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Authorized Heritage: Place, Memory, and Historic Sites in Prairie Canada
By Robert Coutts. 2021
"Authorized Heritage" analyses the history of commemoration at heritage sites across western Canada. Using extensive research from predominantly government records,…
it argues that heritage narratives are almost always based on national messages that commonly reflect colonial perceptions of the past. Yet many of the places that commemorate Indigenous, fur trade, and settler histories are contested spaces, places such as Batoche, Seven Oaks, and Upper Fort Garry being the most obvious. At these heritage sites, Indigenous views of history confront the conventions of settler colonial pasts and represent the fluid cultural perspectives that should define the shifting ground of heritage space. Robert Coutts brings his many years of experience as a public historian to this detailed examination of heritage sites across the prairies. He shows how the process of commemoration often reflects social and cultural perspectives that privilege a conventional and conservative national narrative. He also examines how class, gender, and sexuality often remain apart from the heritage discourse. Most notably, Authorized Heritage examines how governments became the mediators of what is heritage and, just as significantly, what is not.Canada’s social, economic, political, and environmental impacts on the Western Hemisphere have been largely overlooked by historians and other social…
scientists. Most narratives of the relationships between North America and the emerging markets of the south disproportionately focus on the United States. By downplaying Canada’s role, these narratives have fallen short in reconstructing the history of the region. Opportunism and Goodwill fills in these historical gaps, looking at the dynamics of the relationship between Canada and Colombia as they were spearheaded by Canada’s private sector. Stefano Tijerina argues that since the first era of globalization during the second half of the nineteenth century, Canada’s private sector has carved out niche markets across Latin America, sometimes working independently and in other instances working on behalf of foreign interests. In his historical analysis of these temporal and spatial dimensions, Tijerina shows that the long-term economic development of Canada and Colombia was intertwined and interdependent, ultimately stressing the importance of transnational approaches to the study of history. Contributing to questions about Canada’s "goodwill" and other benevolent constructs, Opportunism and Goodwill sets the historical foundation for current debates about Canadian industries across the world.Just the Usual Work: The Social Worlds of Ida Martin, Working-Class Diarist
By Michael Boudreau, Bonnie Huskins. 2021
Born in 1907, Ida Martin spent most of her life in Saint John, New Brunswick. She married a longshoreman named…
Allan Robert Martin in 1932 and they had one daughter. In the years that followed, Ida had a busy and varied life, full of work, caring for her family, and living her faith. Through it all, Ida found time to keep a daily diary from 1945 to 1992.Bonnie Huskins is Ida Martin's granddaughter. In Just the Usual Work, she and Michael Boudreau draw on Ida's diaries, family memories, and the history of Atlantic Canada to shed light on the everyday life of a working-class housewife during a period of significant social and political change. They examine Ida's observations about the struggles of making ends meet on a longshoreman's salary, the labour confrontations at the Port of Saint John, the role of automobiles in the family economy, the importance of family, faith, and political engagement, and her experience of widowhood and growing old.Ida Martin's diaries were often read by members of her family to reconstruct and relive their shared histories. By sharing the pages of her diaries with a wider audience, Just the Usual Work keeps Ida's memory alive while continuing her abiding commitment to documenting the past and finding meaning in the rhythms of everyday life.Indigenous activism put small-town northern Ontario on the map in the 1960s and early 1970s. Kenora, Ontario, was home to…
a four-hundred-person march, popularly called "Canada's First Civil Rights March," and a two-month-long armed occupation of a small lakefront park. Canada's Other Red Scare shows how important it is to link the local and the global to broaden narratives of resistance in the 1960s; it is a history not of isolated events closed off from the present but of decolonization as a continuing process. Scott Rutherford explores with rigour and sensitivity the Indigenous political protest and social struggle that took place in Northwestern Ontario and Treaty 3 territory from 1965 to 1974. Drawing on archival documents, media coverage, published interviews, memoirs, and social movement literature, as well as his own lived experience as a settler growing up in Kenora, he reconstructs a period of turbulent protest and the responses it provoked, from support to disbelief to outright hostility. Indigenous organizers advocated for a wide range of issues, from better employment opportunities to the recognition of nationhood, by using such tactics as marches, cultural production, community organizing, journalism, and armed occupation. They drew inspiration from global currents - from black American freedom movements to Third World decolonization - to challenge the inequalities and racial logics that shaped settler-colonialism and daily life in Kenora. Accessible and wide-reaching, Canada's Other Red Scare makes the case that Indigenous political protest during this period should be thought of as both local and transnational, an urgent exercise in confronting the experience of settler-colonialism in places and moments of protest, when its logic and acts of dispossession are held up like a mirror.A masterful telling of the way World War Two has been remembered, forgotten, and remade by Canada over seventy-five years.…
