News & Blog Posts – Thomas Peace

January 3, 2025 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

The Great State of Canada? Time for a Rethink

This essay was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca on December 19 2024

By Thomas Peace

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has brought with it a revival of continentalist rhetoric to North American politics.

“It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada. I look forward to seeing the Governor again soon…”

A few days ago, when Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland resigned, the President-Elect observed:

“The Great State of Canada is stunned as the Finance Minister resigns, or was fired, from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau.”

And just yesterday:

“Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State. They would save massively on taxes and military protection. I think it is a great idea. 51st State!!!”

The idea Trump is putting forward is not a new one.

Since at least the early-to-mid eighteenth century, continental visions of empire – from Manifest Destiny to Annexation – have permeated North American political culture and haunted Canada’s self-identity. Perhaps not since the Fenian Raids of the 1860s, and the broader nineteenth-century annexation movement, has an American threat to Canadian sovereignty been as visceral.

Contrasting these imperial visions, though, have been other ways of thinking about space, place, and home. Continentalism is not the only way to think about North America’s political geography. If we look to the past, we can see pathways towards a more transformative vision for North America that better reflects regional relationships and identities.

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January 5, 2024 Thomas Peace Uncategorized

No One Killed Canadian History. It is time to move on

This post originally appeared on ActiveHistory.ca

As we welcome 2024, it is time for Canadian historians to turn over a new leaf.

The end of 2023 brought echoes of 2003. As the year wound to a close, some of our colleagues – mostly working outside of the university – began to pile on as they celebrated 25 years since Jack Granatstein published Who Killed Canadian History, a divisive book that shaped the so-called History Wars of the late-1990s and 2000s.

It was no coincidence that this series was put together by The Hub, an online news site that promises an optimistic approach to news and analysis that will strengthen the Canadian nation. Core to The Hub are several of the same people behind the Dominion Institute, another key player that fueled historiographical tensions at the dawn of the new millennium.

Similar stakes from the late-1990s seem to be drawn out today.

The words of Hub editor-at-large Sean Speer summarized a subtext of the series. For Speer, over the course of the past two decades “radical” university professors (specifically at Carleton University) won the History Wars having “vanquished unfashionable scholars like Granatstein… in an exercise of ideological conformity imposed by a combination of peer pressure, hiring preferences, and growing university bureaucracy.”

In this same series, J.D.M. Stewart claims that “universities have eschewed political history and continue to dig down ever deeper into niche topics with limited value to helping Canadians understand each other.”

Neither then, nor now, does this framing of university history departments resonate with my experiences over the past 25 years. Unfortunately, though, these ideas about those of us working in universities are not unique.

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October 7, 2023October 17, 2023 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

Nova Scotia and the Paradox of the Royal Proclamation

Today marks the 260^th anniversary of the Royal Proclamation of 1763.

Over the course of Canadian history, there are few documents that carry more weight. With less than 2,000 words, the Crown laid out in this document a precedent in British Canadian law that normalized territorial treaty-making, and recognized Aboriginal Rights and Title. In 1982, the Proclamation was enshrined in section 25 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Designed to sort out jurisdictional issues in North America following the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), the Proclamation served four important purposes:

It established the boundaries of four new British colonies: Quebec, East Florida, West Florida, and Grenada; it also modified the boundaries of Nova Scotia and Georgia.
It provided a schedule for assigning free land to veterans of the war.
It established a protocol for British administrators to follow regarding colonial expansion onto Indigenous Lands.
From the British perspective, it reserved for Indigenous nations the Land lying to the west of the Appalachian Mountains.

At its core, the Proclamation is the document that set out a process for British colonial settlement and jurisdiction that continues to define the world in which North Americans live today.

There’s a problem, though: the principles outlined in the Proclamation were muddied by the on-the-ground realities of eighteenth-century life in ways that clearly resonate today. Nothing demonstrates this better than the colony of Nova Scotia’s origin story: there, the Proclamation’s provisions have never been fully adopted.

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March 7, 2022October 17, 2023 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Public History

Does a Single Building Matter? A Case for the Fugitive Slave Chapel

There is a small house in downtown London, Ontario that looks ready for the wrecking ball. If you walk by, it would stand out only for its state of disrepair. A security fence surrounds it.

London’s First Black Church, c. 1848

About a year ago, the London and Middlesex Heritage Museum – of which I am currently the Board Chair – received a letter asking whether our museum would be willing to accept this building as a gift.

My heart leapt at the opportunity.

