Let’s Not Romanticize Opponents of the Winnipeg General Strike

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By Tom Mitchell

Tumult was everywhere in 1919. In an autobiographical work published in 1966, Kingsley Martin, British journalist and long-time editor of The New Statesman, recalled that “the only time in my life when revolution in Britain seemed likely was in 1919.”  It is true that in Canada an influential current of labour radicalism celebrated the Russian revolution and called for the end of capitalist rule. In Winnipeg, during the famous (for some infamous) meeting at the Walker Theatre on 22 December 1918 – R.B. Russell among others on the stage – motions celebrating solidarity with the most radical currents of European Marxism were approved with unanimity. Labour radicalism had its advocates in Winnipeg and across western Canada, but when members of Winnipeg’s organized labour movement elected a new President to lead the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council in 1919, they chose labourite James Winning over R.B. Russell. And it was Winning, not Russell, who led Winnipeg workers into the general strike.

Perhaps not surprisingly, when the Winnipeg General Strike came, its opponents organized as the Citizens’ Committee of One Thousand ignored the real causes of the strike and cast the walkout as a version of Bolshevism. In the centennial year of the strike, variations of the Citizens’ anti-labour polemic deployed to effect in 1919 have appeared. The most recent is an op ed by Jenny Motkaluk of the Frontier Center for Public Policy, “Let’s Not Romanticize the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike,” which was published in the National Post 26 June 2019. Motkaluk’s narrative echoes various (false) Citizen refrains: the Strike Committee “sought to usurp the authority of the government,” the strike was directed against the “British Constitution with its liberties and democracy,” the strikers were demanding a “dictatorship.” These claims made by the Citizens in 1919 and by Motkaluk in 2019 were and are pure polemic designed to distract attention from the real economic and social injustice in which the strike was rooted.

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Teaching Life and Death Stories in University Classrooms – Part 2

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Today’s post is the second in a four part series that began as different conversations about teaching Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry’s Structures of Indifference, winner of The Indigenous History Book Prize, awarded by the Indigenous History Group of the Canadian Historical Association. Each week will will focus on one professor’s experiences teaching the book to undergraduate students and – in the final week – we conclude with a reflection on teaching the book to graduate nursing students. Because we were teaching students from different academic backgrounds and stages of career, we used different teaching strategies. But we shared the pedagogical goal of using an individual tragedy – Brian Sinclair’s death – to encourage students to grapple with the ongoing impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous communities and the structures that shape their lives.

By Rhonda Hinther

I taught Structures of Indifference in Western Canada Since 1885. It is a second-year course, with fourteen students. I used the book for several reasons – first, I was looking forward to reading it myself, and this gave me a teaching motivation to do so. I also thought the book, for the way it weaves the past throughout its analysis, demonstrating how it shapes our current present in Winnipeg and elsewhere through the lens of racialized health care, helped to coalesce the various histories we had been studying throughout the term. Finally, since I had opened the course with a book review assignment on Adele Perry’s Aqueduct, which we read together over several weeks in class, Structures of Indifference seemed like an ideal bookend. On the final exam, students were required to review the book. Continue reading →

The Active Historian Action Figure

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By Alan MacEachern

As Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford has come to embody the archaeologist on film. Why hasn’t he done the same for, or to, historians? In Patriot Games (1992), the actor plays Jack Ryan, a professor of naval history who thwarts an assassination attempt in London. The movie is based on Tom Clancy’s novel, an early entry in the – God help me – “Ryanverse” series of 29 books, including 12 written by other authors after Clancy’s death.

The reason we don’t think of Ford as a historian – besides the fact that he played Indiana Jones in a string of hits, and Indy is wicked cool – and the reason you didn’t even remember that his Patriot Games character was a historian, is that we hardly see him historying. No time in archives, no microfilm reading, no evidence of shame about an overdue manuscript. Just brief glimpses of him giving a lecture and holding a seminar, Samuel L. Jackson warning that he might “become part of history rather than a teacher of it,” and that’s it.[1]

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Civil Affairs in Caen

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This is the seventh of several posts marking the 75th anniversary of D-Day and the end of the Second World War as part of a partnership between Active History and the Juno Beach Centre. If you would like to contribute, contact series coordinator Alex Fitzgerald-Black at alex@junobeach.org.