The Second World War shaped modern Canada. It led to the country's emergence as a middle power on the world stage; the rise of the welfare state; industrialization, urbanization, and population growth. After the war, Canada increasingly turned toward the United States in matters of trade, security, and popular culture, which then sparked a desire to strengthen Canadian nationalism from the threat of American hegemony. The Fight for History examines how Canadians framed and reframed the war experience over time. Just as the importance of the battle of Vimy Ridge to Canadians rose, fell, and rose again over a 100-year period, the meaning of Canada's Second World War followed a similar pattern. But the Second World War's relevance to Canada led to conflict between veterans and others in society--more so than in the previous war--as well as a more rapid diminishment of its significance. By the end of the 20th century, Canada's experiences in the war were largely framed as a series of disasters. Canadians seemed to want to talk only of the defeats at Hong Kong and Dieppe or the racially driven policy of the forced relocation of Japanese-Canadians. In the history books and media, there was little discussion of Canada's crucial role in the Battle of the Atlantic, the success of its armies in Italy and other parts of Europe, or the massive contribution of war materials made on the home front. No other victorious nation underwent this bizarre reframing of the war, remaking victories into defeats. The Fight for History is about the efforts to restore a more balanced portrait of Canada's contribution in the global conflict. This is the story of how Canada has talked about the war in the past, how we tried to bury it, and how it was restored. This is the history of a constellation of changing ideas, with many historical twists and turns, and a series of fascinating actors and events.Why We Fight: New Approaches to the Human Dimension of Warfare (Human Dimensions in Foreign Policy, Military Studies, and Security Studies #12)
By Robert C. Engen, H. Christian Breede, and Allan English. 2020
For decades, the Canadian Armed Forces has used the work of foreign scholars and writers in its professional military education…
to try to understand the human dimension of warfare: why and how people are motivated to fight, and how they behave once they do fight. Yet the specific Canadian context, experience, and perspective are often lost in favour of appeals to universal truths. The first major Canadian study of combat motivation in almost forty years, Why We Fight redresses this imbalance by presenting some of the best new work on the subject. Bringing together top military practitioners and scholars to discuss some of the most controversial issues of modern warfare, Why We Fight examines the face of battle as experienced by Canadians. It explores sexual violence in war, professionalism, organizations, leadership, shared intent, motivation in extremis, and the toxicity of the "warrior" culture. Its chapters offer key insights on combat motivation theories, the modern operating environment, and the collective and individual identities of the men and women who fight for Canada. Many worry that technology is leading us towards a post-human age, particularly in war. Why We Fight affirms the centrality of the human being in warfare in Canada's past, present, and future.French North America in the Shadows of Conquest
By Ryan André Brasseaux. 2021
French North America in the Shadows of Conquest is an interdisciplinary, postcolonial, and continental history of Francophone North America across…
the long twentieth century, revealing hidden histories that so deeply shaped the course of North America. Modern French North America was born from the process of coming to terms with the idea of conquest after the fall of New France. The memory of conquest still haunts those 20 million Francophones who call North America home. The book re-examines the contours of North American history by emphasizing alliances between Acadians, Cajuns, and Québécois and French Canadians in their attempt to present a unified challenge against the threat of assimilation, linguistic extinction, and Anglophone hegemony. It explores cultural trauma narratives and the social networks Francophones constructed and shows how North American history looks radically different from their perspective. This book presents a missing chapter in the annals of linguistic and ethnic differences on a continent defined, in part, by its histories of dispossession. It will be of interest to scholars and students of American and Canadian history, particularly those interested in French North America, as well as ethnic and cultural studies, comparative history, the American South, and migration.Combining socio-legal and ethnohistorical studies, this book presents the history of doodem, or clan identification markings, left by Anishinaabe on…
