In today’s increasingly online world, historians, researchers, and students want and expect online access to historical documents offered by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This includes not only journal articles and ebooks, but also primary sources and archival documents, which researchers increasingly expect to find online in searchable, digital formats. In turn, cultural heritage institutions have responded by trying to meet these demands, with various levels of success, for items ranging from census data to yearbooks to photographs. But offering access to digital and digitized collections has a very high cost, in terms of planning, scanning, adding metadata and accessibility features, and most crucially maintenance and long-term preservation. The invisible costs and labour behind online collections are frequently overlooked by researchers. This raises a question that few of us pause to ask: who did the work that made our digital sources accessible, and under what conditions?

This question matters because some of the digitization and data verification work that enables our online access to historical documents relies on the labour of incarcerated people—labour that is, I argue, exploitative. As researchers who depend on digitized primary sources, we have a responsibility to reckon with the hidden human costs of the online access we increasingly take for granted.

A worker operates a book scanner at a library digitization centre. The labour that makes digital collections accessible to researchers is often invisible to those who use them. Image: Book scanner digitization, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Consider the Yearbook Project, a digitization initiative that operated in Oklahoma prisons from at least 2013 until its suspension in 2022. The project scanned and processed high school yearbooks at no cost for high schools, libraries, museums, and historical societies across the United States, justified by the recognition that yearbooks are of irreplaceable historic value. How was the Yearbook Project able to offer this service for free? As a former coordinator candidly explained, it was possible because of the low labour costs associated with employing incarcerated people. According to reporting by Wendy Suares, workers on the project earned $1.45USD per hour, while the Oklahoma Department of Corrections earned $7.25 for each hour of their labour. Between 2020 and 2022 alone, the Yearbook Project generated over $600,000 in revenue for the Department of Corrections.

Prison labour of this kind is unethical. According to philosophers Matt Zwolinski and Alan Wertheimer, “to exploit someone is to take unfair advantage of them: to use another person’s vulnerability for one’s own benefit.” In mutually beneficial exploitation, both parties benefit, but the interaction remains exploitative because it is fundamentally unfair. The exploiter derives far more value than the exploited. This is the case in prison labour: the incarcerated derive some benefit from their work, such as earning money, gaining skills, or simply passing the time, but remain unfairly exploited. For example, in the United States, incarcerated people earn, on average, between $0.86 and $3.45USD per day – not per hour. In Canada, the range is from $5.25 to $6.90CAD per day. Even when incarcerated people gain something, such as this pittance, from their labour, the system degrades and disrespects them.

The Yearbook Project is not an isolated case. Incarcerated people in South Dakota enter state census data into databases for $0.25USD per hour. The American federal prison industries program UNICOR advertises that its digitization contracts will significantly reduce costs for labour-intensive work. In Utah, Idaho, and New Mexico, incarcerated people have indexed genealogical records for FamilySearch, the freely accessible platform operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon Church). This last example raises a genuinely complicated moral question. Some of these individuals volunteer for indexing work and describe it as personally meaningful, even spiritually fulfilling, and FamilySearch offers similar volunteering opportunities to people who aren’t incarcerated. But the conditions of incarceration, where options for how to spend one’s time are severely limited, make the notion of truly free choice difficult to sustain. As one incarcerated person in Utah told a recruiter for the program: “I would have done anything to get out of my cell.”

Notably, I have not found evidence of similar practices with regards to memory work (e.g., digitization, data entry, and the like) in Canadian prisons, although the federal correctional industry, CORCAN, offers a number of goods and services, including office furniture, industrial laundry, printing and engraving, and even, controversially, the creation of Indigenous-made handicrafts such as moccasins. However, Canadian researchers should not assume that they are insulated from this issue. Companies with ties to prison labour operate internationally: FamilySearch, for example, has well-documented ties to prison labour for indexing in the United States, and Ancestry has profited from offering content produced through prison labour, such as yearbooks digitized by the Yearbook Project. Both companies partnered with Library and Archives Canada on the recently released 1931 Census of Canada; LAC has confirmed that the census project did not directly benefit from prison labour. It is worth noting, however, that digitized sources with ties to the United States or to companies that operate internationally may have benefited from exploitative labour in ways that are not always transparent to the end user.

In a 2023 article published in the Library Quarterly, I proposed an intervention for librarians and archivists to increase transparency with researchers: that we clearly and honestly label items, collections, and databases that have benefited from exploitative labour. This intervention was inspired by the concepts of metadata justice and inclusive metadata: using accurate and appropriate language in library and archival systems and catalogues to promote transparency and accountability. This could take the form of neutral, informative statements that appear alongside the collections researchers access, noting the role played by incarcerated labour. On my genealogy guide at the McGill Libraries, for example, I note that “many genealogical companies and websites rely on the use of un/underpaid and exploitative prison labour in order to make genealogical materials such as census records available online and easy-to-use. Keep this ethical consideration in mind when deciding to undertake a genealogical project.”

This kind of labelling is beginning to happen elsewhere. A librarian at the Johnson County Library encountered my research in 2023, and was inspired to implement such a statement on her institution’s online holdings of yearbooks digitized by the Yearbook Project. The process took eighteen months – longer and, by the librarian’s own account, more complicated than she had anticipated. But the statement is now in place. This example demonstrates that institutional change is possible, even when it is slow and difficult. It also suggests that the conversation I hoped to begin is reaching beyond the pages of a scholarly journal.

Here, I hope to start a conversation with a different audience, beyond librarians and archivists: with historians and other researchers who use digitized primary sources, as well as members of the public who access digital collections for personal or genealogical research. Researchers are, after all, the driving force behind many digitization projects.

As researchers interested in learning—and teaching—about the lives of historical actors and in untangling power dynamics, we should extend this consideration to the invisible labour that makes available the resources we rely on finding not just in the archives, but online. It is extremely difficult in many cases to learn who digitizes historical materials, and under what conditions.

We may not have the power to end the practice of exploitative prison labour. But we can ask about the labour behind our sources. We can seek out and, when needed, demand transparency from the institutions and companies that provide our digital collections. We can consider whether these practices are acceptable as part of our research process. And we can insist that the practices taken in the name of making our heritage materials available meet our expectations and ethical demands.

Further Reading

Kristen C. Howard, “Digitization and Exploitation: Acknowledging and Addressing the Use of Exploitative Prison Labour by Libraries and Archives,” Library Quarterly 93, no. 3 (2023): 241–55. https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/concern/articles/s4655n73p

Shane Bauer, “Your Family’s Genealogical Records May Have Been Digitized by a Prisoner,” Mother Jones, August 13, 2015. Link

Kristen C. Howard is a liaison librarian and associate member of the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill University. In addition to her library degree, she has a PhD in history (University of Arizona, 2020). Her research examines the ethical use of information, primary source literacy and pedagogy, and the emerging uses of generative artificial intelligence.

As a child, on Friday nights just before 9:00 pm, I’d tuck myself under a living room end table. If I was quiet and hidden, I could usually get away with watching at least part of Dallas. I was equal parts enthralled and scandalized. The epic “Who shot JR?” storyline was my first memorable introduction to crime and, like millions watching, I was captivated. A few years later, I made the leap to true crime as a somewhat under-supervised, voracious reader with ready access to a bookshelf full of not quite age-appropriate content.

In recent years, true crime stories have become a ubiquitous part of the public conscience. There is no shortage of docuseries, books, or social media accounts dedicated to murder and mayhem. Analyses suggest women are drawn to true crime for a variety of reasons ranging from a sense of control over patriarchal/existential violence to more philosophical considerations about evil, retribution, and how well we can know another person.[i] For me, as a child, I recall being drawn to the unfinished stories. The idea that someone’s life could be interrupted in the middle of living, both horrified and fascinated me. As historians we try to piece together fragments of people’s lives in meaningful ways. I think this is why the true crime narratives have always held such an appeal to me. But where history tries to complicate its subjects, much true crime overly simplifies them.

For some time, I contemplated writing a true crime book. Looking through local unsolved cases, I encountered Geraldine Pickford. Not a lot of information is publicly available about her death.

Most of the material is available via the York Regional Police cold case website. Pickford was killed on the evening of September 18, 1965. She had worked a shift as a waitress in the dining hall at St. Andrews College in Aurora, Ontario. Her belongings were found on a path, and a search team found her body some hours later.

“The Woman Nobody Knew: The Story Behind a Murder Victim,” Toronto Telegram, September 20, 1965, p. 1.

But if you Google Pickford, you’ll find a recent uptake in interest, which includes podcasts, message board entries, and a walking tour. Why? My guess is that the interest stems from one of the few publicly available sources: a Toronto Telegram article about her case titled “Story Behind a Murder Victim The WOMAN NOBODY KNEW.” The article contains commentary from people in Pickford’s life, enough of it salacious to be intriguing, and a fair bit of conjecture. For me, the writing underscores the idea that how the story is told is important for maintaining public interest. This point was clearly illustrated in Kristen Gilchrist’s work “Newsworthy” Victims? wherein she compared the newspaper space given to Indigenous and white women victims of crime. In contrast to the personal stories and intimate photos of white victims, Gilchrist observes how the shorter, less personal articles devoted to Indigenous women contributed to invisibilizing them as victims of crime.

Within the proliferation of true crime narratives, historians can make meaningful contributions. Using the Pickford case, I reflect on three interpretive lines to explore what true crime would look like if more historians helped produce it. To do so, I explore the following topics:

• voices that are in and missing from the historical record;
• the idea that proximity offers truth in evidence; and
• the importance of understanding victims as full human beings with complicated lives.

I’ve chosen to focus on Pickford here because the evidence is biased and incomplete; nevertheless, many are fascinated by the story.

In the Toronto Telegram article about Pickford’s death, several voices are included: her brother, employer, estranged husband, and a long-term “friend” who is also a sometime landlord, Margo Iula. The friend’s comments to the reporter call to mind the adage, “with friends like this, who needs enemies.” However, the colourful narrative that Iula provides is also likely what has kept Pickford’s case alive. The depiction of Pickford is vivid.

From her brother we learn their mother died when Pickford was nine, she quit school in grade 8, she was quiet, a reader with no other hobbies, and that even he didn’t know how she acquired the significant scar on her shoulder blade. From her estranged husband, we learn that Pickford was “very moody. If company came she might talk to them or she might not.” During the course of their six-month marriage, Pickford became “more and more remote,” then quit her job and left. The friend’s comments seem to be criticisms, but they make Pickford into a compelling subject. She confirmed Pickford was an avid reader, but also a picky one: “she seldom read all a book. She would skip pages if she was bored or came to a section she didn’t like.” Iula continued, disparaging Pickford: “When she did say something, she would often lie. You never knew when to believe her.” And inadvertently enticed with this observation: “She could be aggravating to another woman. She could be particularly aggravating to a man.”

Of course, the missing voice is Pickford’s. As the victim, she had no opportunity to affirm or counter these characterizations. We see this a lot in true crime. Sometimes so little information is available about a victim, that they are reduced to one-dimensional characters depicted in ways that are not verifiable. Historians wouldn’t necessarily have access to information that other people don’t. But, here, context is key. For example, to flesh out our understanding of the victim, we might look more closely at how Pickford–as she is described–conformed to or defied cultural norms and what can we suggest from that information.

One of the moments that drove me to write this piece, came from casual viewing of true crime. While we were watching one show, my attention was piqued because the narrator on the screen was labelled a “historian,” which is not a common title used in these shows (although I have started to see it used more frequently). As I listened to the speaker talk, it became clear that she was the daughter of the police officer who had led the initial investigation into the crime; the daughter commented on the case from her (now deceased) father’s perspective. There was no indication that she had any formal training as a historian. I’m not typically one to gatekeep titles, but using “historian” in this case was clearly meant to confer authority on someone who had no apparent authority. It speaks to the question about proximity too – are we to believe this “historian” is reliable because she’s the police investigator’s daughter? Her having expertise would have required her father to disclose confidential information. And, while I am not naïve enough to think such casual disclosures don’t occur, surely such a discussion would not have entailed a fulsome accounting of the evidence. The source (beyond, presumably, conversations with her father) and the nature of her knowledge of the case was never explained.

In the case of Pickford’s unsolved murder, Iula’s voice dominates. What’s interesting about her voice is that it is given authority because of their friendship/living situation. We have no way to judge how Pickford perceived Iula or their relationship. This is a line that is often lost in true crime documentaries. Proximity is not the same as authority or truth, but it is often treated as such. This is where historians typically shine. We already relentlessly evaluate our sources. We look for biases, we interrogate language. We understand that such testimony is not the same as truth telling; sometimes it is entertainment, sometimes mythmaking, sometimes the motivation remains unclear.     

