Canadian History Roundup – Week of January 28, 2018

Ted Grant. “At Matilda Newman’s Store.” Africville Nova Scotia, c. 1964-1969. Library and Archives Canada / e002283006.

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

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

• In the wake of news on the Northeast False Creek Plan in Vancouver, Stephanie Allen put together a great Twitter thread talking about how urban renewal has been used a euphemism for the destruction of Black communities, using Hogan’s Alley as an example.
• Last week, NiCHE completed its mini-series on Canada’s Anthropocene. Early this week, they posted a response to the series by Sean Kheraj, and a response to the response by Alan MacEachern.
• This week Active History ran its own mini-series, commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the Spanish Flu Pandemic and launching the Defining Moments Canada project. This included:
  • An introduction to the series and the post by Neil Orford.
  • A discussion of the long-term impact of the pandemic in the interwar period and its impact on Indigenous peoples and communities, by Esyllt Jones.
  • An explanation of using the pandemic as a learning opportunity for high school students by Mike Clare.
  • And, finally, a post by Ellen Scheinberg about how microhistories can help us understand larger historical events, with a focus on the experience of Alfred Benjamin Geldzaeler.
  • As someone who is married to a person who is immuno-compromised, I would encourage everyone to get their flu shot!
• This week’s most commonly used words in #envhist, according to Jessica DeWitt were: “Nuclear,” “Energy,” and :Climate.”
• Robynne Mellor wrote a new blog post on a project she developed for her course on the Global Environmental History of the Cold War. In this project, her students mapped the impact of the war, including Canada!
• Timothy Andrews Sayle wrote a new blog post for the Canadian International History Committee blog on his experience with the Access to Information process with respect to his recent research on Canadian-American air defence exercises during the Cold War.
• Pamela Sugiman spoke earlier this week at the Royal BC Museum on kindness and complicity during Japanese-Canadian internment. Sally Lin was kind to live-tweet the speech!
• This week on Unwritten Histories saw the return of our Best New Articles series, covering December and January. Find out which articles were my favourites!
• The latest On War and Society podcast episode was released this week, featuring an interview with Meghan Fitzpatrick on PTSD in the Korean War.
• LAC has uploaded a new Flickr album of images from the Gilmour and Hughson Forestry fonds. Check out the images themselves here.
• Krista McCracken shared her recent experiences at the Anishinaabe Inendamowin (Though) Research Symposium at Algoma University last week.
• Daniel Francis gave a presentation at the Vancouver Historical Society, and the VHS has made the video available on Youtube here. The topic was the history of North Vancouver.
• In the latest episode of the Ben Franklin’s World podcast, Liz Covart spoke with Jessica Stern on the role of trade between the Indigenous peoples of North America and British colonists in the 18^th century.
• The BC Archives have uploaded nearly 5,000 new images from the Beautiful BC magazine, from 1960-1987.
• Ryan Fisher reviewed Edward MacDonald, Joshua MacFayden and Irené Novaczek’s edited collection, Time and Place: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island for NiCHE.
• This week Instantanés took a look at the political caricatures of Raoul Hunter, who worked for Le Soleil from 1956 to 1989.
• Continuing their series on Loyalist medicine, the Atlantic Loyalist Connections blog has a new post by Victoria Ackerman on smallpox inoculation in 18^th century Nova Scotia.
• Bill Waiser’s latest column looks at the 1939 Royal Tour and its stop in Melville, Saskatchewan.
• Alan MacEachern provided some historical perspective on Groundhog Day for NiCHE this week. I still do not understand this holiday. The header image caption, however, is awesome.
  • There was also some news coverage on the traditions of Groundhog Day in Canada here and here.
• The UBC Digitizer’s Blog profiled their Rainbow Ranche Collection this week, an independent fruit ranch in the Okanagan.
• Check out these really cool aqua Canada Dry ginger ale soda bottles from archaeological sites in Ontario! I am a sucker for anything that is aqua glass.
• In the latest Historical Reminiscents podcast episode, Krista McCracken talks history memes in the classroom! I am a big fan of using these, though my students tease me for it. 😛
• Also on Active History this week is an expanded and revised version of Veronica Strong-Boag’s blog post on the first female BC MLA, Mary Ellen Spear Smith.
• So last week I included an article on the “lost crops” of Indigenous farms. Chelsea Vowel provides some important clarification here about these crops, and how they were not actually “lost.”
• Michelle Blackwell compiled a list of the top five items at UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections “that every UBC student should see before graduating.”
• Jessica DeWitt has shared her comps notes for Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange.
• In honour of the February-March issue of Canada’s History, McGill-Queen’s University Press profiled two books on the experiences of Helge Ingstad, who, along with Anne Stine, discovered the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows.
• Eve Lazarus honours the 50^th anniversary of the opening of Vancouver Airport’s international terminal. Fun fact: the Vancouver Airport is actually in Richmond BC.
• Relive the week of February 1^st in the Whistler of years past at Whistorical.
• LAC has just launched a new national union catalogue, called Voilà, which allows for searching libraries across the country that subscribe to the Online Computer Library Centre. I have to be honest here, in that I don’t really understand everything that is going on here.
  • Not everyone is a fan.
• Find out about Merle Massie’s recent experience writing for The Dorchester Review in their forum on the question: “How can we strengthen our tradition?”
• Robyn Lacy shared some insight into the life and death of sailor John Harris, as described in the transcriptions of his 1811-1820 diary. Damn, that poor guy went through a lot.
• Find out about the options on offer for après-ski in Whistler in 1968.
• The latest Twitter essay from Bashir Mohamed in his series on Black history in Canada focuses on the story of Annie Saunders, a business woman in Pincher Creek, Alberta.
  • Included in the thread is information about restauranteur Mary Fields and Molly Smith, with additional information input from Cheryl Foggo on Smith and additional information on the Dyson cattle brand from Bertrand Bickersteth.
• Take a tour of the City of Saskatoon Archives with archivist Jeff O’Brien.
• The Dictionary of Canadian Biography’s latest biography is for Peter Henderson Price, a physician and civil servant in Upper Canada/Ontario.
• Stephen Bocking has once again shared his slides from a recent lecture on environmental science and resource management in Canadian history.
• Harold Bérubé’s latest blog post focuses on the advertising and sale of suburban houses in Montreal from 1950 to 1970, and the impact on the emergence of a new suburban ideal. This post is a short summary of a new article published in the Revue d’histoire de L’Amérique française.
• The Olympics start next week, so the Canadian Museum of History has shared this slightly creepy Barbara Ann Scott Doll.
• This month is Black History Month! There was quite a bit of coverage and several blog posts, so I’ve grouped them together here.
  • The 2018 theme of Black History Month in Canada is: Black Canadian Women: Stories of Strength, Courage, and Vision.
  • Jessica Marie Johnson and Martha S. Jones developed and shared this wonderful syllabus on Black Womanhood.
  • The latest blog post from the Champlain Society’s Findings/Trouvailles post was published this week on Black volunteers in WW1. The original piece was published by Barbara M. Wilson in 1977, and abridged and adapted by Patrice Dutil. However, as a number of individuals have pointed out on social media, while the piece does cite a book by Natasha Henry from 2010, it does not refer to any of the significant publications on the topic by Calvin W. Ruck, James Walker, or Melissa Shaw. So read with caution.
  • The Canadian Centre for the Great War also published a piece on the same topic, based largely on Calvin W. Ruck’s work, but which also suffers from the same problems.
  • The Star took a look at the first official census of Toronto’s Black population, which took place in 1840. The article features a short interview with Natasha Henry.
  • CBC profiled the first Black graduate of the Nova Scotia School of Nursing in Dartmouth, Clotilda Yakimchuk.
  • Don’t miss Anthony Morgan’s #BlackLivesCDNSyllabus, which also contains great historical information!
  • McGill-Queen’s University Press has put together a reading list of recent publications relating to the Black experience in Canada.
  • Joanne Hammond posted a new Twitter essay on John Freemont Smith, one of the first Black elected representatives in BC.
  • Natasha Henry spoke with Our Windsor to highlight the stories of five Black Canadians you should know about, including Chloe Cooley, Robert Sutherland, Viola Desmond, Carrie Best, and Kathleen (Kay) Livingstone.
  • The Elementary Teacher’s Federation of Ontario has just released a new Black Canadian curriculum for use in schools, created in consultation with Natasha Henry.
  • Parliamentary poet laureate George Elliot Clarke is working to draw attention to historical Black Canadian literature, including work by Amelia Etta Hall Johnson, R. Nathaniel Dett, and Anna Minerva Henderson.
  • There is a new exhibit honouring the first Black baseball team to win a provincial championship in Canada, the Chatham Coloured All Stars.
  • Find out about the eighteen known Essex County burial grounds that contain the remains of Black-Canadians who escaped enslavement through the Underground Railroad The article also profiles Elise Harding-Davis, who has worked to preserve and protect these sites.
  • Myrna Lashley has written an op-ed for IFpress.com on why Black Canadian history needs to be fully integrated into school curriculums as Canadian history.
  • This week marks the 20^th anniversary of the release of “Northern Touch,” a rap collaboration that brought together artists from across the country. Q produced a segment featuring some of the artists and contributors to the song in honour of the anniversary.
  • The Ontario Black History Society has awarded a lifetime achievement award to Joey Hollingsworth, who broke barriers as a tap dancer through a long career of television appearances across Canada and the United States.
  • There is a really neat initiative happening on February 24^th where children from all over Halifax are being invited to work together to write a book on reparations for African peoples who were enslaved and brought to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
• Canadian History in the News
  • Indian Hospitals were in the news all week.
    • First up was a post by Lauren Pelley, where she spoke with survivors like Annie Michael (Inuit from Niaqunngut), Gerald McIvor (Sandy Bay First Nation), and Elise Wesley (Naicatchewenin First Nation) about the horrors they endured at such hospitals. This piece also featured an interview with Maureen Lux, Ry Moran, Ian Mosby, and Dawn Martin-Hill.
    • And then, just a day later, two Canadian law firms filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all former patients of Indian hospitals. The representative plaintiff is Ann Hardy (of Fort Smith, NWT).
    • CBC Investigates featured interviews with survivors of the Nanaimo Indian Hospital in a news piece this week, including Sharon Whonnock (Kwakwaka’wakw) and Barbara Hunt. The article also featured an interview with Laurie Meijer Drees on her research on the subject.
      • You can see archival footage here. View with caution.
  • Proving yet again that history reverberates through the present, this article from CBC discusses how the high rates of tuberculosis in present-day Nunavut is related to the history of colonialism in the North.
  • A painting by one of the Group of Seven, A.Y. Jackson, depicting the First Nations village of Moosehide, Yukon, is going up for auction.
  • The National Post picked up on Darryl Leroux’s recent Twitter essay on how and why some self-described Métis organizations are retroactively making French colonists “Indigenous,” using the example of Catherine Pillard.
  • In 1967, a collection of seeds was buried in a time capsule in Dawson Creek. They’ve recently been recovered and will be planted so that scientists can study how BC crops have changed over the past 50 years.
  • Hell froze over, and the Senate passed a bill making the Canadian national anthem gender-neutral. The part about “sons” was added during WW1.
  • Cornwallis is down. I repeat, Cornwallis is down. And good riddance as far as I’m concerned. Although this only happened after much stalling and some bad press for Halifax.
    • APTN has more detail here, and also reports that an eagle was circling overhead when the statue came down.
    • John G. Reid was interviewed by Global on this.
    • Shirley Tillotson was also interviewed on CBC Mainstreet, but the link isn’t available yet! It will be here when it is.
    • There was a horrifying article in The National Post on this subject that I refuse to link to. Anne Thériault wrote a great response on Twitter.
  • The title of the article is rather misleading, but last year, the Semiahmoo First Nation issued a work-stoppage order to the City of White Rock after it began construction on a park extension without consultation. The area itself was known to the Semiahmoo as an ancient village site, which was confirmed this week with the discovery of a shell midden. You can probably picture my facial expression right now.
