By the Graphic History Collective and Jesse Thistle
In July 2017, at the height of Canada 150, Métis brothers Jesse and Jerry Thistle released a poster as part of the Graphic History Collective’s Remember/Resist/Redraw series about their great grandmother Marianne Morrissette, née Ledoux. Marianne was a 16-year-old cook for Louis Riel during the Battle of Batoche in 1885. The poster, illustrated by Jerry and accompanied with an essay by Jesse was entitled “When Canada Opened Fire on My Kokum Marianne with a Gatling Gun.” The poster was positively received and continues to be downloaded and shared widely.
In 2018, Jesse made a short film for a GHC presentation at the CHA meeting in Regina explaining the history of his great grandmother and describing why the process of making the poster about her with his brother was so important. In short, the Canadian government’s violent attempts to break the Métis Nation and scatter communities across what is today known as Western Canada in the nineteenth century were attempts to disconnect wahkootowin, a Cree/Michif word that denotes kinship and values connection and relatedness. Recovering and “remembering” Marianne’s story through art, for Jesse and Jerry, was an attempt to heal their own trauma and reconnect their Métis web of wahkootowin, bringing them together and closer to the memory of their ancestor.
Today we are re-sharing Jerry and Jesse’s poster and posting the film he made about the process. We are also including an interview with Jesse about the project conducted by GHC member Sean Carleton.
“When Canada Opened Fire on My Kokum Marianne With a Gatling Gun,” by Jerry and Jesse Thistle. You can read Jesse’s essay here: http://graphichistorycollective.com/project/poster-8-batoche-1885-canada-opened-fire-kokum-marianne-gatling-gun
This is the eighth 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.
Today’s post is the second part of a series published on the Library and Archives Canada Blog. We are grateful to Alex Comber and the LAC for making this post available through the ActiveHistory.ca portal. Please go to thediscoverblog.com for part 1, published June 6, 2019.
By Alex Comber
With part 1 of this post, we marked the 75th anniversary of D-Day and commemorated Canada’s participation in the June 6, 1944, invasion of northwestern Europe, and the Normandy Campaign, which ended on August 30, 1944. In part 2, we explore some of the unique collections that Library and Archives Canada (LAC) holds about these events, and highlight some records that are the most accessible to our clients online. Through outreach activities, targeted and large-scale digitization, and our new DigiLab and Co-Lab initiatives, LAC is striving to make records more easily available.
LAC staff receive many reference requests about our collections of photos. Canadian Film and Photo Unit (CFPU) personnel went ashore 75 years ago, on D-Day, filming and photographing as they landed. During the Normandy Campaign, they continued to produce a visual record that showed more front-line operations than official photographers had been able to capture in previous conflicts. Film clips were incorporated into “Canadian Army Newsreels” for the audiences back home, with some clips, such as the D-Day sequence above, being used internationally.
Photographers attached to the army and navy used both black-and-white and colour cameras, and the ZK Army and CT Navy series group the magnificent colour images together.
A British Centaur close-support howitzer tank assisting Canadians during the Normandy Campaign (e010750628)
Some of the most iconic imagery of the Canadian military effort in Normandy was incorporated into the Army Numerical series; by the end of hostilities, this had grown to include more than 60,000 photographs. The print albums that were originally produced during the Second World War to handle reproduction requests can help in navigating this overwhelming amount of material. Researchers at our Ottawa location refer to these volumes as the “Red Albums,” because of their red covers. These albums allow visitors to flip through a day-by-day visual record of Canadian army activities from the Second World War. LAC has recently digitized print albums 74, 75, 76 and 77, which show events in France from June 6 until mid-August 1944.
A page from Army Numerical print album Volume 74 of 110, showing the immediate aftermath of the landings (e011217614)
LAC also holds an extensive collection of textual records related to the events of June–August 1944. One of the most important collections is the War Diaries of Canadian army units that participated in the campaign. Units overseas were required to keep a daily record, or “War Diary,” of their activities, for historical purposes. These usually summarized important events, training, preparations and operations. In the Second World War, unit war diaries also often included the names of soldiers who were killed or seriously injured. Officers added additional information, reports, campaign maps, unit newsletters and other important sources in appendices. Selected diaries are being digitized and made accessible through our online catalogue. One remarkable diary, loaded in two separate PDF scans under MIKAN 928089, is for the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, the first Canadian soldiers in action on D-Day, as part of “Operation Tonga,” the British 6th Airborne Division landings.