What the articles suggests, is that Pickford was not an “ideal” victim.[ii] She was, however, an intriguing one. In addition to the characteristics noted above, which earned Pickford a reputation for having a ‘difficult’ personality, the article also portrays her as mysterious — and not as a compliment. For example, it is said that Pickford would disappear for a month or two, and when she reappeared, “She usually said she had been going out with somebody. She would never say who.” Iula also indicated that Pickford never had any money and observed that the money shortage began 18 years ago following a time when Pickford disappeared for a year and a half. Iula speculated Pickford was being “blackmailed,” although she had no evidence to support this suspicion. Speculating further, Iula suggested Pickford had a child during that period whom she was quietly supporting. Is it any wonder readers are mesmerized by this article? It is the primary document that keeps on giving.[iii]

The line between storytelling and exploitation can be very thin and is easily missed. In our efforts to share hardships and struggles, we often rely on individual stories to illustrate harms. The risks of this approach include sensationalism, voyeurism, and narrowing people to the worst moments of their lives.[iv] As historians, it’s worth considering how we can contribute to these conversations in important ways. I don’t propose that other historians join my true crime obsession. But I think historians are well-positioned to engage with these narratives in meaningful ways.[v] We excel at interrogating sources (including missing voices), establishing context, scrutinizing authority, living with ambiguity, and approaching subjects ethically. In so doing, we could help move the focus away from a sensationalized focus on crime, to more fulsome recounting of fragmented, interrupted lives.

Shannon Stettner is a historian specializing in reproductive health and activism, oral history, and lived experience. She is an avid traveller, dog enthusiast, world class putterer, and a regular contributor to Active History. 

[i] On this, see Laura Browder, “Dystopian romance: True crime and the female reader,” The Journal of Popular Culture 39, no. 6 (2006): 928-953.

[ii] Nils Christie, “The ideal victim,” in From crime policy to victim policy: Reorienting the justice system, pp. 17-30 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 1986): 12-13.

[iii] The article also goes into some depth about Pickford’s suspicious comings and goings in the weeks leading up to her death. I won’t recount those here because I’ve already outlined the ways Iula’s speculations have fueled interest in the case.

[iv] On this, see Christine Linke, and Lisa Brune, “Intimate Yet Exploitative: Representations of Gender-Based Violence in Platformed True Crime Narratives,” Media and Communication 13 (2025), https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.8964.

[v] A recent excellent example of how historians can tackle these stories, is Ian Radforth, Deadly Swindle: An 1890 Murder in Backwoods Ontario that Gripped the World (University of Toronto Press, 2024).

This post is part of the Indian Act 150 series.

On March 11, 2026, Saskatchewan Court of King’s Bench Justice D.E. Labach issued a summary judgement against Darryl Leroux.¹ The issue was whether Leroux, a well-known authority on “self-indigenization,” had defamed Michelle Coupal, a Canada Research Chair at the University of Saskatchewan, because he suggested Coupal used a fake Indigenous identity to advance her career. The Court ruled he had and awarded Coupal $70,000.00 in damages. This case was, as journalist Jorge Barrera wrote, “no random historical exercise.” Its details are important for historians because they illustrate how the very policies that are supposed to move Canada and First Peoples toward reconciliation—in this case, a land settlement—carry with them odd, potentially even bizarre, implications for the practice of history that serve to reinscribe the very colonialism they seek to overcome. History is already a battleground in the reconciliation process. Coupal v. Leroux illustrates how a conflict over family histories is connected to Indigenous identities and land claims.

The facts of Coupal v. Leroux are not in question. Coupal was born to a non-Indigenous family with no connection to any Indigenous community. She was also raised with very specific family lore about a great-grandparent, one of whose parents was supposedly Indigenous. On this basis, Coupal began to self-identify as Métis while teaching at Laurentian University, where she was tenured and promoted before being appointed to a Canada Research Chair focused on Truth and Reconciliation education at the University of Saskatchewan in 2018.

As Judge Labach’s decision explains, over time, Coupal shifted her self-identification from Métis to Algonquin and became a member of the Bonnechere Algonquin First Nation (BAFN), an unrecognized Indigenous community. As Labach explained in his ruling, this was in part because “she was made aware that it was politically incorrect to identify as Metis because of objections by the Red River Metis in Manitoba.” For reasons the transcript does not explain, Coupal “reached out” to the BAFN to apply for membership initially, it seems, based on family lore. After her application, the BAFN informed Coupal that her family traditions were inaccurate. What this meant was that the great-great-grandparent she believed to be Indigenous was not. But she was told she could still claim Indigeneity because another distant relative—mid-nineteenth-century Thomas Lagarde—was. Lagarde qualified as an “Algonquin ancestor” under an enrollment process started to define beneficiaries to the Algonquins of Ontario (AOO) land settlement negotiations. There is a range of criteria that establish an “Algonquin ancestor,” but one is that the claimant must be connected by family to an historic family member who was Algonquin.

It turns out that Lagarde was not Indigenous, but the mistake had real implications. Over 1,000 Algonquin identity claims—that carry with them the right to participate in the AOO land settlement—rested on recognition of Lagarde alone as an Indigenous root ancestor. The controversy was triggered by the criteria of the land settlement process. In 1983, Algonquin communities petitioned the crown for recognition of traditional lands. By 1992, both the federal and provincial governments had agreed to negotiate a land settlement. For their parts, both levels of government wanted to create a lasting agreement. Thus, as part of the agreement, they wanted all potential individual Algonquin claimants vetted and registered so no further future claims could be made. To this end, an umbrella organization—the AOO—was created to qualify Algonquin identity claims based on a series of criteria. The criteria have been subject to debate, but all claims require a “root Algonquin ancestor,” someone in a direct family line who was Algonquin. 

In 1999, the AOO originally approved Lagarde as a potential root ancestor, a decision that was immediately controversial. This approval was reversed by “an internal screening committee” in 2000, then reversed again in 2000, before it was challenged again in 2011. In the meantime, there were increased concerns about the claims process and whether its criteria were too loose. The loose process, some believed, transformed people who had no demonstrable Indigenous heritage into Algonquin, at least for the purposes of the Settlement process. In response, in 2013, the AOO hired retired Ontario Superior Court Judge James Chadwick to assess a series of controversial root ancestors on which identity claims were based. He determined that Lagarde was Indigenous based almost entirely on evidence provided by William Mann, a civil servant, Freemason, and conspiracy theorist.

Mann believed that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene, with whom he had children, and fled Palestine. In Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, Jesus and Mary come to live in France. Mann seems to believe that later descendants of Christ had moved to Montana, where they lived with Native Americans. Mann had long believed he was Indigenous, and Thomas Lagarde was central to his belief. The evidence he provided to Chadwick consisted of a copy of a letter, the provenance of which is unclear, although it bore the stamp of an archive in Quebec. Chadwick assessed the copy. The letter, dated 1845, purports to be from a priest named Brunet. In one sentence, the letter refers to a Thomas Lagarde who was a Mason—like Mann—of Algonquin descent and who had been sentenced to death for some unknown crime. In the letter, the priest claimed to have met Lagarde at a small mission near Ottawa. Chadwick found this evidence convincing.

For a range of reasons, others did not. First, no one has been able to find the original document. It is not in the archive whose stamp it bears, nor has it been found in any other archive to date, even after extensive searches. There are also problems with the handwriting, the letter’s terminology, and the events it describes. Lagarde, for instance, had previously been sent to jail for debt, but he was never under a death sentence. What is more, other than this letter, there is no empirical evidence that Lagarde was Algonquin.² He and his family have now been subject to extensive genealogical research as part of the AOO land settlement process. Research into the Lagarde family, including Thomas’ ancestors and his descendants, has turned up no evidence of Indigeneity. Research into family history, baptismal records, Algonquin petitions, census records, Indigenous communities, marriage, and fur trade records turns up no evidence that Lagarde was Indigenous nor connected to an Indigenous community.

Joan Holmes, AOO Enrolment Officer, put together this information, and on its basis, Lagarde was again removed from the list of potential root ancestors by another body—the Algonquin Tribunal—set up to re-assess several controversial cases in 2023.

There is much to be concerned about in the Coupal v. Leroux case. It may set something of a precedent. It is not the only suit seeking damages after allegations of Indigenous identity fraud. Some Indigenous scholars are concerned that the judgement opened a loophole. Importantly, Coupal did not argue that she is Indigenous, but that she honestly believed she was, first on the basis of family lore and then on the basis of the AOO enrolment process, which used Lagarde as a root ancestor. Labach found that this was an honest belief and, hence, not an act of deception. The concern is that it provides a back door into false Indigenous identity claims because it creates a ready-made excuse—in effect, “I honestly believed what I said was true.”  

I will leave it to people who are better informed than I am to address the legal issues in this case. To me, it also has significant historical implications. In the first instance, the history of Lagarde’s shifting identity and its effects is a product of the AOO land settlement process on which the state insisted.  What appears like a dramatic growth in pretendianism is another aspect of this, but it was the state’s desire for a once-and-forever settlement—as opposed to, say, an ongoing collaborative relationship—that led to the formation of the AOO and the enrolment process in the first place.

It also highlights a process that re-legalizes Indigenous identity and makes the courts and tribunals the arbiters of history. The issue might be both who makes the decisions about the past and how. The original decision to approve Lagarde as an Algonquin ancestor was based on at best shaky historical methodology. Even if we omit the remarkably important question of exactly who should be making decisions about identity, the original decision to accept a document of unknown provenance, which had not been assessed for internal consistency, as authoritative virtually guarantees interpretive mistakes. 

The history gets even odder. The only other evidence that Lagarde was Algonquin comes from troubling family traditions that cannot be verified. One claim to Indigeneity for Lagarde, for instance, was made based on the fact that a descendant trapped, hunted, and lived off the land. This kind of claim bears an odd similarity to claims for Indigenous heritage made on behalf of Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, connected to her father’s supposed “wild” behaviour and “drinking problems.” In these instances, family histories are being reduced to disturbing stereotypes.

Thomas Lagarde’s history gets even more bizarre. For Mann, the fact that Lagarde was supposedly a Mason seems of particular importance. It created some wider connection to history-as-conspiracy in which the descendants of Jesus Christ found their way to Montana to live with Native Americans.

Leroux will appeal this decision, but it raises one further question. What does it mean to be mistaken about the past? This happens all the time. I’ve made mistakes in my own work, and part of the duty of historians is to revisit the past to produce more accurate versions of it. I think that happens. I wonder, however, if all mistakes are the same. Kim TallBear once said that Indigenous identity fraud—making a false claim to be Indigenous—was a “final act” of colonialism. It both robbed Indigenous peoples of their identity and their ability to control it.  I do believe Coupal, although I have other questions I’d ask if given the chance. In Coupal v. Leroux, Judge Labach correctly noted that she did not forge any documents. What happened might be even more concerning. She became part of an historical process that seems set up to misinterpret the past.

Andrew Nurse is a Professor of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University.

This series was produced within the project Historicizing Our Times: Histories of Migration and Climate in the Digital Space, which is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Note: The title quotation is drawn from Jorge Barrera, “Why a decades-old dispute over Algonquin ancestry is the key to a city hall controversy,” CBC News (February 18, 2021) <https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/algonquins-of-ontario-identity-membership-1.5910334>. Accessed March 24, 2026.

[1] A summary judgement is a particular kind of judgement. It occurs when the court determines that it has the information it needs to make an impartial decision without the need of trial. This can occur for more than one cause, but one reason is that the protagonists of the process seek it. That was the situation in this case. Both Coupal and Leroux asked that the process be expedited by summary judgement based on evidence and affidavits they submitted.

[2] There is some family lore. One later descendant believes Lagarde was Indigenous based on supposedly hearing their mother speak Algonquin.

When it comes to periodizing the history of federal policy of multiculturalism in Canada, existing models have loosely associated changes in policy with the changing of the governments.^[1] But a closer examination of the earliest decades of the policy’s existence suggests that the Cabinet ministers responsible for the policy were more responsible for its evolution than the prime minister or political party in power. This is despite the fact that multiculturalism it was never considered a prestigious portfolio, and therefore some of the figures involved are also lesser remembered.

Take, for instance, the second minister of state responsible for multiculturalism: John Carr Munro (1931–2003). Munro was a long-time Liberal MP for Hamilton East (1962–1984) and although he was responsible for multiculturalism for just under three years (August 1974–April 1977), this was a comparatively long time for the era. Press coverage in his early years as a Cabinet minister emphasized his “social conscience.” For instance, in 1972, a lengthy article in Macleans relayed a series of revealing anecdotes that give a glimpse of a hardworking, grassroots, dedicated, and generally well-meaning politician. According to the article, his mother was his greatest political supporter, even in high school. He scraped through university, became a lawyer, got involved in municipal politics, and eventually ran for Parliament, finally winning in 1962 but accruing significant debt along the way. Despite prime ministerial ambitions, he spent over five years as a backbencher. Passed over for a cabinet post in 1968, he reportedly wept and considered quitting the Liberal party altogether.

