The Arctic Council (dark blue represents members, light blue shows observers).

By Andrew Stuhl

Today marks an important turning point in Canadian history. Or does it?

This morning Canada assumes the chairmanship of the Arctic Council. Formed in 1996, the Council promotes cooperation, coordination, and interaction among the Arctic states and with the region’s indigenous communities. It is a high-level governmental forum that, while limited in its decision-making capacity, has shaped international policies regarding environmental protection and sustainable development in the far north, and elsewhere. For a primer on the Council’s composition, responsibilities, and organization, click here.

In the lead-up to today’s transition, journalists, political scientists—and even a few historians—have commented on what it means for the nation to hold this position. Analyses have varied in their foci and conclusions, but all attempt to characterize the present as a historical crossroads. For the geopolitically-minded, like Joel Plouffe, a fellow of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, the chairmanship presents an opportunity for Canada to chart a path of investment in the north and assert itself as a global leader. His article in the National Post, “North America’s Neglected North,” advocates the creation of North American research and region-building institutions on the grounds that the U.S. and Canada have lagged behind Europe in bringing the full weight of its intellectual resources to northern affairs.  It finds an echo in a recent report by the Munk-Gordon Arctic Security Program at the University of Toronto, which cites sparse northern infrastructure as a reason for Canada to use the chairmanship to push forward plans for ports, search and rescue stations, and icebreaker vessels. While responsive to the modern geopolitical currents intersecting in the Arctic, these interventions lean heavily on the notions of the Forgotten North and the the North-as-Frontier to suggest that Canada can both redeem and make history by claiming the Arctic, making it known through science, and defending national claims there.

Others have deployed a similar understanding of the past to paint the environmental and economic pictures of the circumpolar basin, and thus the importance of Canada’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council. The region is widely regarded as a “canary in the coal mine” for climate change, with melting sea ice and stranded polar bears sending potent messages of how global warming will reshape landscapes and livelihoods. In a policy memo from April 2012, Terry Fenge, the strategic council to the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in the late 1990s and early 2000s, suggested that Canada use its chairmanship to make bold statements regarding environmental action. “Using the Council to engage China, the European Union, and others responsible for these emissions,” Fenge argued, will “reinforce the concept of the Arctic-as-global-barometer and promote negotiation and implementation of global agreements needed to protect the Arctic environment and the peoples who live in the region.”

Fenge’s gesture to Chinese interests in the far north are oft repeated in articles and other media regarding the Arctic Council’s future agenda. Authors point to China’s growing foothold in the region as a sign that the Arctic is emerging as a lynchpin in the global economy.  As the ice recedes, it has revealed previously inaccessible stores of minerals, oil, and natural gas as well as possible commercial shipping lanes. China has already sent vessels on a northern sea route that would shave travel times to northern Europe by two weeks. It has also courted favor with Iceland, Greenland, and Norway, signing free trade agreements and investing in local economies in order to make a bid for a seat at the table as an “observer” in the Arctic Council. Partly because the top of the world seems an altogether different place than the last time Canada last led the Arctic Council, and partly because the nation will direct the course of Arctic governance and development during a period of rapid environmental change and heightened economic investment, observers are referring to Canada’s chairmanship as presiding over a moment or opportunity that is unprecedented.

For historians, such characterizations should elicit both caution and excitement. We should be cautious because if an episode is understood to have no precedent, this means the potential uses of history have been greatly reduced. Usually, as in the case with Plouffe and the Munk-Gordon Program, history is invoked to give punch to a backhanded compliment: Canada is in the position today to make strides in Arctic politics because it has for so long been indifferent to northern affairs. Northern historians have been quick to respond to gestures like this, pointing out that they contort the past to give legitimacy to the plans one hopes will come to fruition. The trope of neglect is peppered throughout the twentieth century, in the boosterism of showmen like Vilhjalmur Stefansson or the nationalist bombast of mid-century bureaucrats.

Then again, the deployment of “unprecedented” to set the present apart from the past might be the best indication that historical scholarship has a role to play in modern decision-making. What better term exists to capture the material changes in northern physical and social worlds that are progressing so rapidly that scientists, residents, and government officials can hardly measure them, let alone find historical counterparts by which to situate them? In the Arctic, where human and natural communities have been so transformed in so little time, environmental historians find an arena where their work can intervene in the politics of defining ecological baselines and the capacity for human resilience.  Similarly, historian Kenneth Coates has been active in the recent media blitz around the Arctic Council, using the forum to demonstrate how a break from historical patterns might strengthen Canada’s relationship with northern aboriginals. In interviews and publications, Coates has argued that it is time to dissolve the dichotomy that what is good for Canada’s aboriginal people is not good for country as a whole. Rather, Canada’s leadership in the Arctic Council presents possibilities for cooperation and the responsible stewardship of northern natural resources in ways that allow aboriginals to enter Canada on their own terms. Speaking with Tim Querengesser of Alberta Venture, Coates says,

“I think we’re at that point where if we can get governments, the business community and the general public to realize that this is something that works to everybody’s benefit – that healthy, culturally successful Aboriginal communities help everybody – we’ll change the paradigm.”

Ironically, then, recent coverage of the Arctic Council both constrains and expands the space for active history.

Given this irony, there is one final lesson to draw from current events concerning the Arctic Council. That is, we historians should be reminded of the power of stories. Our decisions regarding when to start and end our narratives in many ways determine how our scholarship can be brought to bear on the present. Is May 15, 2013 the beginning or the end of an era for Canada, or both? Is today the point at which the Arctic begins to figure in Canadian history, or the point at which Canada figures into Arctic history? Or are there still other histories that Canada and the Arctic find themselves in because of the changes unfolding now in the far north? As William Cronon argued in his endlessly helpful 1992 article, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” the historian’s sharpest tool is that which decides when a story opens and when it closes, because it allows some circumstances to count as history and others to be left on the cutting room floor. Thus, the designation of any one moment in time as “unprecedented” is an indication of how our understanding of the past is impinging on the future. It is one of the many ways that we—the collective we—write history everyday through our interpretation of the present and the meaning we impose upon it.

So is today a turning point? Time will tell, but so can we. We read recently about the need for “speedy history” on northern themes. For those interested in live-action historical work, keep up with the news and shape the conversation about the Arctic Council on Twitter, by using the keyword #Arctic.

By Merle Massie

Over the past two years, I lurked in the halls and wandered wide-eyed through the conferences of my social and natural science colleagues. An interdisciplinary institutional postdoctoral fellowship, funded by MISTRA (The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research) and routed through the University of Saskatchewan, ensured my place at the lunch table and at the front of the classroom.

So, I’ve spent two years trying to explain how I, as a humanist, conduct my research. More importantly, I’ve noticed, the question is not so much how, but where does that research take place?

Since most of my professional work has focused on the 20^th and 21^st century, I do (on occasion) conduct interviews and focus groups with living people. I even have a working knowledge of qualitative methods, rigour, and the point of statistical analysis. I parlayed this penchant into the postdoc, with good results. But I remain, at heart, a document hunter/gatherer.

Working with social and natural scientists, I soon learned that research is about data generation. Set up the research parameters/test/study/measurement/focus group/survey/experiment, in order to generate data. Few, if any, ever work with someone else’s data set. The core concern is to generate something new.

That was my first hurdle: what I always thought of as ‘sources,’ now had to become ‘data.’ It’s a bump in the sidewalk that I trip over, every time.

