Canadian History Roundup – Week of November 26, 2017

Gertrude / Truth-Freedom-Virtue – these, dear child, have power— If rightly cherish’d, to uphold, sustain, And bless thy spirit in its darkest hour! A Christmas card from the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Literature. 1910s. OSB-CARDS-0009. Public Domain.

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

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

• This week’s most commonly-used words in #envhist, according to Jessica DeWitt are: “Tasos,” “said,” and “people.”
• Are you an environmental historian or historical geographer living in the Greater Vancouver area? Then you might want to join the Burrard Environmental History Group!
• Chris Andersen shared some thoughts on his recent discussions with people on Facebook about the Edmonton CFL team name and its logo.
• Krista McCracken has written a new blog post for Active History this week, all about anarchist tags, and how they can used to increase engagement with museum exhibits and historical homes . I totally want to try this next semester.
• Paige Glotzer has a great piece on Black Perspectives about the relationship between urban development and colonialism, and who pays the price for white privilege. While not specifically Canadian, the post is definitely applicable.
• Check out this great profile of the amateur film collections at the BC Archives! These films document life in BC between 1925 and 1950.
• Michael A. McDonnell explores the history of the Anishinaabeg of the Great Lakes region and their political savvy in their dealings with the British during the American Revolution.
• This week on Unwritten Histories was our second annual Holiday Gift Guide for Historians! We’ve scoured the web and social media to come up with some fantastic suggestions at a range of different price points.
  • And for even more suggestions, check out this list of Indigenous artists you can support during your holiday shopping!
• Findings/Trouvailles, The Champlain Society blog is back this week with a new post by Andrea Beverley. This post focuses specifically on a 1983 Vancouver conference “Women and Words,” non-textual artifacts, and the visual record of the past.
• The Canadian Encyclopedia premiered several new entries this week, including:
  • Sarah Riel
  • James Campbell Clouston
  • Valérie Plante
  • And updated the entry for Os-Ke-Non-Ton
• Joanne Hammond explores the Indigenous understanding of the term “forever” with respect to land.
• Alan MacEachern shared this set of guidelines from Parks Canada in 1942, clarifying that Jews are allowed into their hotels. How kind. No word on whether we could sleep or eat there though.
• Paul Seesequasis shared this beautiful image of Lucy Anakgain’s hands, photographed in Kugluktuk, Nunavut in 1949.
• The Algoma University Archives is asking for information about anyone recognized in this video of students in residential schools in Spanish, Ontario, in the 1930s.
• Emily Lonie examines the benefits and drawbacks to colourizing archival photographs.
• Sean Graham is back with the latest History Slam episode! This latest episode features a discussion with Jean-Marie Leduc, who, along with Graham and Julie Léger, co-wrote a new book, Lace Up: A History of Skates in Canada!
• Chris Andersen also responded to comments he received on the National Post article on Métis identity, and what it means to claim to be Métis. The articled was included in the last roundup, but here it is again.
• The Graphic History Collective has just released their latest poster in the Remember|Resist|Redraw series! The poster, titled “Sacred Rivers Within” is by Fanny “Aïshaa” and depicts Melissa Mollen Dupuis, one of the co-organizers of Idle No More. The poster was published to coincide with the 5^th anniversary of the establishment of Idle No More.
• Leah Grandy is back with another blog post on palaeography and understanding historical handwriting. In this latest post for the Atlantic Loyalist Connections blog, Grandy discusses the history of cursive, documents as physical objects, and the kinds of factors that impact a person’s handwriting. It’s probably a good thing that typing was invented, since my handwriting teacher said that my handwriting was “beautiful, but impossible to read.”
• Shirley Tillotston talks poll taxes this week!
• Mica Jorgenson reviewed John McNeill and George Vrtis’ recent edited collection, Mining in North America: An Environmnetal History since 1522 for NiCHE. The book includes a fair amount of Canadian content!
• This week on Instantanés is a new post about David MacLaren, and his correspondence regarding the 1837 Lower Canadian Rebellion.
• Murray Maisey looks at the history of the BC Maternity Hospital site on Beatrice Street this week on the Vancouver as It Was blog.
• There is a lot of digitization news this week!
  • The Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan has just completed the digitization of the recordings of proceedings of the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly from 1948 to 2007. This includes 12,000 hours of audio and video records. Check them out here.
  • BAnQ also has digitization news this week, specifically the addition of 3 million pages from 319 periodicals and newspapers from all over Quebec. Most of these are fully text-searchable. Click on the link above for more information on which publications were digitized and how to access them.
