2018: A Year of Canadian History in Review

Welcome to our third annual Unwritten Histories year-end review and the last post of 2018! As  I did in the previous two years, I have divided this look back into two parts. The first is a month-by-month recap of some of the most important events in Canadian history over the past year.  In the second part of this blog post, Stephanie and I list some of our favourite reads from the past year.

A few quick caveats:

1. In the interest of keeping this list to a manageable length, I’ve limited it largely to subjects that had national relevance. Otherwise this list would never end.
2. With a few notable exceptions, I have not included anniversaries in this list. That’s mostly because anniversaries come around every year.
3. I also have not included every single major digitization or new archival project. However, if you want, I can definitely do a separate post for those in the new year.
4. I’m sure I’ve missed stuff. If I did miss an event that you think should be on the list, let me know in the comments below!

Without any further ado, enjoy!

All Year Long

• Various people in positions of power saying really problematic things about Indigenous peoples and history
• The government trying to block the survivors of St. Anne’s Residential School in any way they could.
• Monument Wars
• Debates and discussions about history curriculums in public schools, and the representations of Indigenous peoples, women, and racialized peoples.
• Settler researchers “discovering” things that Indigenous peoples have been telling them about for decades, and centuries in some cases.
• Several new Canadian newspapers being digitized and uploaded to Newspapers.com.
• Several institutions in Canada and around the world have beginning to repatriate Indigenous ancestors, Indigenous art, clothing, and cultural items, thanks in large part to continuing pressure from Indigenous peoples and communities.
• Depressing archive news.

January

• CBC continued its trend of problematic historical documentaries with Ice Bridge, which including the Solutrean Hypothesis and the Bering Straight Hypothesis as if they were legitimate historical theories.
• Krista McCracken and I launched the Beyond the Lecture: Innovations in Teaching Canadian History series on Active History! FYI: We are still actively seeking submissions!
• LAC launched a new search tool, Collection Search (Beta).There are still some kinks to work out, but I do like it better.
• Two law firms launched a $1.1 billion class-action lawsuit on behalf of former “Indian hospital” patients. The representative plaintiff is Anne Hardy.
• The Edward Cornwallis statue in Halifax was removed.
• Canadian Eyes Only, the Canadian International History Committee blog, officially launched.

February

• The exhibition on the Franklin Expedition, Death in the Ice, launched at the Canadian Museum of History.
• CBC and Radio-Canada announced that they would be digitizing, and then destroying the physical copies, of their music library. And everyone got really upset.
  • But everything might have worked out in the end. Maybe.  
• NICHE launched their latest initiative, Papers in Canadian History and Environment (PiCHE), a peer-reviewed open-access online paper series.  

March

• Historica Canada launched their latest Heritage Minute, featuring Lucy Maud Montgomery.
• We celebrated (?) the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Who Killed Canadian History, a book that continues to divide the profession.
• CBC launched the Beyond 94 project, tracking progress on the TRC’s Calls to Action.
• Inuk historian Louie Kamookak passed away.
• Pope Francis declined to apologize for the Catholic Church’s role in the residential school system.

April

• We switched the roundup format from a chronological list to a thematic list! Ok, maybe not that important to everyone, but it was a big change for me!
• LAC premiered Co-Lab this year, inviting members of the public to help transcribe and describe documents from their collection.
• The UK officially granted Canada and the Inuit co-ownership of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus, minus a few artifacts.
• A federal judge approved a $875 million settlement for Sixties Scoop survivors.
• Canada’s History published their guide to Treaties and the Treaty Relationships, in large part due to the work of Jessica Knapp.
• The City of Vancouver officially apologized to the Chinese Canadian community for past legislation, regulations, and policies that discriminated against them.

May

• The Supreme Court of Canada decided to issue an embargo on their documents for a minimum of fifty years.
• We held CHA Reads 2018!
• Oh yeah, the CHA happened too.
• And the prize-formerly-known-as-the-‘Sir-John-A.-Macdonald-Prize’ was renamed, after contentious debate, to the ‘CHA Prize for the Best Scholarly Book in Canadian History.’

June

• Lee came home from the hospital!
• Bill C-66, which allows Canadians, or family members in the case of Canadians who have died, to apply to expunge historical convictions for buggery, gross indecency, and anal intercourse, passed.
• The War of 1812 was back in the news.
•  Historica Canada launched a new Heritage Minute for Jim Egan.
• CBC premiered a new interactive map with the locations of the more than 130 residential schools that operated across the country.
  • However, as  Madeleine Redfern pointed out, the map only includes schools that were part of the residential school settlement. Not only does this mean the map is incomplete, but it points to the problem with the failure of the settlement and the TRC to properly address unrecognized residential/day schools.
• Shekon Neechie premiered!
• A federal court judge approved a settlement agreement to compensate members of the military and other government agencies who were investigated and/or fired due to their sexual orientation.
• Thanks to the initiative of Riley Kucheron (Biigtigong Nishaanbeg), there is now a plaque near the statue of Egerton Ryerson at his namesake university, explaining his role in establishing the residential school system.
• Know History was awarded a contract by Parks Canada to collect the stories of Inuit knowledge keepers on the subject of the Franklin Expedition, as part of the Franklin Expedition Inuit Oral History Project.     

July

•  The court approved a class-action lawsuit for the survivors of government-funded day schools.These survivors were excluded from the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, so this was a major step forward..
• A new report was released by the Senate Committee on Social Affairs; it detailed the post-WW2 common practice of forcing unwed mothers to give up their children, and the shameful treatment they received while incarcerated in maternity homes.
• New research suggested that Europeans learned how to spin yarn from the Dorset.
• The City of Vancouver park board initiated a ‘colonial audit’ of its policies in preparation for a possible formal apology to the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. 
• Halifax unveiled a ten-member special committee that will study how to commemorate Edward Cornwallis, to be co-chaired by We’koqma’q Chief Roderick Googoo and Monica MacDonald, of the Canadian Museum of Immigration. Also on the committee are an additional four Mi’kmaq members and historian John Reid.
• Canada’s Parliamentary debates were made available online and searchable, back to 1901.

August

• LAC completed the digitization of all Canadian military personnel records from WW1.
• Lisa Helps, Mayor of Victoria, announced the removal of the Sir John A. Macdonald statue from outside city hall. And everyone lost their collective minds.
• The Bank of Montreal removed their two plaques commemorating how Paul de Chomedy killed an Iroquois chief.
• Sean Kheraj introduced a free online textbook intended to complement John Belshaw’s existing two textbooks for both Pre and Post-Confederation Canada. This new textbook, Open History Seminar: Canadian History, is a collection of primary and secondary sources for tutorials and seminars that compliments the Belshaw books.
• Maclean’s digitized and made available 3,400 issues of their magazine, from 1905 to 2008. 
• The federal government announced that it will soon declare a new federal statutory holiday to honour the survivors of residential schools.
• There was a horrific server crash at Memorial University that has affected their digital archive.Though you will be pleased to know the archive has since been restored.
• A scale model of the Avro Arrow was recovered from Lake Ontario.
• This month marked the 500^thanniversary of the start of the transatlantic slave trade. 

September

• The National Museum of Brazil burned.
• The CHA issued a draft response to the recent Tri-Agency Research Data Management Policy.
• Prize Papers announced the digitization of more than 160,000 letters sent between 1652 and 1815 that went undelivered after being captured by British warships.
• The Hansard was made available online, and fully searchable, back to 1901.
• More than 700 ancestors were scheduled to be returned to First Nations communities across BC.

October

• The great seigneurial debate happened on Borealia.
• The Centre for Truth and Reconciliation began development on a memorial register of children who died while attending residential schools.
• CSIS released new papers from the investigation of a Russian spy ring that was uncovered after the defection of Igor Gouzenko. This includes Gouzenko’s handwritten testimony, which you can see here.

