Note from Andrea: I’m super excited to bring you a special guest post this week, written by Ronald Rudin, on his fantastic initiative, the Lost Stories Project! Enjoy!
All photos provided courtesy of their respected owners. Please do not reproduce.
Ronald Rudin is a Professor of History at Concordia University. Author of seven books and producer of seven documentary films, he carries out research that touches upon Canadian cultural and environmental history, with a particular focus on Atlantic Canada and its Acadian population. He is most recently the author of the prize-winning: Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park (University of Toronto Press, 2016), and its connected website Returning the Voices to Kouchibouguac National Park.
Since 2012, I have been the director of the Lost Stories Project, which collects little-known stories about the Canadian past, transforms them into pieces of public art on appropriate sites, and documents the process through short films that are available from the project’s bilingual website. I have long had an interest in the tools that are used to tell stories about the past — monuments, sculptures, murals, and the like –and I have pursued this interest through both publications (Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie,) and documentary films (Life After Ile Ste-Croix). I often find myself wondering about the choices behind such markers, particularly what story should be told and how best to tell it? These may seem like trivial concerns, but if last summer’s Monument Wars and the American debate over Confederate monuments is anything to go by, the choices made have long term repercussions. What’s more, they often tell us more about the people who built them than the history itself.
Lost Stories came about when I was looking for an engaging way to show this process to the public. I imagined that this project would allow us to tell little-known stories about the Canadian past — giving voice to people whose stories have often been ignored — while simultaneously showing an artist puzzling over how to tell that story. The documentaries that accompanied the project were therefore crucial, as they provided an opportunity to tell both the stories about the past and the stories of the artists making their choices. And, of course, the filmmakers are making choices as well. From various perspectives, the project is designed to raise questions about the process of selection that occurs whenever we tell stories in public space.
Our first “season” consisted of a pilot episode made possible by support from the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. For the pilot, we restricted our call to the public for their stories to the Montreal area, since the project is based at Concordia University, where I teach. We received roughly forty stories, but the one that drew us in was about Thomas Widd, a deaf man in late nineteenth-century Montreal who founded the city’s first school for the Deaf. The school that he founded was able to expand thanks to funding from Montreal businessman, Joseph Mackay, and so the school came to be known as the Mackay School. In the process, Widd’s name was lost and, in a sense, his voice was silenced.
His story was brought to us by Janet McConnell, both of whose parents were deaf, although she is not. Nevertheless, she grew up in the local Deaf community, and taught at the Mackay school. She wanted Widd’s story to be more widely known, as it now is thanks to support from the Montreal Deaf community that contributed to the public art project that was created for Lost Stories by the Montreal artist Lalie Douglas and was installed at the school in 2013. Both Widd’s story and Lalie Douglas’ journey to create her installation are told in Bernar Hébert’s film, Thomas Widd’s Lost Story.
Installation of Thomas Widd Commemorative Art, September 2013. Photo courtesy, Caroline Boileau.
With the pilot behind us, we looked for funding to create further episodes, ultimately securing support from the federal government’s Canada 150 Fund, which has allowed us to develop four new stories from across the country. In 2016 we put out a call to Canadians to send us little-known stories for our second season. We received nearly two hundred ideas, many of which were very interesting. However, our final selections were influenced to a considerable degree by the extent of community support that existed to tell a story and by our ability to secure an appropriate site to create public art. There were a number of interesting stories that simply could not be selected because the owner of the land (usually a government agency) would not give us carte blanche so that the artist would be free to tell the story as they wished; and this freedom was important if we were going to show an artist trying to figure out how to tell a specific story.
Ultimately, we developed four new episodes from the various regions of Canada that provide an opportunity to hear the voices of people with relatively little power: First Nations, Inuit, Acadians, people with disabilities or disease, and immigrants of colour. For each of our four new episodes we selected both artists and filmmakers with direct connections to the selected stories. In each case, the public art was installed in a community event during summer 2017, and the four films were published on our website in early 2018. I have briefly described the four stories here, going from east to west.
Our story from Atlantic Canada — brought to us by a group from New Brunswick’s Acadian Peninsula — focuses on individuals with leprosy in the mid-nineteenth century who were confined to Sheldrake Island, off the province’s eastern coast. Most of the people confined there during the 1840s were Acadians, the French-speakers of Atlantic Canada, who had been forcibly removed once before, when they were deported a century earlier. Once sent to Sheldrake Island, they were largely left to their own devices, so there were numerous cases of people trying to escape. Ultimately, fifteen individuals died on the island, before the survivors were evacuated to Tracadie, New Brunswick, which became an important centre for the treatment of leprosy. Marika Drolet-Ferguson’s art installation, based upon photographs of the island, is located near a cemetery for those who died of leprosy at the lazaretto in Tracadie. Her project, and the Sheldrake story more broadly, is told in Julien Cadieux’s film, Sheldrake.
Installation of Tracadie, NB Commemorative Art, September 2017. Photo courtesy, Julien Cadieux.
The “lost story” from Ottawa is also about relocation. In this case, the story focuses on Inuit travellers from the North who found a home-away-from-home in Ottawa’s Southway Inn. Located near the airport, the hotel became the focus for a community that needed to travel by air to Ottawa, mostly to receive medical services. Ottawa has the largest Inuit population outside the North, and the Southway played an important role in the life of the community. Working closely with members of Ottawa’s Inuit community, and aided by the support of John Walsh from Carleton’s History Department, Inuk artist Couzyn van Heuvelen created a modern version of a traditional Inuit dogsled, a Quamutiik, in order to tell this story of movement. That theme is also central to Mosha Folger’s film, Qamutiik: From the North to Ottawa’s Southway Inn.