  • The University of Calgary just launched an new digital collection containing images of all of the flora that has been preserved through the University of Calgary’s herbarium. Check out the images themselves here.
  • More than 23,000 pages of the Prince Edward and Hasting counties Women’s Institutes’ Tweedsmuir Histories scrapbooks have been digitized and are now available to the public. Check them out here!
  • The Sealaska Heritage Institute has announced the completion of a digitization project called “A Decade of Celebrating Native Culture: Educating with Archival Recordings of Southeast Alaska Native Dance and Song.” This project involved the digitization and preservation of audiovisual recordings from the first four Celebration events, a biennial gathering that honours the survival of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian culture.
• The Centre d’archives de la Grande Zone argileuse highlights their Alan Pope collection.
• This week was the 132th anniversary of the largest mass hanging in Canadian history, where eight First Nations Men were killed for the so-called Frog Lake Massacre.
• For those of us who are organized, it’s time to renew your CHA membership!
• The Wilson Institute has just unveiled a list of 32 scholars who have been named as Wilson Associates for 2017-2020! Congrats to all of them!
• Do you remember way back in August when the CHA and the Film Studies Association of Canada sent a letter to the NFB about their archival practice? Well, the NFB has responded!
• Patrick Dennis was interviewed by the On War and Society podcast from the Laurier Centre about his research on the Conscription Crisis.
• LAC has a new blog post this week about the challenge of preserving digital materials. I remember hearing about this back when I was still a teenager. Also, who else remembers the original floppy disks? The ones that were actually floppy! Those were so much fun to use.
• There is a brand new episode of the Nature’s Past podcast from NiCHE. This latest episode is an audio recording of the NiCHE-sponsored panel from the last CHA, “The Past and Future of Canadian Environmental History.”
• New on Active History this week is the latest installment in the series reflecting on the Manitoulin Island Summer Historical Institute. This blog post is by Clara MacCallum Fraser, with Kelley King and Nicole Latulippe, and is on reflection.
• Mary Jane Logan McCallum has written a must-read post for Nursing Clio on why Indigenous nursing history is vitally important, centring around the records of the Registered Nurses of Canadian Indian Ancestry.
• This week was Lucy Maud Montgomery’s birthday! In honour of the occasion, McGill-Queens University Press put together a short reading list about her writing.
• Matthew Hayday reviewed Meaghan Elizabeth Beaton’s The Centennial Cure: Commemoration, Identity, and Cultural Capital in Nova Scotia during Canada’s 1967 Centennial Celebrations for the Acadiensis blog this week.
• Rachel Bryant shared the text of her upcoming talk on “Canadian enclosure” or the use of exceptionalism as justification for settler colonialism in North America that persists to this day.
• Ian Mosby shared two images from a 1978 report by the Department of Indian Affairs on environmental factors and housing. As he notes, this is the very definition of structural inequality.
• A monument to the Red Deer Industrial School was recently unveiled. Retroactive’s latest blog post focuses on the meaning of the monument, its unveiling ceremony, and its design.
• Liz Otero has written a new blog post for the UBC Digitizer’s blog this week, showcasing their collection of images of Japanese-Canadian internment from the Japanese Canadian Research Collection.
• Eve Lazarus has a new blog post where she lists her top ten history blogs written by an individual and with a Vancouver focus. And she generously included Unwritten Histories on the list! Thanks Eve!
• The latest blog post from the Canadian Cetre for the Great War focuses on the shortage of rifles for Canadian soldiers, and how the government compensated with the use of drill rifles
• Crystal Fraser and Sara Komarnisky are back with another blog post for Active History. In this post, they feature their new set of posters sharing the #150Acts of Reconciliation, with artwork is by Lianne Marie Leda Charlie. Additional information, including how to purchase the posters, is available on their website.
• The LAC blog also highlighted a new acquisition — the papers of Arthur R. Menzies, the former Canadian ambassador to China.
• The latest biography from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is for Rögnvaldur Pétursson, a Unitarian minister and leader in the Icelandic community in Canada.
• Do you have any idea what this is? If so, the Archives of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto wants to know!
• LAC has also released its latest podcast episode, a reflection on Canada 150, in collaboration with SSHRC.
• The latest blog post from the Canadian Museum of History is by Matthew Betts, and profiles a new project searching for endangered archaeological sites that are on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, in collaboration with Acadian First Nation.
• HBC Heritage shared this really cool image of a gift subscription order form for The Beaver (the former title of Canada’s History) from 1968! The form is titled: “A thoughtful gift for Christmas: The Beaver.” I would imagine that this ad would play out very differently now…
• Craig N. Cipolla shared these cool pewter bowls (from the ROM) from the fur trade that were possibly dropped from a canoe.