treaties and other legal documents from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. These doodems reflected fundamental principles behind Anishinaabe governance that were often ignored by Europeans, who referred to Indigenous polities in terms of tribe, nation, band, or village – classifications that failed to fully encompass longstanding cultural traditions of political authority within Anishinaabe society. Making creative use of natural history, treaty pictographs, and the Ojibwe language as an analytical tool, Doodem and Council Fire delivers groundbreaking insights into Anishinaabe law. The author asks not only what these doodem markings indicate, but what they may also reveal through their exclusions. The book also ooutlines the continuities, changes, and innovations in Anishinaabe governance through the concept of council fires and the alliances between them. Original and path-breaking, Doodem and Council Fire offers a fresh approach to Indigenous history, presenting a new interpretation grounded in a deep understanding of the nuances and distinctiveness of Anishinaabe culture and Indigenous traditions.Privileging Indigenous voices and experiences, Intimate Integration documents the rise and fall of North American transracial adoption projects, including the…
Adopt Indian and Métis Project and the Indian Adoption Project. Allyson D. Stevenson argues that the integration of adopted Indian and Métis children mirrored the new direction in post-war Indian policy and welfare services. She illustrates how the removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities took on increasing political and social urgency, contributing to what we now call the "Sixties Scoop." Making profound contributions to the history of settler colonialism in Canada, Intimate Integration sheds light on the complex reasons behind persistent social inequalities in child welfare.What happened on 1 July 1867? Over 150 years after Canadian Confederation, it seems like a question with an obvious…
answer. Questions of Order argues that Confederation was not just a political deal struck by politicians in 1867, but a process of reconfiguring political concepts and the basis of political association. Breaking new ground, Questions of Order argues that Confederation was an imperial event that generated new questions, concerns, and ideas about the future of political order in the British Empire and the world. It traces how for many public writers in English Canada, Confederation became an important basis for reimagining political order in the empire and redefining basic political concepts. To some, it marked a clear step in the larger project of imperial federation or even the ultimate union of the English-speaking world. For others, however, it represented the certain fragmentation of the empire into sovereign "national" states. Set in the context of a time of enormous social and cultural change, when so many long-held assumptions and firmly believed truths were faltering in the wave of new scientific and philosophical beliefs, the creation of Canada forced writers and public thinkers to grapple with the nature of political association and attempt to find new answers to critical questions of order.Reflections on the Commemoration of the First World War: Perspectives from the Former British Empire (Routledge Studies in First World War History)
By David Monger; and Sarah Murray. 2021
The First World War’s centenary generated a mass of commemorative activity worldwide. Officially and unofficially; individually, collectively and commercially; locally,…
nationally and internationally, efforts were made to respond to the legacies of this vast conflict. This book explores some of these responses from areas previously tied to the British Empire, including Australia, Britain, Canada, India and New Zealand. Showcasing insights from historians of commemoration and heritage professionals it provides revealing insider and outsider perspectives of the centenary. How far did commemoration become celebration, and how merited were such responses? To what extent did the centenary serve wider social and political functions? Was it a time for new knowledge and understanding of the events of a century ago, for recovery of lost or marginalised voices, or for confirming existing clichés? And what can be learned from the experience of this centenary that might inform the approach to future commemorative activities? The contributors to this book grapple with these questions, coming to different answers and demonstrating the connections and disconnections between those involved in building public knowledge of the ‘war to end all wars’.Canada and the Ukrainian Crisis
By Bohdan S. Kordan, Mitchell C.G. Dowie. 2020
Since 1991, Canada has provided Ukraine with ongoing political and economic assistance. Never was this policy pursued with more urgency…