Installation of Ottawa Commemorative Art, September 2017. Photo courtesy, Caroline Boileau.
The story from the Prairies focuses on the efforts of Yee Clun, a Regina restaurant owner, to fight against Saskatchewan’s White Women’s Labour Law in the 1920s. The law prevented Chinese-Canadian businessmen from hiring white women as employees unless they received a special license from the municipal government. But when the city of Regina refused to grant this licence, he challenged the ruling in a higher court — and won. We were immediately drawn to the impact of this law which discriminated against both the Chinese-Canadian business owners (viewed as potential predators) and the white women employees (viewed as needing protection). Equally crucial was the support we received from Regina’s Chinese-Canadian community, from the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society, and from the Yee family, nearly thirty of whom came to Regina (mostly from the Vancouver area) for the inauguration of the art installation by Saskatoon-based artist Xiao Han. Her work, which consists of a number of recreations of imagined scenes from Yee Clun’s restaurant, is the focus for Kelly-Anne Riess’ film, Yee Clun and the Exchange Café.
Installation of Regina Commemorative Art, August 2017. Photo courtesy, Tom Bartlett.
Finally, our story from British Columbia focuses on the kidnapping during the Fraser River gold rush of the 1850s of boys who belonged to the Stó:lō First Nation. American miners took a number of these boys back home with them. In one particular case, we know that the boy was “adopted” by the family and was buried in California in a grave that bears the name of his kidnapper. This story was brought to the project by Keith Carlson of the University of Saskatchewan, who worked with a steering committee of Stó:lō educators, mothers, and cultural experts to make possible the carving by Coast Salish artist, Terry Horne, who is also the chief of the Yakweakwioose band, located in Chilliwack, BC. The carving is located on a site provided by the Chawatil First Nation, on the banks of the Fraser River near Hope, BC, where one of the boys was last seen. The story and Terry’s creative process are featured in the film, Kidnapped Stó:lō Boys by Sandra Bonner-Pederson of the Tzeachten First Nation.
Installation of Hope, BC Commemorative Art, August 2017. Photo courtesy, Sandra Bonner Pederson.
Teaching Lost Stories
In addition to creating public art and producing documentary films, the Lost Stories Project is also developing teaching material to raise questions for intermediate and high school students (and maybe even university students) about how stories about the past are told in public space.
In early 2018 we launched a new area on our website, called Teaching Lost Stories, which was developed by our two educational consultants. Scott Pollock has a PhD from OISE and does research on history curriculum, with an emphasis on the development of “historical thinking” as a pedagogical concept; he has also worked for seventeen years as a high school history teacher in Oakville, Ontario. Ruth Sandwell is a historian and history educator at OISE and the Department of History at the University of Toronto. In addition to researching and publishing about the social history of energy and of rural Canada, she is the founding Co-director and Educational Director of the history education website: Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History (www.canadianmysteries.ca). Indeed, the educational material for Lost Stories was inspired by the Mysteries project which encourages students to think critically about the use of evidence to solve cold cases from the Canadian past.
Teaching Lost Stories consists of a set of connected lesson plans and historical documents which build on the Lost Stories public art and documentary films. The first set of lessons, recently released, deals with the story of Thomas Widd. Teachers and students who use the Thomas Widd lesson plans will be provided with a wide range of documents, mostly from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that will encourage reflection about what it meant to be deaf. Students will be challenged to think about why Widd’s story had been lost to all but a small number of people in Montreal’s Deaf community, along the way learning that there is a process of selection in terms of which stories are remembered and which are forgotten. Students are given a number of possible explanations for his story having been lost, and are provided with various pieces of evidence that they need to assess. Students will have an opportunity to learn more about this community, and will be challenged to think about how they might tell Widd’s story in a manner different from the one selected by artist, Lalie Douglas.
Thomas Widd, in Commemorative Art by Lalie Douglas. Photo courtesy Paul Litherland.
In this regard, students are encouraged to see both the public art and the film as conveying narratives — to view them critically and not accept them at face value. To introduce them to the challenge of thinking through the narratives that are presented by way of historical markers such as monuments, students are asked to consider whether individuals from the past such as John A. Macdonald deserve to be honoured, introducing them to the point that we always make choices in terms of who to honour and how we honour them. Then, as a follow-up exercise, students are asked to think — building on material that we have provided — about other narratives that might have been told in regard to Thomas Widd, ultimately leading them to pitch their own ideas for Thomas Widd-inspired public art to their class.
Finally, students are encouraged to look for historical markers in their own communities, and to carry out research projects in order to understand why these structures were built, who built them, and what stories they are supposed to convey. In this, as in all of the other exercises, students engage with the fact that how we tell stories in public space is neither natural nor inevitable. Rather, it requires that choices be made, and of course, that we can reverse those choices if we are so inclined. In the end, Lost Stories is all about trying to make visible the choices that are made when we tell stories about the past.
In the months ahead, lesson plans connected with our four new stories will be released, building on the films that are already accessible from the Lost Stories website. When all of this material is available, teachers will be able to select the set of lesson plans with the greatest meaning for their students. However, in all the plans, the goal is to question why we focus on some stories from Canada’s past, and not others; and how we present the past in our public spaces.
Special thanks to Ronald Rudin for this wonderful post! I am really looking forward to seeing all of the future lesson plans, since I know they will be fantastic for first year Canadian history survey classes. I hope you enjoyed this blog post! If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice. And don’t forget to check back on Sunday for a brand new Canadian History Roundup. See you then!
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