The London and Middlesex Heritage Museum operates Fanshawe Pioneer Village, a living history museum that interprets the city’s and surrounding county’s histories between 1820 and 1920. This building – despite its state of disrepair – represents histories that remain poorly known and yet were critical to weaving together the fabric of London’s civic life from the time it was built – in 1848 – right through to the present.

Known locally as the Fugitive Slave Chapel, this small building is one of the few tangible connections to London’s early Black community. Built seven years before the city incorporated,

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August 12, 2021October 17, 2023 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

It is Time to End the History Wars

By Ian Milligan and Thomas Peace

We’ve been fighting about the same things for a quarter century. It’s time to call it quits.

Earlier this week, The Dorchester Review published an open letter under an inflammatory (and arguably misleading, as it did not appear on the version signatories signed) headline of “Historians Rally v. ‘Genocide Myth;” it also apparently appeared as a print advertisement in the Literary Review of Canada, absent the polarizing title.

The letter was signed by 51 historians from across Canada and lamented the “Canada Day Statement” issued by the Canadian Historical Association (and published here on ActiveHistory.ca). The concern brought forth in the letter is about how the CHA framed historians’ work on the question of genocide and the role that professional organizations should play within the public sphere.

This is the second letter of this nature this year. In January, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute issued a similar letter, this time focused on the “Defence of Sir John A. Macdonald’s Legacy.”

Both letters share a common critique (and substantial overlap in signatories). In Monday’s letter, the signatories argue that in issuing their statement, the CHA’s leadership was “insulting the basic standards of good scholarly conduct and violating the expectations that Canadians have of academia to engage in substantive, evidence-based debate.” For the signatories of the January letter, the concern – according to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s press release – was that “those who see Canada’s history as little more than a shameful series of mistakes and failures have grown increasingly vocal in calling for the shunning of figures like our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald.”

The phrasing of these critiques are familiar to anyone following the politics of history. They are reminiscent of provocative arguments that now have a pedigree of a quarter century.

Their roots are found in Jack Granatstein’s 1998 polemic Who Killed Canadian History. Explaining his motivations for writing his book, Granatstein points to the school lessons of a young boy named Brad. About this boy’s history work, Granatstein laments that the curriculum’s aim was more “to teach a lesson about racism and sexism, not history. The history taught is that of the grievers among us, the present-day crusaders against public policy or discrimination. The history omitted is that of the Canadian nation and people.”

The message from Granatstein nearly twenty-five years ago, and from the scholars who signed these letters, is that the discipline of history in Canada is in a state of disarray and is perhaps even, by virtue of its ostensible activist leanings, somehow illegitimate.

They are wrong.

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July 12, 2021October 17, 2023 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

Want to Understand Egerton Ryerson? Two School Histories Provide the Context

In 1842, at the Dawn settlement near Dresden, Ontario, Josiah Henson built the British American Institute (BAI), a school for peoples who had escaped their enslavement. Five years later, about 75 kilometers from the BAI, on the banks of the Deshkan Ziibiing near London, Methodist missionary Kahkewaquonaby (Peter Jones) – a Mississauga leader from Credit River (western Toronto) – built the Mount Elgin Institute, a manual labour school for Munsee-Delaware and Anishinaabeg children.

Both schools were short lived, failing to live up to the hopes of their founders (though Mount Elgin reopened in 1867 with less community involvement).

What is important here is the agency deployed by Black and Indigenous people like Josiah Henson and Kahkewaquonaby in seeking out, and controlling, robust systems of education for their communities.

Making their situation much more complex, however, is that the educational philosophies these men espoused have common roots with the development of the residential school system as well as two elite American colleges.

Understanding this historical context reveals an important turning point in the history of racism and exclusion in Canadian law and society. In this moment, some Black and Indigenous peoples hoped schooling might help navigate the developing settler colonial state while – at the same time – those efforts were thwarted and co-opted by government and churches to entrench racial hierarchies that privileged White English-speaking settlers. Egerton Ryerson falls right in the middle of these divergent interests.

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June 11, 2021October 17, 2023 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Translation

Residential Schools: How Quebec Colonized the West

By Catherine Larochelle

Trigger Warning: This article discusses the residential school system and the Roman Catholic Church. The National Residential School Crisis Line is 1-866-925-4419.

With the Quiet Revolution, identity in Quebec shifted from an association with French Canada to one more tightly bound by the province’s political borders. Quebec’s so-called national history similarly refocused to emphasize histories of Quebec rather than histories of francophones living elsewhere in North America. Along with this transition was buried the shared history between Quebec and the Prairies. As a consequence, many Quebecers today have difficulty associating Quebec with Canada’s colonization of the west.