than in 2014, when Russian aggression prompted the Canadian government to elevate its support for Ukraine to a foreign policy priority. Although the move is often described as a radical departure, Bohdan Kordan and Mitchell Dowie contend that it was consistent with Canada's security interests and political and historical identity. In this calculation the worldview of Prime Minister Stephen Harper also figured prominently. Canada and the Ukrainian Crisis offers a timely explanation of the dynamic interaction between key factors - at the international, national, and individual levels - that shaped the Canadian government's response and imbued it with an unusual degree of urgency. Explaining the nature of the crisis and why it elicited such a forceful reaction from the Harper government, Kordan and Dowie assert that Canada's decision to side openly with Ukraine is best understood as a course correction, rather than a completely new foreign policy direction. They argue that this action reaffirmed Canada's historical commitment to a liberal rules-based order that has been an emblem of its foreign policy since the Second World War, treating the Ukrainian crisis as part of a wider struggle to defend liberal principles and values. Resolving lingering questions about the most serious geopolitical event since the end of the Cold War, Canada and the Ukrainian Crisis demonstrates that the policy changes triggered by the crisis represent a return to deep-rooted concerns about international order.Between the decriminalization of contraception in 1969 and the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, a…
landmark decade in the struggle for women's rights, public discourse about birth control and family planning was transformed. At the same time, a transnational conversation about the "population bomb" that threatened global famine caused by overpopulation embraced birth control technologies for a different set of reasons, revisiting controversial ideas about eugenics, heredity, and degeneration. In Challenging Choices Erika Dyck and Maureen Lux argue that reproductive politics in 1970s Canada were shaped by competing ideologies on global population control, poverty, personal autonomy, race, and gender. For some Canadians the 1970s did not bring about an era of reproductive liberty but instead reinforced traditional power dynamics and paternalistic structures of authority. Dyck and Lux present case studies of four groups of Canadians who were routinely excluded from progressive, reformist discourse: Indigenous women and their communities, those with intellectual and physical disabilities, teenage girls, and men. In different ways, each faced new levels of government regulation, scrutiny, or state intervention as they negotiated their reproductive health, rights, and responsibilities in the so-called era of sexual liberation. While acknowledging the reproductive rights gains that were made in the 1970s, the authors argue that the legal changes affected Canadians differently depending on age, social position, gender, health status, and cultural background. Illustrating the many ways to plan a modern family, these case studies reveal how the relative merits of life and choice were pitted against each other to create a new moral landscape for evaluating classic questions about population control.A first-hand chronicle of Wolseley’s expedition to end Riel’s Red River Rebellion by a remarkable trio embedded on the mission.…
In the spring of 1870, two reporters set off from Toronto to cover one of the biggest stories in Canadian history: Colonel Garnet Wolseley’s 1870 expedition to Red River. Over the course of six months, the Daily Telegraph’s Robert Cunningham and the Globe’s Molyneux St. John brought readers along as they paddled and portaged alongside the expedition’s 1,100 troops and 400 voyageurs and guides from the shores of Lake Superior to Fort Garry.But that’s not the whole story. Buried well below the fold was the fact that St. John’s wife — international burlesque star Kate Ranoe — accompanied him and the expedition, and not just as an adventurer. Owing to an accident early on, Ranoe ended up ghostwriting many of St. John’s stories. Embedded is the remarkable story of two reporters and one extraordinary woman as they journeyed to Red River with Colonel Garnet Wolseley and his expeditionary force.Deep and Sheltered Waters: The History of Tod Inlet
By David R. Gray. 2020
A vivid social history of a remarkable place, drawing on research as deep as the waters themselves.This book brings to…
light the fascinating story of a community and place: Tod Inlet, near Victoria, BC. From the original inhabitants from the Tsartlip First Nation to the lost community of immigrant workers from China and India, from a company town to the development of parkland, the wealth of history in this rich area reflects much of the history of the entire province. The story of Tod Inlet and its communities spans from Vancouver Island to the BC coast north to Ocean Falls, south to California, and east to Golden, BC.David Gray draws from from interviews with elders of the Tsartlip First Nation, descendants of the Chinese and Sikh workers, and the local community, and from archives held in Victoria and Ottawa. This detailed, illustrated book by an award-winning filmmaker tells the whole story of the natural area, the archaeological sites, the community of Tod Inlet, the Vancouver Portland Cement Company and cement plant (an industrial first), and the development of the Butchart Gardens."Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory" explores Canada’s hydroelectric boom in the Lake of the Woods…
