Last week, I wrote about my “collections” of dogs and sheep, and how humans bred farm dogs as “enlightened wolves.” I’d like to share a bit more about the history of the human-wolf relationship.
Hermanubis, the canine-headed god combining Hermes of Greek mythology with Egyptian god Anubis, associated with accompanying souls to the afterlife. Popular during era of Roman control of Egypt. Statue housed at Room IV, Gregorian Egyptian Museum, Vatican museums. Colin / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0
Early pastoral nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples idealized canine predatory power. Wolf packs, with their strength in numbers and cooperation as a social unit, were able to survive and proliferate across the globe at the apex of the ecological food chain, rivaled only by humans. Wolf folklore was born of this recognition of the similarities between human groups and wolf packs. Ancient societies idolized and occasionally worshipped wolves as deities, powerful spirits, or companions of the gods: ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Romans, Greeks, and Persians had both positive and negative attitudes towards wolves.[1] Lycanthropy, or shape-shifting, was often associated with festivals or wolf-warrior-like initiation ceremonies in Greece, Rome, and among Germanic peoples.[2] The wolf played various roles in many Indigenous North American creation stories.[3] Two wolves, Geri and Freki, and two ravens served as guardian-companions for the Norse God Odin; the evil wolf Fenrir ushered in the destruction of the Norse universe (Ragnarök), and his wolf offspring, Sköll and Hati, regularly chased the sun and moon across the sky.[4] The wolf in Japan, as a type of Shinto nature spirit, “Oguchi no Magami,” the “Large-Mouthed God,” received offerings of gratitude for guarding children and for protecting peasants’ crops, which would otherwise be consumed or trampled by the Japanese deer and boar populations.[5] Nomadic Turkic and Mongol peoples in Central Asia possessed origin mythology in which their actual ancestors were believed to have been wolves, or wolf deities who guided their tribes in times of trouble to new lands where they escaped death and lived on to become powerful empires in later centuries.[6] The wolf is everywhere in human societies’ consciousness. In fact, humans have such a deep connection to wolves that they have never been able to live without the wolf in some form, whether positive or negative, imaginary or real.
With Halloween here, I revisit my 2013 conversation with the University of Glasgow’s Sabine Wieber about death masks. We talk about the artistic meaning of the masks and how they affected people’s understanding of death. We also chat about the material culture nature of the masks and how she deals with what would generally be considered a dark topic.
One of the author’s Belgian Shepherds, Khan, herding sheep. Photo courtesy of Fraser Telford.
My collections would, perhaps, better be termed a “pack” and a “herd”; the “collections” that both inform and provide respite from my research are my four dogs and my small flock of sheep.
It wasn’t until I was finishing up my doctorate in Chicago in Islamic and Middle East history that I finally had the opportunity to get a dog. Since 1998, our household has been sharing space with Belgian Shepherds, my “loyal wolves.” Belgian Shepherds have participated in my academic journey, telling me at 5:01pm that it was time to turn off the computer, stop working, and go for a play session, a run, or a swim in Lake Michigan. They still keep me company while reading, writing, or grading. But city-living can be difficult for a Belgian, a very active and intelligent herding dog who will choose a job for himself if you don’t give him one. Our first Belgian fit this bill and someone in the local Chicago dog park suggested we try taking Mr. Spock (named for his pointy ears) to a sheep farm to instinct test him with people who knew our breed.
Thus began my entry into the world of sheep and herding dogs. What started as an exercising outlet for my dog (and then there were two, then 3, and currently, 4 Belgians who live with us!), became a passion for seeing this breed do the job it was originally bred for back in continental Europe. After a few years of paying a dog trainer with Belgians and sheep to teach me how to train and compete in sheepherding trials in the US, my husband and I eventually moved for my academic career to a university in Australia, where we bought our first farm and sheep, and eventually to Canada, where we are now. We have a small flock of sheep, we compete in herding trials, or competitions on sheep, ducks, and cattle, I am a herding judge, and we teach people how to do this with their dogs as well. It is my “alternative life” from the rigors and pressures of academia, though somehow, this rural livestock-keeping lifestyle has come to intersect with my scholarly pursuits in ways I had never contemplated until we owned livestock ourselves. I suppose this was all very timely, as Animal History has recently become a new and innovative sub-field of historical inquiry that explores yet another largely “voiceless” group whose active agency in history is now finally being explored and amplified.