No matter. I forge ahead, explaining gently that although I do sometimes generate new data (using oral interview techniques, statistical analysis, or focus groups), I usually work with sources that already exist. It becomes my job to find those sources, hunt and gather, thinking laterally and strategically, sometimes hitting brick walls or large empty chasms where my ‘data’ (sources) should be but are not. Or I am showered in luck, serendipity, and happenstance and find a treasure trove, an untapped new source waiting for me to harvest, like a new bed of sweet grass, or a docile pod of mule deer.

But, but, where do these sources exist? Are you talking about libraries? Confusion reigns, for libraries, of course, contain outdated data. If it’s in a book, it’s too old. Anything more than five years old is virtually unusable. (Of course, we all recognize the deliberately obtuse generalization here – many social scientists regularly work with similar sources and data sets. Natural scientists, though, perhaps not so much).

No. My data/sources are to be found in archives. Archives? What, exactly, are archives and what kinds of information do you find there?

And that’s how I twigged onto a new way of explaining where I conduct research.

An archive, I now explain, is much like a lab: laboratory space along the lines of the Canadian Light Source Synchrotron at Saskatoon or one of the Toxicology labs or a soil science lab or….  A lab has certain physical requirements that are conducive to research: it requires physical space with heating, light, and custodial services; equipment (shelves, tables, chairs, finding aids and guides, archival quality storage boxes and containers, microfilm readers, lightboxes, cotton gloves, and pencils instead of thermal analyzers or microcalorimeters or…); it needs trained staff (archivists); and it houses raw materials (archival documents, which range from photographs to text to sound recordings, collected over time).

The questions that I, as a researcher, bring to the archive are what guide me through my research process, in the same way that another researcher might ask questions and conduct experiments using the materials/equipment found in a lab. Different researchers posing different questions use different equipment and materials. Each archive is slightly different in its materials and equipment, just like no two labs are exactly the same.

Presto pow! Lights on, understanding, and we’re back on equal footing. (There remain big questions surrounding how I do research and if it is objective, verifiable, and replicate-able, but those are larger questions that might never be solved, as they stand at the dividing line between humanities and natural science research).

Why is this important? I call on all of my fellow humanists and social science researchers who use archives to co-opt this terminology switch, and broadcast it freely. Because I believe that this terminology switch might help save our archives from folding under the collective weight of government and institutional non-support. At a time when investment in science-based laboratory and experimental research is growing (witness the Global Institute for Water Security, and the new Global Institute for Food Security at the U of S), archives funding is cut. We can stop this.

Archives (which collects a record of anthro-centric activity reaching back through time) is the laboratory with which to build research that changes the way our world works and thinks about itself. In fact, I charge you to find another lab that has supported an equal range of research depth and breadth and temporal scope. Where would we be in our knowledge about residential schools, lesbian and gay rights, health geography and poverty, First Nations land claims, war activities, medicare, social protest, and climate change without archives? Accessed by researchers not only in history but in archaeology and anthropology, art, literature, science, technology, sociology, linguistics, education, law, commerce and business, industrial development, mining, resource management, First Nations and Metis studies, institutional foundations, governance and government, medicine and nursing, engineering and agriculture, archives reflect how we as humans make decisions, and what the consequences of those decisions have been.

So let’s make one easy switch: the next time you visit an archive, think of it – and talk about it to interdisciplinary colleagues, institutional leadership, and your MLA and MP – as a laboratory. Co-opt the language that is already implicitly understood – and funded.

Merle Massie is a writer and historian, and a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Ottawa. Find her blog at: http://merlemassie.wordpress.com/.

By Christine McLaughlin

Tommy Douglas, C.M. Fines and Clarence Gillis following the 1944 CCF victory in Saskatchewan.
Original Source: Saskatchewan Archives Board

While it is too soon for the historian to comment on the long-term effects of recent changes on the Canadian political landscape, the larger rightward shift is perhaps best evidenced by the federal New Democratic Party’s decision to “modernize” its constitution at its recent convention by “toning down” references to socialism. Pointing to “pragmatic” economic policies that made the convention floor, one MP went so far as to say “the party is growing up.” It is indicative of our own modern times that alternatives to liberal and neoliberal orthodoxy can be so readily cast as anti-modern. This Whig style of history-telling, which presupposes improvement as natural to the passage of time, is not just questionable history; it obscures the many ways history can and does repeat itself, widening the path for us to repeat its mistakes. Framing a political shift to the right as “modernization” is arguably much more suited to Orwell’s 1984 than 2013.

While socialism and capitalism are often posited as mutually exclusive, it is important to note that most twentieth-century political experiments have combined elements of both, from the state-run capitalism of the Soviet Union to the limited social programs implemented in the United States of America, virtually every modern nation-state has combined socialist and capitalist elements to varying degrees.

Neoliberalism in its current form, on the other hand, is incompatible with even the most limited forms of socialism, in that it is based in unfettered free market ideology. The “neo” is something of a misnomer here, in that this political ideology very much harkens back to nineteenth century classical liberalism. Indeed, in the 1930s, when the failure of free market orthodoxy achieved widespread consensus, neoliberalism was used to describe what was then a new form of liberalism, one which promoted a social market economy, where state regulation and management of the economy was viewed as a modern solution to an outmoded economic system. The rise of socialism in this period also played a key role in shifting liberal economic theory to the left.

This was evidenced in Canada by the founding of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation in 1932. Forming the first social democratic government in North America in 1944, its growth in popularity in this decade pulled the Liberal Party of Canada to the left, leading them to adopt many elements of the CCF platform to maintain electoral power.

Of course, the CCF, and its successor, the NDP, have rarely campaigned or governed on pure socialist principles. As some historians illustrate, social democrats in Canada have a storied history of virulent anti-communist thought and action. As Murray Cooke aptly illustrates, the party also has a long history of attempting to redefine itself, subsequently distancing itself from its more radical roots. Ian Milligan’s exploration of past and present CCF and NDP policy illustrates how the party line has shifted over time. Its current policies are much more moderate than those put forward by its founders.

Yet, despite the moderating tone of Canada’s social democratic party over the course of the twentieth century, and its inability to gain electoral power on the federal scene, this third party has had a significant impact on the nation’s political, social and economic culture. In contrast to the two-party system of the United States, where social gains were subsequently much more limited, Canada’s political culture and national identity have been more deeply tied to left-leaning policies and practices. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than with Canada’s system of socialized healthcare, which has become so deeply ingrained in national consciousness that even the most hardcore supporters of neoliberal orthodoxy – in rhetoric if not in practice – the Conservative Party of Canada, must pay continued lip service to this socialist ideal. This is because an overwhelming majority of Canadians continue to believe that human health and well-being should come before personal profit, and that our ability to live a long, healthy life should not be determined by socioeconomic status. This is a form of social ownership in action, and one example of how social democracy in Canada has become part of its national fabric.

Granted, the new preamble to the NDP constitution recognizes its “social democratic and democratic socialist traditions,” but so too is this tradition largely relegated to the past, as the party commits to a future that acknowledges only its  “best…insights and objectives,” leaving quite a bit of room for interpretive flexibility. Gone now are references to social ownership; instead, New Democrats “believe in a rules based economy.” In essence, federal New Democrats have discursively embraced mid-twentieth century liberalism.

Analyses of the long-term effects of this on the Canadian political tradition are best left to future historians. Will this be cast as another plank in Ian McKay’s liberal order framework in Canadian history? Will the Liberal Party of Canada maintain their longstanding adherence to twentieth-century liberalism, or will they revert even further back to the “new” form of nineteenth-century liberalism that has regained increasing global domination in recent decades? Will this be a first step towards returning to a two-party state in Canada?