All Munro’s political projects were marked by his passionate commitment and personal foibles. The Macleans profile noted that he was finally appointed to cabinet and given the health portfolio, he decided to lead by example and quit smoking cold turkey before unceremoniously backsliding, bumming cigarettes from those around him. Reporter Lawrence Martin further recounted that when the two met at a restaurant, Munro declared that he was starving and “ordered the five-dollar prime ribs,” but as soon as Martin asked a question, he laid down his knife and fork and engaged in a passionate response for over an hour. When his driver called, Munro quickly departed “leaving behind three empty glasses, an ashtray full of du Maurier butts – and five dollars worth of untouched food.”^[2]

As a result of it being an undervalued portfolio, multiculturalism was always given to a minister in addition to another portfolio. In his case, Munro was given labour and multiculturalism together. Although the former took up most of his time, he was determined to get up to speed on his second portfolio and would sporadically spend long hours in the evening with staff from the multiculturalism directorate. Convinced by these bureaucrats that the policy needed to shift from celebrating folk cultures to combatting discrimination, he publicly announced that the policy would be reoriented along these lines. However, his efforts were ultimately stymied by a lack of Cabinet support as well as outright opposition from some quarters, notably many Ukrainian Canadian groups as well as the national chair of the Canadian Consultative Council on Multiculturalism, Julius Koteles, a Hungarian Canadian. Emotional and stubborn, Munro considered moving the entire multiculturalism program to the ministry of labour, so he could more easily effect change. He eventually abandoned the idea and was later shuffled out of the position. Still, some of his policy initiatives, despite being watered down, eventually were implemented by his successor, Joseph Guay.^[3]

Although the above paints a generally positive image of Munro, when searching for information about his work with his constituency, however, I was greeted with a far different picture. In Their Town: The Mafia, the Media, and the Party Machine (1979), Munro is presented as exemplifying the worst kind of politician, known for patronage, undue influence, and corruption.^[4] Around 1975, Munro was implicated in a scandal surrounding contracts for the dredging of the Hamilton harbour. In an early attempt to clear his name, Munro released a great deal of his files. This move did more harm than good, however, for the files laid bare the mindboggling scope of patronage appointments that he had helped arrange.^[5] The backlash was such that Munro offered to resign, but Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau publicly defended him, and reportedly told him to just see a doctor and get some rest.^[6]

Then, in 1978, when one of his constituents was charged with assault (a landlord had attacked a tenant), Munro personally called the judge overseeing the case. When this came to light, he was consequently forced to resign from Cabinet. Munro nevertheless finished his term and was re-elected in 1980. He later re-appointed to Cabinet, serving as the minister of Indian and Northern Affairs from 1980–1984. In 1982, Munro announced that the federal government supported the division of the Northwest Territories, a stepping-stone on the path to the creation of the territory of Nunavut. “This is a turning point. An historic day in the political evolution of the North,” he claimed, though the statement was treated with some scepticism.^[7]

During the final years of his political career, he was subjected to further allegations of corruption, though these were disproven. In 1981, an article in the Toronto Sun claimed without evidence that Munro had engaged in insider trading. The reporter resigned, the Sun apologized in print, and Munro won a $75,000 judgement in the libel suit he lodged.^[8] Then in 1989, the RCMP laid 34 fraud charges against him related to the federal Liberal leadership race in which Munro unsuccessfully ran in 1984. The charges were eventually thrown out and Munro sued; he eventually settled for $1.4 million, the majority of which went to legal fees. “But if [the lawsuit settlement] marked the formal end to Munro’s political odyssey, his career epitaph will be a complex one,” the press concluded.^[9]

As I’ve argued before, scorecard histories are rarely accurate histories, and it is no different with Munro. For in assessing his legacy, both accounts are correct, if still incomplete. Munro was certainly unscrupulous about the means he employed to gain power – such as the endless patronage – but, once he obtained it, he genuinely tried to make positive social change. Ironically, if he is at all remembered today, it is likely not due to any of this – multiculturalism, Nunavut, or scandal – but simply due to the fact that, since his death, Hamilton’s airport has borne his name. But the attempt to reorient multiculturalism from folklore to combatting racism, however unsuccessful, is also an important part of his legacy. 

Daniel R. Meister is an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at St. Thomas University who researches the history of Canada’s policy of multiculturalism. He is a Regular Contributor to Active History.

^[1] Augie Fleras, Canadian Multiculturalism @50: Retrospect, Perspectives, Prospects (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), 81–99.

^[2] Lawrence Martin, “The Social Conscience of John Munro,” Macleans (May 1972), 37-39.

^[3] For a more detailed account of his failed attempt to reorient the policy, see Daniel R. Meister, “Ethnicity to Equity? Official Multiculturalism and Racial Discrimination in Canada, 1971-79,” Études canadiennes/Canadian Studies 95 (2023): 43–72, esp. 57–63.

^[4] Henry Jacek, “John Munro and the Hamilton East Liberals: Anatomy of a Modern Political Machine,” in Bill Freeman and Marsha Hewitt, eds., Their Town: The Mafia, the Media, and the Party Machine (Toronto: Lorimer, 1979),62-73.

^[5] Marsha Hewitt, “Hamilton Harbour: Politics, Patronage, and Cover-Up,” in Their Town, 148-66.

^[6] “Transcript of the Prime Minister’s Remarks to the Press at Uplands Airport on Departure for European Visit, February 26, 1976,” file 3250-1, pt. 6, box 5, accession 1989-09 319, RG6 (Department of Secretary of State fonds), Library and Archives Canada.

^[7] “N.W.T. is at a Turning Point but Division Problems Abound,” Hamilton Spectator (29 November 1982), A9. Munro’s time as minister of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs requires more study but will likely be found to be equally mixed. According to Peter Jull, who held various positions in the PMO and as advisor to Inuit peoples during this period, Munro “put his shoulder to the wheel in the last years of the [Pierre] Trudeau government,” at one point arguing back to Trudeau against some of his more incendiary comments about Nunavut. In 1982, he initiated a review of claims made by nêhiyawak (Cree) and Inuit peoples that Quebec and Canada had not fulfilled their responsibilities in the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. See Summaries of Reports by Federal Bodies and Aboriginal Organizations, vol. 2 of Public Policy and Aboriginal Peoples, 1965-1992, produced by Centre for Policy and Program Assessment, Carlton University, for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (Queen’s Printer, 1994), 57. Yet that same year, his deputy minister dismissed the idea that any promises of return had been made to Arctic relocatees. See Amy Fung, “Redressing the Redress of the High Arctic Exiles: The Limits of Recognition in a White Settler State,” Memory Studies 18, no. 6 (2025): 1573–93, quote at 1583.

^[8] “Toronto Sun Rules Out Libel Ruling appeal,” Calgary Herald (21 August 1982), B6.

^[9] Jon Wells, “Even $1.4m Isn’t Enough Payback,” Hamilton Spectator (11 May 1999), A5.

On 3 March, Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre delivered the keynote Margaret Thatcher Lecture for the Centre for Policy Studies in London, an influential British conservative think tank co-founded by Thatcher with the mission of keeping her ideas and policies relevant in today’s political landscape. Poilievre’s address to this room full of Tory movers and shakers thus was unsurprisingly a paean to free market capitalism, drawing on Adam Smith, Thomas Macaulay, Winston Churchill, and the Iron Lady herself. 

About three-quarters of the way through his speech, Poilievre waxed about the ties that continue to bind the former dominion with its imperial metropole. “Canada and the United Kingdom share language, culture, parliamentary government, and most important of all, folklore,” he claimed, “including the possibly fictional legend of Robin Hood. And, by the way, I don’t mean the medieval Marxist of 20th-century retellings. Robin fought, as do we, for ancient liberties of the common people: to hunt, harvest, and keep what was theirs.” 

I beg your pardon?

I admit, this was not on my bingo card. My doctoral research focuses on the work of Helen Creighton, the Nova Scotian folklorist in large part responsible for popularizing the idea of that province as a singular preserve of British folkloric material. Building on historian Ian McKay’s influential The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (1994), which analyzed this constructed image with a class-based lens strongly shaped by New Left cultural studies, and the work of folklorists like Diane Tye, who have tackled Creighton’s legacy from a feminist perspective within the discipline that has effectively inherited her mantle, I ask how race defined what was authentically Nova Scotian and established a hierarchy in which the folklore of some groups was deemed more authentic than others.^[1]

Poilievre was not being entirely glib when he used the legend of Robin Hood as an example of folklore shared between Canada and the United Kingdom. Few Robin Hood tales have been collected here, but in Helen Creighton’s first publication, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (1933), she printed two Robin Hood ballads, “Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood” and “Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham,” which she had collected from Ben Henneberry of Devil’s Island in Halifax Harbour. In her notes to these songs, Creighton linked them to several of the English and Scottish “popular ballads” canonized by Harvard professor Francis James Child in the mid-19^th century.^[2]

Creighton’s career in folklore collecting coincided with a period in which the discourse around English Canadians’ place in the world would shift dramatically, from imperialism to nationalism and from “founding races” to “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework”—“the other Quiet Revolution,” to use José Igartua’s turn of phrase.^[3] Throughout this sea-change, Creighton privileged Child ballads like the “Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood” and “Robin Hood’s Progress to Nottingham” as evidence of the fundamental Britishness of Nova Scotia. In her fieldwork and in her publications, material like this came first and foremost. While the country grappled with the reality of its racial and ethnic diversity and reconfigured its political narratives to accommodate, folklore offered figures like Creighton a means by which to reinstate the dominant position of British settlers in Canadian culture.^[4]

In the process, Creighton implicitly and explicitly marginalized other groups, doing so along racial lines. Her collection, study, and publication of material from African Nova Scotians and Mi’kmaq was minimal, and what attention she did give them was characterized by a pervasive condescension and a repertoire of popular and racist stereotypes, as opposed to any magnanimity or prescience about the value of multicultural diversity.^[5] This was not uncommon for the time—in fact, it remains common—but Creighton’s prejudices shaped the material she collected, how it was integrated into her published works, and therefore how we continue to imagine and understand cultural traditions in the region. The Canadian mosaic has always been a “racial mosaic,” and the racialized politics of authenticity that suffuses Creighton’s archive warrants specific and sustained attention.^[6]

Poilievre’s argument for a shared heritage of folklore does something similar. His Robin Hood anecdote was not just a chance to get a jab in at Marxist bogeymen or to align his cause with that of the folk hero. Sandwiched between the reactionary cry that new jobs must go to “our people,” not to temporary foreign workers, and just before championing the CANZUK alliance—i.e., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, essentially a trade, security, and movement agreement between Britain and the former white Dominions that would revive something of the empire upon which the sun never set—Poilievre deploys folklore as a kind of “restorative nostalgia” which, in Svetlana Boym’s definition, “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home,” the nostos of nostalgia.^[7]

In this light, Poilievre’s invocation of Robin Hood is not quaint, but dangerous. Musicologist Ross Cole writes in The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (2021) that “the folk have bestowed upon us a double-edged sword,” by which he means that they, the cultural core of the imagined community, inspire both utopian and dystopian visions of the future. The same concept around which left-wing folk singers rallied also mutated and metastasized into the Volksgemeinschaft of the Third Reich. The idea of restoring authentic connections between people and place is an extremely potent one.^[8]

It also inspires the contemporary far right in Canada. Consider Diagolon, the extreme white nationalist tendency led by Jeremy MacKenzie, and their “national anthem,” a rewrite of the shanty “Rolling Down to Old Maui,” made popular in Canada by folk singer Stan Rogers.^[9] One of the verses goes as follows:

In our own towns we’re foreigners now
Our names are spat and cursed
The headlines smack of another attack
Not the last and not the worst
Oh, my fathers, they look down on me
I wonder what they feel
To see their noble sons driven down
Beneath a coward’s heel

A chorus of men then sing with full chest:

Oh, by God, we’ll have our home again
By God, we’ll have our home
By blood or sweat, we’ll get there yet
By God, we’ll have our home

The video accompanying the anthem features footage of a war memorial in Pictou, Nova Scotia, contrasting the current maple leaf flag with the black-and-white slash flag of Diagolon and a matching, monochromatic red ensign flying over rural fields. A final shot lingers on the memorial’s iron railing, to which the words “lest we forget” are attached. One could hardly ask for a clearer example, or a more foreboding one, of the joint potency of restorative nostalgia and the folk.^[10]

Cole observes from the United Kingdom that “we are currently living through an era of resurgent right-wing populism in which repeated references are made to tribal belonging saturated with blood-and-soil rhetoric.”^[11] This is unambiguously the case in Canada as well, obvious in musical examples like the one above but also in the explosion of white nationalist “active clubs” (the largest network of which is Second Sons, also led by MacKenzie) and continued scandals involving white supremacist extremism in the military. 