Memorial statue of Father Albert Lacombe, one of many French Canadians who worked on the Prairies during the 19th and 20th Century. (Wikimedia Commons)

Although the media has begun to discuss Quebec’s twentieth-century residential schools, too often in Quebec, when we learn about tragedies like the one at Kamloops Residential School, we continue to hear common refrains that absolve Quebecers of their participation within this genocidal system.

Some say: “It was the Federal government!” As if Quebecers do not elect their members of parliament and participate through them in the government… don’t forget about Hector-Louis Langevin.

Others reflect: “It was the church! And the church also oppressed French Canadians.” As if priests and nuns were not themselves French Canadians… don’t forget about Albert Lacombe.

And yet others lament: “We have suffered under the British yoke. French Canadians were friends with Indigenous peoples.” As if the desire to eliminate these peoples did not begin in the seventeenth century… don’t forget about the narrative of New France’s Golden Age.

These are not old pre-Truth and Reconciliation Commission claims. From his perch at the Journal de Montreal, columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté made just these arguments earlier this week.

And yet…

The history of residential schools in Western Canada is part of Quebec’s history. The history of genocide is part of Quebec’s history.

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May 17, 2021October 17, 2023 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

Community, Family, & the Hidden History of Southwestern Ontario

“Not acknowledging the multiplicity of histories that we carry around with us can separate more than bring us together and fail to demonstrate how the congruence of narratives that make up the past are the very stories that tell who “we” are in the present.” – Samantha Cutrara, Transforming the Canadian History Classroom, 6.

“Community” is a tricky concept.

The word encourages us to conceptualize our place in the world through a singular sense of belonging. Put a bit differently: the idea forces us to think about groups that we find meaningful and supportive as entities somewhat isolated from each other. Our family is a sort of community, for example, but one that is distinct – often – from the communities we find in our neighbourhoods, at work, in prayer, or in recreation.

For many, though, our values and identities are bound up not in a single community but, rather, in multiple communities, anchored in specific sets of relationships that interlink us with diverse groups of people. We live in webs of communities rather than within one single collective unit. Each of these communities has value for us.

It is this difference, between a singular idea of community, and the reality that we live within many distinct communities, that the Hidden Histories of Southwestern Ontario project seeks to recognize.

The Hidden Histories Dashboard

Since the late eighteenth century, the plural reality of community and its mostly local and regional nature, has posed challenges for businesses, institutions, and politicians.

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November 30, 2020April 5, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

Indigenizing the Teaching of North American History: A Panel Discussion

In late-October, Active History editor Thomas Peace met with Marie Battiste, Alan Corbiere, and Sarah Nickel to discuss decolonization and Indigenization in the teaching of North American history. Over the course of an hour, the conversation explored the meaning of decolonization, Indigenizing the academy, Indigenous resurgence in the Indigenizing of history, assessed specific anticolonial strategies for affecting change in the discipline, and provided advice for history teachers and professors about how to change pedagogies and curriculum.

To extend the conversation, we asked the panelists to provide a list of useful resources history teachers and professors can use to learn more about the subjects addressed during the session. Here is their reading list:

November 23, 2020April 5, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Public History

Monumental Questions: Practical Experiences of the Politics of Commemoration

As cities and communities across Canada confront the legacies of colonialism and racism, monuments and memorials have become a hot topic of public debate. On November 14th, London, Ontario’s Words Festival, brought together Lisa Helps, Mayor of Victoria, Monica MacDonald, co-chair of Halifax’s Cornwallis Taskforce, and University of Toronto History Professor Melanie Newton, for a discussion on the deliberative processes that communities have undertaken to tackle the difficult subject of historical monuments and commemorations, especially when the figures or events they honour confront us with Canada’s legacies of systematic racism and slavery. Join Active History editor Thomas Peace in exploring with the panelists how cities have confronted their monumental legacies, the civic production of history and heritage, and strategies you can draw upon to better understand the politics of historic monuments and place names.