• Adorable baby historian alert! Just before the Canada’s History Forum last week, students from all over the country gathered in Ottawa for the Canada’s History Youth Forum. Find out about the two students from Vancouver who represented BC this year, and their projects. One short warning: the image on the site includes a child wearing a Chicago Blackhawks jersey, including their logo.
• Chris Ryan looks back on the history of the Highlands condominium on St. Laurent in Ottawa this week, as well as the story of the El Ropo Restaurant at Beechwood and Charlevoix.
• Christopher Moore has a preview of the latest issue of Canada’s History!
• The Archives of Manitoba highlights the journal of HBC surveyor and post master, Peter Fidler, who was present for the signing of the Selkirk Treaty.
• Cory Verbauwhede interviewed Louise Bienvenue this week about her work with the website, Mémoires de Boscoville, for the Centre d’histoires des regulations sociales blog. This project was mentioned in a previous roundup, and is dedicated to preserving the history of Boscoville, Quebec.
• This week Trent University Archives announced the launch of a new online exhibit about Peterborough and WW1, with original research by Trent undergraduate students! See the exhibit itself here.
• The Toronto Reference Library blog looks back at the history of novelist W.E.D.. Ross, whom some have called “Canada’s most prolific author.”
• The Empire Trees Climate in the North Atlantic project has an update on their work, including the role that Canadians played in studying Bermuda’s climate in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for meteorological science.
• Andrew Smith has put together a list of resources for those who are interested in the Cormeau case, regarding the constitutionality of interprovincial trade barriers.
• The latest episode of the Historical Reminiscents podcast is here! Listen to part two of Krista McCracken’s series on demystifying archival labour.
• This week Whistorical takes a look at powering Whistler.
• Heritage Winnipeg looks back on the various iterations of the Scott Block on Main Street.
• The City of Vancouver Archives has just announced the release of legacy open data sets from October 2015 to April 2016. Legacy open data sets are raw data from a government or organization that have been released to the public.
• The Virtual Museum of History also premiered a new online exhibit this week, “Science and Survival at Fort Conger: A Polar Heritage Site in the Canadian High Arctic.”
• In the latest St. Catharines Museum Walk about Town, we take a look at the Freemasons.
• The Canadian Museum of history also posted this beautifully carved armoire featuring diamond-point panels.
• Long before Viola Desmond or Rosa Parks, Lulu Anderson went to court for being refused admission to a theatre because she was Black. And this happened in Edmonton, Alberta, in 1922.
• Canadian History in the News
  • A Chinese real estate consortium is hoping to recreate Old Quebec near Shanghai. I have no words.
  • CBC takes us on a brief tour of Grey Cup history.
  • Mr. Dressup wins in the final round of The Great Canadian TV thing!
  • And speaking of Mr. Dressup…. There has been outrage over the fact that Mr. Dressup does not have a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame. The CEO agrees that this is a problem, and says that Ernie Coombs is top of the list for next year.
  • Karine Gélinas and Sophie Tellier, from Library and Archives Canada, were interviewed by tv Rogers’ program “Entre Nous.” Gélinas spoke about the new digitization lab, while Tellier spoke about LAC’s genealogy services. The interview takes place between 19:50 and 29:55.
  • After finding his own family photographs in the archives of the Smithsonian and National Museum of the American Indian, Mi’kmaq artist Jordan Bennett put together an audio-visual exhibit on the history of the Mi’kmaq in Newfoundland.
  • There is new information about the disappearance of Virginia Pictou Noyes, a Mi’kmaq woman who disappeared in Maine in 1993.
  • LAC signed a memorandum of understanding with the General Archive of the Nation of the United Mexican States.
  • This week the LAC screened Miracles in Modern Medicine, a short film that was shown during Expo 67 which caused thousands of viewers to faint. No word on whether or not anyone fainted at the LAC screening.
  • Eighteen years after a Supreme Court decision established the right of the Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy peoples to earn a “moderate livelihood” through fishing, questions remain about what exactly a “modern livelihood” means.
  • Body-snatching history in Kitchener!
  • Evan Dyer looks back on the history of apologies in Canada, particularly with respect to their limitations.
  • The historical Out on the Shelves library, containing materials with at least 60% queer content, are now being housed at Pride UBC.
  • Robyn Maynard has a great piece in The Walrus this week on how the Canadian education system is failing Black students. She discussed the lack of Black individuals in Canadian historical narratives, especially with respect to Black institutions and resilience.
