 men, Rosenes included. He fought the charges in court, but was guilty of being found in a common bawdy house.

This is a historical injustice. In 2016, Toronto’s Chief of Police issued a statement of regret for the raids. In November 2017, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a formal apology to the LGBTQ2+ community in the House of Commons. He stated that discrimination “was quickly codified in criminal offenses like ‘buggery,’ ‘gross indecency’, and bawdy house provisions. Bathhouses were raided, people were entrapped by police.” On the same day as Trudeau’s apology, the government introduced Bill C-66, which would create a legislative process to expunge the records of certain Criminal Code convictions that have been defined as “historically unjust.” Continue reading →

The Active History of Canada’s First World War: A Thematic Guide

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By Sarah Glassford and Nathan Smith

The “Canada’s First World War” series launched on ActiveHistory.ca with a Call for Blog Posts, published on 4 August 2014. It concluded in the Fall of 2019, with a total of 78 posts, including this post. The series editors during this five-year run were: Mary Chaktsiris, Sarah Glassford, Christopher Schulz, Nathan Smith, and Jonathan Weier. This final contribution is a thematic guide to the series in the form of a bibliography organized by subject. There are thirty subjects in total, a breadth difficult to achieve in a traditionally published collection, and indicative of the war’s relevance to historians working in diverse fields.

Also included are references to the series webpage at Active History, and to two pre-series posts which, in retrospect, seem like a prelude to the series. The bibliography’s format follows the Chicago Style for newspaper or magazine articles online. Additionally, we offer readers a larger “Bibliographic Resource” that organizes series posts chronologically, by author, and by subject.

  • Sarah Glassford and Nathan Smith, “The Active History of Canada’s First World War: A Bibliographic Resource,” ca, Published 6 December 2019.

We hope our resource will be useful to our contributors, readers, and historians working in classrooms, and elsewhere. Researchers and students may also find that the resource offers a user-friendly guide to informative pieces on a wide-range of topics.

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Historical Pedagogies & the Colonial Past at Huron University College – Part II

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On October 24, 2019, Active History commenced a series on education “after” residential schools with an article written by Clinton Debogorski, Magdalena Milosz, Martha Walls and Karen Bridget Murray. The series is open-ended. Active History welcomes additional contributions on related themes. This is the second part of a two-part reflection from Huron University College at Western University.

By Amy Bell, Scott Cameron, and Thomas Peace

Huron University College is London, Ontario’s oldest post-secondary institution. The college was founded in 1863 to train priests and missionaries to evangelize throughout the Lower Great Lakes.

Over the course of its history, the college has had two locations, one on either side of Deshkan Ziibii, or Thames River, the waterway which today runs through the heart of London. This river has been (and remains for the latter three) of central importance for Attawandaron, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Lenni-Lenape Peoples; a homeland where relationships between nations have been and (are) governed by the Dish with One Spoon Treaty, the 1796 London Township Treaty, and the 1822 Longwoods Treaty. As such, Huron has a deep and complex history interacting with Chippewa of the Thames, Aamjiwnaang, and Bkejwanong First Nations as well as the Haudenosaunee at Oneida of the Thames and Six Nations of the Grand River.

Huron University College played an active transitional role in normalizing a settler presence on Indigenous lands. For much of its history, the church and the college were tightly interconnected: sharing a name, similar heraldry, common resources, staff, institutional structures, and a focus on evangelizing First Peoples.

Today at Huron, there are few reminders or institutional references to Huron’s complex missionary past, its close connection with the Mohawk Institute or Shingwauk Residential School, or even of the Indigenous students who attended the college and went on to become priests and missionaries themselves.

Huron students were introduced to this material in two upper-year classes and over two academic years (2015-6 and 2016-7). Continue reading →

The Murder of Constable David Dunmore & the Long Debate over whether to Ban ‘Military-Style’ Rifles

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By Blake Brown

In the recent federal election campaign, the Liberal Party proposed banning ‘military-style’ semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15.[1] Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, now leading a minority government, will need to decide whether to fulfill this promise in the face of strong opposition from the Conservative Party and gun-owner advocacy groups.

Limiting the availability of such firearms is not new idea. Police and some politicians first began raising concerns with the sale of semi-automatic rifles in the 1970s. However, legislators have been reluctant to ban such guns despite their use in several infamous shootings, including the 1989 shooting at Montreal’s École Polytechnique (which occurred 30 years ago Friday), the murder of three RCMP in Moncton in 2014, and the 2017 Quebec mosque shooting. As a result, while some such guns are now prohibited, many others are classified as ‘non-restricted’ or ‘restricted’ firearms.

The reaction to a 1984 police murder involving a semi-automatic rifle highlights the typical Canadian legislative response to violence committed with such guns: piecemeal reform designed to avoid angering firearm owners. Continue reading →

Tenth Anniversary Repost – She’s Hot: Female Sessional Instructors, Gender Bais, and Student Evaluations

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Active History is celebrating its tenth anniversary! As part of our anniversary celebrations we are sharing glimpses of how Active History developed and showcasing our favourite and most popular posts from the past ten years. 

