Canadian History Roundup – Week of March 26, 2017

“Centennial Youth Travellers.” 1967. Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1984-4-1463 Centennial Commission.

The latest in blog posts, news, and podcasts from the world of Canadian history.

Missed last week’s roundup? Check it out here.

• Vintage Everday has posted some interesting photos of Canadians this week, including this image of two girls in bathing costumes from 1915 in Victoria, and this one of two women hitchhiking in Toronto in 1974.
• Active History started off the week with a reprinting of an op-ed by Steven High on the gentrification of progressive politics. Or, why populism is so appealing to so many right now.
• This week, Borealia featured a three part series featuring conversation between four academics about what it is like to teach early Canadian history in the US. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.
• This week on Paula Dumas’ Isles Abroad is a post about live feeds and webcams from the Maritimes. I just absolutely love live feeds; my favourite is for Willows Beach in Victoria, where we used to live, though it doesn’t seem to be operating regularly anymore.
• The Dictionary of Canadian Biography has been super busy lately! This week it also introduced two new themed projects, on responsible government and Confederation, as well as a new biography on John Lyons Agnew, a Sudbury industrialist.
• Last week, York University hosted their annual Melville-Nelles-Hoffman Lecture in Environmental history, featuring Sara B. Pritchard of Cornell. NiCHE has kindly made her talk available on the website in audio format! I hope to see more initiatives like this, since living on the west coast means that I miss many of them. This specific lecture focused on the subject of light pollution.
• Acadiensis is back this week with an other post from Jerry Bannister’s students. This latest is by Joy Ciccarelli-Shand, about the future of Canadian Studies as a field, innovation, and inclusion.
• This week LAC posted another profile of Canadian WW1 Victoria Cross recipients. This latest looks at Lieutenant Frederick Maurice Watson Harvey.
• The Canadian Museum of History posted this adorable doll cradle from early 19^th century Quebec.
• The best two Heritage Minutes produced by Laurentian students in Hist 1407 have been added to the Historica Canada Student’s Heritage Minutes list! These are so impressive! They are:
  • Canadian-Japanese Internment
  • The Oka Crisis or Siege of Kanehsatake.
• Jessica DeWitt posted the fourth wordcloud on environmental history, and this week’s top three words were said, Jessie, and Trump.
• This week the Engagement blog posted a new article by Paul Berne Burow on the subject of wildlife conservation and settler colonialism with respect to the bison. While it doesn’t deal specifically with Canada, I’m pretty sure that the bison don’t care about borders.
• This week LAC also posted a Flickr album of images from British Columbia! I heartily approve! Check out the pictures themselves here.
• Katrina Ackerman has a new blog post on Active History this week about abortion access in Atlantic Canada, and the role that personalities play with respect to politics, by looking at Henry Morgentaler’s correspondence with various premiers.
• The Archives of Nova Scotia has a new virtual exhibit! This latest is on Isaac Deschamps, a Nova Scotia trader and, later, judge. The exhibit contains 41 digitized documents from his fonds.
• The American Society for Environmental History met this past week in Chicago. NiCHE provided a great guide for those interested in the field of Canadian environmental history. It looks so awesome! If you missed the conference, keep an eye out for future papers and keep your fingers crossed.
• Unwritten Histories turned one! Woo hoo! Find out a little about the amazing people who’ve helped make this possible, look back at what’s happened over the past year, and don’t forget to fill out the survey so I can make Unwritten Histories even better! So far one of the more popular requests has been for more sarcasm… hmmm…. I don’t know, that sounds pretty hard!
• Though it’s been up for a little while, and I’ve linked to it in a previous resource guide, the UVic History department officially launched its Victoria to Vimy online exhibit! It is absolutely amazing, with more than 3,700 digitized documents and oral histories. There are also lesson plans! Check out the exhibit itself here.
• Not yet convinced about how amazing Twitter can be for academics? Go here to see what happened with Adam Gaudry expressed a desire for a digital map of Métis history.
• A developer is planning to tear down Saint John’s historic Jellybean houses, the ones that are pretty colours and appear in all the ads. The CHA has started a petition to (hopefully) stop this.
• The latest articles from the Champlain Society’s Findings/Trouvailles blog is out! This piece, by Travis Hay, shows how important microhistories can be by looking at the use of Percy Moore’s rat experiments in residential and day schools. Highly recommended read.
• The Algoma Universities Archives received a new donation for the E. Jane Mundy fonds of images of North Shore Indigenous communities.
• Exporail, the Canadian Railway Museum, has just launched a new digital platform of their collections, which you can find here.