If the swirl of red ensigns and inflammatory clickbait kicked up in response to his social media posts are any indication, Poilievre’s comments about an ancient inheritance of British folklore are a dog whistle to the far right. To be clear, most far-right commentators on sites like X scorn Poilievre. One account which appears to exclusively post racist hate speech replied to a clip of his folklore remarks, “How disappointing is this? @PierrePoilievre, none of this makes any sense until you begin mass remigration. Millions must go.” (“Remigration,” i.e., ethnic cleansing by deportation, is a current watchword for extremist white nationalism).^[12] Poilievre, on the other hand, maintains a degree of plausible deniability by denouncing alignment with the far right as examples come to light. But even though they disagree with Poilievre about what action is required, these extremists do agree with the fundamental premise: that of a primordial British folk at the heart of Canadian society. 

Poilievre’s allegory to Robin Hood was not, after all, a quaint diversion from matters of real political substance. His speech sets a dangerous precedent for shifting public discourse toward the mystical, exclusionary community of “the folk,” and that it is a threat against which we should all be vigilant.

^[1] Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994); Diane Tye, “‘A Very Lone Worker’: Woman-Centred Thoughts on Helen Creighton’s Career as a Folklorist,” Canadian Folklore 15, no. 2 (1993): 107–17, and “Katherine Gallagher and the World of Women’s Folksong,” Atlantis 20, no. 1 (1995): 101–12. On “authenticity” as a fundamental organizing concept in the history of folklore studies: Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).

^[2] Helen Creighton, Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia (J. M. Dent and Sons, 1933), 12–16. On Child’s “popular ballads,” see David Harker, “Francis James Child and the ‘Ballad Consensus,’” Folk Music Journal 4, no. 2 (1981): 146–64. Harker’s work is controversial among folk music scholars, but this article highlights well the intellectual scaffolding of Child’s definition of ballad. 

^[3] José E. Igartua, The Other Quiet Revolution: National Identities in English Canada, 1945–71 (UBC Press, 2006).

^[4] On this point, I crib from several scholars: on the dominant position, John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 1965); on the reinstatement, Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and Canadian National Identity in Canada (Routledge, 1999); Richard J. F. Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (University of Toronto Press, 2000); and Eve Haque, Multiculturalism within a Bilingual Framework: Language, Race, and Belonging in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2012).

^[5] My article, “‘I doubt if they were unusual’: Race and Place in Helen Creighton’s 1967 African Nova Scotian Recording Project,” MUSICultures 51 (2024): 193–225, explores one discrete instance of how this manifested for Black communities in Nova Scotia. My dissertation research explores Creighton’s collecting in Mi’kmaw communities further and in comparative perspective. 

^[6] Daniel Meister, The Racial Mosaic: A Pre-History of Canadian Multiculturalism (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).

^[7] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books, 2011): xviii. 

^[8] Ross Cole, The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination (University of California Press, 2021), “Coda”; quotation on p. 177. 

^[9] Stan Rogers, “Rolling Down to Old Maui,” Between the Breaks… Live! (Fogarty’s Cove Music, 1979). 

^[10] A video of the “anthem” is available at the time of writing: Merc 306 (user), “diagolon national anthem, we will have our home again!.” YouTube, posted August 26, 2021. The authorship of the song is obscure; recorded versions online are attributed to the group Pine Tree Riots or “The Mannerbund.” The song is also used outside of Canada: for example, the United States Department of Homeland Security referenced it an ICE recruitment post on X in January. 

^[11] Cole, The Folk, 161.

^[12] I’m not completely convinced that the account in question isn’t a bot, but that only amplifies the issue. Evidence in favour of a human operator includes frequent references to C. P. Champion’s The Strange Demise of British Canada: The Liberals and Canadian Nationalism, 1964–1968 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), complete with scanned, highlighted images of passages from this monograph. 

Chris Greencorn is a PhD candidate in History at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and holds an MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto.

Roundup, noun:

1. A systematic rounding up of people or things, esp.
   1. The arrest of people suspected of a particular crime or crimes
   2. The rounding up of cattle etc. usu for the purposes of registering ownership, count, etc.
2. The people and horses engaged in the rounding up of cattle etc.
3. A summary, a resume of facts or events.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd edition, Online edition, 2005

The very first “roundup” appeared on Unwritten Histories on April 24, 2016. My original idea was that there was so much cool stuff being published online, and more people needed to know about it. The first one was 650 words long. Little did I imagine that by the last one, published on July 28, 2019, it would grow to 1680 words, divided into 13 different themes. But then again, that’s kinda how Unwritten Histories always worked: it started very small and grew beyond anything I could have possibly imagined.

As we prepare to shut down Unwritten Histories, I find myself very conflicted. I’ve always felt that all writing, whether academic or creative, is inherently biographical. Looking back, Unwritten Histories was very much a product of a particular time in my life. How do you sum (or round….) something like that up?

I suppose the only real place to start is the beginning.

When I started Unwritten Histories, it was due to frustration and anger after having worked at a history department for three years, only to not even get an interview when the first permanent Canadian History job came up. At that point, I had been working as a sessional instructor for over 5 years, and I was exhausted. In one memorable semester, I had to get up at 5:30 am to take a coach bus and then a shuttle bus to teach an 8 am class two cities over from where I lived. The trip took two hours.  After that class was over at 11, I had to wait 3 hours (because of conflicting bus schedules) before taking the same trip in reverse, to teach another 3 hours class from 6 to 9. I still don’t know how I did it. All I knew was that, after finding out I didn’t get the interview, it felt like my entire career had been a waste of time and I needed a new plan. 

At first, that plan was vague. I wanted to gather the resources I had developed through teaching and make them available to others. Pedagogy had always mattered to me, and after years in the classroom, I had a good sense of the kinds of questions people were asking. My first idea was a podcast. But if you’ve ever met me in person, you know I sound like Minnie Mouse. More to the point, I needed something I could build and control myself. So I started a blog. The earliest posts on Unwritten Histories reflect that choice, and focused on teaching and learning.

I never really expected much to come from this. I had already been reading blogs like Active History, NiCHE, and Nursing Clio, and I loved them, but never expected to grow to their reach. 

But things slowly started to change once I started posting the roundups. All of a sudden, people started actually reading what I was writing.

In fact, when I asked some of my former readers what they remembered most about the blog, it was the roundups, though not necessarily for the reasons you might think. Yes they helped people to stay up to date on all the goings on in the field, but mostly what I heard was that they created connection. I heard from one person that they remember reading the roundups while on maternity leave, and feeling less alone. Others told me about the online and real-life conversations the roundups inspired. Again and again, what I heard was that the roundups helped people feel seen—helped them recognize themselves and their work in what was being brought together. 

This is what I remember the most about Unwritten Histories – the care and community. 

In the end, however, it became clear that Unwritten Histories was an unsustainable project. Most of the other large Canadian history blogs were started by tenure-track or tenured academics, often with grant money, and were operated with teams of editors. Mine was the only one that was run almost entirely by a female sessional instructor, with support from a female graduate student. While we were able to secure some level of ongoing funding, largely from individual donors through Patreon, it was not even enough to cover the basic cost of running Unwritten Histories, let alone providing any kind of fair compensation. By mid-2019, I was working on the blog for 30 hours a week, while also teaching 2 to 3 courses a semester (at two different universities) to pay my rent and groceries. To say nothing of the fact that none of the work I was doing on Unwritten Histories was considered relevant academic experience in terms of the job market, and my schedule didn’t allow me the time to work on my own research. 

Even though Unwritten Histories only lasted for three years, its impact on my life cannot be understated. While it did give me important work experience that has facilitated my career outside of academia, for me the most important were the friends that I made along the way. There are too many to list individually, but I would like to especially acknowledge Krista McCracken, Jenny Ellison, Shannon Stettner, Kesia Kvill, the late Elizabeth Mancke, Jessica Dewitt, Sarah York-Bertram, and Stacey Zembrycki. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t devote an entire paragraph to Stephanie Pettigrew, my forever partner in crime. She was always there for whatever I needed. We met randomly during CHA Reads, and just never stopped talking. She listened to me rant about reading articles I hated, read countless drafts while I argued over innate details, and kept things going when I couldn’t. But most importantly, she was a shelter in the storm when I needed one. None of this would have been possible without her, and I cannot overstate the impact she has had on Unwritten Histories and my life. 

To all of the people who read Unwritten Histories, whether you donated or not – thank you from the bottom of my heart. 

If there is a lesson to be learned from Unwritten Histories, it is this: if you value something, you have to fight for it, again and again. In the world that we live in, it is so easy to dismiss projects relating to history, heritage, and community. Afterall, when we are in crisis mode, who has time for all that? But when we make this argument, we fail to realize that without history, heritage, and community, we lose the ties that bind us together and make us humans. Humanities isn’t just about the study of human beings, it is about the connections that make us who we are. And in the end, actions speak louder than words, but silence speaks loudest of all. 

—-

While Unwritten Histories in its current form is coming to end, this isn’t the end of the story. Stephanie and I are working on converting the best projects into a Pressbook that will be available online for free. Stay tuned to Active History for more news on this project, and all future news about Unwritten Histories. 

Thank you again to Active History, especially Tom Peace, for hosting this series, and for all of their support.

Andrea Eidinger is a Canadian historian who lives and works with her cat Hedy in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal, and hates writing biographies.

When I first started my PhD in 2013, I left a very comfortable, established community of support in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, made up of friends I had known since middle school, of family. I had a general sense of knowing my community and being known by it.

When I arrived in Fredericton, I found myself not only in a strange place, but without any pre-existing community support. It was really my only complaint about those early years at UNB. My mentors, Drs Elizabeth Mancke and Greg Kennedy, were amazing and would stop at nothing to support me, but they were not the peer network I increasingly craved. The grad student network at UNB was scattered, incohesive, almost ephemeral. I knew my peers existed on campus, sometimes I’d even get the odd beer with one or two of them, but they did not exist as a supportive network. 

I had friends doing their grad studies at other universities who had the sort of peer support network I wanted, and I was downright envious. I missed having that sense of community.

As I started attending conferences and establishing a network outside of my own university, I began to grow more and more of that community I was looking for. Enter Andrea, and Unwritten Histories.

This is weird to say considering how much of an impact Unwritten Histories ended up having on my career and subsequently my life, but I actually do not remember how Andi (Andrea Eidinger) and I were first introduced. The blog was already well established by the time we met. But I don’t have a concrete memory. It would not surprise me if Andi remembers this (note: after reading a draft of this, Andi tells me we met when I participated in CHA Reads). It just seemed to happen, and once it did, the relationship seemed to always exist. There wasn’t really any effort that went into creating it, or in working together.

A lot of effort and work was extracted from both of us, however, when it came to maintaining the blog. From our creativity, to our research and editing skills, to the sheer amount of time it took to get everything from an idea to a published post – it was a lot. It was especially onerous when you consider that I was still a grad student, and Andi was precariously employed from contract to contract.

The work did pay back dividends. A community sprung up around UH, particularly of female grad students and early academics in the humanities. Suddenly, I had the community of support I had been lacking since moving to Fredericton. There was always a group of women I could reach out to for advice. Whenever I attended conferences, I would be delighted to meet up with people I had been introduced to through the blog. A few times, people approached me at conferences asking if I “was Stephanie from UH” (real star power!) 

There is even a direct line that can be drawn from my time with UH to the career I have now. 

So why did things fall apart? The same reasons why many digital initiatives in the humanities fall apart: a lack of understanding for how much time, effort, and money these projects require. 

What started as a passion project became a story of two early career academics who were completely overwhelmed and afraid to push for more resources to help maintain a valuable resource due to the potential backlash. We began to feel more and more like our labour was being exploited. It is hard for those who depend on digital resources without being involved in their creation to really understand the scope of the labour that goes into creating them. For many of our readers, I think there was a gross underestimation of the work, time, hours, and effort involved. The only supporters who really understood were those who also ran blogs, like Cory at the Acadiensis blog, the team at Borealia, NiCHE, etc. 

The work involved was simply not sustainable for two of us, considering we both had “day jobs” with heavy work loads. Eventually, something had to break, and it ended up being the blog. But I am still eternally grateful for the opportunities it afforded me, the community it provided when I really needed it. 

The confidence I gained from the creation of an academic community from afar helped give me the confidence to create a stronger community at home. Wanting to assure that grad students entering the program did not feel as isolated as I did, I spoke to Elizabeth Mancke about ways to create more community around the Atlantic Canada Studies centre, and the result was real, meaningful friendships that have carried into the present. I am eternally grateful for the support of Richard Yeomans, Rachel Bryant, Erin Morton, Erin Isaac, Zachary Tingley, Keith Grant, and so many others. 

Unwritten Histories was a lot of work. Exhausted nights after writing dissertation sections, long days of research, frantically prepping CHA Reads pieces for upload while also trying to prep my own conference papers. But in the end, UH helped me find my voice.

Stephanie Pettigrew is a collections data anaylist at Library and Archives Canada and a longtime contributor to Unwritten Histories.

