Active History

Memory and Objects: Family History, Local Economy, and Hook Rugs

March 23, 2020 3 Comments

Stephanie Pettigrew

Rug made as a gift for my Great-Aunt Stella and her husband, Yvon, by my grandmother, Marguerite-Anne Lefort. Photo provided by Stella Michaud/Lisa Michaud-Sheffar.

I would like to thank all of my family members who participated in helping me put this together, particularly my sister Debbie, my great-aunts Cecile, Stella, and Sophie, and my cousins Yvonne, Lisa, and Laura, who helped immensely with photos, by sharing memories, and spending hours chatting with me about what were sometimes difficult topics. Thank you.

I need to start this with a disclaimer: this was a difficult, emotional post for me to write. I had to get up, walk away, and feel many feelings before I could get back to writing. When I proposed this, all I could think about was the excitement of discussing the beautiful textile work done by the women in my family, especially my grandmother. I really should have foreseen the emotional impact of discussing my grandmother’s death. The emotional impact of my grandmother’s hook rugs on me might be one of the best testimonies of the significance of material culture on memory.

When my sister and I imagined ourselves getting married as kids, we imagined our Mémére being there, just as she had been for all our moments, big and small. Mémére was everything for us. Mother, protector, teacher, and provider. My memories of her as a child are wild and varied, and would likely not align with most people’s archetypal French-Canadian “grandmother” figure. I remember her chopping wood in the backyard. I remember her teaching me how to cook an egg and crêpes. I remember the enormous meals she would prepare for company, and the time that I got stung by a wasp and she grabbed the wasp’s nest with her bare hands and threw it into a fire out of pure spite. But most of all, I remember watching her hook rugs in the evenings, after the day’s work was done.

A hook rug frame, containing many balls of different coloured yarn. Photo provided by Yvonne Lefort-Goosens.

Cheticamp hook rugs are somewhat famous, and not just in Nova Scotia. Queen Elizabeth II had her portrait done by a Cheticamp hook rug artist, Elizabeth Lefort. There is a Cheticamp hook rug hanging in the Pauline Vanier room of Rideau Hall. The Vatican even has a hook rug, because of course the extremely catholic women of Cheticamp would send a hook rug to the Vatican. My own grandmother made a rug for the sacristy of the church in Cheticamp, a donation of not only materials but hard work and hours of labour. Continue reading →

Material Culture Theme Week Introduction

March 23, 2020 No Comments

Krista McCracken

My love of material culture is tied to my love of textiles. In particular, I love embroidery and I am interested in the use of textiles to explore personal and community connections to the past. I put the call out for this theme week with the hopes of bringing together posts that explored the impact of material culture on our understandings of the past. I also had the not so secret hope that someone might write about textiles.

Someone did write about textiles, but this week encompasses much more than textiles as material culture. The submissions to this theme week came from a huge range of professional, personal, and regional perspectives. The posts bring together perspectives on material culture from both inside and outside academia and the range of posts really speak to the breath of the field of material culture.

So, what exactly is material culture? At the most basic level, material culture is the study of the objects that are used by people and communities and how those objects reflect a community or inform the identity of a community.

The study of material culture is incredibly diverse and encompasses a range of disciplines including history, sociology, anthropology, fine art, and others. People who study and preserve material culture exist in a whole range of places – museums, academia, archives, and communities. Despite the abundance of people who work with material culture, material culture tends to be underrepresented within academic historical dialogue. This series bridges academic and practitioner divides and encourages readers to reflect on how material culture interests with history, daily life, and our understand the past.

Throughout this week we hope to deepen discussions between material culture professionals,historians, and those working in the community, so please be sure to engage and further the conversation in the comments section and on Twitter. You can reach us at @ActiveHist

Emergency Remote Teaching: A Post Secondary Reality Check

March 20, 2020 3 Comments

By Ian Milligan

They fell like dominoes throughout the week as the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic became unavoidably clear: first, Laurentian University suspended classes and moved them online on Wednesday, March 11^th;by the evening of Friday, March 13^th, every university in Ontario had suspended in-person classes and declared that winter term classes would be completed online (or via other alternative means). We are about to see Ontario engage with technology-mediated learning on an unprecedented scale.

