CHA Reads 2018: An Introduction

Welcome to our second annual CHA Reads! Last year’s series was so great, we could not pass up the opportunity to do it again. So we’re back, with five brand-new readers to review and reflect on the five books shortlisted for the Canadian Historian Association’s (CHA) Sir John A. Macdonald Prize* for the best book in Canadian history published in the last year.

Over the course of this week, five scholars will argue why their book should win the coveted award.

Based on the format of CBC’s Canada Reads, five different scholars have agreed to champion these five books. They are:

• Krista McCracken (Agloma University)
• Ian Jesse (University of Maine)
• Carly Ciufo (McMaster University)
• Dan Horner (Ryerson University)
• Carmen Nielson (Mount Royal University)

And Andrea and I will be acting as the moderators.

Each scholar selected a book that was outside their particular field of expertise, so that the books could be judged on their merits alone. Because we are Canadians and academics, we have decided that this will be a friendly discussion, rather than a competition. To that end, each scholar has written a short piece explaining the merits of their chosen book and why they think it should win the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize.

*For those who aren’t already aware of this, the name of the prize is currently under debate, and will in all likelihood change following this year’s annual meeting.

The Contenders

Here is this year’s shortlist for the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, in alphabetical order, as determined by jury members, Cynthia Comacchio, Gregory M. W. Kennedy, Dominique Marquis, Daniel Samson, James Daschuk, and Catherine Gidney (non-voting).

Note: Images and blurbs below are taken from the publishers’ websites.

Hill, Susan M. The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017.

If one seeks to understand Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) history, one must consider the history of Haudenosaunee land. For countless generations prior to European contact, land and territory informed Haudenosaunee thought and philosophy, and was a primary determinant of Haudenosaunee identity.

In The Clay We Are Made Of, Susan M. Hill presents a revolutionary retelling of the history of the Grand River Haudenosaunee from their Creation Story, through European contact, to contemporary land claims negotiations. She incorporates Indigenous theory, Fourth world post-colonialism, and Amerindian autohistory, along with Haudenosaunee languages, oral records, and wampum strings to provide a comprehensive account of the Haudenosaunee relationship
to their land.

Hill outlines the basic principles and historical knowledge contained within four key epics passed down through Haudenosaunee history. She highlights the political role of women in land negotiations and dispels their misrepresentation in the scholarly canon. She guides the reader through treaty relationships with Dutch, French, and British settler nations—including the Kaswentha/ Two-Row Wampum (the precursor to all future Haudenosaunee-European treaties), the Covenant Chain, the Nanfan Treaty, and the Haldimand Proclamation—and details outstanding land claims. Hill’s study concludes with a discussion of the current problematic relationship between the Grand River Haudenosaunee and the Canadian government, and reflects on the meaning and possibility of reconciliation.

Lennox, Jeffers. Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690–1763. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. 

The period from 1690 to 1763 was a time of intense territorial competition during which Indigenous peoples remained a dominant force. British Nova Scotia and French Acadia were imaginary places that administrators hoped to graft over the ancestral homelands of the Mi’kmaq, Wulstukwiuk, Passamaquoddy, and Abenaki peoples.

Homelands and Empires is the inaugural volume in the University of Toronto Press’s Studies in Atlantic Canada History. In this deeply researched and engagingly argued work, Jeffers Lennox reconfigures our general understanding of how Indigenous peoples, imperial forces, and settlers competed for space in northeastern North America before the British conquest in 1763. Lennox’s judicious investigation of official correspondence, treaties, newspapers and magazines, diaries, and maps reveals a locally developed system of accommodation that promoted peaceful interactions but enabled violent reprisals when agreements were broken. This outstanding contribution to scholarship on early North America questions the nature and practice of imperial expansion in the face of Indigenous territorial strength.

Miller, J. R. Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts Its History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.

Since the 1980s successive Canadian institutions, including the federal government and Christian churches, have attempted to grapple with the malignant legacy of residential schooling, including official apologies, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In Residential Schools and Reconciliation, award winning author J. R. Miller tackles and explains these institutional responses to Canada’s residential school legacy. Analysing archival material and interviews with former students, politicians, bureaucrats, church officials, and the Chief Commissioner of the TRC, Miller reveals a major obstacle to achieving reconciliation – the inability of Canadians at large to overcome their flawed, overly positive understanding of their country’s history. This unique, timely, and provocative work asks Canadians to accept that the root of the problem was Canadians like them in the past who acquiesced to aggressively assimilative policies.

Morgan, Cecilia. Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.

In the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century, an unprecedented number of Indigenous people – especially Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabeg, and Cree – travelled to Britain and other parts of the world. Who were these transatlantic travellers, where were they going, and what were they hoping to find?