In the coming weeks, the site will be taken offline. The material won’t be lost: Andrea is in the process of building a Pressbook to house the content, and the website itself has been archived.

To mark the occasion, we’ll be revisiting some of the most memorable posts from Unwritten Histories—the ones that challenged assumptions, opened up new conversations, and continue to resonate.

May 7, 2019

I absolutely love citations. There is something beautiful about a perfectly formatted bibliography that just makes my heart sing. But aside from their aesthetic value, citations have tremendous transformative potential when it comes to academia, education, and the sharing of knowledge. So, in today’s blog post, I want to talk about why this is the case, and how you can maximize the potential of citations in your classroom.

This blog post was inspired by a recent Facebook post by the talented and lovely Joanna L. Pearce, which I will include below. While I was writing this blog post, I also happened to mention my plan to Krista McCracken, who was already planning to do a podcast episode on the same subject (in case you needed more evidence that our minds are psychically synced). So while I will be talking about citations in terms of education today, Krista will be speaking about citations and research; definitely make sure you check out that podcast episode.

The Power and Politics of Citations

When most of us think about citations in the classroom, we think about student papers and plagiarism.

Many of us teach students that is important to cite your sources because it is important to acknowledge the work of others. And some of us emphasize the importance of citational styles as a means for communication information about our sources (what type, where they are located, etc…). And usually that’s about it. We rarely stop to think about how we use citations and source in classrooms, and what this communicates to our students.

That’s because, as critical feminist and anti-racist scholars have demonstrated, citations have power. As many other have noticed, the foundational text on citational practices and power is Sara Ahmed’s blog post, “Making Feminist Points.” In it, she describes citations a “as a rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies.” To put this another way, citation is a political practice that academic disciplines used to establish and uphold legitimacy and authority. Regardless of field, this authority tends to attach itself overwhelming to white, male scholars.

One of the most important sites for the creation of this legitimacy and authority are course syllabuses. When we design syllabuses, we often begin with foundational texts and scholars, who again, are almost always white men. For example, a recent survey of syllabuses from 2018 in the department of Political Science at McGill university found that out of the 300 authors listed, 86% where white and 75% were male. While there haven’t been any comprehensive studies on citational practices and syllabuses in the field of Canadian history, there are still worrying signs. I would again point to Elise Chenier, Lori Chambers, and Anne Frances Toews’s piece, “Still Working in the Shadow of Men? An Analysis of Sex Distribution in Publications and Prizes in Canadian History,” which shows conclusively that there is a bias against women and women/gender/feminist history in both publications and prizes. When we consider that many comps lists are drawn directly from CHA prize lists, and that these lists are instrumental in the development of syllabuses, we can see how inequality is reproduced within our own field.

Some people argue that certain authors and texts are classics from the field, and should continue to be cited. However, these individuals rarely stop to consider why this is the case. As Victor Ray notes, “what counts as canonical is shaped by who had access to existing knowledge and the tools and the institutional resources to produce new knowledge.” What’s more, these individuals also fail to consider that canon is neither natural nor inevitable, but the result of conscious decisions by academics.

And these decisions have wide-ranging implications for both our students and the wider world. Syllabuses that are overwhelming dominated by white and male scholars sends a message about which individuals we see as authoritative, whose voices we centre, and whose expertise is recognized. This contributes to the ongoing racial and gendered bias against scholars and experts who are not white or male. What’s more, these practices alienate students who don’t fit into these categories, and makes them feel as if their experiences and voices have no place in academia. And finally, when we continue to cite these same sources over and over again, we reinforce these texts and authors as part of our “canon,” and therefore reproduce and institutionalize inequality within the academy.

There are more wide-ranging implications for scholars as well. Citational practices, including those on syllabuses, have real-life impacts on the career trajectories of scholars. Frequency of citation is often used to measure relevance and importance, and therefore is often considered for hiring, promotion, tenure, and other performance evaluations. For example, many scholars, even in the humanities and social sciences, are judged on the basis of how frequently they are cited, something which is now called an h-index. Increasingly journal articles are posting metrics on individual journal issues and articles about citation frequency. So when we continue to cite the same canonical authors and texts over and over again, we again contribute to the ongoing dominance of white male scholars in our fields, invest them with more authority, and silence the voices of academics from marginalized groups.

Conscientious Citations in The Classroom

However, just as citational practices have the potential to reinforce power structures, they also have tremendous potential to undo them. In their article, “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement,’” Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne argue for that they call “conscientious engagement” with citations, being mindful of their impact. This conscientious engagement, or what I’m calling conscientious citational practices, require us to make careful and mindful choices about whose voices we choose to highlight and promote. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t cite important scholars in our fields if they happen to be white or male. Rather, conscientious citational practices encourage us to cite people because they have good ideas, rather than because they have status. It encourages us to think carefully about traditional academic hierarchies and work to cultivate a more diverse and inclusive discipline. Finally, I would refer back to the blog post Krista and I wrote earlier in the year on the celebration of women and non-binary academics. I won’t repeat myself too much here, but I would like to refer to Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow’s practice, “Shine Theory,” or the practice of celebrating each other’s work as a way of uplifting us all. Conscientious citations or a critical citation practice operates in much the same way.

When we bring conscientious citational practices in the classroom, we also help to create more diverse and inclusive classrooms. We can show all students that their voices matter, and that diversity is a strength rather than a bonus. Conscientious citational  practices can foster the creation of safer and braver spaces. They can also provide opportunities for your students to learn about, and respect, multiple perspectives and different backgrounds.  As Sasha Turner noted, quoting Sadiah Qureshi, “what if in addition to requiring students read white (predominantly male) theorists—canonized as universal truth tellers—like “Tacitus, Herodotus, Max Weber, Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Derrida and, more rarely, Judith Butler,” we also require that students critically engage the works of “Audre Lorde, Stuart Hall, Frantz Fanon, Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed, Kim TallBear or Kimberlé Crenshaw?”” We can even dream bigger. In her podcast episode on the subject of citational politics, Hannah McGregor asks: what would happen if our fields were entirely reorientated? What if we didn’t just talk about scholars from marginalized groups in relation to white, male scholars, but rather centred their voices in our work? What would this look like?

What’s more, conscientious citational practices the classroom can extend far beyond the syllabus. For example, what would happen if we considered all of our classroom documents and activities as scholarly work, and cited our sources?   As Julie Glass explains in a piece entitled “Modeling Scholarly Practice Using Your Syllabus, “doing so demonstrates to students that teaching IS scholarly, provides them with examples of how to use citations, and models scholarly practice starting with the very first day of class.” When we practice deliberate and intentional citations in all aspects of our teaching work, we acknowledge and teach students that the production of knowledge is a conversation and that scholarship is fundamentally about relationships, and that it is important to give credit where credit is due.

Conscientious citational practices in the classroom also allow us to disrupt hierarchical structures beyond the classroom. I am thinking here specifically of the work being done by the Cite Black Women Collective, who work to “reconfigure the politics of knowledge production by engaging in a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honours Black women’s transnational intellectual production.”  For example, in the same podcast episode, McGregor mentions a conversation she had with Jessica Marie Johnson about journalists stealing ideas from her tweets and consistently fail to credit her as a co-author. This reflects the fact that Black women are still not treated and credited as experts.  But when we practice conscientious citational practices in a broad and comprehensive manner, we have the power to change this.

What You Can Do to Cultivate a Conscientious Citational Practice

Here is the Facebook post by the brilliant Joanna L. Pearce that I mentioned above, on creating a classroom culture that acknowledges the work done by others, that originally inspired this blog post. It is reproduced here with her permission.

The very first thing I start doing with students immediately in tutorial is every time I refer to something a student said, or refer to something specifically said in lecture, I will verbally “cite” it by saying “As Chris said earlier, ‘blah blah blah’.” I’m trying to create a culture within the classroom where we acknowledge each other’s contributions BY NAME. (So I won’t let them get away with “As he said” with gesturing at someone.)

After a few weeks of this, I specifically point out to students that I’m doing it. I want them to notice that we’re acknowledging each other’s contributions to the class discussion (BY NAME) as part of thinking about how knowledge and understanding builds on what we’re all doing. Let’s make it very clear to them how this works in the classroom, so it’s easier to get them to do it in the essay writing.

I also make a point of using citations on my ppt slides (if I use ppt slides in tutorial or lecture) and including a “Bibliography” on my ppt slides. This is again trying to create the understanding that I’m using other sources to build my lecture/tutorial material. (This also helps get away from “cite the lecture” in essays or on exams – I provided my sources! If you want to use them, use them!)

As the term progresses, I start looking at the secondary sources we’re using in class. Let’s look together at WHERE the author is citing things. I try to use examples that are similar to how I want students to cite in class. I get where folks are coming from when using bad examples, but I like to use good ones instead. I have students look at citations and both see where/when something is cited, and then look at the citation itself and see what information is included.

Other Things You Can Do:

1. When you are lecturing, talk about the research that specific scholars are doing. This one comes from my husband, who has been doing this for years. For instance, when he lectures on a specific topic, he names specific scholars who have contributed to the field, and explains their arguments. This helps student to understand that knowledge is not created in a vacuum.
2. Instead of using classic textbooks, assign journal articles and chapters from monographs and edited collections instead. Not only are these pieces (often) more interesting to read (and more likely to get read!), but they can expose your students to a range of perspectives and voices. If you need some information on where to start, these are some fantastic resources:
   • Cite Black Women Crowdsourced Syllabus
   • Reconciliation Syllabus
   • An Immigration Syllabus (Canadian)
   • The Black Canadian Lives Syllabus
   • #WomenAlsoKnowStuff
   • Decolonize Your Syllabus
   • Trans* Studies in Higher Education
   • Trans Justice Syllabus
3. Along the same lines: fully integrate research by scholars from marginalized groups into your syllabus and your lectures.
4. Check out Eve Tuck (Unangax), K. Wayne Yang, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández’s Citational Practices Challenge.
5. See if your syllabus and/or publications pass the Gray Test, developed by Wendy Laura Belcherand named after Kishonna Gray (who invited the hashtag #citeherwork). To pass the test, a syllabus or article 1) must cite the scholarship of at least two women and two non-white people and 2) must discuss these works in the body of the text. (And thanks to Raul Pachego-Vega for letting me know about this awesome test!)
   1. You can also ask that students ensure that their sources and/or essays pass the Gray test as well!
6. Cite downwards. A.K.A. Cite new and upcoming scholars, especially if they are precarious academics.
7. Teach your students about the importance of footnotes and endnotes.
   1. I personally love Roxanne Panchasi’ piece, “Cite Specific: Analyzing Endnotes to Teach Historical Methods”and the Xtreme Endnotes exercise, and have used it many times. Panchasi printed copies of notes for her students, I do them digitally.
   2. I’ve also used the apocryphal Van Halen’s Brown M&M explanation to explain to students why fine details like properly formatted citations are important. They are the canaries in the coal mine. (Ok, I will stop with the metaphors now).
8. As an assignment, ask your students to go out and find articles on a specific topic written by scholars from a marginalized group.
9. Include a “works cited” page in your syllabus, documenting the articles about teaching and learning that have influenced your approach to education.
10. When you cite authors in your syllabus, use their full names.
    1. Ensuring that you use full names in your citations means that in the event that your material ends up online, it will show up when someone searches for the scholar’s name. Tina Adcock is the person who noticed that this was a good way for scholars to demonstrate scholarly impact in the preparation of dossiers for hiring and promotion.
11. Learn about and practice Indigenous citation styles. I like Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples, by Gregory Youngin ( who sadly passed away last week).
12. Talk about what you and others can do to change an academic culture that silences the voices of folks from marginalized groups.
13. Instead of asking your students to submit a bibliography, have them submit a bibliographic essay. I really liked would encourage you and then to read the bibliographical essay “Citational Relations,” in Daniel Heath Justice’s Why Indigenous Literatures Matter.  Here is what he says:

Citations and broader references have been included as a bibliographic essay to allow for easier reading of the main body, with last names of those authors cited directly highlighted in bold. I also wanted the bibliography not to be merely a list of sources, but a conversation about the embraided influences of words, ideas, and voices on the topics at hand. No scholar comes to these ideas and this work without being part of a much broader community, and I’ve been very blessed to have been deeply transformed by the good work of others. This essay, of course, can’t possibly address every person and every work that has impacted this volume, but these are, I hope, a good sample of the works that made my book possible. [3]

One final quick note: McGregory also mentions the challenge that the ephemeral and transient nature of these platforms presents with respect to citational practices. While we can be exposed to a wide variety of ideas, without a careful citational practice, it can be difficult to track down, and give credit to, these sources later on. This is an increasingly common problem on public platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, particularly for folks who are Black, Indigenous, and non-Black People of Colour.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s blog post! If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice. And don’t forget to check back on Sunday for a brand new Canadian history roundup! See you then!

