A new approach to debates over Macdonald and other monuments in Canada: Part 1

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By Stéphane Lévesque

“One of the things we heard very clearly from the Indigenous family members” says recently re-elected Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps (2018), “is that coming to city hall… and walking past John A. Macdonald every time, feels contradictory. And if the city is serious about reconciliation, which I would say we are, then one important thing we do is temporarily remove the [statue] from the front steps of city hall.”[1]

The city of Victoria’s recent political decision to take down the statue of Macdonald is not trivial. It came at a strategic moment when local, provincial, and national governments face pressing demands to remove historic monuments or rename buildings and sites of memory, from Hector Langevin to Egerton Ryerson and John A. Macdonald. How should Canadian authorities respond? What role could historical consciousness play with respect to these pressing demands?

Given the various articles on the subject on Active History[2], my goal is not to replicate their important contributions but rather to discuss their implication for public education and historical consciousness using Canada as a context for analysis.

Why them? Why now?

Monuments are making news around the world: from South Africa to Argentina, from Australia to Canada. Christopher Columbus, James Cook, Cecil Rhodes, and John A. Macdonald never met one another but they all share something in common: they symbolize the new history war – a frontal public attack on powerful historical male figures who represent contested narratives of the collective past. Why is this happening now? Continue reading →

A Short History of Treaty Nomenclature in Ontario

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By Daniel Laxer, Jean-Pierre Morin, Alison Norman

Treaties in Ontario

Have you ever wondered why the treaty for the territory you live on is named as it is? Why are some numbered and some named after people? Why is the Toronto Purchase also known as Treaty 13? Why are there two Treaty 3s in Ontario? No doubt that Ontario’s treaty history is the most complicated in the country, with the most treaties and the most varied naming conventions. This article is an attempt to clarify some of the messiness.Treaty making has a long and complicated history in Ontario. Continue reading →

Remember/Resist/Redraw #17: Canada’s Internment of Ukrainians, 1914–1920

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In the spring, the Graphic History Collective re-launched Remember / Resist / Redraw: A Radical History Poster Project as an ongoing series.

Last month we released RRR poster #17 by Orion Keresztesi and Kassandra Luciuk that looks at Canada’s internment of Ukrainians, 1914-1920. The poster makes connections between the past and present and grapples with timely issues such as immigration, law, and racism.

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.

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Grappling with Settler Self-Education in the Classroom: Rereading the History of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed

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By Rebekah Ludolph

“If the past 30 years have taught us anything, it is that there is a powerful, loud bunch of privileged white settlers who do not want to learn about us or from us…they are unaware and do not have to bother doing their research.” – Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Anishinaabe)

Akiwenzie-Damm calls for settlers to self-educate. To do their research and acknowledge the information that is available to them because of the hard work of Indigenous writers and scholars.

As a settler graduate student attending lectures and leading tutorials I have worked primarily in thematic courses featuring one or two Indigenous literary works framed as texts to promote settler-student education about settler-colonialism in Canada. From this experience, I notice that class discussions often verge on what Eve Tuck (Unangax) calls “damage-centered research.” Our curriculum “intends to document people’s pain and brokenness in order to hold those in power accountable for their oppression” but, in the process, often “reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of [Indigenous] people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless” (409).

This often happens inadvertently when classes overlook the important work Indigenous texts perform outside of settler education or when class is conducted under the assumption that it is only composed of settler students (whether Indigenous students choose to publicly identify themselves or not). While there are already many resources teachers can use to address this situation, the politics of settlers using Indigenous literatures for self-education warrants deeper investigation.

The publishing and reception history of Métis writer and community worker Maria Campbell’s 1973 autobiography, Halfbreed, for example, points to the long-standing practice of positioning Indigenous texts as first-and-foremost tools for settler education. Maintaining this interpretive position, to the exclusion of other perspectives, continues to produce damage-centered readings of Indigenous texts.

In this post, I want to try to explore different ways in which Settlers can approach this literature, its literary history, and the broader concerns raised with regard to education by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I will use Campbell’s Halfbreed, a key work in Canadian and Indigenous literary history and thus a key point of interaction between settlers and Original Peoples, as a case study. Continue reading →

History Slam Episode 124: Live at the Cellar

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By Sean Graham

In this episode of the History Slam, I talk with Marian Jago about her new book Live at the Cellar: Vancouver’s Iconic Jazz Scene in the 1950s and ’60s. We talk about Canada’s jazz scene, the co-operative structure of the Cellar, and the type of performers who played at the club. We also chat about clubs in other cities, the counterculture movement of the mid-20th century, and Marian’s use of oral history.