  • CBC highlights the life of Joseph John Belanger, an early activist in the LGTBQ community in Edmonton.
  • Showcasing how meaningful apologies are is this news that the federal government is arguing that IRS survivors don’t have the right to “procedural fairness” in the hearings for compensation. This essentially means that survivors wouldn’t have the right to an unbiased hearing, and is seen as an attempt by the government to stop reviews of cases due to the failure of the government to disclose all of their related documents.
  • Senator Murray Sinclair is asking for a new royal proclamation by the Crown that recognizes Indigenous nations as equal partners in confederation.
  • CBC remembers the Alouette I, the first Canadian satellite, launched in 1962 and still orbiting the planet! Its younger sibling, Alouette II, launched in 1965, and is also still there! Did I get the song stuck in your head now?
  • You must read this piece by Jordan Engel on reclaiming Indigenous places and knowledge through decolonial mapmaking. And be sure to check out the Decolonial Atlas project, which includes several maps of northern Turtle Island!
  • Every Tuesday, Unreserved posts a two-minute video sharing Indigenous knowledge from elders and knowledge keepers across Canada. You can see the entire archive here.
  • Martha Troian has written this amazing piece where she, along with her son, retraces the steps her mother took while escaping from Pelican Lake residential school.
  • Daniel Steeves appeared on CTV Atlantic this week to talk about the history of Daniel Samson, a Black Nova Scotian who was accused of murder in the 1930s.
  • The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls inquiry was in northern Quebec this week, and Innu women, including elder Mary Mark, described the abuse they suffered at the hands of a Belgian missionary during the second half of the twentieth century.
    • They also recounted what happened to a Naskapi baby that was placed in foster care thirty years ago. Content warning: this article features discussions of child abuse, rape, and murder.
  • There is a new petition calling on the federal government to include the history of residential schools in the new Canadian citizenship study guide.
  • A developer is hoping to build condos on the site of Beechville, a former historic Black community in Nova Scotia. The city of Halifax is asking for an impact study before considering the proposal.
  • Mi’kmaq from all over PEI are now meeting once a week in Charlottetown and learning traditional Mi’kmaq hand drumming and singing to connect with their heritage.
  • More baby historians! Grade five students created new displays at the Royal BC Museum about the history of minority groups in Canada.
  • Last week I mentioned the work that Sixties Scoop survivor Colleen Cardinal is doing to map the locations of Indigenous children who were removed from their homes during the Scoop. Find out more about the project and Cardinal’s work in this interview with her from Canadian Geographic.
  • Eight West End laneways in Vancouver are going to be named after local historical figures, including Eihu, Mary See-em-ia, Rosemary Brown, Kathleen (Kay) Stovold, Ted Northe, Peter Jepson-Young, Peter Basil Pantages, and Vivian Jung. And, the new temporary plaza at City Hall will be named after Helena Gutteridge.
  • Explorers have discovered ice-age caverns from more than 15,000 years ago under Montreal.
  • The University of Lethbridge has just received a donation of nearly 7,000 rare books on Western Canadian history.
  • Saint John is supposed to be getting a new provincial museum, but the details are shrouded in secrecy. While the city claims to have listened to “stakeholders,” there haven’t been any public consultations.
  • Elsbeth Heaman and Shirley Tillotson talk taxes and the Canadian psyche in this new piece for the Literary Review of Canada.
  • Irene Moore Davis is part of a group of researchers who are looking for interview subjects and photographs for a new project documenting the Black history of Windsor-Essex.
  • Relive Slow’s performance from the Vancouver Expo 86 concert with this interview with two of the band members.
  • Patrick Lacroix has written an op-ed for Le Droit about the invisibility of the Canada150 celebrations. Specifically, he points to Confederation as a pivotal moment for French-language rights in the province, a fact that has largely gone unrecognized in the province.
• Lead up to 100^th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion (December 6, 2017):
  • The Nova Scotia Archives has just released a new online exhibit: “Still Standing: W.G. MacLaughlan Albums of Buildings Damaged by the Halifax Explosion.” This includes 123 photographs, as well as videos based on the stories of witnesses. (The text version is here.)
  • CBC put together a really cool interactive news story on the explosion, including a 3-D representation of Halifax in 1917 before the explosion.
  • Wanda Robson shared her family’s experiences of the Halifax Explosion. Robson, along with her sisters Viola Demond and Emily Clyke, all lived through the experiences with only minor injuries.
  • Most people have forgotten that race placed a huge role in the response to the Halifax Explosion. The Halifax Relief Commission routinely discriminated against Black survivors, discontinuing food allowances, failing to provide housing, and forcing Black survivors back to work as soon as possible.