By David Borys

After a series of hard-fought battles, the first Anglo-Canadian patrols stepped foot in the rubble-strewn streets of Caen on 9 July 1944. The ancient city of William the Conqueror was a post-apocalyptic disaster zone. Two-thirds of it was utterly demolished. Parts of the city were entirely cut off and isolated due to the heaping mounds of rubble. Out of a population of 60,000 people at the beginning of 1944, 25,000 were still residing within the city with approximately 13,000 of them living in makeshift shelters and caves. Nearly 3,000 civilians lay dead and 1,500 wounded. Hundreds of bodies lay scattered in the streets and buried under rubble. There was no running water, no sanitation, no electricity, barely any medical supplies, and food was running short. The civilian population was in dire need of help and this help would come from II Canadian Corps Civil Affairs.

Engineers Clearing Roads Through Caen by Captain Orville Norman Fisher. Canadian War Museum collection 19710261-6247

The men of Civil Affairs (CA) were an unusual bunch. Continue reading →

Grounded: Academic Flying in the Time of Climate Emergency

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By Dr Jaymie Heilman

“I don’t like harming others, so I don’t fly” climate scientist Peter Kalmus explained, noting that airplane emissions heat the planet, imperiling humans and non-humans alike. The IPCC warns that we have only eleven years to radically reduce carbon emissions or face ever-more devastating effects of climate change, and it is time for academic flyers to be grounded by the hard truths of our climate emergency.

Rank and Flight

I got where I am professionally precisely because I flew. A lot.

I am a full professor at a major research institution. My doctorate, my university jobs, tenure, and promotions all came about because I did a ton of international flying.

Between starting graduate school in 1998 and 2014, I took an average of five round-trip international flights each year – to study, do research in Peru, visit my family, go to conferences, and go on vacation.

All that flying allowed me to write two books and a number of articles, and build ties with other scholars of Latin America, and I have benefitted professionally and personally. But since 2014, I have been steadily reducing my flying.

Ethics Review

Several climate scientists have pledged to reduce their air travels, acknowledging the hypocrisy of flying while warning about climate change and recognizing that such hypocrisy undermines their credibility.

Scholars concerned about social justice must likewise question the ethics of our flights. Take those of us horrified by Central America’s refugee crisis. Hundreds of thousands of children, women, and men have fled from in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala in recent years, trying to escape deadly gang violence, repressive governments, and devastating poverty. Climate change is making this terrible situation worse: failing crops displace families to cities unable to adequately employ and protect them. That displacement, in turn, empowers criminal gangs able to provide very particular (and bloody) forms of employment and protection to desperate youth. Failing crops also drive rural families to bypass their nations’ cities altogether, heading straight for el norte.

Is it ethical for me to fly from Edmonton to San Salvador – expending 1.73 metric tons of carbon – to research the historical roots of this refugee crisis? Probably. If the knowledge fostered by my oral history interviews and archival research somehow helps mitigate the humanitarian disaster, then all the carbon emissions from that round-trip flight — and the estimated 5 square meters of arctic ice that would melt as a consequence — are likely well spent.

Would it be ethical for me to expend 2.34 metric tons of carbon (and melt 7 square meters of arctic ice) to fly to Tokyo to give a keynote lecture about the crisis and engage interested colleagues and students? To me, the answer is clear: No.

What about expending 0.91 metric tons of carbon by flying to New York to talk about the refugee crisis at a conference? Would those emissions be justifiable, given how many people would hear my talk, and given how many insights and opportunities I’d be able to offer and receive? To me, the answer is again ‘no.’ As climate scientist Kevin Anderson puts it, “Even if our talks are riveting canters through the intellectual surf, are they really so important that we have to be there in person and in an instant, before launching off to dispense our pearls of wisdom to another packed house in another exotic location?” Continue reading →

Preparing the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division for the Normandy Campaign, 1942-1944

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This is the sixth of several posts marking the 75th anniversary of D-Day and the end of the Second World War as part of a partnership between Active History and the Juno Beach Centre. If you would like to contribute, contact series coordinator Alex Fitzgerald-Black at alex@junobeach.org.

By Caroline D’Amours

On 6 June 1944, the units of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division successfully completed one of the most challenging military operations of the Second World War: building the bridgehead on Juno Beach from which allied troops could gain a foothold on continental Europe. As historian Marc Milner recently noted, in the days following the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division’s deployment, the division took heavy casualties but succeeded in paralyzing a counterattack by the 12th SS Panzer Division (Hitler Youth). They did this with very little battle experience and only the training conveyed to them before the invasion. Under these circumstances, the quality of their training was a critical factor in making the Canadian troops effective when they arrived on Juno Beach. Though it was certainly not perfect, the training these soldiers received was not as bad as historians have suggested in the decades following the conflict.