This week, I talk with Jennifer Clark, author of Producing Feminism: Television Work in the Age of Women’s Liberation. We discuss the role of women in the television in the 1970s, the ways in which women organized, and how societal changes were reflected in the industry. We also chat about the challenges of finding women in the archives, how production changes made their way to the screen, and the legacy of women’s labour in television during this era.
It’s American election time again and, once again, everyone has an opinion on whether this is just another election or whether rule of law is seriously under threat. Donald Trump has said that he needs only one day of dictatorship, only one hour of summary violence, to quell all unreasonable resistance, leaving only the reasonable. Can we test such claims against experience and evidence? It behooves the historians, if no one else, to scour the archives for answers.
Some historians point to Nazi Germany circa 1933 as the obvious rejoinder. When the public empowered politicians who promised dictatorial and violent solutions to social and economic tensions, the dissolution of the Reichstag and Kristallnacht followed. But the comparison fails without deeper causes and consequences: the circumstances leading up to the Nazi seizure of power and the circumstances that finally restored democracy and rule of law. When peace came, at the end of the Second World War, it was built on the ashes of Nazi Germany but also on the firm conviction that the Second World War must not end as the First World War did: with a Carthaginian peace and American isolationism.
John Maynard Keynes called the Treaty of Versailles of 1919 a “Carthaginian peace” because it took the lessons of economics and applied them in reverse, to impose lasting economic injury to Germany. For Keynes, it obstructed not just Germany’s but also Europe’s economic recovery. It enabled the Nazi seizure of power, repudiation of Germany’s payments (with American conniving), and the remilitarization of Germany.[1]
CPR porters, L–R Phil Witt, Jack Davis. Source: Stanley G. Grizzle Collection, Library and Archives Canada, E-copy number: e011781985
In 1986 and 1987, Stanley G. Grizzle began to cold call old friends, asking them if they would be willing to share their memories of portering during the first half of the twentieth century. This famed Toronto-based labour activist, war veteran, civil servant and citizenship judge, who was also a porter for twenty years, was in the midst of writing a memoir. Beyond his own story, Grizzle sought to fill in gaps in his knowledge about the history of unionization and, in particular, the development of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Canada. This was the first organized union for Black Canadian men who worked as porters for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). Some were unabashed in their refusal, making it quite clear that they did not want to revisit the past. Dredging up the details was too complicated, and they had closed the book on that chapter of their lives.[i] Most, however, said yes immediately, inviting Grizzle into their homes across the country, where they proceeded to banter about life on the rails while hammering out the finer details of the larger processes through which they had lived.
A selection of cassette tapes from Stanley G. Grizzle’s collection; note that while the tape recorder pictured here was not his, it is similar to the one he would have used to record his interviews. Credit: Jennifer Woodley, Multimedia Production Specialist at LAC
These interviews and others are at the heart of a new Discover Library and Archives Canada podcast series. In particular, Voices Revealed showcases LAC’s vast but little-known oral history collections, making space for those from a variety of marginalized and underrepresented communities from across the country to tell their own stories in their own voices. Narratives of injustice, conflict, resilience and resolution enable us to understand how the past powerfully defines our present, while also providing the insights we need to imagine new directions for our collective future. Everyone has a story to tell, and it is our hope that this podcast series will provide an accessible means through which a variety of narratives can be contextualized and shared.
The first season, “Porter Talk,” which is rooted in Grizzle’s interview collection, introduces listeners to the Black men who rarely had a name, let alone a voice, while they were employed in the extractive and highly exploitative job of portering. Their stories, along with those shared by their wives and children, speak truth to power, emphasizing the anti-Black racism these folks endured both on and off the rails and the strategies they employed to move forward and build community. This season begins by introducing listeners to Grizzle himself, reconstructing his life story and the ways that activism shaped his worldview. This episode provides the essential information needed to wade into his interview collection and the particular clips that are integrated into successive episodes. “Porter Talk” also focuses on who the men were, where they came from, what their working conditions were like, how unionization developed and the various ways that communities, and women in particular, created the necessary foundations on which change could occur. Episodes are contextualized by leading Black scholars, Canadian historians and community storytellers and knowledge keepers, helping listeners make sense of the larger narrative that shaped the kinds of stories porters could tell. It is our intention to launch a new episode every six weeks. Those interested are encouraged to subscribe on their favourite podcast platform to listen to episodes as they are released!