In the coming weeks, the site will be taken offline. The material won’t be lost: Andrea is in the process of building a Pressbook to house the content, and the website itself has been archived.

To mark the occasion, we’ll be revisiting some of the most memorable posts from Unwritten Histories—the ones that challenged assumptions, opened up new conversations, and continue to resonate.

February 20, 2018

Co-authored with Sarah York-Bertram

Note from Andrea: Sarah York-Bertram has been setting social media on fire with her wonderful Twitter essays on this subject. So of course I had to dragoon  ask her if she would be willing to co-author this post with me! And she is so kind that she said yes! Thank you, Sarah!

“If you come here to help me, you’re wasting your time. If you come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” – Lilla Watson

We wish to acknowledge that this blog post would not have been possible without the work of Indigenous scholars, many of whom are listed below, who have been researching and writing in this field for decades. We are deeply indebted to them for their generosity and patience. 

Like so many others, both Sarah and Andrea have been appalled, angered, and outraged by the Stanley decision, as well as the way in which so many people are in denial about anti-Indigenous racism in this country.  While we are heartened to see all of the great discussions online, we are alarmed to see that many individuals do not know or understand how settler colonialism has shaped the history and present of this place we now call Canada. As settlers, scholars, and historians, we believe that it is our responsibility to help rectify this situation. We also believe that we need to keep these conversations going, beyond the Stanley decision, and that they should be an integral part of the teaching and learning of history in this country. Further, we believe that it is important that we continually and actively fight against racism in all its forms. Anti-racism is an active approach to unpacking, accounting for, and dismantling systemic racism. It’s not about simply abstaining from being racist, it’s about doing what’s necessary to build an equitable, de-colonial culture and society that all humans can thrive in. What follows are guidelines, resources, and frequently asked questions that are informed by anti-racist and decolonial approaches to teaching about settler colonialism in Canada. This blog post is targeted specifically towards educators who want to increase their knowledge of the subject as well as integrate it into their teaching practice. However, it is our hope that this guide will also be of use to any individual who is interested in helping to imagine a better future for us all.

A Quick Word on the Meaning of the Term “Settler”

A lot of people in Canada take offence to being called “settlers” even though the term is not derogatory. Being a settler means that you are non-Indigenous and that you or your ancestors came and settled in a land that had been inhabited by Indigenous people (think: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc.). However, it is important to recognize that while the term is not derogatory, it can often be very difficult to hear. Many people, particularly when first learning about the subject of settler colonialism, have strong and negative reactions to it. Andrea recalls yelling at the person who first called her a settler (thankfully Emma forgave me!), and Sarah recalls feeling like the rug had been ripped out from under her.  Most of us like to think that we are good people, and being told that we’re complicit in a colonial project can be emotionally wrenching. So we would like to encourage those who are interested in learning about this subject to make space for their feelings, recognizing them without judgement, and, whenever possible, to extend the same consideration to others. This is not to suggest that racist behaviour is acceptable under any circumstances, but, rather, that each person is on their own journey. We embrace the philosophy of love as political resistance whenever possible. However, part of this radical love is being open to learning and growing, even when it is painful. 

What is Settler Colonialism?

Simply put, settler colonialism is a term that is used to describe the history and ongoing processes/structures whereby one group of people (settlers) are brought in to replace an existing Indigenous population, usually as part of imperial projects. Settler colonialism can be distinguished from other forms of colonialism by the following characteristics:

1. Settlers intend to permanently occupy, and assert their sovereignty, over Indigenous lands.
2. This invasion is structural rather than a single event, designed to ensure the elimination of Indigenous populations and control of their lands through the imposition of a new governmental/legal system.
3. The goal of settler colonialism is to eliminate colonial difference by eliminating Indigenous peoples, thereby establishing settler right to Indigenous lands.

Though often assumed to be a historical process, settler colonialism as a project is always partial, unfinished, and in-progress. Examples include Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

Colonization, settlement, and the creation of nation-states like the ones mentioned above depend upon particular historical narratives that reinforce or justify settler occupation of Indigenous lands. These narratives seek to reinforce the idea that these lands “belong” to settlers and that settlers “belong” on this land.  Therefore, the rewriting of history is a key part of settler colonialism. This often rests on an artificial temporal division that divides a location’s history into two distinct periods: before and after settlement. Central to the “before” time is the idea that the lands in question were either empty or not being used (referred to as the Doctrine of Discovery/Terra Nullius (literally, empty lands). {1}

{1} Chelsea Vowel, Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada (Newburyport: Portage and Main Press, 2017), chapter 26 and Henry Yu, “A Provocation: Anti-Asian Exclusion and the Making and Unmaking of White Supremacy in Canada,” in Dominions of Race: Rethinking Canada’s International History, eds. Laura Madokoro, Francine McKenzie, and David Meren, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017), 25-37.

A (Brief) History of Settler Colonialism in Canada

Most of us are familiar with the traditional narrative. Once upon a time, North America was basically empty of humans. Then some people came across the Bering Land Bridge, and started moving across the continent. We call these people Native Americans. Some of them practiced agriculture, while others were hunter-gatherers. But then, European explorers arrived and “discovered” the New World. The colonists who came were intrepid adventurers, determined to make a new life for themselves through hard work and perseverance. There will often be some mention of Louis Riel after this point. But afterwards, while there are some variations depending on where went to school, Native peoples essentially vanish from the narrative. Aside from a short discussion of Louis Riel, Native peoples essentially vanish from the narrative.

While there are myriad problems with this narrative, the most important part is that it is not accurate. This is the kind of history that results when only sources from settlers are used, and these sources are not interrogated regarding their intentions.

So what really happened? Here’s what we know:

Indigenous peoples have lived on Turtle Island (A.K.A. what settlers call North America) since time immemorial (more on this later). The continent was highly populated, the people culturally & ethnically diverse. It was a diplomatically complex space inhabited by a wide range of Indigenous peoples who had systems of law, trade, and governance. These societies were as complex and sophisticated as other societies at the time.

After contact, the French & British began to send settlers to what is now Canada in order to benefit from its resources. Britain and France had differing approaches to Indigenous relations but when Britain eventually took over in 1763, British law began to develop different categories that reflected their understanding of race. Through the Indian Act, the crown divided inhabitants of Canada into two categories: Indigenous people and non-Indigenous settlers. While Turtle Island prior to contact was as complex and sophisticated as Europe at the time, the Indian Act negated Indigenous diversity and reduced the people of Turtle Island to the category of “Indian.” By the same mechanism, all non-Indigenous people who came to Canada for economic benefit were settlers.

Some, though not all, Indigenous groups signed Treaties which constituted agreements that Indigenous and non-Indigenous settlers would share the resources of the lands in good faith, that non-Indigenous settlers wouldn’t take more than what they needed, and that the relationships would be respectful. However, this isn’t what happened. Even after making many agreements the crown actively and violently broke its agreements with Indigenous leadership in order to achieve racial  and economic dominance, and to assimilate Indigenous people into British/settler culture.

Expert Tip: A legacy of Canada’s settler colonial history is the ways Canadians continue to pay the royal family money. According to Business Insider, Canada paid the family $20.86 million in 2015, for example. And we’re just ONE of the commonwealth nations who gives them money.

The category “settler” was legally solidified in Canada through the construction of legal binaries developed by the Indian Act. That is, not only does being a settler describe a particular history of migration and economic relationship; in Canada, it’s also an effect of the law.

General Guidelines When Learning about Settler Colonialism

1. Do not act out of guilt, but rather out of a genuine interest in challenging the larger oppressive power structures;
2. Understand that they are secondary to the Indigenous people that they are working with and that they seek to serve. They and their needs must take a back seat;
– Lynn Gehl, “My Ally Bill of Responsibilities.”

Andrea and Sarah have both been learning  and teaching about settler colonialism for several years. The following recommendations are based on our own experiences and a lot of trial and error. We do not wish to present ourselves as experts in this area, nor are these guidelines to be taken as authoritative.

• Accept that you will make mistakes and upset people as you learn.
• Accept that you will be corrected by those more knowledgeable than you. Be gracious, thank your corrector, and apply the correction.
• Do not waste time feeling guilty. This is inherently selfish, and does no good. Act instead.
• Do not burden Indigenous peoples with your feelings. Do not go to them seeking guidance or validation. It is not their job to educate you or make you feel better. Be considerate of the fact that they already carry a heavy burden of emotional labour. Do not add to it.
• Self-educate. Where do you live? Are you on unceded land? Are you on Treaty land? If you’re on Treaty land, that makes you part of the Treaty. Learn what your responsibilities are. If you’re on unceded land, look into why it is unceded, what that means, and how you can act in solidarity with Indigenous people in your area.
• Learn the terminology and use it. Don’t be afraid to practice in regular conversation.
• When writing about Indigenous peoples, comply with the following guidelines from the Journalists for Human Rights’ Indigenous Style Guide.
  • Whenever possible, always be specific about the group, people, community, or nation you are referring to.
  • Defer to the community or individual(s)’ preferences on being identified.
  • Otherwise, use the correct Indigenous terms for groups, communities, and nations ( or example, Kanien’kehá:ka rather than Mohawk).
  • Avoid saying things like:
    • Canada’s Indigenous Peoples
    • Indigenous Canadians
    • Native Canadians
  • In general, include an Indigenous person’s nation or community in their name. For example, Frank Calder (Nisga’a) rather than just Frank Calder.
•  Learn how to properly pronounce Indigenous words and phrases (Youtube can be very helpful for this).

Guidelines and Recommendations for Teaching about Settler Colonialism

The same caveats apply here.

• Allow your Indigenous students to opt-out. Not only are they constantly bombarded with this information on a regular basis, but they do not need to be put in a position of teaching their peers about their historic and continued oppression. Keep in mind also that many subjects that are discussed in history classes have personal meaning for many Indigenous students, so it’s a good idea to give them a head’s up about when you will be discussing these topics (like residential schools or the Numbered Treaties), and give them permission to miss class if they want.
• Avoid turning class discussions into “both sides” debates (especially role-playing court cases). These debates tend to alienate Indigenous students and re-perpetuate the impacts of settler colonialism.
  • Some good discussion ground rules that are frequently used in similar contexts include:
    • 1. Listen actively — respect others when they are talking.
    • 2. Speak from your own experience instead of generalizing (“I” instead of “they,” “we,” and “you”).
    • 3. Do not be afraid to respectfully challenge one another by asking questions, but refrain from personal attacks — focus on ideas.
    • 4. Participate to the fullest of your ability — community growth depends on the inclusion of every individual voice.
    • 5. The goal is not to agree — it is to gain a deeper understanding. {2}
• It often helps to include some kind of warning at the beginning of the lecture, particularly if you come from a marginalized group. For instance here is the one that Andrea uses:
  • You are free to disagree with my comments in this lecture.
  • This lecture is informed by the common consensus among Canadian historians with respect to the history of colonialism in Canada
  • Particularly since the publication of the TRC findings, scholars and the general public alike have been tasked with decolonization.
• Anticipate that, for some students, this topic will be emotionally difficult. Make space for all of the feelings, good and bad. Provide emotional aftercare (special office hours for people who want to talk, etc…)
• Ground your discussion in the place you live in or teach in. This will help make the topic much more immediate and relevant to your students.
• Once students have an understanding of what settler colonialism is, have them consider the way it continues in the present.
• Take care of yourself. Understand that a lot of emotional labour goes into facilitating these necessary and sometimes difficult discussions.

{2} These guidelines appear in numerous forms across the internet. We have reproduced them here, but would like to be clear that we did not come up with them. For more information, please go here.

Student FAQs and How to Answer Them

These are some of the most common questions we’ve received on this subject from students.

• Didn’t we win the war/conquer Indigenous peoples?

No, “we” didn’t.  There was no single moment or battle that has shaped the course of Indigenous and settler relationships in this place that we call Canada. Keep in mind that contact and colonialism occurred over the course of more than five centuries, with some Inuit communities not contacted by settlers until the 1920s. It’s impossible to generalize across such vast distances and times. It would be more accurate to say that starting in the late 18th century, the British (and later Canadian) governments embarked on a mission to assimilate and eliminate Indigenous peoples by whatever means necessary, be it forcible enfranchisement, starvation, or genocide. While these efforts have been devastating on Indigenous peoples, the process has always been partial and incomplete. Indigenous peoples have always fought against and resisted these pressures, and continue to do so to this day.

• Didn’t the British/Canadian government purchase this land from Indigenous peoples?

Nope. Again, it’s impossible to generalize in this case due to the the vast geographic and temporal ranges. When individuals talk  about “purchasing land,” they are often referring to the treaty process. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the treaty process actually involved.  The first thing to keep in mind is that settlers and Indigenous peoples have two different attitudes regarding the meaning of treaties. Settlers believed that land can be owned, and subdivided into parcels. They did not recognize that Indigenous peoples held title to the land, but in order to prevent any problems down the road, they wanted Indigenous peoples to surrender any claims to the land in return for gifts or annual payments. Indigenous peoples believe that no one can own the land, because it is divinely created. In their eyes, treaties confirmed that they held the land, as stewards for future generations. They sought to secure and protect land for the future, while allowing some settlers to live alongside them. Thus treaties were intended as pacts of friendship, peace, and mutual support, not the abandonment of their rights and interests.