  • Artist Laurie Swim created this beautiful quilt showing scenes from the Halifax Explosion.
  • One researcher thinks that a mysterious shipwreck, found at the bottom of Halifax harbour in 2002, may be connected to the Halifax Explosion.
  • A time capsule that was placed at the site of the explosion in 1985 will be opened this week, and replaced with a new one, to be opened in 2067.
  • While the anniversary of the Halifax Explosion is well publicised today, this wasn’t always the case.
  • One Nova Scotia teacher is using her own family history to teach her students about the Explosion.
  • Check out some of the artifacts from new exhibit on the Explosion at the Army Museum.
  • The Coast interviewed Jacob Remes about the history of the Explosion, and how historic commemorations say more about the present than the past.
  • John Hurst of Blind Veterans UK is searching for a photograph of Private James Ross MacPherson, who was blinded in the Explosion, but still served in WW1.
• Early this week, Justin Trudeau apologized for the treatment of LGBTQ2 employees of the federal government and the military. There was, as expected, a great deal of media coverage.
  • In advance of the apology Steven Maynard wrote a great op-ed on the subject, and how the recent apology seems to be erasing the uncomfortable and messy parts of queer history.
  • Maynard also a wrote a piece that was co-published by Active History and the C4E Journal: Perspectives on Ethics that picks up on much of the same themes, with considerable elaboration. As Maynard himself puts it, this is his contribution to the disruption of queer inclusion. FYI: This would make a great addition to any syllabus on Canadian history.
  • $100 million has been set aside to compensate those LGBTQ2 employees of the federal government and the military whose careers were impacted.
  • Here is coverage of the apology itself.
  • CBC explains why the apology was needed, with a particular focus on the fruit machine.
  • Anthony Germain compared how both Trudeaus approached the issue of historical wrongs, and why Pierre Elliott Trudeau was opposed to apologies.
  • CBC also profiled Everett Klippert.
  • Chatelaine magazine’s Sarah Boesveld spoke to Diane Dorion, who was forced out of the military in the 1980s for being gay, about her experiences and what the apology means for her.
  • Rachel Giese wrote a piece for Maclean’s this week about the sacrifices of Canadian LGTBQ activists that paved the way for this apology.
• Better Late than Never
  • Charlie Angus is asking why Justice Canada supressed thousands of police files documenting abuse at St. Anne’s Indian Residential School, particularly given the ongoing work of survivors from that school to prove their claims of abuse.
    • And the government also argued that shocks from the school’s electric chair, or the trauma from children being forced to eat their own vomit, weren’t severe enough to merit compensation.
  • Marcel Mousette has written an op-ed for Le Soleil, arguing that Park Canada’s archaeological collections should remain in Quebec, rather than being transferred to Ottawa.
  • The British Journal of Photography interviewed Luce Lebart of the Canadian Photography Institute, which acts as both a museum and as an archive.
  • The McGill University Archives has a new director and archivist, Yves Lapointe. Find out a little bit about his background in this new interview.
  • If you live on the Sunshine Coast, you can now adopt an archival photograph!
  • The mayor of Dusseldorf has abruptly cancelled an exhibit of the late Montreal art dealer Max Stern. The exhibit was intended to chronicle how the German-born Stern had been forced to sell his art collection by the Nazis (because he was Jewish), and how heirs established the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, which helps to return artwork appropriated by the Nazis to the original Jewish owners or their heirs. The article is definitely worth a read, since it talks about the controversial nature of art restitution, particularly in Germany.
  • Omg, I think I need this new video game about the Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows.
• Calls for Papers
  • The Canadian Committee on Migration, Ethnicity, and Transnationalism is seeking submissions for their 2018 Article Prize compeition. Submissions are due January 15.
  • The Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History is seeking paper proposals for an upcoming one-day workshop on Canadian nuclear history. Proposals are due January 15.
  • Acadiensis has issued a CFP for the 2018 David Alexander Prize, for the best essay on Atlantic Canadian history by an undergraduate. Entries are due June 30^th.
  • The Laurier Centre has issued a call for papers for the 29^th Canadian Military History Colloquium, to be held at Wilfrid Laurier in May 2018. Proposals are due February 5. All topics are welcome, including those relating to “1918, the last year of fighting on the western front.”
  • The Political History Group is also seeking submissions for its 2018 book prize competition. Submissions are due January 19.

This has been a big week for news as far as Canadian history is concerned! Also, I know that it isn’t Christmas yet, but you know I love these vintage cards, so I have to take advantage while I can! 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 brand new blog post why Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas. See you then!

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