Pedagogy has been central to the design of this series. Encouraging listeners to ponder who created the interviews and the conditions under which these exchanges took place serves as our starting point. Each episode also includes a timestamped and searchable transcript that directs listeners back to the original collection material. Our hope is that teachers and students in particular will engage with the primary sources themselves, listening to the interviews, making their own connections to these men and finding their own unique meanings in the words that are shared. Additionally, we have provided a list of resources for each episode, drawing attention to major works in this field, as well as biographies for each interviewer, interviewee, scholar and community member included in the episode. There are many ways to gain access to this important collection!
Oral histories, once recorded, are rarely listened to again. They tend to gather dust on closet shelves, remain packed away beneath mattresses or simply take up space on our computers and external hard drives. Publicly available interviews are often edited into short clips and presented on engaging websites. Mostly though, whenever possible, the vast majority of us choose to read transcripts rather than take the time to listen. Limited time, resources, and searchability often make this choice for us. Very few of us can commit to listening to a complete interview, let alone an entire collection. “Porter Talk,” and subsequent seasons of Voices Revealed,provides an alternative, albeit long-form, way to engage with the stories that shape who we are as Canadians. The humanity inherent in these narratives allows us to build connections with the past, which rarely looks that much different from the present. This is the power of oral history, however we choose to access it.
Stacey Zembrzycki is an award-winning oral and public historian who serves as a Podcast Development Specialist in the Outreach and Engagement Branch at Library and Archives Canada.
The second episode in the Porter Talk series launches today.
Notes
[i] Towards the end of his life, Grizzle recorded nearly every telephone message and conversation he had on cassette tapes, in addition to the interviews he conducted. Some of these conversations are available here.
Suggested Readings
Melinda Chateauvert. Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
Cecil Foster, “They call me George”: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada(Windsor: Biblioasis, 2019).
Stanley G. Grizzle with John Cooper, My Name’s Not George: The Story of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Canada. Personal Reminiscences of Stanley G. Grizzle (Toronto: Umbrella Press, 1998).
Steven High, Deindustrializing Montreal: Entangled Histories of Race, Residence and Class (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).
Saje Mathieu, North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
Dorothy W. Williams, Blacks in Montreal, 1628-1986, An Urban Demography (Montréal: Les Éditions Yvon Blais Inc, 1989).
Dorothy W. Williams, The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal (Montréal: Véhicule Press, 1997).
This week I talk with Bethany Kilcrease, author of Falsehood and Fallacy: How to Think, Read, and Write in the Twenty-First Century. We discuss the assumption that young people are well prepared for online misinformation, increased accessibility of quality sources, and the pros and cons of gatekeepers’ reduced power. We also chat about the CRAAP test, the benefits of short-form online writing, and proving causation.
“Surveyor Mr. Stayner, at Don Diversion, Toronto, Ont,” 1914. Credit: Toronto Harbour Commissioners / Library and Archives Canada / PA-097849. Copyright: Expired.
Active History recently circulated a survey that asked readers how they use the site, what they like about it, and what they would like to see in the future. The respondents provided fantastic feedback, and we would like to thank them and share what we learned.
Our Reach
Active History has been publishing for 15 years. In that time there have been over 2.5 million site visits. The site hosts an archive of over 2,600 essays. We have readers in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, Australia, Germany, France, the Philippines, the Netherlands, and Italy.
Posts get traffic year over year in part because students access them; 80% of the educators who responded to our survey assign Active History posts in their classes.
Lawrence Avenue West and Weston Road (site of two MTHA properties) from the air, 1974. Copyright City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 124, File 8, Item 51.
This is the third in a series of articles on Toronto public housing in the late 1980s. All entries in the series will be collected here.
In the 1980s, the Metropolitan Toronto Housing Authority (MTHA)’s tenant population shifted as the demographic makeup of Toronto changed. At the same time, Community Relations Worker (CRWs) developed big and ultimately doomed plans for social service provision. The MTHA was hampered in its unwieldy mission. Poor organizational structure and management of CRWs meant they were not equipped to deliver ambitious programming. Furthermore, since staff failed to take demographic shifts into account and sometimes held prejudiced attitudes toward tenants, they failed to identify and plan appropriate programs. A consultant report from Simon Associates and the MTHA’s response to it provide a window on these major issues in MTHA in the 1980s.
This week I talk with Rosemary Pennington, author of Pop Islam: Seeing American Muslims in Popular Media. We discuss how Ms Marvel contributed to the book’s origins, what forms of media are included in the book, and how stereotypes of Muslims are perpetuated in popular culture. We also chat about the challenges faced by Muslim stand-up comedians, how reality show editing influences perceptions, and how popular culture reflects society at large.