Learn More:

Cindy Blackstock, Spirit Bear: Echoes of the Past (First Nations Child & Family Caring Society)

City of Toronto Briefing Note Responding to the Petition to Rename Dundas Street

City of Victoria – Reconciliation Programs

Monica MacDonald, Recasting History: How CBC Television has Shaped Canada’s Past (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019)

Melanie Newton, “Henry Dundas: Naming Empire and Genocide,” History Workshop (Nov 2020)

Emma Renaerts, “The Right Way to Topple a Statue,” We Are Not Divided (Oct 2020)

Report of the Task Force on the Commemoration of Edward Cornwallis and the Recognition and Commemoration of Indigenous History

July 22, 2020April 5, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

K’jipuktuk to Halifax and back: Decolonization in the Council Chamber

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

For nearly nine decades visitors to Halifax, arriving by boat or train, were welcomed to the city by Edward Cornwallis. Encased in bronze, Cornwallis stood tall, his stern face peering towards travelers pouring out from the city’s main train station and the famed Pier 21, site of first arrival to Canada for over 1.5 million immigrants. In 2018, Cornwallis was removed from his prominent perch at the south end of Barrington Street. Yesterday evening, Halifax Regional Council solidified that decision, voting to accept a report from an expert task force on the Commemoration of Edward Cornwallis and Commemoration of Indigenous History.

The Edward Cornwallis statue, in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia, on July 15, 2017. (Ben MacLeod, Wikimedia Commons)

From a global perspective, the timing of the Halifax report could not be better. Released just six weeks after protesters in Bristol toppled a statue of Edward Colston, a prominent philanthropist whose wealth was built upon the human trafficking of enslavement of Africans, the issue of public commemoration – specifically of individuals involved in imperial and corporate systems of enslavement and oppression – remains front and centre around the world.

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June 17, 2020April 5, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

So long Dundas: From Colonization to Decolonization Road?

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

Last week, following widespread Black Lives Matter demonstrations across Canada and the rest of the world, a push began to rename Toronto’s Dundas Street. Building upon a similar movement in Edinburgh, it was not long before the call to remove the Dundas name spread to other places, such as, in Ontario, London’s main commercial street and Hamilton’s west-end suburb. Dundas’s namesake has been deeply emblazoned across the province.

The impetus for this removal stems from the person these designations sought to honour: Henry Dundas, 1^st Viscount Melville.

Dundas was a Scottish aristocrat and key British cabinet member under William Pitt the Younger. In 1792, Dundas (who had tight links to the West Indies) led the charge to modify a parliamentary motion to immediately abolish the slave trade. Here, it was the addition of one word – and Dundas’s subsequent actions – that tarnished his name. Much to well-known abolitionist William Wilberforce’s chagrin, Dundas amended a motion to abolish slavery by adding the word “gradually.” Dundas was then pressured to put forth another motion calling for an end to the trade by 1800. When the original motion was amended to end the trade four years earlier, in 1796, Dundas walked away from the bill. For the rest of his career, Henry Dundas opposed abolitionist efforts (you can read more about him here and here). Those calling for Dundas’s removal blame him for delaying abolition by as much as 15 years; others (specifically his family) argue that he was in fact an abolitionist and his role during these years governed by political pragmatism.

I am not an expert in the career of Henry Dundas, but as a historian who grew up in Dundas, Ontario and now frequents Dundas Street in downtown London, I do know a bit about the places that people want renamed.

When I grew up, I was told that the Dundas Streets in both Toronto and London took on these monikers because they led to Dundas the town. No one really talked about who the town was named after. What we did talk about, though, was the Governor’s Road.

The Governor’s Road was the first road to be built in what would become Ontario. Elsewhere, it was (and is) called Dundas Street.

Understanding the Dundas Street/Governor’s Road connection is important because it teaches us much about Ontario’s early history and how calls to rename Dundas might serve as an opportunity to better acknowledge that past.

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March 20, 2020April 5, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

History’s Reputation Problem: The Sequel, History isn’t Humourless, is it?!?

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

We’ve all heard it: History is boring.

Historians may rebut: We’re not boring! We’re serious!

A quick Google Image search suggests that both perspectives may be correct! Not only does history look boring and serious, it also looks White, Wealthy, Masculine, and Antiquated (okay: White, Male, and Stale). No wonder history has a reputation problem!

Frank, the Famous Historian. Does he represent us all?

Good news for historians: 2020 is proving itself to be quite a serious year. Perhaps it will turn out to be the year of the historian (Everything is coming up Milhouse!).

The other day, though, as I ventured forth from my haven of seclusion into our COVID filled world, I realized (just now!) that this image of the historian is wrong.

In response to this image of the historian, some might say that challenge ought be made to the problematic racialized, gendered, and class norms it presents, but on this day – for it was sunny – a more pressing issue crossed my mind: history isn’t always boring and serious, it can also be funny.

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March 16, 2020April 5, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

Bringing the Flu into the Classroom

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

Who would have thought that almost exactly one hundred years after the Spanish Flu closed schools, churches, and other public gatherings around the world, that we would once again find ourselves in similar circumstances?

Death Statistics for London, ON. Compiled by students in HIS 2204G at Huron University College.

The Spanish Flu hit Canada in the fall of 1918 and, after an initial scare, persisted for nearly two years. Unlike the current pandemic, it was the young and healthy that it hit the hardest. In the end, about 50,000 Canadians, and over 20 million people worldwide, died.

Death Statistics for London, ON. Compiled by students in HIS 2204G at Huron University College.

From a more positive perspective, one of its most significant and lasting impacts, was the beginning of the federal Department of Health, and a consciousness about public health that – I think – continues to serve us well today.

As many of us find ourselves working from home, and teaching online, I want to use today’s post to share a replicable assignment I used last year to engage students with the history of the Flu and how to use primary sources to study the past.

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February 10, 2020April 5, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

If we had only known… whistle blowers, Florence Nightingale, and residential schools

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

It appeared of great importance to ascertain, if possible, the precise influence which school training exercised on the health of native children…
The Indian schools in Canada afford a total annual death rate of 12 ½ per 1,000 for both sexes; but the mortality of girls is nearly double that of boys…
Making allowance for native children dying at home, we shall be within the truth in assuming the mortality of native children at school as double that of English children of the same ages [emphasis added] …
Florence Nightingale, Sanitary Statistics, 1863.

In 1863, Florence Nightingale – best known as the founder of modern nursing – published a statistical report on the health of Indigenous students in day and boarding schools across the British Empire. As these selections from her text suggest, the situation looked bleak.

I came across Nightingale’s work over the weekend, after listening to Lynn McDonald on CBC’s Fresh Air discuss the famous nurse’s turn to statistics and her concern with the plummeting populations of peoples whose land was increasingly occupied and commodified by Britain, its emigrants, merchants, and industrialists.

Florence Nightingale (middle) in 1886 with her graduating class of nurses from St Thomas’ outside Claydon House, Buckinghamshire (Wikimedia Commons)

What struck me most in this CBC interview was a sense of missed opportunity in the nineteenth century for a change in policy and approach. At its core, Nightingale’s argument in the report is this: colonial statistics are poor – almost useless – but what statistics she could compile suggest real health problems for Indigenous children attending colonial schools. While she does not directly blame settler colonialism for these health issues, her short report called for reform in how these schools were run.

As the TRC’s final report reminds us in vivid detail, in Canada, reform did not come until the late 1960s – over a century later.

What may surprise some readers, though, is that despite its 1863 publication date – indeed, it was penned several years before residential schools became a systematic, government-led form of oppression and re-education – Nightingale was neither the first, nor last, to call attention to the risks colonial schooling posed for Indigenous students.

In 1822, Anglican social reformer, Walter Bromley, blew the whistle on Canada’s first residential school: the New England Company’s academy at Sussex Vale, in New Brunswick.

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January 13, 2020April 5, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

History’s Reputation Problem

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

Historians are out of touch. So we are told.

This summer, in response to declining enrollments in university history courses, The Economist ran a piece critiquing Britain’s university-based historians as hibernating while the world changes. “Historians need to escape from their intellectual caves,” the Bagehot columnist announced. They need to “start paying more attention to big subjects such as the history of politics, power, and nation-states.”

Last week, TVO’s The Agenda picked up on the piece, asking the pointed question: why have university enrollments plummeted at a time when interest in history, and civic engagement with it, remains high?

Though the panelists on The Agenda mostly avoided critiques of the profession, others – like Bagehot – have framed the problem around the behaviour of professional historians and, specifically, our retreat from subjects that matter to society.

Remarks like these suggest that history – as a profession – has a reputation problem. When placed beside the sharp decline in undergraduate student enrollments, we must consider – given that interest in the past does not seem to have declined – perhaps, it is the public value of academic history, and – more specifically – the history professor, that has eroded.

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December 5, 2019April 17, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

Historical Pedagogies & the Colonial Past at Huron University College – Part II

This post originally appeared on ActiveHistory.ca

By Amy Bell, Scott Cameron, and Thomas Peace

Huron University College is London, Ontario’s oldest post-secondary institution. The college was founded in 1863 to train priests and missionaries to evangelize throughout the Lower Great Lakes.

Over the course of its history, the college has had two locations, one on either side of Deshkan Ziibii, or Thames River, the waterway which today runs through the heart of London. This river has been (and remains for the latter three) of central importance for Attawandaron, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Lenni-Lenape Peoples; a homeland where relationships between nations have been and (are) governed by the Dish with One Spoon Treaty, the 1796 London Township Treaty, and the 1822 Longwoods Treaty. As such, Huron has a deep and complex history interacting with Chippewa of the Thames, Aamjiwnaang, and Bkejwanong First Nations as well as the Haudenosaunee at Oneida of the Thames and Six Nations of the Grand River.