One fact remains: there is absolutely nothing “modern” about adopting a political ideology that is almost a century old, and which dates back to the same era that the CCF was founded. Framing this shift as “modernization” is an insult to the many people who dedicated their lives to building a real alternative to liberalism in its many forms. It leaves them as the “unperson,” vapourized from the “modern” political record, their history and role in a larger project of modernity erased. It doesn’t get much more Orwellian than that.

Christine McLaughlin is a PhD Candidate in History at York University and Co-Editor of ActiveHistory.ca.

Three generations of Portuguese-Canadians at Tivoli Billiards Hall, on Augusta Ave., Kensington Market, 1980. Photo by Gilberto Prioste.

From May 13-19, Toronto’s City Hall will feature “The Portuguese in Toronto,” a free photo exhibit. What follows are some reflections on how historians can engage with the public by one of the exhibit’s organizers.

Raphael Costa

On May 13, 2013, the Portuguese Canadian History Project’s (PCHP) photographic exhibit celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of mass Portuguese migration to Canada will open (the inaugural event is scheduled for 5:30, if you are free). Held in the Rotunda of Toronto’s City Hall, the exhibit will feature twenty historic photographs from the PCHP’s catalogue in the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections (CTASC) at York University, along with other images provided by various community members. The enthusiastic and active participation of community organizations and individuals has played a key part in the exhibit. For me, the most refreshing aspect of curating an exhibit like this is seeing just how excited people get about the kind of history – a history, I think, in contrast to the ‘War of 1812-esque’ public history we have seen so much of recently – we want to share.

Like most of the PCHP’s initiatives, this one started with an offer for collaboration. In the fall of 2012, Gilberto Fernandes, a fellow PCHP co-director, received a phone call: “please hold for the Consul-General.” Not familiar with consulate etiquette, Gil has admitted that he was a little thrown; indeed, having received a couple calls myself since then, it takes some getting used to. Once the Consul picked up, the PCHP was invited to lunch to discuss a possible project. Meeting in a corner in a downtown Toronto Portuguese restaurant, the Consul explained to us that he wanted to host an event commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of Portuguese mass-migration to Canada (in 1953, an agreement was signed between Portugal and Canada welcoming Portuguese workers).

Excitingly, the Consul wanted us to curate the exhibit. He had seen our website and online exhibits that highlighted labour, gender, children, recreation, household economy, and political activism and protest (sometimes against the Portuguese consulate – the photo we used in the Consul’s newsletter in January, for example, shows people protesting the Consulate in the 1960s when it represented Portugal’s dictatorship) and he was open to our approach.

Patrons playing guitar at the Blue Wall Cafe on Augusta Ave, Kensington Market, 1980. Photo by Gilberto Prioste.

Stomachs full and minds spinning, we left the restaurant with an agreement to curate the exhibit. Admittedly, we worried about a lack of photographs in our collections: we were very good on the 1960s and 1970s, but if we were going to include topics across the past sixty years, we needed more. Various organizations like the Casa de Alentejo, the Casa dos Azores, the Federation of Portuguese Canadian Business and Professionals, and several individuals welcomed us to look through photo collections that these organizations’ representatives worried were unremarkable. We were warned: the photos lacked important people; they were of ho-hum dances and dinners; they might include pictures of crowds at parades (the photographer should have looked at the parade more often, so the warning continued); they were not centered. In short, they were not really of ‘historical interest.’

Sitting down with people from the Casa dos Azores, for example, while looking through dozens of photo albums, the organization’s representatives hemmed and hawed: what about this one? It has Pauleta (a Portuguese soccer player); this one has Charles Sousa (Ontario’s Finance Minister). In response, we hemmed and hawed: what about this one? It has children enjoying themselves in class; this one has people starting a BBQ; this one shows some women who look none-too-pleased to be involved in a parade. Slowly, the Casa dos Azores’ representatives started to ask: what about this one? It shows a bunch of guys building a float for a parade; this one shows some people lined up to get street food; this one was taken just before this person went on stage. Similar things happened with individuals like Sergio Garcia, a 1970s player for Ferma Soccer Club, organized and funded by Ferma Food Importers. He just ‘had some snap shots’ from games and events: ‘did that kinda stuff matter?’

Our hosts began to realize that they did not need to be dignitaries or professional soccer players to be included in a historical narrative. They and their history were empowered.

As you will see when you visit the exhibit (free of charge and open to all May 13-19 in Toronto’s City Hall), the photos we chose center on lived experience. Major events are included, of course, but they are not the center of our photos, merely a stage upon which our actors perform. More often than not though, we could not pinpoint exact dates of photos, highlighting the ‘everyday experience’ that they convey. Are the photos inclusive of every aspect of Portuguese Canadian life over that last sixty years? No. However, what has been refreshing and encouraging is that participants in the exhibit have not only learned to acknowledge their role in history, but also have come to own their place in history. Something that, it seems to me, should be the goal of public history.

Raphael Costa is a PhD candidate in History at York University and a Co-Director of the Portuguese Canadian History Project with Gilberto Fernandes, Susana Miranda and Emanuel da Silva. His research looks at democratization and local political culture in Portugal since the early 1960s.

By Ian Mosby

History has a distinct taste. Actually, it also has a distinct smell, feel, sound, and look to it but – as a historian of food and nutrition – I always find myself coming back to the taste of history. No, I’m not talking about the musty, acrid taste of dust and mildew as you open up a long neglected archival box or that weird metallic aftertaste you get after sitting in front of a microfilm reader for way, way too long. History can also taste like molasses, cloves, nutmeg, raisins. You know, the good stuff.

At least this is what I tried to prove to the students in History 3240: Food History at the University of Guelph this past semester. Not only did I want to teach them about the versatility of food history as an entry point into the history of science, immigration, colonialism and gender – not to mention business, environmental, or political history. But I also wanted to prove to them that, as budding food historians, they should always make sure to actually eat their primary sources.

For instance, while lecturing on the history of the Canadian home front during the Second World War ­– my own particular area of expertise – I tried to communicate some of the ways in which social class determined Canadians’ individual experiences of wartime rationing and shortages by presenting students with two cakes. In one unmarked container, students were offered Canada War Cake – one of the most popular wartime recipes for a sugar-stretching, eggless, milkless, and butterless cake – based on this March 1942 recipe from the Windsor Daily Star. In another container, I passed around a depression-era cake called Poverty Cake – also often known as Economy Cake or Depression Cake – from this March 1930 recipe featured in the Vancouver Sun.

War and Poverty cakes, side-by-side.

The point of the exercise was a rather simple one. The cakes, for all intents and purposes, taste and look almost exactly the same. When asked whether they knew which one was Poverty Cake and which one was War Cake, the class was divided because, really, there weren’t many tangible differences between the two. They were both tasty – if not a bit chewy – yet neither was particularly sweet or decadent. Instead, each tasted like a spiced, dense raisin bread. And both of them, I argued, told us something about the taste of war on the Canadian home front.