Daily entry for June 6, 1944, from the War Diary of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, detailing unit objectives for Operation Overlord (D-Day) (e011268051)
War diaries of command and headquarters units are also important sources because they provide a wider perspective on the successes or failures of military operations. These war diaries included documents sourced from the units under their command. Examples that are currently digitized include the Headquarters of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, from June and July 1944.
War Diary daily entries for early June 1944, including the first section of a lengthy passage about operations on June 6, 1944 (e999919600)
LAC is also the repository for all Second World War personnel files of the Canadian Active Service Force (Overseas Canadian Army), Royal Canadian Navy and Royal Canadian Air Force. The service files of approximately 44,000 men and women who died while serving in these forces from 1939 to 1947 are open to the public. These records include the more than 5,000 files of those who died in operations during the Normandy Campaign. As the result of a partnership with Ancestry.ca, a portion of every open service file was digitized. This selection of documents was then loaded on Ancestry.ca, fully accessible to Canadians who register for a free account. To set up a free account and access these files on Ancestry.ca, see this information and instruction page on our website.
These records have great genealogical and historical value. As the following documents show, they continue to be relevant, and they can powerfully connect us to the men and women who served in the Second World War, and their families.
Private Ralph T. Ferns of Toronto went missing on August 14, 1944, during a friendly-fire incident. His unit, the Royal Regiment of Canada, was bombed by Allied aircraft as soldiers were moving up to take part in Operation Tractable, south of Caen. Sixty years later, near Haut Mesnil, France, skeletal remains were discovered. The Department of National Defence’s Casualty Identification Program staff were able to positively identify Private Ferns. The medical documents in his service file, including this dental history sheet, were important sources of information. Ferns was buried with full military honours at Bretteville-sur-Laize Canadian War Cemetery in 2008, with his family in attendance.
Private Alexis Albert, serving with the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment, was killed in action in France on June 11, 1944. Four years later, his father, Bruno Albert, living in Caraquet, New Brunswick, requested the address of the family that was tending his son’s grave at Bény-sur-Mer Canadian War Cemetery in France, to thank them. The Director of War Service Records, Department of Veterans Affairs, provided this response, which helped to connect the grieving family in Canada with French citizens carefully maintaining the burial plot in Normandy.
These are only a few examples of LAC records related to the Canadian military effort in France from June 6 until the end of August 1944. Our Collection Search tool can locate many other invaluable sources to help our clients explore the planning and logistical efforts to sustain Canadian military operations in France, delve deeper into the events themselves, and discover personal stories of hardships, accomplishments, suffering and loss.
Alex Comber is a Military Archivist in the Government Archives Division at Library and Archives Canada.
There were three foundational texts in my early development as a historian. I would love to say one of them was E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. But it wasn’t. Rather, the first was Hamlyn Children’s History of the World (1969) by Plantagenet Somerset Fry (oh, that name) and the second was R.J. Unstead’s Story of Britain (1970), with beautiful illustrations by Victor Ambrus.
The third was Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1953). To be clear: I was a child when I read Fry and Unstead. I was seventeen when I read Lucky Jim. To be clearer: I continue to read all three.
Amis’ novel of Jim Dixon, a disaster-prone History lecturer at a British university in the years following the Second World War, is a hilarious, rage-filled attack upon the fustiness of bourgeois, provincial England, its pretensions, its petty but stultifying class differences, its sexual unease. In later life, Amis complained to his son Martin that he couldn’t abide modern literature, swearing: “I’m never going to read another novel that doesn’t begin with the sentence, ‘A shot rang out.’.” Fittingly, perhaps, Lucky Jim was itself a shot that rang out in the early 1950s, an opening salvo of the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement that helped blow away the cobwebs of Victorian repression and deference in British society.