For example, in Eastern Canada, Indigenous peoples and settlers (first the French, then the British) signed several agreements outlining how they could share the land. One of the most famous of these agreements is the Two Row Wampum, which visually depicts two boats going down a stream side by side, never intersecting. One boat represents Indigenous peoples, while the other represents settlers. Each group governed themselves, and shared the land on the basis of friendship and respect.

The situation is more complex elsewhere in Canada. Much of Ontario, the Prairies, parts of Northern Canada, as well as much of Vancouver Island, are now covered by treaties signed between Indigenous communities and settler governments throughout the nineteenth and early 20th centuries (Nunavut being an exception). Many Indigenous communities were forced into signing these treaties in order to receive assistance and protection, since their way of life was being systematically destroyed by the Canadian government. What’s more, while Indigenous peoples entered into these agreements in good faith, representatives from the Canadian government did not. They routinely broke promises that they made, since their main objective was to open these lands for more settlers.

It is important to remember as well that many parts of Canada, including most of BC, are not covered by treaties or land sharing agreements. Settlers living in these areas are, by their own laws, illegal squatters. However, many Indigenous communities and the provincial and federal governments are in the process of negotiating treaties to cover these areas.

• Can’t Indigenous peoples just make stuff up in their oral histories to get what they want?

The short answer is no. This is an attitude based both on a fundamental misunderstanding of Indigenous oral tradition, as well as how primary sources work. First of all, most Indigenous communities in this place we now call Canada record their histories orally. In some communities, certain individuals will be tasked with remembering these histories, and ensuring that they are passed on accurately to future generations. These are not stories that are told for entertainment purposes, but rather to record and transmit important information that is vital for the continued survival of Indigenous communities. The idea that someone would just “make something up to get what they want” is a violation of this sacred trust.

What’s more, as archaeologists, historians, and other scholars have begun working with Indigenous peoples, particularly with elders and knowledge keepers, they’ve discovered that Indigenous oral traditions line up exactly with both historical accounts as well as scientific evidence of past environmental events. There are numerous examples, with the Franklin Expedition being only one of the most recent.  

Second, some individuals believe that written texts are inherently more “trustworthy” than oral histories. But this is not correct. The information that a person records is shaped not only by their worldview, but also the message they are trying to send, who the intended recipients are, and a whole host of other factors. For instance, if you were writing a report to your boss, you usually want to depict events in a flattering light. But this might not actually reflect reality.

•  Aren’t we all immigrants, including Indigenous peoples?

No. Indigenous oral tradition records that Indigenous peoples have been here since time immemorial. What this means is that Indigenous peoples have always lived in North America, or for so long that the exact number of years is irrelevant. While there are settlers alive today whose ancestors came to North America five hundred years ago, this isn’t really comparable to the fact that Indigenous peoples have lived, worked, and died on this continent for tens of thousands of years.

Many people who bring up this question also talk about the Bering Land Straight theory. There is currently no historical or scientific consensus on how or when Indigenous peoples came to North America (although we are definitely sure that Europeans didn’t arrive first). As many scholars have noted, the debate on “when” Indigenous peoples came, as well as announcements of new “discoveries” about ancient archaeological sites are inherently problematic because they privilege scientific information over Indigenous ways of knowing. As one scholar put it, “‘we’ve always been here’ [should be] good enough.”

• What is the relationship of other oppressed racialized people to settler colonialism? For example, what about Chinese people who were targeted by discriminatory and racist laws?

Strictly speaking, all peoples who are not Indigenous, fall under the category of “settler.” But the reality is a lot more complicated.

In Canada, it is English speaking white people who hold institutional power. That means that those of us who are white and English speaking benefit from racism and are protected from feeling its effects.

Black peoples and people of colour don’t hold the institutional power that whiteness confers to white people. The ancestors of many of these individuals came to Canada against their will, (such as as African slaves); as a result, their relationship to Indigenous people in Canada is different than what we’re describing here. Others came to Canada as refugees, fleeing oppression in their homelands. Each of these peoples have their own distinct histories and relationships with Indigenous peoples, and, further, “settler colonialism and antiblackness [are] entwined historical and contemporary social structures.” Some scholars in this area argue that Black peoples and people of colour should still be considered settlers, because they do benefit from settler colonialism (albeit not to the same extent as white settlers). However, other scholars argue that this designation ignores the complicated histories of Black peoples and people of colour and the fact that settler societies like Canada are deeply racist, and unfairly assigns blame to people who did not come to North America by choice.

However, as two white women, we are neither qualified nor in a position to make a judgement call here.

Do More: Decolonizing Your Syllabus

Talking about settler colonialism is a good place to start. But we would also encourage you to go further by rethinking how and what you teach more generally. This subject is deserving of its own blog post, but here are some suggestions to get you started:

• De-centre the historical experiences of settlers.
  • Break away from that more traditional historical narrative! Andrea likes to start her pre-confederation surveys, for example, by talking about the American World System around the year 1000 C.E.
  • Similarly, integrate Indigenous history throughout your course, no matter what your topic is. Make Indigenous peoples the centre.
• Emphasize Indigenous agency, resistance, and activism whenever possible.
• Talk about the historical narratives that reinforce settler colonialism in the present.
• Use readings by Indigenous authors and show films with Indigenous directors, writers, and actors.
• Take the UBC MOOC on “Reconciliation through Indigenous Education.” Not only is it free, but you can complete it at your own pace!

Becoming an Ally/Concrete Actions

A discussion of allyship is beyond the scope of this blog post. Keylsey Raynard’s piece on a recent talk by Chantelle Bryson, “Allyship in the Context of Indigenous Rights,” contains a lot of useful information. As Bryson notes, you cannot give yourself the title of “ally.” Instead, “with a continuous commitment to building relationships with Indigenous peoples and communities, you may be invited to act as an ally and to use your privilege to amplify the voices and concerns of others.” If you seek to become an ally, Bryson outlines three particularly important recommendations:

1. Do “continually advocate for discussions about Indigenous peoples to be centered around the actual lived experiences of these communities and the sources that support these experiences.”
2. Do talk to other non-indigenous people about “privilege, oppression, and colonialism.”
3. And finally, don’t take up space. Sometimes the most important thing to do is “[pass] the mic and [get] out of the way.”

For more information on concrete actions you can take in your journey to become an ally, we recommend the following sources:

• Forge connections with your Indigenous neighbhours
• ReconciliACTION – How Settlers Can Support Indigenous Peoples Daily
• A Statement on Structural Racism in Canada
• 150 Acts of Reconciliation for the Last 150 Days of Canada’s 150

Recommendations for Learning More

* Particularly important works. If you can only read a couple of things, read these.

Where possible, links have been provided.

Settler Colonialism in Canada

• Kristine Alexander, “Childhood and Colonialism in Canadian History,” History Compass 14, no. 9 (2016): 397-406.
• An Antane-Kapeh, Je Suis une Maudite Sauvagesse/Eukuan Nin Matshimanitu Innu-Iskueu, (Ottawa: Leméac, 1976).
• *Emma Battell Lowman and Adam J. Barker, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada (Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2015).
• Marie Battiste, Decolonizing Education: Nourishing the Learning Spirit, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013).
• Deni Ellis Béchard and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Kuei, je te salue: conversation sur le racisme, (Montreal:  Les Éditions Écosociété, 2016).
•  Sean Carleton, “Colonizing Minds: Public Education, the ‘Textbook Indian,’ and Settler Colonialism in British Columbia, 1920-1970,” BC Studies nop. 169 (Spring 2011): 101-130.
• Ryan Eyford, White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West (Vancouver: UBC Pres, 2016).
• Adam Gaudry, “Fantasies of Sovereignty: Deconstructing British and Canadian Claims to Ownership of the Historic North-West,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 46-74.
• Patrice Groulx, Pièges de la mémoire: Dollard des Ormeaux, les Amérindiens et nous (Hull: Vents D’Ouest, 1998).
• Emma LaRocque, When The Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2010).
• *Arthur Manuel, Unsettling Canada: Rebuilding Indigenous Nations (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015).
  • Parts 1, 2, and 3 are particularly well-suited for undergraduate students as well
• *Arthur Manuel, with Ronald M. Derrickson, The Reconciliation Manifesto: Recovering the Land, Rebuilding the Economy (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 2017).
• Lee Maracle, My Conversations with Canadians (Toronto: BookThug, 2017).
• *Paulette Regan and Taiaiake Alfred, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014).
•  Sarah Rotz, “‘They took our beads, it was a fair trade, get over it’: Settler Colonial Logics, Racial Hierarchies and Material Dominance in Canada,” Geoforum 82 (2017): 158-169.
• Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).
• Murray Sinclair, What We Have Learned: Principles of Truth and Reconciliation (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2015.)
• Owen Toews, Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg (Winnipeg: ARP Books, forthcoming).
• Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40.
• *Chelsea Vowel, Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada (Newburyport: Portage and Main Press, 2017).
•  Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409.

Settler Colonialism Outside Canada

• Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died For Your Sins,(New York: Macmillian, 1969).
• Laura Hurwitz and Shawn Bourque, “Settler Colonialism Primer,” Unsettling America: Decolonization in Theory and Practice, June 6, 2014.
• Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
• Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017)
• L. Veracini, “Understanding colonialism and settler colonialism as distinct formation,”. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 16 no. 5 (2014):615–33.

Additional resources

• Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples
• Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action
• United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
• Indigenous Canada Online Course 
• Media Indigena Podcast
• The Henceforward Podcast
• The Think Indigenous Podcast
• The University of Alberta Faculty of Law Faculty Blog
• âpihtawikosisân
• Native-Land.ca
• Facing Canada

Some Recommendations for Student Readings

*This is a very partial list of both personal favourites, and recommendations from friends and colleagues (see below for acknowledgements!)

• Adam Barker, “Deathscapes of Settler Colonialism: The Necro-Settlement of Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, prepublished January 23, 2018: 1-17.
• Kristin Burnett, Travis Hay, and Lori Chambers, “Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Peoples and Food: Federal Indian policies and nutrition programs in the Canadian North since 1945,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 17, no. 2 (Summer 2016).
• Emilie Cameron, “Indigenous Spectrality and the Politics of Post-Colonial Ghost Stories,” Cultural Geographies 15, no. 2 (2008): 383-393.
• Sarah Carter, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies, (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016).
• Adam Gaudry and Darryl Leroux, “White Settler Revisioning and Making Métis Everywhere: The Evocation of Métissage in Quebec and Nova Scotia,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 116-142.Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst, “Colonial Encounters at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: “Unsettling” the Personal Photograph Albums of Andrew Onderdonk and Benjamin Leeson,” Journal Of Canadian Studies 49, no. 2 (Spring 2016): 227-267
• Victoria Jackson, “Silent Diplomacy: Wendat Boys’ ‘Adoptions’ at the Jesuits Seminary 1636-1642,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 27, no. 1 (2016): 139-168.
• John S. Long, Richard J. Preston, Katrina Srigley, Lorraine Sutherland, “Sharing the Land at Moose Factory in 1763,” Ontario History 109, no. 1 (Autumn 2017): 238-262.
• Adele Perry, Aqueduct: Colonialism, Resources, and the Histories We Remember (Winnipeg: ARP, 2016)
• Adele Perry, Colonial Relations: The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth Century Imperial World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
• Sharon Wall, “Totem Poles, Teepees, and Token Traditions : ‘Playing Indian’ at Ontario Summer Camp, 1920-1955,” Canadian Historical Review 86, no. 3 (205): 513-544.

Resources for Talking About the Stanley Decision

• Idle No More – Discussion Guide: Justice for Colten Boushie
• Groundwork for Change – Justice for Colten
• The Keyboard Warriors Handbook to #JusticeforColten

Films

• 270 Years of Resistance
• Angry Inuk
• Colonization Road
• The Pass System
• ‘Reel Injun’
• @shuabert’s list of films by Indigenous directors, writers, and actors

Really Smart and Awesome People to Follow on Twitter

• Chelsea Vowel
• Darryl Leroux
• Chris Andersen
• Kim TallBear
• Daniel Heath Justice
• Alicia Elliott
• Joanne Hammond
• Erica Violet Lee
• Veldon Coburn
• Robert Jago
• Paul Seesequasis
• Ian Mosby
• Ryan McMahon
• Eve Tuck
• Zoe Todd
• Kelly Black
• Sarah Hunt
• Jesse Wente
• Adam Barker
• Emma Battell Lowman
• Sheila Larocque
• Idle No More
• Russ Diabo

We hope that you found this blog post to be useful! While it can be challenging to teach on the subject of settler colonialism in Canada, it is vitally important. 