• The BC Archives has just launched their Twitter account! Follow them here. Shout out to Kathryn Bridge, my supervisor-sibling!
• Steven Maynard has written a new piece for Queen’s History department blog, The Watson, on the Queen’s Historical Society.
• Active History posted the latest History Slam podcast episode, a satirical take on “fake news.”
• In honour of International Theatre Day last week, Carleton’s library posted some pictures from the Carleton University’s Socks ‘n’ Buskin theatre company.
• The latest blog post from the Atlantic Loyalist Connections blog is a profile of Silas Deane, an American secret agent in France during the American Revolution.
• The South Peace Regional Archives shared a story about a happy coincidence that occurred while organizing materials.
• And I broke the internet earlier this week with my latest piece on Active History, about gender bias in student evaluations and the repercussions for female sessional instructors. The single post got more views in two days than Active History usually gets in a month, with over 6,000 shares as of this writing.
• Éliane Laberge wrote about conservation methods this week over on the Canadian Museum of History blog. She focused specifically on a wooden model of an Anishinaabeg-style cradleboard.
• LAC and the National Archives of the United Kingdom will be collaborating over the next month on a series of posts about Vimy Ridge.
• The UBC Digitizers blog looked through its collection of BC Historical Newspapers, comparing and contrasting them to our current social media.
• This week on Histoire Engagée is an interview with Viveka Melki about the relationship between film, memory, and history.
• The CCGW has posted episode 7 of its Dear Bessie podcast!
• Retroactive has brought back its Ask an Expert series this week, with a question about early stone and brick masonry in Alberta.
• Also from the CCGW this week is a special post by Michael McNorgan, the Corps Historian of the Canadian Armoured Corps, about the Battle of Moreuil Wood.
• Bill Waiser has a new post this week, looking at the feats of endurance regularly performed by voyageurs during the fur trade.
• Gordon Lyall has a fantastic post over on the Scholarship and Activism blog, reflecting on his privilege and what he learned by attending the recent Douglas Treaties Conference and subsequent Songhees Land and Sea Tour. This is what reconciliation is supposed to look like.
• Joan Sangster and the CHA have sent an official notice to the Liberal government calling on them to keep their promise about reforming the Access to Information system.
• The latest post on the Canadian Network on Humanitarian History blog is by Julie Van Drie, reflecting on her experiences at the recent conference, “A Samaritan State Revisited: Historical Perspectives on Canadian Foreign Aid, 1950-2016.”
• The McGill Library has just digitized old issues of the Public Address, a weekly student newspaper that was established in 1966.
• Check out some of the panels on offer at Dal’s history graduate student conference, “History Across the Disciplines,” happening this weekend.
• The Richmond Archives has a blog post about Steveston Island (also called Shady Island), a man-made island that is entirely undeveloped.
• The Doing our Bit blog looks at a Vimy Ridge Trench Map for the 7^th Brigade Assault on April 9, 1917.
• Gillian Leitch tells the story of a missing or misplaced historic plaque from Montreal
• Julian Peters offers another sneak peak at his graphic novel on the Battle on the Plains of Abraham, along with discussion about how he used colour to easily distinguish characters.
• This week Instantanés takes a look at the lengths to which the people of Rouyn-Noranda went to support their soldiers fighting in WW2.
• Today Esther Wheelwright would be 321 years old! Anne Little reflects on the response to her book.
• Read this Twitter essay by ‪@Dolchok about the ways in which Indigenous peoples have been erased from history, in response to a recent piece claiming that the only reliable information we have about the Arctic from before satellites were ship’s logs. Seriously, this is a must-read.
• Eve Lazarus remembers the missing houses of Yaletown, one of the cute old homes that you used to be able to spot in downtown Vancouver amidst all the new development. You can still see these occasionally, especially here in Richmond.
• UBC raised its Reconciliation Pole on Saturday! Check out some photos and videos from Twitter documenting the event, especially the ones posted on Allison Mill’s timeline (@sometimesal )
  • Find out why it’s so important here.
• The Scholarly Kitchen profiled the work of the AAIHS and their blog, Black Perspectives!
• Canadian History in the News
  • Last week I mentioned the new exhibit at the Vancouver Maritime Museum about the impounding of the Japanese-Canadian fishing fleet in BC. There has been continuing news coverage this week, including:
    • This piece on the CBC
    • And this one in the Vancouver Sun, by Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross, from the Landscapes of Injustice project.
  • John Price has written an editorial about his work at the University of Victoria trying to locate items that were stolen from BC First Nations and disappeared into collections around the world. This is part of a course he’s teaching, History 111: Age of Encounters in the Pacific World. Can someone sign me up for that?