For those who had suffered from long-term unemployment and underemployment during the 1930s, for instance, War Cake likely had a decidedly familiar taste. In fact, my own research has shown that many of the so-called “War” recipes printed during WWII were – like War Cake – often indistinguishable from the Economy, Economical, Poverty, and Low-Cost recipes that filled Depression-era cookbooks and newspapers.  Such recipes therefore highlight the ways in which working-class and lower-income families didn’t experience wartime rationing or shortages as a particularly significant shift in their daily eating habits. They were already skilled in stretching dear or expensive ingredients like butter, sugar, tea, coffee, meat and preserves – the precise foods that were rationed in Canada during WWII – and were therefore well-prepared to make do with less of these items during the war in much the same way as they had for years. But for middle-class and wealthier families who had escaped the ravages of unemployment during the 1930s and therefore didn’t personally experience it as a decade of hunger and want, the war truly did require far more drastic cutbacks in the kitchen. War, for these families, really did taste a lot more like sacrifice and austerity and, to that end, it was a quite unique culinary experience that harkened back to the previous war far more than the hard years of the 1930s.[1]

War or Poverty cake? (I honestly can’t remember which is which.)

Historical recipes, in other words, can often be fun, tasty and occasionally useful classroom props. But they can also teach students much more important lessons about the historian’s craft, particularly when the students, themselves, are the ones doing the cooking. That’s why I designed an assignment that required each student to give a five-or-so minute presentation on a recipe of their choice from one of the more than 13,000 cookbooks housed in Guelph’s fantastic Culinary Collection that, in some way, related to that particular week’s readings. In doing so, students would not only use the recipe to assess some of the broader themes that we were discussing in seminars – which ranged from “food and colonialism” to “industrial foodways” to “food, health and risk” – but I also asked that they spend some time discussing the challenges they faced while attempting to recreate their historical recipe of choice.

The students quickly learned that, while many of these old recipes could be quite delicious, they were also surprisingly difficult to recreate. Many of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century recipes they found, for instance, often failed to include important information like – oh, I don’t know – how long to cook something for, what temperature to cook it at, how much a handful of sugar or a knob of butter might be, or what a slow oven refers to. And if students could actually read the handwritten recipes from old manuscript cookbooks, they often found that they were designed for kitchen equipment that no longer exists outside a museum or, in other cases, that our highly processed, standardized modern ingredients act nothing like their historical counterparts.

Ultimately, the most important lesson that the students seemed to come away with was that primary sources – whether recipes, letters or census tracts – need to be read carefully and with a decidedly critical eye attuned to the source’s particular historical context. Not only did they learn quite a bit about what different forms of culinary literature said about women’s lives, labour, and everyday life; the revolutionary impact of changing household technologies; or the industrialization of food and the transformation of print culture – but they also learned quite a bit about the limitations of primary sources more generally. When you misinterpret a recipe or fail to account for its historical idiosyncrasies, the result is immediate: the cake fails to rise, the meat is undercooked, or the soufflé collapses in on itself. When you fail to do the same for our reading of the census, on the other hand, the result is less immediately obvious but no less devastating: your data is simply wrong and your conclusions similarly turn out to be only half-baked.

Even more important, from my perspective at least, was that students really got in to the spirit of the assignment and gave some fantastic presentations. Whether it was the student whose exploration of a 1970s-era, back-to-the-land, foraging-themed cookbook led her out to a frozen pond digging up cat-tail roots (which tasted like muddy rope and provided her with about 1/20 of the calories that it took to harvest them) or another student who taught the class the hard lesson that the recipes in early twentieth century banana-advertising cookbooks had never been tested or tasted before going to print (a lesson that the still-lingering taste of sardine-banana salad will never let me forget), students managed to get into the spirit of things and bring the themes of the course to life. Here, for instance, is just one fun example that a student posted to YouTube:

Food, in other words, is not simply a great way to get students interested in history. As museum curators and public historians have long known, the sensory experience of history can sometimes be far more powerful and illuminating than the text-centric narrative structure that historians tend to rely upon. It’s therefore worth exploring the ways in which we can apply some of these lessons to both the classroom and our own scholarly research. As Joy Parr’s fantastic book Sensing Changes and its associated Megaprojects website have both shown in recent years, sensory history offers new vistas for historical analysis. It’s up to the rest of us to start to make the past more tangible and sensible in our own teaching, research, and writing.

Arthur Doughty, the first Dominion Archivist of Canada, believed that ‘of all national assets archives are the most precious; they are the gift of one generation to another and the extent of our care of them marks the extent of our civilization’

By Pete Anderson

I had the good fortune to facilitate a lively discussion on the role of public historians in the history wars at a ‘dine around’ session during the recent annual conference of the National Council on Public History, held in Ottawa from April 17-20. We had representatives from both Canada and the United States of various ages and experiences across the range of the public history community: students, consultants, archivists, parks interpreters, educators, museum professionals, bureaucrats, and heritage professionals, with some attendees wearing more than one of these “hats.”

While our conversation flowed freely, three questions emerged in different forms time and time again:

• What is the role of public historians in history wars?
• How do we strike a balance between professional ethics and the obligations of employment?
• Who will champion our cause if and when we can’t speak for ourselves?

“ There’s always politics in history.”: The Predicament of the Public Historian

All history professions, and especially public historians, are deeply entangled with the politics of selection. The archivist disposes, the museum professional curates, the parks worker interprets. The fact that we actively select one document, artefact, or narrative over another lies at the heart of our profession so much so that I’d argue that self-awareness regarding the act of selection is one of the key public history threshold concepts.

Historians are storytellers, weaving together the competing narratives of the past in the form of books, articles and lectures. Public historians are limited in scope by the mandate of their institution and, at times, their administrators and funding sources. Indeed, one participant reminded us of the “golden rule,” that is, money can exert influence over interpretation by funding certain projects or by denying funding for future projects if certain narrative expectations are not met.

The recent emphasis on the War of 1812 and the coming changes at the Canadian Museum of Civilization present two Canadian examples of how funding and mandate affect the ways stories are told. Public historians working within institutions may have to align their work to government or private priorities to secure their often meagre budgets. Presenting critical histories and preserving records from all sections of society are important, but public historians also require funding to keep the doors open.

The challenge facing public historians is to tell stories that are relevant to our times and that resonate with our audiences. We need to draw audiences in and engage them in rich conversations about the past. If funding bodies are focusing on the War of 1812 and, soon, the First World War, can we use these priorities to tell stories that capture the public’s imagination and also critically engage with the dominant narrative? How can we use external priorities to educate our audiences about the subjective nature of the past and direct them to resources that will let them explore it on their own terms and in their own time?

“How much BS can you handle?”: Professional ethics and the obligations of employment

Working in an institution carries numerous expectations that may be antithetical to our ideas of professional ethics and responsibility. This point bluntly made by the conflict of interest section of the new Code of Conduct at Library and Archives Canada. While the Canadians were well aware of this document (and referred positively to Jian Gomeshi’s intervention), the Americans reacted strongly when we described the designation of activities such as of volunteering, teaching and attending conferences as “high risk”. Their reactions included the relevant and unanswered question of “high risk to whom?”

Public historians are above all passionate about their work and often volunteer at local institutions, mentor colleagues, and train the next generation in their free time. Unfortunately, many institutions know this and there seems to be a “race to the bottom” when it comes to wages and benefits. Employers know that public historians love the work they do and there is a steady stream of new graduates looking for jobs. As a result, as one participant put it, “salaries are terrible in this profession.”

When faced with increasingly stringent obligations of employment that limit the kind of passionate professionalism public historians often bring to their jobs, limited by budgets and restrictive mandates, and low pay and increased competition for scarce jobs, an important question we have to ask ourselves is, to put it in the words of another participant: “How much BS can you handle?”

Answering this question requires a balancing of factors. For example, even though funding priorities and mandates are often set at a level above that of the public historian, governments and boards don’t last forever. Further, these are not the same as floor plans, interpretative text, and acquisition and disposition policies. It may be worth sticking it out in a poisoned workplace to lay the groundwork for better days or to try to influence the received narrative from the inside while relying on professional organizations and colleagues to champion your cause from the outside.