Infantrymen of The North Nova Scotia Highlanders landing from LCI(L) 135 of the 2nd Canadian (262nd RN) Flotilla during Exercise FABIUS III, Bracklesham Bay, England, 4 May 1944. Glen M. Frankfurter / DND / LAC / PA-137005

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The Eighth Stage of Genocide

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By Daniel Rück and Valerie Deacon

According to Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch, the eighth stage of genocide is denial. Perpetrators of genocides will do what they can to destroy evidence, intimidate witnesses, blame victims, block investigations, and change the narrative. No one wants to be remembered for having committed genocide, and few citizens of a country can easily reconcile their positive feelings about their country and its institutions with the fact that these same institutions have been used to commit genocide.

So when the Inquiry for Missing and Murdered Women and Girls released its report on June 3, 2019 framing its argument around the historic and ongoing genocide against Indigenous peoples in Canada, it’s not surprising that the overwhelming response by mainstream commentators in Canada was denial.

Not only did it seem many prominent commentators did not read the report, many focused exclusively on the use of the term ‘genocide.’ They argued that using the term in the Canadian context is inappropriate and harmful, and that what happens in Canada does not correspond with what they understand as the definition of genocide. Most of these critics did not engage with the report’s rigorous analysis of how violence against Indigenous women and girls fits into an overall context of historical and ongoing genocide, nor with the legal definition of the word laid out in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Continue reading →

Historians in the Movies

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Coming to a screen near you

Colin Coates

This summer season, Active History is providing a series of posts on historians in the movies.  These are not necessarily historical films – although we know as well as anyone that every film is a product of its time and place.  No, these are films that feature historians (and people in allied occupations) as characters.  In some cases, the character is central to the narrative, in others not so much.  If you’re looking for historians writing about the historical accuracy of films and the contemporary implications of historical films, well, Active History has done that too, as do others, like “Historians at the Movies” #HATM.   This series of posts looks at how historians have been depicted on the big screen.

A young male historian, surrounded by stacks of old newspapers, using a magnifying class to read one. The historian is wearing a bowler hat and a waistcoast. He is not cool.

Image of an historian from https://careerthoughts.com/historian-jobs/ .

When was the last time any of us looked this this, or did research using using paper copies of old newspapers??

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Teaching Life and Death Stories in University Classrooms – Part 1

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Today’s post is the first in a four part series that began as different conversations about teaching Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry’s Structures of Indifference, winner of The Indigenous History Book Prize, awarded by the Indigenous History Group of the Canadian Historical Association. Each week will will focus on one professor’s experiences teaching the book to undergraduate students and – in the final week – we conclude with a reflection on teaching the book to graduate nursing students. Because we were teaching students from different academic backgrounds and stages of career, we used different teaching strategies. But we shared the pedagogical goal of using an individual tragedy – Brian Sinclair’s death – to encourage students to grapple with the ongoing impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous communities and the structures that shape their lives.

By Karen Dubinsky

I assigned Structures of Indifference to 450 students in “Introduction to Canada and the ‘Third’ World,” which is taught in the Department of Global Development Studies. It introduces students to topics such as Canadian foreign policy, business activities, development aid, and migration policies in the Global South, and Indigenous communities here. We move constantly between past and present in this class, and I think that’s one reason the book was such a hit. Continue reading →

A Pivotal Experience: Indigenous Participation in D-Day and the Second World War

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This is the fifth of several posts marking the 75th anniversary of D-Day and the end of the Second World War as part of a partnership between Active History and the Juno Beach Centre. If you would like to contribute, contact series coordinator Alex Fitzgerald-Black at alex@junobeach.org.

By: Shawkay Ottmann

Indigenous veteran Clarence Silver once said, “When I served overseas I was a Canadian. When I came home I was an Indian.”[1] These two lines illustrate the Indigenous experience in the Second World War. Indigenous soldiers fought in all major battles Canada participated in, including D-Day, side by side with non-Indigenous soldiers. The difference was in the situation Indigenous soldiers came from and returned.

D-Day, 6 June 1944, was a pivotal day in the Second World War. When the Allied forces landed on five beaches in Normandy it signaled the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany. Likewise, the war was pivotal for Indigenous peoples in the fight for Indigenous rights and equality. In both situations, these experiences became decisive influences in the course of history. Continue reading →