The empty Hagey Hall of the Humanities atrium at the University of Waterloo on March 18th, 2020 (credit: Ian Milligan).

The warning bells are chiming. Some faculty are wary. The Canadian Association of Universities Teachers, for example, warns against workload pressures that would now require “additional support for staff, such as assigning teaching assistants,” and cautions that academic bodies “involved in monitoring the pedagogical effectiveness of temporary online instruction and to decide on adjustments or discontinuance.”

Dipping one’s toes into Twitter and you’ll see rhetoric as varied as how this devalues the hard work of online education, that it is an impossible task being given to instructors, and – in conspiratorial tones – how this might just be the first herald of a “neoliberal” move towards online education. Naturally, nobody would argue that any of this was ideal.

Framing this as a move to “online education,” however, is deeply misleading. Continue reading →

History’s Reputation Problem: The Sequel, History isn’t Humourless, is it?!?

March 20, 2020 2 Comments

By Thomas Peace

We’ve all heard it: History is boring.

Historians may rebut: We’re not boring! We’re serious!

A quick Google Image search suggests that both perspectives may be correct! Not only does history look boring and serious, it also looks White, Wealthy, Masculine, and Antiquated (okay: White, Male, and Stale). No wonder history has a reputation problem!

Frank, the Famous Historian. Does he represent us all?

Good news for historians: 2020 is proving itself to be quite a serious year. Perhaps it will turn out to be the year of the historian (Everything is coming up Milhouse!).

The other day, though, as I ventured forth from my haven of seclusion into our COVID filled world, I realized (just now!) that this image of the historian is wrong.

In response to this image of the historian, some might say that challenge ought be made to the problematic racialized, gendered, and class norms it presents, but on this day – for it was sunny – a more pressing issue crossed my mind: history isn’t always boring and serious, it can also be funny. Continue reading →

Talking History Podcasts, Vol. 2; or, The Podcast Lover’s Quarantine Survival Kit

March 20, 2020 1 Comment

Edward Dunsworth

For my post this month, I’ve decided to revisit a piece I wrote last year in which I shared some of my favourite history podcasts.

As many of us hunker down for extended periods of “social distancing” with the spread of COVID-19, we will be looking for ways to pass the time while at home.

And what better way than by listening to historical podcasts?!

Here are a few more favourites that I’ve started listening to in the last year or so.

The Keepers, by the Kitchen Sisters

The Keepers is a series created by the Kitchen Sisters, a radio-producing duo consisting of Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva. The series, which airs on National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States, chronicles the “stories of activist archivists, rogue librarians, curators, collectors and historians – keepers of the culture, and the cultures and collections they keep.”

The Keepers’ also features a “Keeper of the Day” on their website, including this one, no. 98, A Walking Library

Continue reading →

Bringing the Flu into the Classroom

March 16, 2020 1 Comment

By Thomas Peace

Who would have thought that almost exactly one hundred years after the Spanish Flu closed schools, churches, and other public gatherings around the world, that we would once again find ourselves in similar circumstances?

Death Statistics for London, ON. Compiled by students in HIS 2204G at Huron University College.

The Spanish Flu hit Canada in the fall of 1918 and, after an initial scare, persisted for nearly two years. Unlike the current pandemic, it was the young and healthy that it hit the hardest. In the end, about 50,000 Canadians, and over 20 million people worldwide, died.

Death Statistics for London, ON. Compiled by students in HIS 2204G at Huron University College.

From a more positive perspective, one of its most significant and lasting impacts, was the beginning of the federal Department of Health, and a consciousness about public health that – I think – continues to serve us well today.