  • Captain Cook’s waistcoat went up for auction this week in Sydney, Australia, but did not sell due to its failure to reach its minimum bid.
  • More coverage of the Lynn Beyak stupidity
    • First, she claimed that she has suffered alongside residential school survivors and that because she has Indigenous friends, she doesn’t need any more education on residential schools
    • Then she demanded an apology from residential school survivors, due to the negative publicity
    • These Conservative senators came to her defense, while others were more critical
    • Senator Murray Sinclair responded to Beyak’s comments. Can we saint this man?
    • The Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler and Grand Council Treaty #3 (GCT#3) Ogichidaa Francis Kavanaugh called for her resignation.
    • In response, she told residential school survivors that she wants an accounting of all First Nations spending, and that her original speech was about taxes. Too bad she forgot that her speeches are recorded, and CBC was not shy about pointing this out.
    • And Senator Sinclair also said in response to complaints that survivors need “to get over this,” “why can’t you remember this?” Watch the video, it is amazing. This man is a national treasure.
  • CBC’s “PhDs On the Go” series selected a historian from Memorial, Curtis Robinson, for his work on in the surveillance of German-Canadians during WW1.
  • Publisher’s Weekly reviewed Chris Dummitt’s upcoming book, Unbuttoned: A History of Mackenzie King’s Secret Life.
  • CBC remembered the first Vancouver Be In in 1967, where hundreds of hippies gathered together in Stanley Park.
  • The Story of Us came out this week, and it was just as bad as I thought it was going to be. Here are a couple of responses:
    • This one from Joseph Gagné, especially with respect to the portrayal of Les Filles du Roi
    • The premier of Nova Scotia is also unhappy because the documentary forgot about Port Royal. Oops.
    • The mayor of Annapolis Royal is also not impressed.
    • And the government of New Brunswick, as well as some notable historians, are unhappy with the exclusion of the Acadians.
  • Everyone’s gearing up for the 100^th anniversary of (the battle of) Vimy Ridge:
    • The Canadian War Museum put together a new exhibit for the 100^th anniversary of Vimy Ridge. The Globe and Mail has an article with images of some of the artefacts, with commentary from Tim Cook.
    • Jake Edmiston reflects on what the battle should mean for Canada today, again featuring contributions from Cook.
    • Robert Everett-Green examines the symbolism of Vimy Ridge, also quoting Cook.
    • And The Globe and Mail remembers its own coverage of Vimy and Hill 70.
    • Two Indigenous women have come forward to describe how they were sexually abused by clergy at a Catholic day school they attended as children. They have launched a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of St. Boniface and the two (now dead) priests. The names of the women have not been released due to their status as survivors of sexual abuse.
  • You absolutely need to read this piece by Erica Violet Lee and Hayden King on how the Canada150 celebrations depict Indigenous peoples as “static stereotypes,” appropriating the idea of “home” in the service of colonial oppression.
  • As Bob Muckle pointed out on Twitter this week, the Society for American Archaeology met this week in Vancouver, so the local press has been digging up (haha) stories about archaeology in Canada:
    • A Heiltsuk village site on Triquet Island has been dated to 14,000 years old, one of the oldest Indigenous settlements dated so far. You know who’s not surprised? The Heiltsuk, who’ve been telling archaeologists this all along.
    • A development company has worked with the Saugeen Ojibway First Nation to excavate a famer’s field. Some of the artefacts that were uncovered go back to 200 B.C.E.
    • An ancient pithouse has been unearthed at Bridge River in Fraser Canyon that is more than 1,500 years It included 17 distinct layered floors, replaced every 20 years.
  • In 1956, the federal government declared the Sinixt First Nation extinct. A recent ruling overturned this when a Sinixt hunter was acquitted for hunting without a license. Because of course the Sinixt didn’t disappear — they moved south! The judge’s ruling is pretty awesome.
    • There’s more coverage here.
    • And Ian Mosby commented on Twitter.
  • Alberta is planning to apologize for their participation in the Sixties Scoop.
  • There is a new novel coming out from Emily Shultz about rum-running across the Canadian border.
  • Tristin Hopper, of The Province puts the signing of the BNA Act into a global perspective. Turns out, Canada wasn’t terribly important at the time.
  • The Toronto Film Festival has a new article by Alanis Obomsawin, reflecting on her career using film to show the true past and present of Indigenous peoples in Canada.
  • A new documentary is coming out about the history of Black hockey players from the Maritimes!