area. It complicates narratives of increasing affluence in postwar Canada, revealing that the inverse was true for Indigenous communities along the Winnipeg River. "Dammed" makes clear that hydroelectric generating stations were designed to serve settler populations. Governments and developers excluded the Anishinabeg from planning and operations and failed to consider how power production might influence the health and economy of their communities. By so doing, Canada and Ontario thwarted a future that aligned with the terms of treaty, a future in which both settlers and the Anishinabeg might thrive in shared territories. The same hydroelectric development that powered settler communities flooded manomin fields, washed away roads, and compromised fish populations. Anishinaabe families responded creatively to manage the government-sanctioned environmental change and survive the resulting economic loss. Luby reveals these responses to dam development, inviting readers to consider how resistance might be expressed by individuals and families, and across gendered and generational lines. Luby weaves text, testimony, and experience together, grounding this historical work in the territory of her paternal ancestors, lands she calls home. With evidence drawn from archival material, oral history, and environmental observation, "Dammed" invites readers to confront Canadian colonialism in the twentieth century.Hockey and multiculturalism are often noted as defining features of Canadian culture; yet, rarely are we forced to question the…
relationship and tensions between these two social constructs. This book examines the growing significance of hockey in Canada’s South Asian communities. The Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi broadcast serves as an entry point for a broader consideration of South Asian experiences in hockey culture based on field work and interviews conducted with hockey players, parents, and coaches in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. This book seeks to inject more “color” into hockey’s historically white dominated narratives and representations by returning hockey culture to its multicultural roots. It encourages alternative and multiple narratives about hockey and cultural citizenship by asking which citizens are able to contribute to the webs of meaning that form the nation’s cultural fabric.In this absorbing narrative, Barry E.C. Boothman traces the history of Abitibi Power and Paper Limited alongside the rise and…
fall of the newsprint industry and the advent of Canadian corporate capitalism. In the first half of the twentieth century, Abitibi was Canada’s biggest manufacturer – an apparent success story after the Wall Street crash of 1929 and a company deemed "too big to fail" – but the company eventually ended up at the centre of the longest and most controversial bankruptcy in Canadian history. Moving from the frontier areas of northern Ontario to the heart of the continental economy, Corporate Cataclysm shows how competitive strategies, industrial organization, corporate finance, and law combined with the empire-building dreams of entrepreneurs and the concerns of politicians to generate an economic disaster. It then chronicles the disputes and intense strife that plagued Abitibi’s fourteen-year receivership.Formed in 1825, the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society is the second-oldest law society in common-law Canada, after the Law Society…
of Ontario. Yet despite its founders' ambitions, it did not become the regulator of the legal profession in Nova Scotia for nearly seventy-five years. In this institutional history of the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society from its inception to the Legal Profession Act of 2005, Barry Cahill provides a chronological exploration of the profession's regulation in Nova Scotia and the critical role of the society. Based on extensive research conducted on internal documents, legislative records, and legal and general-interest periodicals and newspapers, Professional Autonomy and the Public Interest demonstrates that the inauguration of the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society was the first giant step on the long road to self-regulation. Highlighting the inherent tensions between protection of professional self-interest and protection of the larger public interest, Cahill explains that while this radical innovation was opposed by both lawyers and judges, it was ultimately imposed by the Liberal government in 1899. In light of emerging models of regulation in the twenty-first century, Professional Autonomy and the Public Interest is a timely look back at the origins of professional regulatory bodies and the evolution of law affecting the legal profession in Atlantic Canada.From their everyday work in kitchens and gardens to the solemn work of laying out the dead, the Anglican women…
of mid-twentieth-century Conception Bay, Newfoundland, understood and expressed Christianity through their experience as labourers within the family economy. Women's work in the region included outdoor agricultural labour, housekeeping, childbirth, mortuary services, food preparation, caring for the sick, and textile production. Ordinary Saints explores how religious belief shaped the meaning of this work, and how women lived their Christian faith through the work they did. In lived religious practices at home, in church-based voluntary associations, and in the wider community, the Anglican women of Conception Bay constructed a female theological culture characterized by mutuality, negotiation of gender roles, and resistance to male authority, combining feminist consciousness with Christian commitment. Bonnie Morgan brings together evidence from oral interviews, denominational publications, census data, minute books of the Church of England Women's Association, headstone epitaphs, and household art and objects to demonstrate the profound ties between labour and faithfulness: for these rural women, work not only expressed but also shaped belief. Ordinary Saints, with its focus on gender, labour, and lived faithfulness, breaks new ground in the history of religion in Canada.