We would like to extend a special thanks to Catherine Larochelle, @rcormeau, Karina Vernon, Sean Carleton, Ian Mosby, Kristine Alexander, Adele Perry, Sarah Rain, Sam Mclean, Anne Janhunen, Georgia Sitara, Krystl Raven, Carling Beninger, Heather Stanley, Kristian Hogan, Pete Anderson, Erin Millions, Maddie Knickerbocker, Skylee-Storm Hogan, Andrew Watson, and Amy Blanding for their help compiling this list of resources.  Extra special thanks to Maddie Knickerbocker, whose guidance has been invaluable in the writing of this blog post. Seriously, our community is awesome, and we are privileged to be a part of it. 

Finally,  I am so grateful that Sarah was willing to co-author this blog post with me. It was a pleasure and a privilege to work with her! Thank you again! Please make sure you follow her on Twitter @AllYorkNoPlay!

If you did enjoy this blog post or found it useful, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice! And don’t forget to check back on Friday for our regular look at upcoming publications in the field of Canadian history. See you then!

In the coming weeks, the site will be taken offline. The material won’t be lost: Andrea is in the process of building a Pressbook to house the content, and the website itself has been archived.

To mark the occasion, we’ll be revisiting some of the most memorable posts from Unwritten Histories—the ones that challenged assumptions, opened up new conversations, and continue to resonate.

October 31, 2017

Note from Andrea: When I found out that Stephanie is doing her dissertation on the history of witchcraft in early French Canada, I immediately started harassing asking her to do a special blog post about her work for Halloween. Because how super cool is that topic? And, kind person that she is, she has obliged. Enjoy!

By Stephanie Pettigrew

I spent the first few years of my life in Cheticamp, Nova Scotia. After moving with my parents to Sydney, I channeled my teenage resentment into learning as much as I could about my real home at the library. This is where I first heard the story of the Cheticamp witches, in an old collection of Cape Breton ghost stories. Around the turn of the twentieth century, two warring camps in the village, the Acadians and the Jerseys, would take turns casting spells upon each other. The Jerseymen had their witch, and the Acadians had their “counter-witch.” When the Jerseys were displeased with someone in the community, they would respond with witchcraft, and the battle would begin. For example, if a fisherman didn’t come in with the expected haul, he might come home to find the family cow had stopped milking. He would call the “good” Acadian witch to solve the problem, and “unbewitch” the cow. There was one particularly amusing story of the Acadian witch getting particularly frustrated and enchanting a number of buckets to chase after the suspected Jersey witch.[1]

I had never heard of any of this growing up, and my grandmother didn’t think it was important. Having grown up in a fishing family, I think my focus on the past worried her a bit. She wanted me to be a woman of the future, with an education and the ability to depend only on myself and nobody else. We did, however, live next door to the run-down Anglican church, which by my time was an extremely spooky place, and my dad has told me stories about using his shotgun to scare off Satanists. But since Satanists are not witches, I’ll move on.

Fast forward several years, and I came across a casual mention of the 1684 witchcraft trial of Jean Campagnard in Beaubassin, Acadie.

I nearly jumped out of my chair. If you can imagine me yelling “WHAT!” and spilling my coffee everywhere, that was essentially my reaction. I had no idea that Acadia had ever had a witchcraft trial. None. And a passing mention in a book that I can’t even remember the title of now was not going to be it for me – I needed to read that trial. It turns out that Jean Campagnard was Acadie’s only prosecuted witchcraft case. An expert dyke builder from Aunis, he was accused of causing the death of his employer by blowing a mysterious substance into his eyes. My favourite part of the case is during the confrontation, when one of the witnesses has his testimony read out loud

“The witness states that he saw the accused spread mysterious seeds into the marsh while reciting an incantation and the next fall he had a terrible crop,” and Campagnard replied, “He doesn’t need magic to be a terrible farmer.”

So of course, this led me down the academic rabbit hole, and now here we are.

When most people think about witchcraft in early colonial North America, they immediately think of Salem, Massachusetts. In fact, those trials are so ubiquitous that I don’t even need to explain what I am talking about. But witchcraft and witchcraft trials were also relatively common in another part of early colonial North America: French Canada. However, these two locations had very different experiences with witch trials. So in today’s blog post, I am going to talk about the history of witchcraft and witchcraft trials in colonial French Canada and share some of my favourite stories!

Beyond Salem

While we most famously associate witchcraft law with Britain and Spain, many other countries, including France, also had witchcraft laws that were unique to each particular location. French witchcraft laws were very different from the British models. For one thing, because of the prevalence of witchcraft cases in certain areas, anyone found guilty of witchcraft, a capital offence, had the right to appeal to the provincial parlement.[2] So, for example, if someone was found guilty of witchcraft in Rouen in 1645, and sentenced to death, they would have the right to appeal their case to the provincial parlement of Normandy, which acted as the higher court. To avoid the costs of appeals, most individuals found guilty of witchcraft (and blasphemy, an accusation which was often intertwined with French witchcraft accusations) were condemned to banishment rather than death – a condemnation which could still be appealed, and was, but wasn’t payable by the community magistrates. Rather, it had to be paid out of pocket by the accused (or the condemned, as it were). The French courts also outlawed all forms of spectral evidence; “swimming” a witch to see if she would float, finding a witch’s mark, or testifying to how she could fly, change into some form of animal, or had visited you in a dream to torment you – popular forms of evidence in English courts – were not admissible in France. Essentially, anything that was deemed impossible in the natural world, or against God’s law, was deemed impossible by French judiciaries and therefore not credible evidence. Even someone confessing to witchcraft was deemed suspicious. In order to convict someone of witchcraft, tangible evidence needed to be presented. In the case of an individual accused of using witchcraft to poison someone, the actual poison would need to be presented in court – either a mysterious powder, potion, or even a toad would be considered damning. This is in direct contrast to the British, who, in the same era, were still condemning witches based on the swimming test.[3] By the time French colonization has reached the level where there is a formal legal process, there was already more than fifty years of precedent for witchcraft proceedings in the French legal framework, which was transported to the colony. While the New England colony is often seen as a separate place with separate laws, New France was very much an extension of the metropole. (That’s a controversial view to hold these days, but it’s true.)

Sexy Witches

It will perhaps come as no surprise to find out that sex is a frequent theme in the magic of New France. The first witchcraft accusation in the records of New France dates from 1661. A Local man, René Besnard, was accused of using the “nouement à l’aiguillette” (which can be translated as knotting the needle) on a young couple in the town, Pierre Gadois and Marie Pontonnier. The nouement à l’aiguillette was an extremely popular and feared spell in early modern France, used by jealous rivals to cause impotence in newly wedded grooms. It involved tying a piece of string three times while reciting an incantation, and was so feared, in fact, that getting married in secret, in the middle of the woods or in the dead of night, or both, to avoid possible rival witchcraft, was not unknown.[4]

The documents for Besnard’s trial are actually pretty scant, which is probably understandable considering the courts are only barely established at this point. All we have are his interrogation, which at the very least makes a couple of things clear. First, much of the trial centred on why Pontonnier and Gadois had been married for three years, and yet had still not provided a child. Besnard is interrogated regarding the subject of his conversations with Marie Pontonnier. It is not clear who started the rumours of magical intervention being the cause, but it’s definitely being talked about. Finally, after being asked over and over again if Besnard had told Pontonnier that he would remove the effects of the spell if she would have him over to her house while her husband was away, he admits

“yes, I did say that, but not because I did the magic – it was only because I wanted to enjoy her.”[5]

Books are Dangerous

Often witchcraft came alongside other charges, as was the case with Anne Lamarque, a cabaretière (tavern-keeper) in 1680s Montréal who was not only accused of witchcraft, but also debauchery, adultery, and suspected infanticide for good measure. Anne’s records are long, complicated, and gossipy. If you’ve ever lived in a small town, this trial will feel intimately familiar to you. Her neighbours are testifying to how often her husband is spending the night at the house, how often she is taking walks with suspected lovers, how frequently certain men are walking in and out of her tavern. But most importantly, she’s accused of having a magic book, or a grimoire. The doctor in particular is concerned with this book; he not only sees it, but reads some of it. He tells the court that the passage he read has to do with “making people love you,” and it disturbed him so much that he didn’t read any further. It didn’t disturb him so much that he refrained from telling the entire town, though. In fact, every witness who is asked if they know of the existence of such a book and who answers positively says, “Yes, I know of that book, the doctor told me about it, but I’ve never seen it.” The rumour begins to spread that Lamarque is using the spell the doctor saw in her book to draw all the young men to her tavern, and is debauching all the youth of Ville Marie with her magic and her sex.

Even soldiers were not immune to witchcraft charges. Three soldiers were caught with love spells in their pockets in 1699 in Trois Rivières, and subsequently charged with witchcraft. These spells were in the form of scrolls of paper with words written on them, but as part of the judgement was to burn the paper in question, sadly we’ll never know what the paper said. If it was anything like the counter-spells used by grooms who feared the nouement à l’aiguillette, it was likely bits of Latin written backwards. Lamarque’s grimoire, according to the doctor, had bits of Latin, French, and Greek mixed together. Love was obviously a huge concern for the witches of the seventeenth century.

The Best Laid Plans…

But by the eighteenth century, love (or sex) was less on the minds of the magically inclined. The 1742 trial of Charles Havard condemns him for the blasphemous use of a crucifix in a divination spell. A neighbour had lost a sum of money, and he promises to find it using a rather creative spell involving oil, ash, herbs, an upside-down crucifix which he sets on fire, and a mirror. Much to his error, he invited pretty much the entire neighbourhood to witness his feat, and like a true showman, had set the proper atmosphere with a banked fire and spooky candlelight. They all made sure to attest to every single minute detail when testifying against his blasphemous acts in court afterwards, especially since he failed to find the money.[6]

I wasn’t going to include the story of Jean Boudor, but Andrea asked me to (Andrea: can you blame me?). The actual charge against Boudor is blasphemy, but I’m classifying it as witchcraft cause it’s weird. A well-connected merchant with plenty of well-connected friends in 1680s Montréal, Boudor decided to have a dinner party. His chosen form of entertainment was his drunken servant, who got so inebriated he passed out. On the dinner table. So Boudor set up a crucifix, and his servant into position as if he were Christ, and “resurrected” him using a bucket of cold water, thereby re-enacting the resurrection of Christ. There were numerous complaints from those in attendance to the Montréal judiciary.[7]

La Corriveau

Of course, the most famous witch in all of New France was La Corriveau. The real-life woman, Marie Joseph La Corriveau, was accused and condemned of murdering her second husband in 1763. I find the popularity of La Corriveau mystifying. She’s on beer, she has songs, I think there’s a television show or a movie or something. French Canada can’t name any other witch, but something like 90% of them know about La Corriveau.

LA CORRIVEAU WAS NEVER ACCUSED OF WITCHCRAFT.

The whole mythos of La Corriveau and her supposed witchcraft evolved decades after her death. She was the first woman executed by the English regime in Québec, and I think that’s where her mystique comes from – they used a gibbet to hang her dead body, and the device had never been seen before in French Canada. She was actually accused of murdering her husband. Nothing in her trial speaks even a whisper of witchcraft. (If you want to see her trial documents, you can find them here.) I am almost certain the primary reason the association with witchcraft actually originates from Salem, and the iconography of the gibbet. So I guess you could call it ironic that French Canada’s most well-known witch is not a witch but is thought a witch because of English iconography. There are lots of interesting, actual witchcraft cases in French Canada’s archives, but for some reason, it’s the one that was never accused of witchcraft that gets the most attention. Go figure, I guess.

If you’d like to know anything else, please feel free to ask any questions you’d like! In the meantime, Happy Halloween!

That’s it for today! We hope you enjoyed this blog post. If you did, please consider sharing it on the social media platform of your choice. And as always, don’t forget to check back on Sunday for our regular Canadian History Roundup. Until then, have a Happy Halloween!

Notes

[1] For more information on the Cheticamp witches, you can consult the masters thesis written by Elizabeth Beaton, held at the Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University.

[2] This determination was made in 1624. Alfred Soman “The Parlement of Paris and the Great Witch Hunts (1565-1640)” Sixteenth Century Journal, 9:2 (30-44)

[3] Soman “The Parlement of Paris and the Great Witch Hunts (1565-1640)”

[4] Kevin Robbins, “Magical Emasculation, Popular Anticlericalism, and the Limits of the Reformation in Western France circa 1590” Journal of Social History 31:1 (61-83)

[5] All primary source material originate from the BANQ; the Montréal trials from the Vieux-Montréal branch, the Campagnard trial at the Québec branch (as well as digitized on their online Pistard search engine). Interrogation of René Besnard, 1660.

[6] The trial of Charles Havard, Montréal 1742. BANQ.

[7] The trial of Jean Boudor, Montreal 1689. BANQ.