“There has to be people who question things.”:  The need for champions

A beloved institution is harder to meddle with than one that is barely on public’s radar. Compare public perceptions of the Library of Congress and National Archives in the United States with LAC in Canada. LAC simply doesn’t have the same outreach program to the general public that the LoC and NA do and even LAC’s outreach to other archival institutions has been severely curtailed.

Those working in public history cannot always publicly speak out on their own behalf without risking their jobs. With this in mind, it was heartening to see the Canadian Historical Association, the Association of Canadian Archivists, the Canadian Anthropology Society, and the Canadian Archaeological Association stand together to support access to Canada’s documentary, artifactual and natural heritage, historical research, critical public history, and the professional rights of all public historians but especially of archivists during the conference.

What is to be done, then? How we can, as public history professionals, academics, and others interested in history advocate on behalf of these important causes in a way that is at once effective and non-partisan? For one, we will have to engage the public in a meaningful way. This might be a job especially well suited for public historians. We are storytellers at heart, and we have a multiplicity of skills and experiences to rely upon. The question, then, is how do we tell our own story to the Canadian public in a way that both is relevant to them and resonates with them?

Note: All quotations came from participants at the dine around session.

Pete Anderson holds an M.A. in Public History from Carleton University. He is currently working as a public historian in Ottawa, ON.

By Sean Kheraj

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Library and Archives Canada Building, Ottawa

The new history wars are not battles over the meaning of Canadian history. They are battles over public financing of historical research and historical preservation. Historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, librarians, and archivists all have a stake in these important conflicts and debates. Recent federal efforts to commemorate the War of 1812 and to create a Canadian Museum of History by rebranding the Canadian Museum of Civilization have triggered new arguments among historians that echo the history war debates of the 1990s, but these arguments distract from the broader (and more important) challenge of the steady reduction of federal public financing for historical research and preservation.

In the 1990s, Canadian historians were allegedly at “war” with one another. A segment of the first generation of post-war Canadian historians approaching retirement expressed discontent with historiographical changes that had occurred over the course of the 1970s and 1980s which shifted scholarship away from national political histories toward a wider spectrum of academic inquiry that considered the histories of women, ethnic minorities, regions, and labour. Furthermore, their discontent was directed toward new revisionist interpretations and analyses of Canadian history that tended to foreground criticism of the state and highlight crimes and sins of the past, including the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War, the oppression of Aboriginal peoples, and the subjugation of women. The conflict among academic historians famously spilled out onto the national stage during the controversy and subsequent Senate inquiry into the production of the CBC television documentary series, The Valour and the Horror. Some military historians and veterans’ groups expressed outrage at the work of Brian and Terence McKenna, the writers and producers of this documentary series.

The discontent of those historians who lamented the scholarly shift away from national political histories found its loudest voice in Jack Granatstein’s 1998 extended polemical essay, Who Killed Canadian History?. In one-hundred and forty-nine blistering pages, Granatstein took aim at the degradation of public knowledge of Canadian national and political history, what he believed to be “the basic nuts and bolts of Canadian historical knowledge.” [1] Who was to blame? Who killed Canadian history? In a buckshot fashion, Granatstein offered a frenetic list of homicide suspects, including elementary and high school teachers, university professors, “TV, movies, comic books, and the Internet,” the Constitution (which “gives control over education to the provinces, which guard their rights jealously”), provincial ministries of education that “bought holus-bolus every trendy theory to emerge from faculties of education,” “the millions of immigrants who have poured into and continue to flood, Canada,” and federal multicultural policy that “promotes a very weak nationalism.” [2] Needless to say, Who Killed Canadian History? was a landmark work in these so-called “history wars” of the 1990s.

The echos of Granatstein’s cant have found their way back into public discourse regarding the commemoration of Canadian history. Terry Glavin’s recently published op-ed artilce took direct aim at a “history establishment” that has allegedly turned its back on Canadian history. “For too long,” Glavin writes, “academic historians have neglected to tell our story.” He claims that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his cabinet have chosen to celebrate the War of 1812, the start of the First World War, the bicentennial of the birth of John A. Macdonald, and the 150th anniversary of Confederation because, in Harper’s own words, “These milestones remind us of a proud national story rooted in the great deeds of our ancestors and in a centuries-old constitutional legacy of freedom.” He warns his readers, however, that “If it’s ‘a proud national story rooted in the great deeds of our ancestors’ you’re after, the very last place to go looking for it would be the history faculty of a Canadian university.” Glavin blames the failure of the academy to “tell our story” on New Left politics of the 1960s when, according to his understanding of Canadian historiography, “history was activism, and the old order was upended in order to focus on the marginalized and oppressed.” Christopher Dummitt, associate professor of Canadian history at Trent University, endorsed Glavin’s hypothesis, alleging that “The historical profession has become kind of an activist organization. The result is we have lost authority, as a discipline, and we can’t talk about history writ large.”

Both Glavin and Dummitt then find fault in the “activism” of academic historians. They contend that this is the root of the shift away from national and political history. The implication is that academic historians have become too sympathetic with leftist politics and that their active engagement with such politics has somehow rendered them illegitimate authorities on the history of Canada and no longer relevant to the broader Canadian public. The primary problem with this argument is that it makes normative another kind of activist historian, nationalist active historians.

A small group of nationalist active historians have, in fact, found great success in persuading the federal government to endorse and promote their particular (and arguably narrow) vision of Canadian history. Jack Granatstein has, in some ways, become the foremost nationalist active historian. As he made plain in 1998, he consistently “preached the gospel of Canadian history and national history to thousands of students.” He wrote popular commercial books on topics in Canadian military history and he has appeared so regularly on television and in newspapers that he has become a metonym of Canadian history. Christopher McCreery, a graduate from the doctoral program in Canadian history at Queen’s University, has also had tremendous influence on the policies of the federal government. He currently sits on the board of trustees for the Canadian Museum of Civilization (soon to be renamed the Canadian Museum of History). He previously served as a senior adviser to the Leader of the Government in the Senate and he played a prominent role in the renaming of the maritime command of Canadian Forces to the Royal Canadian Navy. Finally, Michael Bliss, another retired professor of Canadian history who has emphasized a desire to promote national and political history, has also been appointed to the board of trustees for the Canadian Museum of Civilization. [3]

Academic historians have lost the ear of government (if they ever had it to begin with) not because they have been less engaged with the public or the national history of Canada, but because they have been less sympathetic to the interests of the state in their analyses of the past. As such, their histories have less use for governments interested in bolstering or promoting nationalism and ignoring or eliding class conflict, racial and ethnic oppression, the legacies of colonialism, gender and sexual inequalities, and environmental degradation.

But revisiting the history wars, as Tom Peace recently suggested, overlooks numerous examples of current historical scholarship in national political history and does not adequately acknowledge significant changes in Canadian historiography in last fifteen years. It might also miss the point of the current debate over the commemoration of Canadian history and the relationship between the federal government and academic historians. This revival of the history wars of the 1990s, including the debates over the place of national and political history in undergraduate teaching and Canadian historiography, is to some extent a red herring or distraction. The Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage has taken this kind of misdirection so far as to call for “a thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects in Canadian history.” The new history wars, however, are not being fought over plaques, statues, reenactments, museum exhibits or documentaries. They are being fought in the federal budget and the publicly funded institutions that foster, support, and promote Canadian history research.