Today’s post is the final essay 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 Christine Ceci
I taught Structures of Indifference to a graduate level seminar (Masters) on the nature of nursing knowledge, in which a central goal is for students to become more familiar with the nature of knowledge development in nursing, including developing critical stances in relation to concepts and issues relevant to knowledge development more generally. The course materials include readings from multiple disciplines including nursing, sociology, history, and philosophy. My approach to teaching is influenced by Foucault’s strategy of problematization and effective history, using both historical and contemporary materials to begin to see and understand the processes through which the past becomes the present. In this context, the critical concern is not so much to understand the past but to understand the present (of nursing specifically). The students are practicing nurses who have returned to school for advanced degrees. Continue reading →
With summer in full swing and many people enjoying the outdoors, the Graphic History Collective has released RRR Poster #20 that looks at the history of national parks, colonial dispossession, and Indigenous resilience in what is currently Canada. The poster, by Nancy Kimberley Phillips and Wacey Little Light, illustrates how many Indigenous peoples experience the “conservation” of Canada’s national parks as a continuation of the violent process of settler colonialism.
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.
On May 23, 1889, a packed courtroom in Edmonton watched as “Big Nelly” Webb, the most famous woman in town, answered to the charge of shooting a member of the North West Mounted Police. Several months earlier, Constable Thomas Cairney had been found seriously wounded on Big Nelly’s doorstep. He survived but was injured for life, and Webb faced serious prison time if convicted. Standing before a judge and jury, Big Nelly saw a host of familiar male faces. Was she nervous? Women like Webb did not always enjoy a good relationship with the law, but she was skilled at the art of persuasion. Big Nelly was the town madam.
Very few details about Big Nelly and her brothel have survived, but we know that most women who entered the sex trade did so because of the inequalities they faced in the 19th century. Religious leaders usually assumed that women were kidnapped and forced into sex work, but the reality is that the brothel was one of the best economic options for poor women, especially young widows and single mothers, women of colour, and queer and trans women. [1] It’s important not to romanticize sex work during this period, but it is clear that when survival was impossible in “respectable” settler society, brothels offered access to food, medicine and money. The Canadian North West could make a woman rich if she pursued this line of work. Dozens of Ontario and American madams and workers followed news of the fortunes being made out west and journeyed there in the 1870s and 1880s.
Big Nelly was a charming younger madam who counted some of the Edmonton elite among her clients and friends. On Oct. 24, 1888 – the night of the shooting – her brothel was probably busy. There had been a dance at the local barracks of the North West Mounted Police, and brothels were known for their “after parties.” She may have been welcoming guests or pulling liquor out of the cellar when she heard the arrival of two drunk and ornery off-duty constables: Cairney and Thomas Rogers. Big Nelly, like many other madams, knew that very drunk men were bad for business. They were often rude to staff and customers, bought fewer overpriced drinks (a major money-maker at brothels) and, if they passed out, took up valuable real estate on couches and beds. They were also prone to violence.
Laurie K. Bertram is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. She teaches a seminar on the history of sex work and is working on a book about brothel economies and colonial expansion in 18th and 19th century North America.
When Canadians consider the French-Canadian experience of the First World War, what most often comes to mind is the opposition of French Canadians in Québec to conscription, and the war itself more broadly. Very few Canadians consider that there were multiple francophone communities outside of Québec and that their experiences during the war varied. Even fewer consider the possibility that the experiences and perspectives of those in Québec do not represent all of French Canada. When I was in my second year of my bachelor’s degree, I undertook a research project for a Canadian history class hoping to learn more about the conscription crisis. I expected to learn about the French Canadians of Québec and how the francophone communities outside of Québec reacted to conscription. However, all I could uncover was literature on Québec. It was as if French Canadians did not exist outside of Québec and had no part to play in this controversy.
Of particular interest to me was the experience of Alberta’s growing francophone community. France Levasseur Ouimet[1], one of the few Canadian historians to have done significant work on the community, notes there were 24,286 francophones living in Alberta in 1916, primarily in Edmonton and Calgary and the surrounding area. The population was a mix of French Canadians who migrated from Québec, French Canadians who were born in the West, others who descended from Metis populations and recent immigrants from France and Belgium. This was a vibrant, diverse and thriving community with strong social bonds and multiple organizations, including a number of French newspapers. From this research, the general question of my master’s thesis was born – to what extent were the perspectives and reactions of the francophone community of Alberta similar or different to those of the French Canadians of Québec during the First World War?