Huron University College played an active transitional role in normalizing a settler presence on Indigenous lands. For much of its history, the church and the college were tightly interconnected: sharing a name, similar heraldry, common resources, staff, institutional structures, and a focus on evangelizing First Peoples.

Today at Huron, there are few reminders or institutional references to Huron’s complex missionary past, its close connection with the Mohawk Institute or Shingwauk Residential School, or even of the Indigenous students who attended the college and went on to become priests and missionaries themselves.

Huron students were introduced to this material in two upper-year classes and over two academic years (2015-6 and 2016-7). In HIS 4202F: Confronting Colonialism: Land, Literacies and Learning, Tom Peace situated Huron’s nineteenth-century collection of missionary books within the context of the Lower Great Lakes. The course challenged students to grapple with the complex ways that education, schooling, literacy and writing have been used, and contested, as imperial and colonial tools to assimilate and dispossess Indigenous people of their Land, culture and political power.

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November 28, 2019April 17, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

Historical Pedagogies & the Colonial Past at Huron University College – Part 1

This post originally appeared on ActiveHistory.ca

By Amy Bell, Scott Cameron, and Thomas Peace

The filing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Final Report marked a watershed moment when Canadian universities began to respond to calls for recognition and reconciliation. Land acknowledgements recognizing the link between Indigenous peoples and their traditional territories have gradually spread to universities across Canada, and university administrations have begun processes of self-auditing and consultation with Indigenous communities and nations.

Three weeks after the TRC report, Universities Canada, which represents the leadership of 96 universities across Canada, published a set of thirteen principles on Indigenous post-secondary education to advance opportunities for Indigenous students in post secondary institutions and integrate Indigenous themes and topics throughout the academy. In 2017, eighty percent of their member universities self-reported that they were conducting activities to promote intercultural engagement through cultural activities, events and forums, talking circles, competency or reconciliation training; just under seventy percent were developing strategic plans for advancing reconciliation; and two-thirds were working to incorporate Indigenous knowledge and methods into research projects and classrooms on campus.

These initiatives range from teach-ins on Indigenous law and practice at the University of Waterloo, to University of Toronto’s hiring of an outreach librarian to work with Indigenous students, communities and collections, to the University of Alberta’s Massive Open Online Course [MOOC], Indigenous Canada, which explores contemporary issues and Canadian history from Indigenous perspectives and can be audited for free.

Broader initiatives include greater outreach and recruitment within Indigenous communities, developing curricula specific to Indigenous cultures, hiring more Indigenous faculty positions and incorporating Indigenous representation in university governance. Both Ryerson University and Acadia University have, for example, committed to long-term decolonization strategies that will incorporate these types of systemic changes (Acadia Launches, 2018, Truth and Reconciliation, 2018). They require a long-term financial and resource commitment, a willingness to consult and listen to Indigenous communities, and an openness to structural change.

But what happens when your home university is not able to, or is unwilling, to engage institutionally with the Calls to Action? For a variety of reasons, the administration of our home institution, Huron University College, in London, Ontario, was slow to respond to the TRC. The question we faced in this context was: how can faculty enact change without structural transformation or significant administrative support?

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September 13, 2019 Thomas Peace Uncategorized

Letter of Concern to the Police Services Board

I wrote this letter of concern to the London Police Services board because of a long term frustration with these issues in London and, in the immediate, an announcement yesterday that London Police Service would do a safety blitz targeting pedestrians and cyclists (see here for coverage in the Free Press, Global News, CBC, Blackburn). I get that they will be targeting “all road users” – and intersections are certainly the most dangerous part of our city – but the language used by London Police in these reports demonstrates clearly that they see pedestrians and cyclists as the problem, rather than what many of us perceive as a dangerous driving culture in the city. Anyway, I wanted to share because the only way to affect change at both London Police Service and City of London is at the top and from a policy and planning level.

September 13 2019

Dear Mr. Salih, Mayor Holder, Chief Williams and members of the Police Services Board,

I am writing to express my perception that London Police Services inadequately addresses pedestrian and cyclist safety. I have developed this perception over the past five years living in London, interacting with members of the Traffic Management Unit, and using our city’s infrastructure as a driver, cyclist and pedestrian. This week’s announcement that London Police Services would crack down on these road users confirms many of my suspicions.

My concerns are mostly based on experiences as a cyclist who commutes daily from Ryerson Public School to Huron University College. If you think about this commute, you will realize that I only cross one arterial road (Richmond) before arriving at Western’s campus, riding mostly in a residential neighbourhood and on the university campus. And yet, on a near weekly basis I end up in altercations with drivers who either do not give me enough space or roll through stop signs inattentively. Most concerning is that about once a month vehicles cross through intersections while my children (5 and 8) and I are still crossing. To be clear, I am talking about instances where a vehicle moves through the intersection while we are standing in front of it, not when we are almost through crossing.

Because of these frequent incidents in my residential neighbourhood, I have tried to understand London Police Services’ strategies to protect cyclists and pedestrians. I have read through all the material available on the “Reports and Statistics” section of your website. Doing so suggests to me that London Police Services neither takes this aspect of public safety very seriously, nor see it as part of your core mandate. Continue reading “Letter of Concern to the Police Services Board” →

June 18, 2018April 17, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

From Early Canada to Early North America: Why We Stopped Teaching History before the 1860s from a National Perspective

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

Let’s begin with a question: without help from the internet, can you name the person who founded the city of Chicago?

I suspect that for many of our readers, the answer is ‘no’.

“Founders” are not terribly in vogue these days, anyways.

It was, however, the man who founded Chicago that helped me make a profound shift in how I teach Canadian history. Last month, at the Canadian Historical Association’s annual meeting, I presented about this curricular shift, arguing that people like Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the putative founder of Chicago, help us rethink early North American history, moving us away from national frameworks. The feedback I’ve received since that presentation has been very fruitful and quite diverse, so I’ve decided to post the talk here to continue the conversation.

Bust of Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, next to the DuSable bridge in downtown Chicago. (Photo by Groov3, Wikimedia Commons)

The life lived by Jean Baptiste Point du Sable has all the necessary components for the pre-Confederation Canadian History survey course. Though we know little about his early life, du Sable was supposedly born to a French sailor and an enslaved woman in the French colony of Saint Domingue around 1745; there is also an argument suggesting he was born in the St. Lawrence Valley. Regardless, he was well educated and, by the time concrete evidence emerges about his life, he was active in the fur trade. It was in that capacity that, during the 1770s, he met and married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa according to Potawatomi customs and then, years later, in a Catholic ceremony in Kaskaskia in the Illinois Country. By the 1780s Jean Baptiste and Kitihawa moved to the place known as Eschikagu (“the place of the bad smells”), today known as the north bank of the Chicago river, where they established a trading post, a mill, a smokehouse, and a workshop. The businesses they established brought them considerable wealth. In 1800, with the United States now claiming this place, Point du Sable sold his businesses and moved to French Louisiana. There the French governor commissioned him to operate a ferry across the Missouri River.

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May 22, 2018April 17, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

What Does Canadian History Look Like? A Peek into University Classrooms before CHA 2018

This post originally appeared on ActiveHistory.ca

It’s that time of the year again.

Over the coming weekend, historians will join our colleagues in the social sciences and humanities in Regina for the annual Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities, during which the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) will meet.

This year, the CHA has been organized around the theme of “Gathering Diversities,” reflecting upon how both our understanding of the past and historical methods have been shaped by diverse and divergent perspectives. You can read the program here.

For the past several years I have examined the words most commonly used in the titles presenters have assigned to their papers, transforming the conference program into word clouds, in an effort to provide a cursory overview of the breadth of subjects being presented at the meeting. Occasionally, I have complemented this analysis with some sort of parallel examination of another aspect of the Canadian historian’s craft. One year it was abstracts from journal articles, another year it was past CHA programs, and last year it was a flash-in-the-pan #Canada150 TV special called The Story of Us.

Figure 1. Common words used in Canadian-history course descriptions.

This year, as I was preparing for my own CHA presentation, which is based on our decision at Huron University College to stop teaching the pre-Confederation Canadian History survey course, I decided to look at academic calendar descriptions of first- and second-year introductory courses to Canadian history in order to get a better sense about how Canadian history is being taught across the country. Here’s what I discovered:

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April 23, 2018April 17, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

Open Pedagogy: The Time is Now

By Thomas Peace

I’ve been a rather slow convert to the open-access movement. Though ActiveHistory.ca operates under a Creative Commons Attribution, non-commercial ShareALike copyright license whereby you’re free to repost this (or any other essay you find here) so long as you provide us with attribution and do not profit, this was my sole venture into the world of open access.

OER Global Logo by Jonathas Mello is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Unported 3.0 License

Then in 2015, Thompson Rivers University historian John Belshaw approached us about promoting his new two-volume open Canadian history textbook (click here for pre-Confederation and here for post-Confederation) published as part of the BC Open Textbook Project (we ran two posts about it here and here). Belshaw’s books were the first open access textbooks I encountered. I was excited and – having gradually moved away from textbooks in my teaching – integrated them as support material for my Canadian history courses.

Until recently, these were the only open projects with which I have been involved. Though I was never fully resistant to the idea, I also never pursued it with much interest. I have been fortunate enough to move from academic contract to academic contract in such a way that only for a few months have I ever been without full access to a university’s library subscription services. From my vantage point, as a student then professor, all of the on-campus resources I used were free.

This, of course, is not true. Both institutionally and personally, the costs to purchase educational resources are significant. At Ryerson University, a school with about 50,000 students, the library’s annual acquisition budget for serials, databases and e-journals is over $4.7 million, about $94 per student. Add to that the books, computer software and other course-related materials faculty demand of their students, and the total nears $800/year.

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March 12, 2018April 17, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

What’s really killing Canadian History?

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

Last week marked the twentieth anniversary of Jack Granatstein’s provocative polemic Who Killed Canadian History, a book that laments the perceived steep decline in Canadians’ knowledge of our past.

It is rare for any book to have such staying power. Earlier this month, for example, the book was drawn upon extensively in an op-ed column for my local paper, The London Free Press. In the column, history teacher Michael Zwaagstra warns about the dangers of historical thinking and how the growing influence of this inquiry-based pedagogy has eroded the teaching of historical content.

Granatstein’s book and Zwaagstra’s op-ed column are polarizing. They force people to take sides in a debate that has mostly been unproductive. Either you are in favour of a strong chronological narrative about Canada or you focus on so-called marginal topics and – according to Zwaagstra – the development of historical thinking skills.

The binary is false.

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January 8, 2018April 17, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Teaching History

19th Century Legacies in 21st Century Historical Research Practice

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

By Colleen Burgess and Thomas Peace

In 1898, T. Watson Smith delivered a detailed lecture on the history of slavery in Canada to the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. In it he lamented:

Our historians have almost wholly ignored the existence of slavery in Canada. A few references to it are all that can be found in Kingsford’s ten volumes; Haliburton devotes a little more than a half-page to it; Murdoch contents himself with the reproduction of a few slave advertisements; Clement, the author of the school history accepted by nearly all the provinces, dismisses it with a single sentence; and in the long manuscript catalogue of Canadian books, pamphlets and papers gathered during a long life-time by the late Dr. T. B. Akins – a large and very valuable collection – the word “slavery” nowhere appears, even as a sub-heading.

The end of this quotation is perhaps most direct. In 1898, Watson Smith is saying: most historians do not see slavery as a subject requiring independent study.

The work of historians like Afua Cooper, Karolyn Smardz-Frost, Marcel Trudel, James W. St. G. Walker, and Amani Whitfield (among many others) demonstrates that nearly 120 years later this is no longer the case.

Last month, though, following the publishing here of a piece about treaties and public memory in Ontario that drew on Drew Lopenzina’s concept of Unwitnessing, and a presentation about the Library of Congress classification system run by Colleen in Tom’s North American history course, we began to think that perhaps things haven’t changed as much as we thought they had.

The Library of Congress Classification system (LCC) and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) continue to reflect the world Watson Smith so severely critiqued. Scholarship has changed, but the frames within which it has been placed have not. If we are going to witness the way past assumptions about the world continue to structure our present, we feel a need to make these biases even more transparent.

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November 13, 2017April 17, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

Witnessing and Unwitnessing Ontario’s Treaties

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

Last week was the second annual Treaty Recognition Week in Ontario. Organized by the provincial government, this is a time for Ontarians to acknowledge and learn about the treaties upon which the province was developed. This year, Ontario’s Ministry of Education announced that Indigenous history and culture would become part of the K-12 curriculum by fall 2018.

A Wampum Belt Marking the 1764 Treaty of Niagara

In southern Ontario, treaty recognition is sorely needed. Here, the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century treaties that enabled settlement on Indigenous lands remain poorly understood. Though individual First Nations, the Union of Ontario Indians, and the provincial and federal government all provide basic information about these treaties on their websites, most of these initiatives are relatively recent. From a comparative perspective, there are no parallel in-depth studies to the relatively vast literature on treaties elsewhere in Canada.[1] The most comprehensive resource that I have found remains Robert Surtees’s 1984 Land Surrenders in Ontario in addition to a handful of academic journal articles, doctoral dissertations and more local studies.[2]

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