Like other branches of the civil service in Canada, the primary public institutions for Canadian history have felt the impact of the austerity policies of the federal Conservative government. Parks Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Library and Archives Canada have all suffered significant reductions in base funding that have limited the capacity of each of these institutions to support independent historical research. The Canadian Association of University Teachers has compiled the full details of these budget cuts and their implications for historical research at http://www.canadaspastmatters.ca/

Last year, Parks Canada was the hardest hit by layoffs in the civil service. As a result of the 2012 budget, the federal government reduced funding for the agency’s programs by $29 million annually resulting in an estimated 638 job losses. Parks Canada is not only responsible for the management of Canada’s national parks and park reserves, but it is also responsible for 167 national historic sites. The job cuts have reduced Parks Canada to just twelve archaeologists and eight conservators. These cuts have severely circumscribed the both the historical research and historical preservation capacities of Parks Canada, one of the primary branches of the civil service responsible for such work.

The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the primary public funding council for Canadian historical scholarly research, has not been immune to such austerity policies. Between 2008 and 2012, SSHRC experienced a 10 per cent base funding reduction of $41.1 million. In its wake, the federal government has also redirected funding away from basic research programs to special one-time grants and projects for applied research, diminishing the support for independent historical scholarship.

Finally, Library and Archives Canada also experienced a wave of job losses last summer with the termination of twenty-one archivist and archival assistant positions, a fifty per cent reduction in digitization and circulation staff, and the elimination of the interlibrary loans program. The cuts compounded past reductions in the LAC budget and the series of “modernization” policies that have reduced public access to archival materials and compromised the ability of LAC to acquire new records.

Even Professor Granatstein tried to raise alarms about the threat these cuts and policy changes pose to the preservation and knowledge of Canadian history. But, in his June 2012 article in the Globe and Mail, he seemed puzzled by these policies:

The Harper government has genuinely seemed to be more concerned with honouring history than most of its predecessors. The emphasis given to the War of 1812 is only the most recent example, and the Prime Minister’s own efforts at writing the history of hockey in Canada (during which he must have used LAC’s collections and books) indicate his personal interest in the past. But the treatment of LAC will hurt research and scholarship now and forever. It shows nothing so much as contempt for the past and, regrettably, for the future as well.

Granatstein’s concern for the fate of LAC is shared by many academic historians, but he is likely alone in his naivety regarding the Conservative government’s interest in the past. Like the crow whose vanity led him to be tricked by the flattery of the fox, Granatstein seems to have failed to see the broader picture of the relationship between the federal government and Canadian history.

As I wrote in February, the federal government has not invested more public funding into Canadian history. It has shifted funding away from arms-length government institutions that typically have supported independent historical scholarship. In its place, the federal government has focused on commemorative events and projects that fall under direct cabinet or ministerial control. In 2012, the government devoted $28 million to commemorate the War of 1812 and it retained direct control over most of that funding through Heritage Canada and Treasury Board. It also promises to invest $25 million into the rebranding of the Canadian Museum of Civilization. At the same time, it cut $29 million from Parks Canada, $41.1 million from SSHRC, and $9.6 million from Library and Archives Canada.

This is the challenge that Canadian historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, librarians, and archivists now face. What role will public financing play in historical research? What effects will the reduction of federal support for historical research have on academic scholarship about Canada’s past? What impact will the reallocation of federal public funding for selective commemorative events have on public knowledge of Canadian history? How will direct cabinet control over the representation of Canadian history through commemorative events and museums shape our understanding of the past?

Sean Kheraj is an assistant professor in the Department of History at York University. He blogs at http://seankheraj.com

[1] J.L. Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1998), 11-12.

[2] Ibid, 11-16.

[3] Ibid, xvii-xviii.

By Colin Coates and Daniel Ross

“The rise and fall of America’s largest socialist utopian experiment”
-Program blurb from the 2013 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival

This post, inspired by the documentary film American Commune (2013) by Rena Mundo Croshere and Nadine Mundo, takes two different looks at the history of a 1970s countercultural commune located in the southern US. The first is a broad reflection on how we frame the stories of utopian experiments, while the second explores how communes were the subject of special scrutiny by the North American state. 

“DOOMED TO FAIL?”: HOW WE REMEMBER UTOPIAN EXPERIMENTS

It is a standard to describe the history of utopian communities as involving a “rise and fall.” In fact, what often makes utopian experiments so appealing to writers is their fall, the result of disastrous, wooly-headed dreams that could not adjust to the realities within which the communities were located. The very idealism that underpinned their foundation, and led to their “rise,” also ensured their inability to survive.  It is a tidy narrative, where the utopians’ hubris guarantees their downfall. But is it too tidy?  Maybe utopians fail for the same mundane reasons that the rest of us do.

This compelling documentary film tells the story of two sisters who come to terms with their childhood. Born on “The Farm,” the archetypical hippy commune of the 1970s, Rena Mundo Croshere and Nadine Mundo left the community as their parents’ marriage disintegrated, an event which seems tied chronologically and causally to the end of the utopian phase of “The Farm.” They weave home movies shot on The Farm, contemporary news reports of the famous (and infamous) commune, and family photos with recent footage of a reunion and interviews with their family and many former adult and children members of the community.

(For access to a gallery of historical photographs from the farm, click here)

Founder Stephen Gaskin looms large in American Commune, a religious inspiration, solver of community discord, and occasional authoritarian. The film states that he forbade birth control on The Farm, and hence the eldest daughter was conceived and the family was formed. On this remote acreage in Tennessee, firmly in the Bible Belt – though Gaskin is a compelling spiritual leader in his own right – the sisters, and their brother (who appears only briefly), spent their early years in the isolated, safe, treed environment, surrounded by children their own age and a large community of adults who shared a counterculture dream.

Family structures could be fluid, though the filmmakers’ parents apparently remained together until their acrimonious divorce. Members of the community contributed their labour to the collective good, and cash was almost entirely absent. The Farm attempted to reach the goal of self-sufficiency that many 1960s and 1970s back-to-the-land readers of Thoreau’s Walden believed they could attain. Members swore an oath of poverty and turned over their wealth to the whole. The Farm epitomizes many of the standard features of a utopian settlement: separation from whatever is deemed the “mainstream,” a charismatic leader, communal property, an overarching goal of bettering the world.  In one key way it was different. Gaskin did not exclude anyone who wished to join The Farm, regardless of whatever wealth they could contribute. There were no metaphorical gates on the farm.

As a result, The Farm could not last, the film states. Early in the film we see the ramshackle huts in which the early families had lived being torn down; the buses on which the founding members had travelled from California to Tennessee in 1971 were rusting. The Farm of the women’s childhood was no more. However, an interview partway through shows that it shifted from a commune to a decollectivized intentional community after its crisis in the early 1980s. The film ends by commenting that the The Farm was the longest utopian experiment in American history. This detail is not true – a number of other communes have lasted longer.  The Oneida Community lasted from 1848 to 1881, New Llano in Louisiana from 1917 to 1939, and various Hutterite colonies in the United States and Canada dating back over 80 years are still going strong. But the film also accepts that The Farm experiment continues into the present. After all, there was a place in which to hold the reunion, and Stephen and Ina May Gaskin still live on the land.  And poignantly, the former members rally around one of filmmakers at a time of personal need. The spirit of the community transcends the decades.