Knowing that the various French school crises had an enormous impact on the perspectives of French Canadians in Québec, the second point of the study was to determine if the persecution of the French language had a similar effect on the francophone community in Alberta. This article provides a general summary of my key discoveries and sheds some light on the francophone community of Alberta during the First World War.
Scroll through reviews of National Treasure (2004) on Rotten Tomatoes or IMDB and you’ll notice a lot of critics describing the movie as a kind of set-in-America Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or Da Vinci Code (then in production for 2006). After all, it’s an adventure film that involves some really valuable old stuff. But those comparisons undersell just how American a movie this is, as the love child of their obsession with the American Revolution and Top Gun. I mean this literally: Jerry Bruckheimer produced both films. I remember Bruckheimer saying once that he felt badly that some kid had seen Top Gun, enlisted thinking he’d be Maverick, and now was stuck in a windowless room seven stories down on an aircraft carrier. I don’t think he’s said anything similar about National Treasure – which apparently did cause an uptick in visits to the National Archives – but for anyone about, oh, say, now about twenty-five, in grad school: I have not once been invited to a gala. Continue reading →
Today’s post is the third 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 Nancy Janovicek
I taught this text to a first-year ‘post-confederation’ Canadian history class. The last time I taught this course, I asked students to write a response paper to Elder in the Making, a documentary that is part of the Making Treaty 7 project, an initiative that brings together Elders and Indigenous and settler actors. The documentary, directed and narrated by Chris Chung, a Chinese Canadian raised in Calgary, features Cowboy Smithx, a filmmaker and multimedia artist of Piikani and Kainai ancestry who speaks to Niitsitapi elders about the resilience of their cultures in the face of the history of dispossession of their lands. I asked students to think about how Indigenous understandings of the past were different from what they had been taught in high school. Continue reading →
This is the second post in a summer series exploring societal, community, and familial connections to food and food history. See the series introduction post here. An earlier version of this post appeared on The Canadian Cooking Chronicles, as part of a final project for an Archives Practicum class.
When examining the history of Canadian food, the vast variety of choice in geographic region, era, dish, and cookbook – among other factors – can be overwhelming. When starting my investigation, I knew that I wanted to recreate archival recipes and use them as primary sources to see what could be learned about the history surrounding them. However, as a relative new-comer to this type of history, choosing where to start was a daunting task.
When I had the opportunity to look through a small selection of cookbooks held by they archives at Algoma University, I came across a cookbook titled Traditional Indian Recipes From Fort George, Quebec. As I read through the various recipes that had been contributed by Indigenous women in the late 1960s, there was one recipe that stood out as a food known for its interconnectedness to early Canadian history; a dish that has been regarded as one of Canada’s earliest known staple foods: pemmican. As soon as I saw the recipe, I knew that this was where I wanted to start.
Pemmican is a food made of protein, fat, and berries that originated with Indigenous tribes in North America. The nutritional density and long shelf life of this food made it ideal for hunters that wanted to travel light.
The name of the food comes from the Cree, Pimikan, which means fat/grease. Although it is difficult to pinpoint the origins of pemmican, it is known that it has been a traditional food of many Indigenous communities in North America long before colonization. It was a useful source of nutrition after the hunting season ended because, if preserved properly, it would not spoil for months or even years after it was made. Post-colonization, Pemmican was introduced to fur traders and quickly became sold as a form of sustenance during travel, especially to the traders in the prairies. In Canadian writing, Pemmican was referenced as early as 1743, although it’s origins significantly predate this documentation.
The following recipe for Pemmican is from the cookbook, Traditional Indian Recipes From Fort George, Quebec, found in the Fort George Collection of the Shingwauk Residential School Centre archives at Algoma University. This book was published in 1967, with traditional recipes compiled from First Nation communities in the Fort George region.
Pemmican, Traditional Indian Recipes From Fort George, Quebec, 1967.
Cover for the Penguin edition of Lucky Jim, 1965.