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Tanya Talaga, Thunder Bay, and all of our relations

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Alvin Fiddler, Grand Chief of the NIshnawbe Aski Nation, tweeted this the night of the Thunder Bay lecture. “Thunder Bay, you are beautiful. Chi Miigwetch for coming out to hear @TanyaTalaga deliver the first of her #MasseyLectures. What an incredible evening. #FullHouse”.

Karen Dubinsky

On October 16th I witnessed (and there is no better word for it) close to 1500 people come together in the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium to hear the first of Tanya Talaga’s CBC Massey Lecture series, “All Our Relations.” Based on the recently published book of the same name, a product of her year long Atkinson Foundation Fellowship “All Our Relations” explores the rising suicide rates of Indigenous youth in Canada, Brazil, Australia and Norway.

Why Tanya Talaga, why Thunder Bay, and why was I there?

Talaga introduced her lecture joking about the pantheon of Massey Lecturers she was joining – a formidable list indeed. “These illustrious people” she said, “have three degrees, they are people of letters; they probably don’t share their bathroom with their teenage kids. They probably have ensuites.”  Despite her modesty, and despite the fact that the list of Massey Lecture luminaries – since 1961- includes only one other Indigenous person (Thomas King), there’s no question this is a club in which Talaga belongs. Her work has had such a powerful impact, and nowhere more so than Thunder Bay.

Talaga is a Toronto Star journalist who was sent to Thunder Bay in 2011, in the midst of a Federal election, to do a story on Indigenous voting behaviour. She switched gears to the story of Indigenous student deaths at the insistence of the Indigenous leaders she was interviewing for the voting story. A good journalist follows where the story leads them, and Talaga is a good journalist. Talaga’s first book Seven Fallen Feathers, Racism, Death and Hard Truths in a Northern City rose to meteoric heights when it was published last year. It tells the stories of seven Indigenous youth who died while attending high school in Thunder Bay, far from their homes in various Northern communities, between 2000 and 2011. She puts the lives and deaths of Jordan Wabasse, Kyle Morrison, Curran Strang, Robyn Harper, Paul Panacheese, Reggie Bushie and Jethro Anderson into clear historical context, covering the specifics of colonization and the education system especially in Northwestern Ontario.

It’s obvious that she was quicker than many to realize what was happening in Thunder Bay in 2011 because of her relationship to the place. Continue reading →

Early Globalization: Exploring British Imports 1856-1906

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By Jim Clifford

[The visualizations in this post do not render very well on a small screen.]

The British were at the centre of the globalizing economy in the second half of the nineteenth century. British cities and their industrial economies were growing fast and the country increasingly relied on trade to supply food and raw materials.

During the past few years I have worked with a group of students to develop a database that includes all of Britain’s imports. The main goal of the database is to allow me to write journal articles and a book on the links between industrialization in Greater London and global commodities, but I thought interactive visualizations of the data created using Tableau might be interesting for ActiveHistory.ca readers. The full database is also available for download.

Visualizations for this project help us understand this early period of globalization during decades of intensifying imperialism and a rush to bring much of the world’s arable land into cultivation and other natural resources into the global market place. A London family in the 1890s might have started their day by washing with soap produced with Egyptian cottonseeds and Australian tallow, dressing in wool and cotton clothing sourced from Australia, India, South Africa and the United States, drinking sweet tea from Ceylon and Jamaica, and eating marmalade toast made with wheat from the United States and oranges from Spain. Their home would have been built with local bricks and timber from Quebec, Norway, Sweden or Russia. Most of these global connections, aside perhaps from tea marketed by its place of origin, would have been hidden by the process of commodification and the industrial transformation of the global raw materials into British consumer goods. Continue reading →

From Learning to Cite To Learning To Write: Using Zotero in the Classroom

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This post by Andrea Davis originally appeared on The American Historical Association’s Perspectives On History.  

Learning Management Systems (LMSs) have become ubiquitous in higher education. In online and traditional courses, instructors regularly use LMSs to post syllabi, house readings, facilitate student engagement, and provide feedback and grades. As these practices have become routine, digital pedagogues Sean Michael Morris and George Veletsianos remind us to interrogate the values and objectives of the university LMS. Rather than have us adopt its logic without question, they urge us to make critical decisions about our course platforms. I did exactly that in my undergraduate methods course, Practice of History, by repurposing Zotero as a course platform to help students achieve specific learning outcomes.

