Unwritten Histories

The Unwritten Rules of History

Category: Inconvenient Pasts (Page 1 of 2)

An Interview with Historica: Making a Heritage Minute

August 13, 2019 / / 0 Comments

image of Acadian woman in field

Welcome to the last of our Summer Series on Acadian history! This week marks not only the end of our series, it’s also the fête nationale d’Acadie on August 15th! From the amount of people who tried to wish me a “Joyeux Saint Jean Baptiste” on the 24th of June, there seem to be quite a few people who are unaware of the fact that Acadians have their own national holiday, chosen specifically to be separate from that of the Québec St-Jean Baptiste day by the convention nationale d’Acadie in 1881. (If you want to find out more about that process, both Chantal Richard and Ron Rudin have written about it.)

This year’s fête nationale comes with its own special surprise – our own heritage minute! I’ve been a big fan of the heritage minutes since I was a kid, so to get one that features Acadian history is pretty special. The debut will be on stage in Moncton during the Congrès Mondiale Acadienne 2019, after which everybody can see it on YouTube! I’ll be sure to post it on twitter for everybody to see, so be sure to watch that space! And, as always, you can catch the rest of the summer series here.

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Decorous Dispossession: Legally Extinguishing Acadian Landholding Rights

July 30, 2019 / / 0 Comments
A view of George Street in Halifax by Richard Short in 1759

“Halifax looking down George Street, Nova Scotia 1759” by Richard Short, 1759. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to the fourth post of our Acadian History Series! Our post this week is by Elizabeth Mancke, CRC in Atlantic Canada Studies at UNB Fredericton, and amazing mentor to many, including myself. In fact, this particular blog post is part of a project that she has been working on for a while with two of her students – myself and Keith Grant (Borealia, now a graduated former student of Elizabeth Mancke). As always, this content is cross-posted on Acadiensis and Borealia; you can find an index to the rest of the series here.

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Wide Angles, Close Quarters: A Human History of the Grand Dérangement

July 23, 2019 / / 1 Comment
Archival image taken by author of a letter written by Joseph Leblanc to his brother

Joseph Leblanc’s 1757 letter to his brother Charles, sent from Liverpool to an unnamed British city.

Welcome to the third post of our Acadian History Series! Our post this week is by Christopher Hodson, historian and associate professor at Bringham Young University, and author of The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History. This is the third post of a six week series which is also being posted on Acadiensis and Borealia; you can find an index to the rest of the series here. If you would like to hear more about this topic, Dr. Hodson will be joining us for our Pointe Sainte-Anne visiting lecture series the evening August 28th in Fredericton, at Government House.

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Reconciling Chignecto: The Many Stories of Siknikt

July 16, 2019 / / 0 Comments
A map dating from the 1750s which shows the Chignecto Isthmus, and various features including Acadian dykes.

This map, A DRAUGHT of the ISTHMUS which joyns Nova Scotia to the Continent with the Situation of the ENGLISH and FRENCH FORTS & the Adjacent BAYS and RIVERS, was drawn at some point between 1751 and 1755. The sites marked “O” are captioned as: “Dykes levelled by the English from which the Indeans used to Fire at the Vesells as they came up the River Mesiguash” and the villages in red, all Acadian, are indicated as those “burned by the Indeans.” Those villages were burned in September of 1750, when the British took control of the region. (There is also an indescribable image of an Indigenous person shaking hands with a European, behind the cartouche.) This work is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike License. , https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:hx11z5039

Welcome to the second post of our Acadian History Series! Our post this week is by Anne Marie Lane Jonah, historian for Parks Canada and editor of the Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. This is the second post of a six week series which is also being posted on Acadiensis and Borealia; you can find an index to the rest of the series here. Enjoy!

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Pointe Sainte-Anne: The Continuity of a Destroyed Eighteenth-century Acadian Village

July 9, 2019 / / 11 Comments
A map of the Saint John River drawn by royal surveyor Charles Morris in 1765.

“Map of the River St. John in the Province of Nova Scotia, exhibiting the grant to officers &c. in 1765, with other patents.” Charles Morris (1765) Library of Congress

Content Warning: The history of Pointe Sainte-Anne’s displacement is violent, and mentions specific instances of violence and murder; in particular, child death & torture. Proceed with caution.

 

Editor’s note: This blog post has been cross-posted on Acadiensis and Borealia, along with the rest of the series; be sure to check them out!

As I mentioned in the last blog post, today we will be starting with general overview with the history of Pointe Sainte-Anne, the events of 1759, and what we are attempting to achieve with the exhibit at the FRM.

But first, we need to emphasize that the history of Pointe Sainte-Anne obviously does not begin with the French at all, but with the Wəlastəkwiyik. Sainte-Anne (and thereby Fredericton) is located on Wəlastəkwiyik territory, which was never ceded. The first thing we aim to do with our exhibit is disabuse ourselves of the notion that the Acadians always peacefully co-existed with the local indigenous people. They did not. Although Acadians mostly managed to avoid outright war with the indigenous communities nearest to them, that doesn’t mean they didn’t outright displace them, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the local indigenous communities benefited from their presence.[1]

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Summer Series – Introduction to Acadian History

July 9, 2019 / / 4 Comments
Image of the burning and plundering of Grimross, by Thomas Davies (currently held by the National Gallery of Canada)

“A view of the burning and plundering of Grimross” by Thomas Davies, National Gallery of Canada (Digital image from Wikimedia Commons)

Welcome to our summer series on Acadian history! We are very excited to be presenting this special six- week series, cross-posting on Unwritten Histories, Borealia, and  Acadiensis, and in collaboration with the Fredericton Regional Museum, the York Sunbury Historical Society, an Open Academy grant from the Royal Society, the UNB Departments of History and French, the New Brunswick College of Craft & Design, the Institut d’Études Acadiennes, and Historica Canada.