A few events led to the end of Gaskin’s leadership in the early 1980s: an FBI raid in search of a marijuana plantation (they found milkweed patches instead), the limitations of self-sufficiency, and bank decisions to call in loans, which were supposedly linked to the police raids. I think that here the filmmakers may have touched on a key moment for a variety of utopian settlements in both Canada and the United States. Undercapitalized in general, communes depended on cheap land.  Land was often cheapest when it was rather unproductive. And it was easiest to live on cheap, marginal land when the financial costs of remaining there were lower. By 1981 and 1982, interest rates neared 20% in the United States and Canada. Few utopians, or non-utopians for that matter, were prepared for such an increase in borrowing costs, and particularly for those who believed in self-sufficiency and cashlessness, the costs were too burdensome. I would suggest that the historical context of utopias must be acknowledged as well. Utopias are not ipso facto fated to fail, any more than any attempt at agrarian settlement or business creation is fated to succeed.

But to tell the story of the fall of the utopian experiment is to reassure ourselves that, as wonderful as the dreams may be, they really are not practical. We don’t really have to bother with such reveries. But sometimes the historical contingency of a mundane issue like high interest rates can actually influence the rise and fall of utopia.

HARMLESS HIPPIES OR DANGEROUS SUBVERSIVES? NATIONAL SECURITY AND COUNTERCULTURAL COMMUNES

In retrospective, utopian communes may appear as beautiful but necessarily ephemeral experiments.  From the point of view of the state, this was not always the case. Before nostalgia for countercultural living, there was anxiety, particularly on the part of the Cold War-era state. Considerable government resources were devoted to the surveillance of the seemingly harmless Farm residents in the United States, and, it turns out, in Canada as well.

The Farm and its Canadian connections. Credit: Map tiles by openstreetmaps.org, overlay by Stamen Design

Over the past twenty years, scholars have documented amply how agencies like the FBI in the United States, and CSIS and the RCMP in Canada devoted considerable resources to policing political dissent in the 1960s and 1970s. Surveillance and undercover operations produced information on, and directly influenced the fate of groups ranging from the Black Panthers (see my previous post here) to Canadian hippies. As persistent use of access to information legislation on both sides of the border has demonstrated, it was a rare non-conformist who did not have a file with the RCMP or FBI – or both. Recently, for example, it has come out that both singer Rita McNeil and father of Medicare and former premier of Saskatchewan Tommy Douglas had extensive RCMP files.

Stephen Gaskin and The Farm were no exception. From 1970 until well into the 1980s, the FBI generated reams of reports on the commune and its residents, investigating whether their socialist lifestyle, drug use, cultish behaviour, and links to the peace movement made them criminals or threats to national security. Farm resident Albert Bates has documented how agents followed Gaskin and his fellow communards on their trek east looking for land, and surveilled their activities once they were established in Tennessee. At least one agent seems to have infiltrated the community, and Gaskin was interviewed on several occasions by the agency (who referred to him as a “very reliable source”).  Yet these investigations seem to have turned up little that could harm The Farm, although Bates and other long-time residents maintain that the FBI had a hand in the unfavourable loan renegotiations that eventually bankrupted the community in the 1980s.

The story does not end there, however. An access to information request made earlier this year reveals a Canadian dimension to state concern with The Farm and its projects. In the late 1970s—if not before—the Intelligence Division of Canadian Immigration had its own file on the commune. Heavily redacted and in part destroyed, the file remains interesting reading for its insight into state methods and concerns.

The Immigration Intelligence file on The Farm. Credit: Library and Archives Canada.

In 1977 two groups of communards from The Farm crossed the border north into Canada, settling in rural Hampton, Nova Scotia and Lanark, Ontario, where they established branch offices of the commune’s international aid NGO, called PLENTY, and began fundraising. Since 1974, PLENTY had been involved in providing aid to disaster victims around the world, mostly in the form of food and reconstruction projects. In 1976 and 1977 PLENTY volunteers from The Farm were working hand in hand with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) providing earthquake relief in Guatemala.

The Farm residents who moved to Canada in 1977 were quickly flagged by Immigration Intelligence officers for further investigation. It was the communards’ international aid activities—as detailed in an article in the local Perth Courier—that originally brought them to the attention of immigration, but it is not clear why they merited investigation. Immigration status may have been an issue for the group that settled in Hampton, but it was not for the couple who moved to Lanark, Canadian Allan Brown and his American wife Susan, who was a landed immigrant. Instead, it is likely that the PLENTY activists were targeted in the context of a larger investigation of American immigration to eastern Ontario communes: authorities seem to have seen the Browns as part of a potentially dangerous chain migration of radicals and long-haired do-gooders from south of the border. One label applied to associated records was “Non-Immigrants – Vagrant Control,” suggesting their potential to be a burden on the state or to attract other unproductive (and illegal) immigrants.

Credit: Perth Courier.

Officials in both Nova Scotia and Ontario created files on the PLENTY organizers. Investigators reported to Ottawa that “PLENTY claims to be a non-profit charitable organization with headquarters in Nova Scotia. They claim they are engaged in raising money for Guatemala relief.” However, they raised doubts as to where the money being raised was actually going, arguing that controls on CIDA programs were “very lax and a group such as PLENTY could use funds for their own purpose”. In the 1960s and 1970s a number of government efforts to build infrastructure and civil society—including the Company of Young Canadians and the Local Initiatives and Opportunities for Youth programs—raised similar doubts from security services and conservative politicians, who felt that taxpayers’ dollars were being used to fund dissent. The press often echoed this concern, or at least played upon the incongruity of state funding of so-called “shit-disturbers”. In the case of PLENTY, a 1977 Toronto Star article mused that Canada was “giving U.S. hippies $70,000 to rebuild Guatemala town”.

Background checks revealed that none of those concerned had criminal records in Canada, but the investigation did not end there. Officers communicated with authorities in the United States to learn more about The Farm and Stephen Gaskin, receiving in response newspaper clippings about the commune as well as a copy of a detailed file on Gaskin, produced by the Tennessee Department of Corrections following his 1974-5 imprisonment on marijuana charges (received for growing plants at The Farm). The report describes Gaskin as intelligent, energetic, and responsive to counselling: an ideal prisoner, apart from the fact that the main entry under his “Interests and Activities” was the growing and use of marijuana.

For the moment it is impossible to say what, if anything, was done with this information. The file does not seem to have been widely read: it was checked out seven times over the course of 1977, and then just once more in 1979. What is clear, however, is that the Canadian security services, like their American counterparts, were invested in keeping an eye on those citizens who had decided that the best solution to a society they did not accept was to build a better one. If the goal of many countercultural utopias of the 1960s and 1970s was to escape from an oppressive and unjust system, the suspicions generated by that ideal ensured that back-to-the-landers never strayed too far from the watchful eye of the state.

American Commune reminds us of the optimism and idealism that underlay this attempt to create a different way of living, just as the state-produced records underscore the obstacles that faced those who wished to imagine alternative futures.

Colin Coates holds the Canada Research Chair in Canadian Cultural Landscapes at Glendon College, where he teaches in the Canadian Studies programme. In July 2011, he became director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies. A specialist in the history of early French Canada and environmental history, he has been conducting research on Canadian utopias since coming to York University in 2003.

Daniel Ross is a PhD candidate in history at York University. His research focuses on the 1960s and 70s, and he is currently studying the history of cycling activism in Canadian cities. He blogs at historiandanielross.com.

Further reading:

www.americancommunemovie.com

www.thefarmcommunity.com

www.thefarm.org

Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

Reg Whitaker, Gregory S. Kealey, and Andrew Parnaby, Secret Service: Political Policing in Canada from the Fenians to Fortress America (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2012).

Ivan Greenberg, Surveillance in America: Critical Analysis of the FBI, 1920 to the Present (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012).