  • LAC is refusing to release a ninety-eight-year-old document relating to the treatment (and compulsory removal) of First Nations children with tuberculosis. This is some seriously shady behaviour. I’m also wondering why this hasn’t received more news coverage.
  • In more surprising news, the Supreme Court has ruled in favour of the T’exelcemec (Williams Lake Indian Band) people of the Secwepemc Nation, who are claiming that the colony of British Columbia failed to protect their territory from settlers during the Gold Rush.
    • More here!
  • It’s official: Toronto’s Old City Hall will become a museum on Toronto.
    • And check out these pictures of Old City Hall from the Toronto Public Library Digital Archive.
  • The Boston Public Library is asking for assistance with transcription around 12,000 antislavery manuscripts.
  • 24 Sussex is falling down, falling down…
  • My husband sent me this photo essay of postcards depicting PEI around the turn of the last century to include in the roundup!
  • John Jay College has just launched a publicly searchable database of slave owners and enslaved peoples in New York State, dating back to 1525. This database includes 35,000 records.
  • A group of individuals representing the Sixties Scoop survivors, the National Indigenous Survivors of Child Welfare Network, are protesting the fact that the government settlement does not include Métis survivors.
  • It’s debatable whether this is considered history, but you may remember how in December, Halifax voted to restore the original boundaries of Lucasville to recognize the history of the historic Black community. Well, some white people are not happy, and the Nova Scotia Advocate does a good job of talking about racial language and codes.
  • Bill Casey, a Nova Scotia Liberal MP, has tabled a private member’s bill to create an official strategy for the repatriation of Indigenous cultural items held in museums around the world. While this is awesome, keep in mind that Indigenous peoples and communities have been working towards this for decades.
  • Doug Cuthand wrote this great piece for The Saskatoon Star Phoenix on Cree tradition with respect to death and loss, and how the trial of Gerald Stanley is failing to respect these traditions. This includes naming the lost loved-one, since repeating their names prevents theirs spirit from moving on.
  • Lethbridge, Alberta is hoping to develop a plan in consultation with Blackfoot elders (including the Blood Tribe, the Siksika Nation, and the Piikani Nation) to preserve and respect their history and sacred sites.
  • Saskatoon has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Central Urban Métis Federation Inc. to integrate Métis history into all Saskatoon public schools.
  • Check out some of the archaeological items that were found in a 2012 excavation at Store and Wharf Streets in Victoria.
  • Radio-Canada published an overview of the history of residential schools and the damage that they have caused to Indigenous individuals, peoples, and communities across the country.
  • The first NDP premier of BC, Dave Barrett, has died.
  • There is a new BC Stop of Interest sign for Snuneymuxw soccer player, Harry Mason!
  • Carol Off shares her experiences as a young female reporter working in 1980s Ottawa. The more things change…
• Better Late than Never
  • There is some more coverage of the recent court decision that forbids the reopening of settled IAP claims for residential school survivors, and the impact that this decision has on survivors who are from the North.
• Calls for Papers
  • The Indigenous History Studies Group has issued their Call for Submissions for the 2018 Article and Book Prizes. Submissions for the article prize are due March 15, and February 28^th for the book prize.
  • The Canadian Oral History Association has issued a Call for Submissions for their 2018 prize. Projects, books, articles, exhibitions, films, and other activities are accepted. Submissions are due March 20^th.
  • The University of Manitoba and the 2018 Fort Garry Lectures has issued a CFP for undergraduate and graduate students. The lectures will take place from May 3 to 5. Submissions are due February 26^th.
  • The Canadian Foreign Intelligence History Project has issued a CFP for papers on the history of Canadian foreign intelligence. The workshop will be held in July 12th. Submissions are due March 1^st.
  • The McMaster University Department of History Conference Committed has issued a CFP for their upcoming annual graduate student conference. This year’s theme is: “Historical Innovations: A Conference on Emerging Historical Practices.” Submissions are due March 31^st.

How much are we willing to bet that next week will see a barrage of news articles relating to various Canadian achievements at Olympics past? Probably not very much… Anyways, I hope you’ve enjoyed 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 brand new blog post on something else that causes headaches for historians. See you then!

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