Canadian History Roundup – Week of March 25, 2018

Dorothy Stotesbury and Harry Thomson, winners of the Easter Egg and Spoon Race, stand together for a portrait. Shilly Shally Lodge, Gatineau Park. 1957-1958. Rosemary Gilliat Eaton / Library and Archives Canada, No. R12438

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

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

• It was a busy week over at LAC:
  • First up was a new Flickr album on tintype photography. Check out the images here.
  • There were two new blog posts on Canadian Victoria Cross recipients from WW1, Lieutenant Alan Arnett McLeod and Lieutenant Gordon Muriel Flowerdew. Flowerdew was awarded for gallantry at the Battle at Muriel Woods, which occurred 100 years ago this week.
  • They also profiled their Gratien Gélinas Fonds this week. Gélinas was a performer, writer, and director with a wide body of work, and his fonds contains lots fascinating information.
    • This culminated in their latest podcast episode, on Gélinas.
  • They went behind the scenes of a new exhibit at the Canadian Museum of History, “A Little History: The Hidden Stories of Children,” which features items from their collection.
  • And finally, they published the Spring/Summer 218 edition of Signatures.
• This week on NiCHE:
  • Angie Tucker wrote the latest CHESS reflection on the potential for historical narrative disruption and communal strength that lies in land acknowledgements.
  • And Sean Kheraj wrote about his experiences at the ASEH conference, armed only with technology from 2007! Sean, you are a brave, brave man.
• Last week’s most commonly used words in #envhist, according to Jessica DeWitt were: “University,” “Canada,” and “Canadian.”
• Do you know the history of Expo 67’s films?
• This week was Unwritten Histories’ second anniversary! In honour of the occasion, I profiled 10 absolutely amazing female-identified Canadian historians who are grad students or recent grads. I am so privileged to be part of such an amazing community!
• This week on Active History:
  • Eric Story contributed the latest blog post to their “Canada’s First World War” series, on the subject of Indigenous veterans, how the Indian Act limited their access to veteran’s benefits, and why there is a National Aboriginal Veterans Day.
  • Cameron Willis looked back at the development, history, and limitations, and sustainability of twentieth century rehabilitation prison farms in Canada.
  • Veronica Strong-Boag wrote a fantastic piece on a 1922 article, “Confessions of a She-Politician”, and the attempt to use “fake news” to call into question the legitimacy of contemporary female politicians, and how they in turn called this out. Plus ça change, huh?
  • And the latest episode of History Chats was published, featuring Ruth Sandwell’s talk on “The 1860s and the Origins of Canada’s Transition to Fossil Fuels.”
• This week on Borealia, Claire Campbell reflected on her new course, co-taught with a digital humanist, on “The Politics and Meanings of Maps.” Along the way, she reflects on the course framework, content vs. skills, digital history assignments, and the importance of historical maps.
• So, kind of randomly, the Online Archive of California has a great collection of digitized photographs of Ottawa from the 1920s! See them for yourself here.
• Robyn Lacy is back with a new blog post reporting on her activities in the 2016-2017 excavation season at a settler burial ground in Foxtrap Newfoundland.
• Adam Coombs has written a great Twitter essay on why it is so important that Canadians know their political history, and what life was like for politicians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
  • Also, apparently I am the Queen of the Roundup Fairies, which flit around the internet reporting on Canadian history news. 😉
• So many Twitter essays by Joanne Hammond this week!
  • First, she wrote about speaking up in favour of returning some land to the Secwepemc, and why it is so important that we do.
  • And, later in the week, she shared an image of a cool arrowhead that was lost 1,200 years ago, while also discussing some of the other finds she made on the first day of the new excavation season.
  • Finally, she wrote about the how the federal and provincial governments have used laws to alienate Indigenous lands.
• Dominique Clément has added a complete collection of briefs to Canada’s Special Joint Committee on the Constitutions (1980-1), which solicited feedback from the public about the repatriation of the constitution and the entrenchment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
• In the latest Historical Reminiscents podcast, Krista McCracken talks about different tools for organizing archival research! One program she didn’t mention, because it’s only available for Macs, is Devonthink Office Pro. I do use it, however, and I love it. Would you like me to write a blog post about it?
• The latest biography from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is for author, adventurer, photographer, and botanist, Julia Willmothe Henderson.
• The Université de Montréal has officially acknowledged that it stands on Indigenous lands. The specific wording of the new acknowledgement was created in consultation with Indigenous students and faculty members.
• Tuscarora writer, Alicia Elliot, spoke with the Secret Feminist Agenda podcast about her work and, among other things, the nutritional experiments that were conducted on residential school students.
• If you’ve spent any time in Vancouver, you’ve likely been to Waterfront Station. And it has a pretty neat history.
• A few weeks ago, I included a blog post on the problems that Timothy Andrews Sayle encountered accessing archival information, relating to his research on Canada-US air defence exercises in the Cold War. There has been a resolution of sorts (scroll to the end for the new info)!
• There were two new posts from Histoire Engagée this week:
  • Mathilde Michaud wrote about the ways in which 1890s religious authority figures sought to influence or regulate Quebec Catholic women through the institution of marriage.
  • Clint Bruce wrote about the assassination of Constant Melançon, an Acadian immigrant to Louisiana, by Toussaint, his enslaved childhood friend, and what this reveals about Acadian mythologies and the resistance of enslaved peoples.
• And on Instantanés this week,
  • They look back on the rise and fall of the le Théâtre de Dix Heures.
  • And the Conscription Riots of 1918, which occurred 100 years ago this week.
• The latest episode of the Living Heritage Podcast featured a talk with Tyler Stapleton about his work restoring the Simms House in St. John’s.
• This week on Whistorical:
  • They looked back at the Week of March 29^th in the 1980s.
  • And their history of hosting World Cup downhill races.
• The Royal Alberta Museum blog featured a fascinating community cookbook from the late 1930s, and what it can tell us about the individuals who wrote it.
• Krista McCracken has a great review of this season of the CBC podcast, “Missing and Murdered,” by Connie Walker. It sounds fantastic!
• Ben Bradley finds the neatest stuff in his research.
• Although what Joanne Hammond found while googling “discovering Canadian History” is pretty funny too, but in a depressing way.
• Kesia Kvill put together a great Twitter essay on the importance of living history museums challenging settler colonial narratives and addressing their complicity in perpetuating historical narratives that ignore the complexity and diversity of our history.
• Did you miss the awesome Harvard Talk on “Centering the Voices of Indigenous Women,” which featured Kim TallBear and Erica Violet Lee (among others)? While I can’t seem to link to it directly, you can access it here (just scroll down).
• The University of Alberta remembered the 20^th anniversary of the Vriend Course Case, which ruled that Alberta’s lack of protection from discrimination based on sexual orientation violated the Charter, with a neat roundtable.
  • And the Calgary Gay History Project also remembered the court case, and recent newspaper articles on the subject (including the roundtable!)
• Stephanie Bellissimo has written a fantastic blog post about her experience creating a Wikipedia page for the Centre for Canadian Historical Horticultural Studies.
• Colleen Beard has launched an important part of a new HGIS project, mapping the historic Welland Canals! Love this.
• Read this Twitter essay by Jess Dunkin on two NWT federal day schools, Grollier Hall and Stringer Hall, the TEST program, and how cross-country skiing was used both as a tool for the colonizers, and a way of finding freedom and connection to the land for students.
• This week Bill Waiser shared the story of Joseph Erving Kelly (aka Sam Kelly, aka Red Nelson), a farmer turned outlaw.
• Jesse Donovan is hosting @IndigenousXca this week! Here are a couple highlights.
  • He interviewed Darryl Leroux about his work on the “Eastern Métis.”
  • I think that the adoption of the phrasing “in what is currently Canada,” is fantastic, and Jesse Donovan made a really good case for it!
  • And he wrote a great thread on the debates about exonerating Louis Riel.
• The latest online exhibit from the Virtual Museum of Canada has launched, by the Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent, on “Vacationing on the St. Lawrence (1815-1950).
• The latest episode of the Footnote Podcast looked at the United Empire Loyalists.
• Check out this toque from the wreck of the Machault (1760).
• Canadian History in the News
  • So the AMC show, The Terror, has premiered. I can’t watch it, because I don’t have access to that channel. That, and I value my mental health. But Harry Wilson, Russell Potter, and Stephen Smith are reviewing each episode for Canadian Geographic.
    • Here is their review for episodes 1 and 2.
    • Potter also offered some additional comments on his blog.
  • Justin Trudeau exonerated the six Tsilhqot’in chiefs who were hanged in 1864 during the Chilcotin War. Understandably, there was quite a bit of news coverage:
    • CBC has a fascinating piece that gets an F from me for using scare quotes around the term stolen lands.