As many of us find ourselves working from home, and teaching online, I want to use today’s post to share a replicable assignment I used last year to engage students with the history of the Flu and how to use primary sources to study the past. Continue reading →

The Distance Between Us: The Implications of Pandemic Influenza in 1918-1919

March 14, 2020 1 Comment

By Esyllt W. Jones

For a historian of pandemic influenza these are uncanny days. The past is colliding with the present. As if a thread has emerged, now, connecting us with those who faced, in their own ways, a globally shared experience in 1918-1919.

A group of nurses in High River, Alberta, wear face masks in an attempt to ward off the Spanish Flu, October 1919. Glenbow Archives 3452-2. Continue reading →

6 Things to Consider when Moving a Course Online

March 13, 2020 1 Comment

By Mary Chaktsiris

Many of us have just received an official e-mail informing us that classes have been suspended for the rest of the term and that learning will transition online. This is just the latest in a series of shifting messaging, circumstances, and fluctuating decision-making as institutions cope with the global spread of COVID-19.

People, instructors and students, are feeling this uncertainty in multiple areas of their lives, and now in the area of course design with a sense of urgency about how to respond and adapt quickly. Abruptly transitioning your course to a new online pedagogical approach three quarters of the way through the term is not how you imagined it unfolding.

When approaching the teaching of History, which often revolves around lecture-based transmission of knowledge, moving to digital pedagogies might seem like a stretch for your teaching strategy toolkit. You will need to pivot.

As an instructor this concept is familiar to you. There is likely at least one specific time, probably burned into your memory, where a course or activity did not go as planned and it caused you to reconsider or change direction quickly and sometimes drastically. Recall how you navigated this circumstance, and how you acted to create meaningful change. Draw on that experience and apply it here.

Student learning online

Continue reading →

An open letter to the Canadian Historical Association

March 11, 2020 31 Comments

From Tenure-Track and Tenured Faculty
Precarity in History is our discipline’s great challenge today.
As the Precarious Historical Instructors’ Manifesto puts it: “There is a crisis in working conditions for precariously employed history professors in Canadian universities. It is a crisis decades in the making; it has taken a profound personal and collective toll on generations of historians.”
All too often, the burden for finding solutions falls on the precarious instructors themselves – the people with the least power to make changes. When they do propose solutions, tenured faculty and university administrators too often ignore those ideas or give them a low priority.
The Precarious Historical Instructors’ Manifesto is a remarkably constructive and thoughtful document. People struggling to make ends meet and faced with broken promises and high walls on the part of their profession would be well within their rights to express anger. The Manifesto instead makes a series of sensible calls for change that would in many cases be simple to implement. Taken together, they lay out an agenda for real change and for greater justice within our profession.
The Canadian Historical Association has responded. It is a welcome step that the peak association for Canadian historians has not ignored the Manifesto. Yet the response reads as half-hearted. The CHA pledges to create “a sub-committee to examine and highlight the progress that has already been made toward addressing the concerns expressed in the calls to action, and to consider ways in which we can continue to work towards limiting precarity, and limiting the high professional and emotional cost of such employment.”
The undersigned welcome the CHA’s decision to address the crisis of precarity, but we see a simpler and more responsive solution: the CHA should work to implement the calls to action addressed specifically to historical associations. Some of these are simple: the removal of institutional affiliations can happen immediately at the 2020 CHA conference, where it would also be simple to make sure contract instructors are referred to by academic title. Others may take longer, but the work can be started now and the end goals accepted.
The CHA’s decision to address the Manifesto’s calls is a good first step, but discussion of how to do so should be done openly within the wider profession, not only by narrowing it down to a sub-committee. And the intention to listen and act can be announced now. As CHA members and Canadian historians, we urge the CHA to start acting now, and accept the calls to action for professional associations made in the Precarious Historical Instructors’ Manifesto.