Travellers through Empire unearths the stories of Indigenous peoples including Mississauga Methodist missionary and Ojibwa chief Reverend Peter Jones, the Scots-Cherokee officer and interpreter John Norton, Catherine Sutton, a Mississauga woman who advocated for her people with Queen Victoria, E. Pauline Johnson, the Mohawk poet and performer, and many others. Cecilia Morgan retraces their voyages from Ontario and the northwest fur trade and details their efforts overseas, which included political negotiations with the Crown, raising funds for missionary work, receiving an education, giving readings and performances, and teaching international audiences about Indigenous cultures. As they travelled, these remarkable individuals forged new families and friendships and left behind newspaper interviews, travelogues, letters, and diaries that provide insights into their cross-cultural encounters.

Chronicling the emotional ties, contexts, and desires for agency, resistance, and negotiation that determined their diverse experiences, Travellers through Empire provides surprising vantage points on First Nations travels and representations in the heart of the British Empire.

Heaman, E. A. Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017.

Was Canada’s Dominion experiment of 1867 an experiment in political domination? Looking to taxes provides the answer: they are a privileged measure of both political agency and political domination. To pay one’s taxes was the sine qua non of entry into political life, but taxes are also the point of politics, which is always about the control of wealth. Modern states have everywhere been born of tax revolts, and Canada was no exception.

Heaman shows that the competing claims of the propertied versus the people are hardwired constituents of Canadian political history. Tax debates in early Canada were philosophically charged, politically consequential dialogues about the relationship between wealth and poverty. Extensive archival research, from private papers, commissions, the press, and all levels of government, serves to identify a rising popular challenge to the patrician politics that were entrenched in the Constitutional Act of 1867 under the credo “Peace, Order, and good Government.” Canadians wrote themselves a new constitution in 1867 because they needed a new tax deal, one that reflected the changing balance of regional, racial, and religious political accommodations. In the fifty years that followed, politics became social politics and a liberal state became a modern administrative one. But emerging conceptions of fiscal fairness met with intense resistance from conservative statesmen, culminating in 1917 in a progressive income tax and the bitterest election in Canadian history. Tax, Order, and Good Government tells the story of Confederation without exceptionalism or misplaced sentimentality and, in so doing, reads Canadian history as a lesson in how the state works.

Tax, Order, and Good Government follows the money and returns taxation to where it belongs: at the heart of Canada’s political, economic, and social history.

The Breakdown

So here is how CHA Reads is going to work:

Today, we kick off this mini-series of sorts with an introduction to the series, followed by Krista McCracken defending Susan M. Hill’s The Clay We Are Made of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River.

On Tuesday, Ian Jesse will defend Jeffers Lennox, Homeland and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690–1763. 

Next, on Wednesday, Carly Ciufo will defend Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts Its History.

On Thursday, Dan Horner will defend Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada. Then, on Friday, Carmen Nielsen will defend Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917.

Directly following Carmen Nielson’s defence of Tax, Order, and Good Government, we will feature a live twitter conversation of all five books and their defenders which everyone can participate in. Here, we will explore some of the questions and themes that emerged over the course of the week. The relevant hashtag will be #chareads2018, and the resulting conversation will be posted on the blog later in the day. The conversation will start at 2pm EST/11amPST.

Social Media

We would love to continue this conversation throughout the week on social media! Use the hashtag #chareads2018 to follow along with the discussion and participate on Twitter. You can also follow all of us individually at the following accounts:

• Krista McCracken (@kristamccracken)
• Ian Jesse (@IanJJesse)
• Carly Ciufo (@CarlyCiufo)
• Dan Horner (@DanHorner5)
• Carmen Nielson (@Carmen_nielson)
• Stephanie Pettigrew (@steph_pettigrew)
• Andrea Eidinger (@AndreaEidinger)

Be sure to join us Friday on Twitter all day when all CHA Reads contributors will be available for questions and answers, and further discussion! Who says Canadian historians don’t know how to have some interactive fun?

Coming up next, our first post!

Special thanks for Catherine Mary Ulmer for having come up with the idea for CHA Reads in the first place.

Editor’s Note: We originally posted last year’s award selection committee rather than this year’s. We have since corrected the error. Thanks to Greg Kennedy for pointing it out.

Don’t forget to check out the other posts in our CHA Reads Series!!

• Series Introduction
• Krista McCracken defending The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River
• Ian Jesse defending Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690-1973.
• Carly Ciufo defending Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts Its History
• Dan Horner defending Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada
• Carmen Nielson defending Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917.

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