    • Derek Simon and Trevor J. Adams laid out some of the other problems with this article.
    • Chief Jo Alphonse, Tribal Chairman of the Tsilhqot’in National Government explains why the exoneration is so important to the Tsilhqot’in people. (There is an English translation at the end.)
    • The BBC asked, does Justin Trudeau apologize too much?
  • What’s the most popular online course in Canada? Indigenous Canada, of course! (I’m so punny.) If you’d like to know why the series is so awesome, check out my review here.
  • Find out a bit about the history of whaling along the BC coast.
  • Pope Francis has declined to apologize for the role of the Catholic Church in residential schools. So much for the cool pope.
    • CBC spoke with former NWT premier, Stephan Kakfwi, about the decision.
    • Derek Simon was not impressed.
    • Nor were Indigenous leaders from across the country.
  • So apparently Tom Jones spent a weekend partying at a BC ranch in 1981. I can’t decide if I’m shocked or not.
  • Am I the only one who finds this article, about tax adjudicators disputing whether or not Alexander Graham Bell was the first to invent the telephone, amusing?
  • So you may or may not remember this, but in a previous roundup, I mentioned the Ontario Provincial Police Files on the St. Anne’s residential school. Well, the CBC has gained access to those files. And it is worse than you can possibly imagine.
    • As Ian Mosby pointed out, remember that these files were deliberately withheld by the government from the TRC.
    • And Cindy Blackstock also noted that the government is continuing the fight these survivors in court.
  • I really appreciate the title of this piece, noting that the recent discovery about the oldest footprints in North America were exactly where the Heiltsuk and Wuikinuxv said they were. Funny how that happens.
    • Let’s hope that the media does a better job of handling this discovery than they did the last time scientists “discovered” Heiltsuk history.
    • Here’s the scholarly article that the news is based on.
    • And Bob Muckle pointed out, despite what the media says, the coastal route has been widely recognized as the main route whereby the Americas were populated since the 1980s.
  • One of the last relics of Canada’s Atomic Age, the Chalk River Nuclear Reactor, has been shut down.
  • The New Brunswick College of Craft and Design spent 4 years re-creating Wolastoqey regalia, and it was unveiled to the public this week. And omg, it’s gorgeous. Several Indigenous educators and artists were involved in the project, including the director of the Aboriginal Visual Arts Program, Charles Gaffney (Tobique First Nation).
  • CBC has just signed an agreement to allow for the release of three albums from their archives. These albums were originally released in runs of 250 copies and sent to affiliate stations. The first batch includes albums by Judy Singh, the Emile Normand Sextet, and Perth County Conspiracy. Future runs will feature Muddy Waters, Johnny Cash, and the Doors.
  • A PEI woman has just rediscovered a collection of hundreds of wartime love letters written by her great-grandparents in WW2. Her great-grandfather, George Peters, always signed the letters to his wife Inez, “Good night and barrels of love and kisses and all for you.” I’m not crying. Nope.
  • The new Canadian Memory of the World Register, a UNESCO program, has just received its first additions: the Halpern collection of music and recordings of BC First Nations communities, as well as the Douglas Treaties.
  • Sixty years later, and we’re still obsessed with the Avro Arrow.
  • This week marked the 100^th anniversary of the Battle of Moreuil Wood.
  • This article is an important example of how history can help empower youths from racialized and marginalized communities.
  • Victoria’s iconic Blue Bridge is now gone. I have many fond memories of that bridge.
  • I don’t know whether or not the allegations of this piece are true, but both it and the fact that all of the new Heritage Minutes have been directed by men (and one female co-director) is very troubling.
  • The Museum of Highwood is trying to identify one mysterious hippie.
  • Christine Cameron, one of Cleo Semaganis Nicotine’s siblings, reflects on the failure of the Sixties Scoop movement. 
  • Twelve new national historic designations were given out this week, including Calgary Reader Rock Garden and the birth of the Dionne Quintuplets.
• Better Late than Never
  • Gwich’in sisters from Aklavik, NWT, Sharon Anne Firth and Shirley Firth — both cross-country skiing champions — have been honored with a new stamp.
• Calls for Papers
  • The Beyond the Lecture series on Active History (co-edited by Krista McCracken and I), is soliciting views and contributions from precariously employed academics for a future blog post or mini-series.

That’s all for this week! I hope you 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 special guest blog post about a really important public history project. See you then!

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