Today we are revisiting 2017 which included a number of great series including: Women’s Social and Political Activism in the Canadian West, Deconstructing Children’s Books, Archives and Archival Labour, History Curriculum, and Income Tax Centenary. 

We also started our partnership with the Graphic History Collective and their Remember/Resist/Redraw project and we co-sponsored the Beyond 150: Telling Our Stories Twitter conference.

In 2017 one of our most popular posts was Andrea Eidinger’s “She’s Hot: Female Sessional Instructors, Gender Bias, and Student Evaluations.” To date, this post has been viewed 53,251 times, making it our second most popular post of all time – only surpassed by Crystal Fraser and Sara Komarnisky’s 150 Acts of Reconciliation for the Last 150 Days of Canada’s 150 which also appeared in 2017.

Girl Sitting at Desk

Girl sitting at desk flipping through textbook pages at Putnam School. 1961. Gar Lunney. Canada. National Film Board of Canada. Photothèque. Library and Archives Canada, e010976007. CC by 2.0. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lac-bac/7797311412/

by Andrea Eidinger [1]

I would like to acknowledge and thank the many female instructors who got in touch with me over the past week, not only for their bravery in sharing their experiences with me, but for their strength in continuing in their dedication to the field of history and education. I am profoundly grateful and honoured.

“I think your feminist stances are slightly overcorrecting reality. I’m sure minorities had a harsher experience than women, ESPECIALLY today, a point you seem to overlook. You’re a really nice person though.”

That comment comes from my student evaluations from one of the first courses I ever taught, back when I was still a graduate student. At the time that I read that, I burst out laughing. I mean really, how else can you react to that kind of statement? But many courses and student evaluations later, I am starting to think that this is reflective of a larger problem in the world of academia, and history in particular, with respect to female sessional instructors and course evaluations.

Over the course of the past year or so, there have been a number of studies that have emerged detailing the gender bias against female instructors in student evaluations.  According to one study, male professors routinely ranked higher than female professors in many areas. [2] For instance, male professors received scores in the area of promptness (how quickly an assignment was returned) that were 16% higher than those of female instructors, even though the assignments were returned at the exact same time.  Another research project, which examined word usage in reviews of male and female professors on “Rate My Professor” found that male faculty members are more likely to be described as “funny,” “brilliant,” “genius,” and “arrogant,” while female faculty members are more likely to be described as “approachable,” “helpful,” “nice,” and “bossy.”[3]

While many of these studies discuss the negative impact that this bias has on tenure and promotion few consider how devastating they can be to sessional instructors, particularly given the overrepresentation of women at this academic rank. Continue reading →

Wexit and the Alternative Right

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By Andrew Jones

“What is Wexit?”: this is the question that many Canadians were asking in the immediate aftermath of the 2019 federal election.

Justin Trudeau had just won a minority government, while the Conservative party had won a larger share of the popular vote, leading some in Alberta to question their place within Canada.

While the significance of Wexit has yet to manifest itself in support from Members of Parliament, it cannot be easily dismissed. The five years since the last Canadian election have been dominated by the political influence of the Alternative Right across the anglosphere. Both Brexit and Donald Trump’s electoral success demonstrate the power of feelings of alienation towards the liberal multicultural politics that Justin Trudeau’s government seems to embody, at least outside of Canada.

Is Wexit indicative of the Alt-Right’s presence in Canada or is it anchored in another ideology?

Western alienation is nothing new. The Wexit movement originates out of the sense of western alienation that has simmered in the hearts and minds of many Canadians from Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Continue reading →

Listening to Anishinaabemowin: the Voice of Mnidoo Mnising

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This is part of an ongoing series of reflections from the Manitoulin Island Summer Historical Institute (MISHI)

What can historians learn from engaging with Indigenous languages, and how can we do it in a respectful, reciprocal way?

Aanii Cathleen ndi-zhnikaaz. Toronto ndoo-njibaa. Hello, my name is Cathleen and I am a settler person living in Toronto and also a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Toronto.

Sara McDowell ndi-zhnikaaz. Toronto ndoo-njibaa. My name is Sara McDowell. I am a settler from Toronto and a graduate student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education focusing on Indigenous Studies.

As former classmates of Anishinaabemowin at the University of Toronto studying under Professor Alex McKay, and as settler scholars interested in Indigenous language learning, we want to share some of our experiences at MISHI 2018 and 2019, and to highlight some of the ways that they have enriched our understandings of Indigenous histories and Indigenous language revitalization. We acknowledge our privilege in having access to Indigenous language learning resources and opportunities when so many Indigenous peoples still face barriers to learning their own language. With this in mind, we also offer a few suggestions for settlers about how to engage with Indigenous languages responsibly and respectfully.

LEARNING TO INTRODUCE YOURSELF IN THE LANGUAGE Continue reading →