Practice of History is a required course for history majors at Arkansas State University, designed to prepare students for upper-level courses. As it stands in the curriculum, the course’s main objectives are to teach students how to find, evaluate, and cite sources, and how to use primary and secondary source evidence to construct interpretations that engage with historiographical conversations. These learning goals—combined with my commitment to preparing students for our predominantlypost-print world—led me to Zotero, a free and open-source research and bibliographic management system developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Although marketed as “easy-to-use,” Zotero can be challenging for students. Without an understanding of how the different system applications and plugins work together, it can be difficult to figure out how and where to complete discrete tasks. Navigating Zotero is not the only challenge. Conceptually, it can be difficult to get students to buy in to the program if they have not yet developed a thorough understanding of the research process.

I alleviated these challenges by repurposing Zotero as a course platform. The course was divided into three modules: “Approaches to Historical Writing,” where students had low-stakes opportunities to familiarize themselves with Zotero’s online application while reviewing foundational historical skills; “Developing a Research Paper,” where students learned additional facets of the program while completing individual research papers; and “Communicating Research to a Public Audience,” where students built upon the digital skills that they had developed throughout the course to create interactive Medium postsbased on their research.

A screenshot of the “Course Resources” folder for the course Practice of History, fall 2018.

Image 1: A screenshot of the “Course Resources” folder for the course Practice of History, fall 2018.

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“Seeing Refugees”: Using Old Photographs to Gain New Perspectives on Refugees, Past and Present

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Serbia, 1919 (image described in detail below),

Sonya de Laat

In the summer of 2018 an unprecedented number of people claiming to be refugees crossed into Canada at unofficial border points. Many Canadians learned of these events through photographs and other visual media circulating through the popular commercial press. Responding to such images, public reaction in Canada has been mixed. While some people support actions aimed at helping these families and individuals, others have sensationalized the situation by labelling it a “crisis” and calling border crossers as “illegals” or “cue jumpers.”

It is not the photographs on their own that have contributed to this ambivalence, since “photographs are mute”.[1] Photographs take their meaning from the words around them: captions, news anchor statements, accompanying articles, or even the “narrative templates in our own minds.”[2] Responses such as those that surfaced this summer are not new. Indeed, they are reflective of a historical pattern of response towards refugees over the past century. Looking at one set of photographs from that era can give us another perspective on current debates and remind us of the powerful role photography plays in mediating social relations.

There’s a little-known collection of photographs made by Lewis Hine for the American Red Cross (ARC) at the tail end and immediately following the Great War, 1918-1919. Continue reading →

Provincializing Europe in Canadian History; Or, How to Talk about Relations between Indigenous Peoples and Europeans

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Theodor de Bry from America, 1634 (image discussed later in this post).

Paige Raibmon

(Editor’s note : This piece was updated with footnotes, including one making explicit its reference to the work of postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty. A shortened version of this piece first appeared in TheTyee.ca.)

When I received the manuscript, I was excited to dive in. The subject was close to my heart. This was to be a new grade four text book focused on early relations between Indigenous peoples and Europeans, a topic I have taught at the university for close to 20 years. I had been asked to join the editorial team to help with the work in progress.

I am a settler, the mother of two daughters. We live, go to school, and work on land. That is to say: the have never ceded or surrendered their rightful title to these lands that they have inhabited for millennia. Put another way, the settler state has never acquired rightful title to these lands that it has occupied for the past century and a half.

In 2015, the Province of British Columbia began to overhaul—in its words “modernize”—what and how, children are taught in kindergarten through grade twelve. The new curriculum is reoriented around critical thinking and key competencies (skills) that are integrated across the subjects. It uses this approach to respond to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call to educate students about the histories and cultures of Indigenous peoples.

These changes are big improvements. But, I wondered, what would they actually look like? And so, as I say, when a publisher invited my assistance, I eagerly accepted. The timing was right. My older daughter had just begun grade four. Perhaps my younger daughter would use this book in a couple of years.

The manuscript proved instructive in unanticipated ways. It provided a guide to the ways that harmful, outdated assumptions lurk within common words and phrases that we take for granted. This means that we can perpetuate these assumptions unwittingly. And, it means we can begin to challenge them by bringing attention to the language we use.

There was plenty to admire about the manuscript. Its content was rich. It tackled topics many texts and teachers have long avoided, including the intentional spread of smallpox-infected blankets by the British. It went beyond token insertion of a few Indigenous names. It drew from illuminating oral and written accounts to highlight the active role of Indigenous actors.

I realized that although there was a lot about the past in it, the draft was not yet adequately historical. I mean by this that the book presented as universal concepts and ideas that are specific to particular times and places. Another way to put this is that the draft text did not yet adequately provincialize the actors and concepts at play. To “provincialize” is to strip away the mask of universality that covers the true nature of the European-derived concepts, ideas, and practices.¹

This matters because hierarchies of value are embedded within the terms and categories we use. Continue reading →