By Sean Graham

On Wednesday night there was a screening of four documentary films as part of Northern Scene in Ottawa. The evening’s feature film was Dan Sokolowski’s Degrees Northand it was preceded by three shorts: Andrew Connors’ Come Back Little Star, Daniel Janke’s Finding Milton, and Lulu Keating’s Dawson Town Melted Down. Each of the films presented a different point of view on the North to the capacity crowd at the Mercury Lounge in the ByWard Market.

In this episode of the History Slam I talk with Madeleine Kloske from the University of Ottawa about the four films. In addition to the films, we also chat about preconceptions and stereotypes of the North as we wrap up Northern History Week.

Sean Graham is a doctoral candidate at the University of Ottawa where he is currently working on a project that examines the early years of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He has previously studied at Nipissing University, the University of the West Indies, and the University of Regina and like any red-blooded Canadian his ultimate dream is to be a curling champion while living on a diet of beer and poutine.

Caspar David Friedrich, Das Eismeer (The Sea of Ice), 1823-24

By Tina Adcock

I groaned when I saw the headline. “Google Street View braves Canadian Arctic to chart little-known territory,” it read. “Iqaluit mapping expedition sees Google staff hike along remote city’s snow-covered trails and risk wrath of polar bears.” Even the writers and editors at the Guardian aren’t immune to the occasional bout of polar fever. But I can’t blame them. The rhetoric of exploration—of braving dangers on remote, inhospitable, and unknown frontiers—continues to sell newspapers and garner page hits. Public demand for tales of northern adventure, hardship, and heroism in high latitudes remains strong.

Exploration has dominated popular conceptions of the Canadian North, out of proportion to its actual significance to life and work there. Could we, as historians, turn public fascination with this activity to our advantage, rather than ignoring it or dismissing it out of hand? What if we used exploration, and other northern topics of interest in southern climes, as a bridge to introduce southerners to different perspectives and stories in northern history, thus opening up the rich, diverse scholarship of recent years to wider audiences? This move could unsettle and complicate the representations of subarctic and arctic places that southern travellers have bequeathed to southern audiences, and that undergird our imaginative geographies of North even today. It’s an uncommonly apt moment for the destabilization of foundational narratives. The Arctic is undergoing a monumental transformation, to which we’re all bearing witness.

Over the last decade, the world has watched northern ice and glaciers diminish year on year, and has feared for the fate of fauna dependent on frozen objects and ecosystems. Climate change has underscored the mutability of northern environments—a characteristic that past and present explorers have been always keen to downplay in their narratives. Instead, they painted the North as a permanent frontier, a harsh and unchanging place against which would-be explorers could always pit their wits and strength. This idea of North has survived into the present day among many southerners who have not travelled there. But a North frozen in place is a North outside of time. A place presented as static and unvarying is one inimical to historical analysis, which seeks to explain change over time. As the North thaws physically, perhaps it is also thawing imaginatively in southern minds, enabling new stories to fall on newly fertile ground.

Even as climate change punctuates our entrance into a new century, the language and imagery of past centuries of exploration still shapes southern perceptions of northern environments. Familiar exploratory gestures and desires can reveal both continuities and discontinuities with the past, which historians are well placed to tease out. Consider the Northwest Passage, Canada’s exploratory landscape par excellence. Europeans sought this strait for five hundred years, first as an alternate trading route to Asia, then for its value as a geographical prize and national/imperial point of pride.

The allure of the passage on both grounds still resonates today. There is widespread speculation that the decreased amount of summertime ice in the Arctic will finally render the Northwest Passage a viable shipping route between Europe and Asia. It is 9,000 kilometres shorter than the Panama Canal route, and 17,000 kilometers shorter than going via Cape Horn, after all! Yet this economic dream, nurtured throughout the history of exploration, will not come to pass for some time, if ever. The Canadian Arctic archipelago will likely be one of the last areas of the Arctic with widespread summer ice cover. Its complex geography also continues to yield distributions and quantities of ice that are both highly variable and highly unpredictable from year to year. With the forecasting of ice patterns and rhythms difficult, if not impossible at the present time, shipping companies won’t send their containers through straits that may suddenly contain ice absent the year before. Costly delays are anathema in a fiercely competitive industry operating with razor-thin margins of profitability.

Minimum sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, September 16, 2012. Yellow outline shows average sea ice minimum, 1979-2010. Courtesy NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Other industries venture where shipping companies dare not go. The rising popularity of cruise tourism in the Canadian Arctic has enabled latter-day explorers to take the Northwest Passage. Like the narrator in Stan Rogers’s song, they want to “find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea”—but also to succeed where Franklin failed. Since 2010, about 40 vessels have made partial or full transits of the passage each summer, mostly in the service of the tourism industry. These travellers go North anticipating comforts and safeguards that their predecessors did not have. Yet they could just as well suddenly face situations no less dangerous than those encountered by past expeditions. Passengers on a cruise ship that ran aground—by no means an impossibility in the imperfectly charted waters of the Canadian archipelago—might soon discover the limitations of regional search and rescue capabilities. If such an incident occurred far from existing networks of infrastructure and settlement, injuries or fatalities could ensue. The imaginative afterlives of northern exploration could yet lead to new tragedies layered atop older ones.

While clarifying the hold exploration still has on our actions and imaginations, historians can also bring northern voices and perspectives to the fore. Thanks to the efforts of many historians and northern communities, it’s now easier than ever to present multivocal accounts of episodes in northern history. In the undergraduate course on the global history of exploration that I taught this term, students read European and Inuit accounts of Frobisher’s first expedition to Baffin Island side by side. They saw how George Best, one of Frobisher’s men, presented the raw-flesh-eating Inuit as “subtle traitors” who captured five Englishmen. Then they read the reflections of Inookie Adamie, of Iqaluit, who recalled how poorly the Englishmen were dressed to Inuit eyes.[1] These “ghostly” men wore “rags” that could never protect them from the cold. My students also perused the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s virtual exhibit on Frobisher’s voyages. In this retelling, the story begins and ends with Nunavut. The North is situated firmly as an ancestral and present-day Inuit homeland.

A turn to northern voices makes it clear that the southern fascination with northern exploration is, many times, just that—a southern fascination. Stories from expeditionary narratives clash with the memories and sensibilities of northern communities. The geographer Emilie Cameron highlights this fact in her work on contrasting European and Inuit attitudes to the infamous “massacre” at Bloody Falls, memorialized by the English explorer Samuel Hearne and by subsequent European travellers to the Coppermine region. The community of Kugluktuk resists this interpretation. To them, the place is known as “Kugluk,” the rapids. In their view of the fishing, hunting, gathering, and camping sites that together make up Kugluk, and the “centuries of other stories and feelings” they emplot there, the massacre has no place or purchase.[2]

Northern historians know of the existence and significance of these stories, and others like them. Most Canadians, most southerners, don’t. When such people show interest in northern history, perhaps we should pay attention, and then give them some new stories, new histories, to place alongside the old.

It is a propitious moment to begin this work. We live in the Anthropocene. Humanity has exerted large-scale changes upon the planet, the results of which are only now becoming widely recognized. People south of the Arctic Circle are learning that the North is not the remote and eternally frozen frontier that the explorers once affirmed it to be. Southern actions and decisions have altered northern spaces. The fate of northern and southern peoples and environments are bound ever more tightly together, and the immediate effects of the new geological age are now falling disproportionately upon the former. As we move further into this uncertain but shared future, it seems more crucial than ever before for southerners to hear, and to know the stories that matter most to people from the North.

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Tina Adcock is a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis.