Note from Andrea: I’m super excited to bring you a special guest post this week, written by Ronald Rudin, on his fantastic initiative, the Lost Stories Project! Enjoy!
All photos provided courtesy of their respected owners. Please do not reproduce.
Ronald Rudin is a Professor of History at Concordia University. Author of seven books and producer of seven documentary films, he carries out research that touches upon Canadian cultural and environmental history, with a particular focus on Atlantic Canada and its Acadian population. He is most recently the author of the prize-winning: Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park (University of Toronto Press, 2016), and its connected website Returning the Voices to Kouchibouguac National Park.
Since 2012, I have been the director of the Lost Stories Project, which collects little-known stories about the Canadian past, transforms them into pieces of public art on appropriate sites, and documents the process through short films that are available from the project’s bilingual website. I have long had an interest in the tools that are used to tell stories about the past — monuments, sculptures, murals, and the like –and I have pursued this interest through both publications (Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie,) and documentary films (Life After Ile Ste-Croix). I often find myself wondering about the choices behind such markers, particularly what story should be told and how best to tell it? These may seem like trivial concerns, but if last summer’s Monument Wars and the American debate over Confederate monuments is anything to go by, the choices made have long term repercussions. What’s more, they often tell us more about the people who built them than the history itself.