The blog series is the result of an exhibit, which will be opening this summer at the Fredericton Region Museum (FRM), and which myself and Dr. Chantal Richard of the UNB French Department have been coordinating – Dr. Richard as Curator, and myself as Research Director, along with many more wonderful folks. The exhibit originated in numerous conversations between Chantal and myself about how lacking Fredericton was in terms of public education and knowledge of its Acadian history. Everything you see around here is Loyalist history . Beyond a few street names, and the name of the French school here in Fredericton, there is very little acknowledgment of the complex history of Saint-Anne, the Acadian village that existed in this location until its destruction in 1759. In an effort to get some traction behind the notion of revamping the history of Acadians in Fredericton, we organized a lecture series. The series has been far-reaching, and has included so many excellent speakers, including Dr. Andrea Bear-Nicolas, Fidèle Thériault, Dr Greg Kennedy, and many more.

In honour of this series, we have invited several of the presenters to share their presentations here in blog-post form. Here’s what you can look forward to seeing over the series:

We hope that you will enjoy this series as much as we will! And don’t forget to stay tuned for my blog post, coming later today!

Guest Post: Yes, Canada Did Burn Down the White House in the War of 1812

June 12, 2018 / / 7 Comments

 

An image of flames against a black background

 

Note from Andrea: Today we’re excited to bring you a very special guest post by Rachel Bryant. This post was previously published on her blog (https://rachelbryant.ca), and she has graciously given us permission to repost it here! Enjoy!

Image of Rachel Bryant.Rachel Bryant is a is a Settler Canadian researcher who divides her time between the unceded territories of the Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik peoples. She is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Dalhousie University in K’jipuktuk/Halifax and the author of The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2017). She spends most of her time in Menahkwesk/Saint John with her partner and their two babies.

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Inconvenient Pasts: Women’s Suffrage in English Canada

February 13, 2018 / / 7 Comments

Picture of an old fashioned pen nib.

If you’ve been watching the news lately, you may have seen several recent references to the British suffragettes. That’s because last week marked the 100th anniversary of women obtaining the right to vote in Britain. On this side of the pond, there have been some questions raised about why there hasn’t been a similar celebration of the women’s suffrage movement, particularly since some people consider 1918 to be the year when Canadian women received the right to vote. While I can’t speak on behalf of the government, I can tell you that historians have some major reservations when it comes to celebrating the accomplishments of Canadian suffragists. So, in this installment of Inconvenient Pasts, we’re going to take a critical look at the women’s suffrage movement in Canada, discussing what it did and did not accomplished, and whether or not it should be celebrated.

 

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Unpacking DNA Ancestry Tests

February 6, 2018 / / 6 Comments

This photograph was taken from the perspective of someone standing on the ground, looking up in the the canopy of a forest. Tall tree trunks climb high in the sky, converging at one point in the centre of the image. You can see some blue sky between the leaves of the tree canopy.

Special thanks to Shannon Stettner for her help with this piece.

If you’ve spent any time either watching television or on social media in the past few months, there is a high likelihood that you’ve run into a commercial, blog post, or Youtube video featuring DNA ancestry tests. Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe have been pushing these tests as important ways to find out about your family history. Which sounds pretty cool. However, much like Canada150, many historians find themselves incredibly frustrated by the increasing popularity of these tests. I can neither confirm nor deny that some yell incomprehensibly at the television screen whenever one of the Ancestry.com commercials comes on. Now, there are numerous articles out there explaining the scientific limitations of these tests. For instance, this recent piece on Gizmondo talks about how the results of these tests aren’t always reliable, due to the limited availability of comparative data, which alleles are being used to access ancestry, and just plain error. However, there haven’t really been any detailed discussions about the limitations of these tests from a historical perspective. So, in today’s blog post, I’m going to talk about exactly that, with a particular focus on the complicated nature of historical populations, the “science” of race, the role of white privilege, and notions of belonging and community.

 

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Hurtful Histories: Louis Riel and Why Accuracy Matters

June 9, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Header Image Louis Riel

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I was recently talking about the Louis Riel podcast episode from Stuff You Missed in History. This blog post is based off of that original Twitter essay.

Special thanks to Krystl Raven, Catherine Ulmer, and Melissa Shaw for their help reviewing this blog post, and also to Krystl Raven and Adam Gaudry for reading recommendations on this subject! Finally, a big thank you to my friends on Facebook, who insisted that I needed to write this post.

As I was getting ready for bed the other night, I received a notification that a podcast that I occasionally listen to, Stuff You Missed in History Class, had a new episode. I clicked over to see what it was, and immediately felt uneasy. The subject was Louis Riel. Not that there is a problem with the subject, but in most cases, the history of Louis Riel is handled poorly.

I do want to make it clear here that I’m not trying to pick on Stuff You Missed in History Class. To be fair, the hosts of the show do not claim to be historians. And the show is not intended to be academically rigorous. It is for entertainment value, though the hosts do try their best to be accurate and provide a list of their sources.

However — and it is a big however — I believe that they failed in their due diligence to ensure that they accurately and fairly represented this particular subject, especially given the sensitive and political nature of it. And I know they can do better; I’ve listened to some great and well-sourced podcast episodes from this show (like their series on Redlining or their “Unearthed” episodes!) But, if you’re using a public platform to explain and disseminate information about history, the onus is on you to present your information accurately and fairly.

This blog post is not a re-telling of the history of Louis Riel. Rather, I focus on some of the major errors in the podcast episode and the ramifications of these mistakes. You may think that this is just another historian griping about some non-historians being inaccurate about random obscure facts that no one else cares about, but perpetuating certain dominant historical narrative can do great harm.

 

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