  • Remember that discussion between Jack Granatstein and Noah Richler at the MacDonald-Laurier Institute about whether or not Canada should be ashamed of its history? The audience was polled, and you can see their responses, as well as later commentary, here.
  • Can you imagine one family living in the same house for nearly 100 years?
  • CBC remembers Reginald Fessenden, who brought the world AM radio.
  • Reinforcing the idea that great minds think alike, Steven Maynard also helped his students put together an exhibit on cookbooks!
  • An abandoned rail line is becoming a new cycling route to UBC Okanagan. They did this in Victoria, too, years ago, making the Galloping Goose trail.
  • Mark Campbell has just created a playlist showcasing the history of rap in Canada.
  • And CBC profiled one of the earliest Canadian hip hip stars, Ron Nelson!
  • Part 2 of Jessie Thistle’s documentary on the CBC about his life story and the impact of stealing Indigenous lands aired on Thursday. Listen to it here.
  • Le Monde Diplomatic has a feature on immigrants from the “Maghrebe,” a loose term that includes individuals from northern Africa, such as Algeria and Morocco, and their disenchantment with Quebec. If you look at the map, you can also see the extent to which ethnic divisions still mark the city. I grew up in Cote Saint-Luc. Can you spot it?
  • Thanks to Maddie Knickerbocker (‪@maddieknicker ) for spotting this one: anti-colonial Canada150 trading cards!
  • The National Post recently provided a platform for John English’s take on the historical contributions of Pierre Trudeau.
  • Historica Canada had a competition a little while ago asking current elementary students to take the citizenship test. The school with the highest score? Richmond, BC’s own Ferris Elementary!
  • The Globe and Mail remembers WW1’s Hill 70.
  • And Canadian veterans are hoping that the Chinese-Canadian community in Vancouver will help fund a monument for Hill 70. This strikes me as rather dicey.
  • Wallis Snowdon spoke with Arthur Bear Chief about his recently published memoire, My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell, about his time in residential school.
  • David Maurice Smith will take over Maclean’s Instagram account from April 1 to the 7th, making the point that stereotypes about Indigenous peoples have been a tremendous barrier to reconciliation and providing adequate funding and resources for Indigenous communities. Maurice Smith will be posting image from his time in Attawapiskat in the hopes of countering this problem.
  • The Vancouver Sun remembers the 1924 Vancouver Auto Show.
  • The Smithsonian and the Library of Congress have purchased the recently discovered photograph of Harriet Tubman.
  • And the BC government has announced the 56 Japanese-Canadian historic places chosen by the public over a four month period.
    • Here is the official press release
    • and CBC’s coverage of the story.
    • and here is the official interactive map!
• Better Late than Never
  • I missed this one by the skin of my teeth last week, but Eve Lazarus posted the latest in her series about favourite buildings. This latest edition featured Patrick Dunae and Tom Hawthorn, both looking at buildings in Victoria.
  • Two survivors of St. Anne’s residential school in Fort Albany and their lawyers are calling on the Ontario Superior Court to launch an investigation into the federal government’s withholding of relevant documents that back up survivors seeking compensation. Seriously, when will the government stop re-victimizing survivors!
  • BC has introduced new legislation to repeal historical legislation dating back to 1971 that has been deemed discriminatory.
  • Ian McKay talked about the Wilson Institute, their new initiatives, and the importance of considering Canadian history in a global context.
  • Stephanie Bellissimo took a look at the Women’s Institute in Ontario, particularly the collective history of the Atikokan branch’s “The Tweedsmuir Village History Books.” Laugh if you will, but I had no idea what the WI was until I met my husband. His parents live in PEI, where there is a flourishing community of “institutes.”
  • A rare stamp from BC issued in 1859 and depicting both colonies (B.C. and Vancouver Island, which were separated at the time) recently went up for auction. And yes, I am such a nerd that I collected stamps for a while when I was a kid.
  • Check out this fantastic live-tweeting by ‪@FancyBebamikawe from a panel by about Indigenous peoples and fashion in a historical and contemporary context, moderated by Riley Kucheran.
  • This new to me website by Steve Marti features some great blog posts about his research into troop mobilization in WW1 in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Check out part 1 and part 2 of “Recurring Footprints,” where he traces the geographical distribution of enlisted soldiers.

Well this has certainly been quite the week…. Apparently I’m internet-famous, which is hilarious! hehehe Anyways, I hope you liked this week’s roundup! If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice! And don’t forget to check back on Tuesday for a new blog post. I won’t spoil the surprise, but it has something to do with books. See you then!

Liked this post? Please take a second to support Unwritten Histories on Patreon!