Signed (in alphabetical order),
Tina Adcock, Simon Fraser University
Kristine Alexander, University of Lethbridge
Jess Clark, Brock University
Isabel Campbell
Jim Clifford, University of Saskatchewan
Michèle Dagenais, Université de Montréal
Joanna Dean, Carleton University
Karen Dubinsky, Queen’s University
Finis Dunaway, Trent University
Brian Gettler, University of Toronto
Jason Ellis, University of British Columbia
Robert Englebert, University of Saskatchewan
Steven High, Concordia University
Dan Horner, Ryerson University
Benjamin Hoy, University of Saskatchewan
Nathan Kozuskanich, Nipissing University
Catherine Larochelle, Université de Montréal
Mark Leier, Simon Fraser University
Josh MacFadyen, University of Prince Edward Island
Daniel Macfarlane, Western Michigan University
Laura Madokoro, Carleton University
Ian McKay, Wilson Institute, McMaster University
Lynne Marks, University of Victoria
Sally Mennill, Douglas College
David Meren, Université de Montréal
Ian Mosby, Ryerson University
Jamie Murton, Nipissing University
Sharon Myers, University of Prince Edward Island
Sarah Nickel, University of Saskatchewan
Carmen Nielson, Mount Royal University
Thomas Peace, Huron University
Daniel Ross, Université du Québec à Montréal
Daniel Rück, University of Ottawa
Daniel Samson, Brock University
Veronica Strong-Boag, UBC/University of Victoria
Shannon Stunden Bower, University of Alberta
Janis Thiessen, University of Winnipeg
Coll Thrush, University of British Columbia
Peter L. Twohig, Saint Mary’s University
Ali Versluis, University of Guelph
Andrew Watson, University of Saskatchewan
Martha Walls, Mount St. Vincent University
John Walsh, Carleton University
David Webster, Bishop’s University

Please add your name and affiliation using the comment section below:

Teaching Canadian History After the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)

March 10, 2020 No Comments

By Allyson Stevenson [1]

When I began this blog on January 29^th, I had just returned to my office at the University of Regina after speaking about my research on an inspiring panel of powerful First Nations women leaders in Treaty 4 territory that included Chief Lynn Acoose, Chief Roberta Soo-Oye Waste, Dr. Priscilla Settee, and Dakota Elder Diane McKay. “The Indigenous Women’s Leadership Forum: Reclamation of Matriarch and Ogijidaakew Sovereignty” was framed around reclaiming Indigenous women’s roles and responsibilities as matriarchs in their families and communities and nations through storytelling, visiting, and inspiring each other. This conference followed, but was not related to, another compelling full-day event at First Nations University of Canada (FNUniv), organized by FNUniv’s Students’ Association, in response to the appalling behavior of George Elliot Clarke and the University of Regina. Originally conceived by a group called “Matriarchs on Duty,” the event on Thursday January 26^th, which would have been the day that George Elliot Clarke gave his ill-conceived talk “‘Truth and Reconciliation’ versus ‘the Murdered and Missing’: Examining Indigenous Experiences of (In)Justice in Four Saskatchewan Poets”, began with a pipe ceremony, followed by a smudge walk around the U of R Campus, and then a series of dialogues about the relationship between the University of Regina and Indigenous peoples in the community. The controversy made national headlines when Clarke initially refused to consider altering his topic, or responding to concerns raised by faculty, staff and Indigenous community members. Several in the Regina university community early on identified the problematic relationship between Clarke and Steven Kummerfield/Stephen Brown, and Clarke’s decision to speak on this issue in Regina.

Perhaps it might seem odd to begin a blog about teaching Canadian history with this story. Perhaps it might also seem odd that I am writing a blog about Canadian history, considering I myself do not teach in a History department. In fact, I chose deliberately to locate my Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples and Global Social Justice in the Department of Politics and International Studies when I began at the University of Regina in January of 2018.

Please bear with me though. I think I might have something useful to offer.

Continue reading →

Last »