November

• Justin Trudeau officially apologized to the Tsilhqot’in Nation for the execution of six Tsilhqot’in chiefs in 1864.
• This year marked the 100th anniversary of the WW1 armistice.
• Justin Trudeau apologized on behalf of the government of Canada to the passengers of the MS St. Louis as well as the entire Jewish Canadian community. You can read the official statement here.
•  Ian Mosby published his annual review of the status of the TRC Calls to Action.
• Canadiana was made available to the public for free! The collection features 60 million pages of early Canadian documents, from books to government documents, to newspapers
• The new $10 bill, featuring Viola Desmond, finally entered circulation.
• The CHA launched a brand new website.
• The Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan announced that it would be closing their office in Saskatoon, and transferring the records to Regina.
• The Archives of Montreal also announced that they would be closing for three years as part of a move to a new location.
• The Canadian Committee for International History announced the launch of “Canada Declassified,” a digital archive of recently declassified government Cold War documents, spanning from 1945 to 1991.
• A class-action lawsuit brought by Canadian Thalidomide survivors will proceed, challenging the previous denial of compensation.

December

• Ottawa agreed to compensate the survivors of more than 700 Indian Day Schools, who were left out of the Indian Residential Schools agreement.
• LAC launched a new interface for searching and accessing for their published holdings, called Aurora.

Things to look forward to in 2019

• Two new heritage minutes, one on the Acadians, and one on the Asahi baseball team
• CHA 2019

---

Andrea and Stephanie’s 2018 Canadian History Favourites

Favourite Canadian History Scholarly Journal Articles of 2018

• Andrea
  • Katrina Srigley and Lorraine Sutherland, “Decolonizing, Indigenizing, and Learning Biskaaybiiyangin the Field: Our Oral History Journey,” Oral History Review 45, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2018): 7-28
• Stephanie:
  • Rachel Bryant, “Kinshipwrecking: John Smith’s Adoption and the Pocahontas Myth in Settler Ontologies,” AlterNative, First Look (2018): 1-9.
  • Alex Tremblay Lamarche, “La transformation des capitaux culturel et social en region au xix^e siècle dans un contexte de renouvellement des élites: l’example de Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu,” Mens 17, no. 1-2 (Fall 2016): 41-77.

Favourite  Blog Posts of 2018

• Andrea:
  • Katrina Ackerman, “In Pursuit of Excellence: The Limits of Mentorship in Academia,” Active History, April 24, 2018.
  • Brenda Macdougall, “Naming and Renaming: Confronting Canada’s Past,” Shekon Neechie, August 1, 2018.
  • Paige Raibmon, “Provincializing Europe in Canadian History, or How to Talk about Relations Between Indigenous Peoples and Europeans,” Active History, October 24, 2018.
  • Jessica DeWitt, “Problems of Place: Place in Three Acts,” Environmental History Now, December 10, 2018.
• Stephanie:
  • Jessica DeWitt, “Problems of Place: Place in Three Acts,” Environmental History Now, December 10, 2018.

Favourite History Book We Read in 2018

• Andrea:
  • Gregory Younging, Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples, (Edmonton: Brush Education, 2018).
• Stephanie:
  • Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit, (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

Most Overrated Canadian Historical Event in 2018

• Andrea and Stephanie: The WW1 Armistice Centenary.

Most Underrated Canadian Historical Event in 2018

• Andrea:
  • The Huron-Robinson Treaty Annuity court case
  • The release of the CAUT report
• Stephanie:
  • The anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre

---

Well, this was quite the year. I’m not gonna lie and say this was the best year ever. Mostly I think there were lots of highs and lots of lows. But once again, the highlight were the amazing people in my life and the entire Canadian history community. I particularly want to thank Stephanie Pettigrew for being my rock over the past year, Krista McCracken for being the best co-conspirator for world domination that a person could ever ask for, as well as Jessica DeWitt, Sarah York-Bertram, Jenny Ellison, Shannon Stettner, Jessica Knapp, Anne Dance, Catherine Ulmer, Lynne Marks, Margaret Little, Sarah Nickel, Jo McCutcheon, and Adele Perry for endless conversations,  support and encouragement. I am so grateful to have so many awesome and brilliant supporters and friends, and I learn so much from them every day. And of course, none of this would have been possible without my better half, Mr. Unwritten Histories himself, Lee Blanding. 

I would like to wish everyone a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year! We’ll be back with a brand new blog post on January 8th, 2019! See you then!