In this episode, I talk with Jean-Michel Turcotte, Acting Chief Historian of the Directorate of History and Heritage at the Department of National Defence and the convenor of the 2025 Shannon Lecture Series. We talk about Jean-Michel’s background, how that influenced the series theme of ‘Revisiting Canadian Armed Forces Experiences’ and some of on-going projects at the Directorate. We also discuss the changing nature of military history, incorporating more voices into the stories of Canada’s armed forces, and how those changes relate to broader historiographical trends.

The final session of the Shannon Lecture Series, entitled The Transnational Making of United Nations Peacekeeping by Brian Drohan, will take place on May 6 at 4p ET on Zoom. You can find more information here.

Historical Headline of the Week

Defence Stories, “Web portal to military historical documents open to the public.” June 11, 2024.

Sean Graham is a cultural historian, an Adjunct Professor at Carleton University, and a contributing editor with Activehistory.ca

Understanding the far-right is key to making sense of our political moment.

We are witnessing a resurgence of explicitly fascistic organizations, like the “active clubs” springing up in several Canadian cities, as well as strains of right-wing populism that clearly recall the tactics and rhetoric of historical fascism. Debates over the fascism label/analogy have tended to gravitate towards discussions of Donald Trump and Trumpism.

Similar conversations have been taking place in many contexts, however. In India, the affinities between the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and European fascism have been subject of serious discussion on the left for decades. Attending to Indian anti-fascist criticism and considering the common features and differences between contemporary far-right movements around the world can enrich our understanding of the global right and its relationship to historical fascism.

In one sense, the relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and fascism is not a question of analogy at all.

The BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s paramilitary parent organization, subscribe to a project explicitly inspired by European fascism. Hindutva, their guiding creed, is premised on the idea that India is a Hindu nation in which non-Hindu minorities live on sufferance. V.D. Savarkar, who defined modern Hindutva in the early twentieth century, greatly admired European fascism and fantasized that India’s Muslims “would have to play the part of the German Jews.” Hindutva’s ethnonationalist ambitions threaten many communities in India, but its proponents have always reserved a particular animus for India’s Muslims. Today’s Hindutva ideologues may be less likely to invoke Hitler and Mussolini as inspirations, but they embrace Savarkar as a national hero.

The contemporary Indian debate over fascism began in earnest in the early 1990s. The watershed moment in the political ascendancy of the BJP was the illegal 1992 demolition of a sixteenth century mosque in Ayodhya by party activists. Ensuing anti-Muslim riots killed hundreds, especially in Mumbai. In the wake of the violence, leftist activists and scholars drew pointed comparisons between the RSS-BJP and European fascism (Sumit Sarkar’s 1993 essay, “The Fascism of the Sangh Parivar” is a major intervention).

The violence and polarization only fuelled the BJP’s success; the party won its first national election six years later in 1998. This pattern of profiting from anti-Muslim violence has shaped Modi’s own career: he was propelled to national prominence by his notorious complicity in the 2002 pogroms in Gujarat, while he was Chief Minister of the state. Today, Modi presents himself abroad as a business-friendly reformer, but his twelve years in power have also been marked by the mass disenfranchisement of Muslims, intensifying repression in Kashmir, and a rise in mob violence and lynchings directed especially against Muslims and Dalits. 

Historian Jairus Banaji has drawn particular attention to the work of Arthur Rosenberg, a communist member of the Reichstag. Rosenberg’s 1934 essay, “Fascism as a Mass Movement,” distinguishes fascism from other reactionary political movements, above all by its mass character and strategic use of paramilitary violence. As Banaji argues, these features of fascism are disturbingly present in contemporary India. The RSS has been periodically banned since its founding in 1925, including in 1948 after one of its members assassinated Gandhi. Today, the paramilitary organization counts millions of members in its ranks and has managed to deeply embed itself in Indian civil society, operating through thousands of front organizations and affiliated groups including student associations, trade unions, charities, and more. Known for their marches and parades, RSS cadre have a well-earned reputation for instigating violence and harassing political opponents.

The RSS boasts an organizational infrastructure and capacity for mass mobilization that is unique among the global right—fascistic non-state actors elsewhere generally still belong to looser, inchoate networks, and are more likely to carry out lone-wolf attacks than coordinated assaults.

If the Indian context is in this sense, exceptional, there are other significant parallels between fascistic movements in India and the rest of the world. For example, they are united in their deluded fantasies of victimization; where white nationalists in the West promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, Hindutva activists imagine themselves on the defensive in a “demographic war” purportedly waged by Indian Muslims. While this conspiratorial paranoia is consistent with past fascisms, the far-right in India and elsewhere has generally dispensed with the utopianism of historical fascism. Supporters of far-right movements worldwide appear quite willing to accept business-as-usual austerity and rapacious capitalism to see their enemies humiliated. Modi’s rule, as Richard Seymour puts it, might be aptly described as “capitalism with pogromist characteristics.”

While the impulse to “provincialize Europe” typically takes the form of a positive reclamation of non-European traditions, Indian anti-fascist critics have long observed how claims to post/decolonial difference have been exploited by the Hindutva right. Understanding the global far-right demands serious attention to reactionary movements beyond the West. Far-right actors themselves recognize the connections between their movements; Trump advisor Steve Bannon has admiringly referred to Modi as “Trump before Trump.” Contemporary fascism consists of a diverse array of forces; to the extent that a “Fascist International” can be said to exist, it encompasses movements including MAGA, Zionism, and Hindutva, which are united in their shared violent ethnonationalism and Islamophobia. Any adequate left response to this challenge requires the development of global solidarities and a principled universalistic politics that stands firm against the rising tide of nationalism everywhere. History might suggest, however, that this is easier said than done.

In India, as in the United States, the electoral success of the extreme right has not seen the complete destruction of democratic institutions and dictatorial seizure of state power associated with classical fascism. Since 2014, the BJP has faced major challenges to its authority on the streets and, recently, at the polls: in 2024 the BJP lost its majority in the Lok Sabha and now leads a minority government. For some, this fact alone might seem to invalidate the fascism diagnosis. However, as Dilip Simeon argues, recent Indian history might helpfully serve to “dispel apocalyptic theorisations of fascism.” Rather than a “singular event,” in which political possibility is suddenly and definitively eclipsed, this is fascism as a “slow bleeding process”: a protracted corrosion of democratic institutions, increasing exposure to state and mob violence, and a chilling of public dissent.

We must remain alert, in short, to the dangers of fascism in the making. As Arundhati Roy puts it: “The division in opinions on the use of the term comes down to whether you believe that fascism became fascism only after a continent was destroyed and millions of people were exterminated in gas chambers, or whether you believe that fascism is an ideology that led to those high crimes – that can lead to those crimes – and that those who subscribe to it are fascists.”

Christopher Balcom defended his PhD in Social and Political Thought at York University in 2025.

This post is part of an activehistory.ca series “The Time of Monsters.” It looks at the challenges contemporary times pose to history and how historians can and have responded to it. Our aim is to highlight how history and historians can address matters such as denialism, the manipulation of public history, the appeal of authoritarianism and a host of other topics. The editors encourage submissions or personal reflections. If you are interested in contributing or even just finding out more about this series, please feel free to write to Andrew Nurse at anurse@mta.ca or Roberta Lexier at rlexier@mtroyal.ca.

You can find the first post in the series here.

Danielle Terbenche completed her PhD at the University of Waterloo. During her time there, Danielle co-founded the Tri-University Graduate Students’ Association, published two peer-reviewed papers, and won the tri-university history programme’s award for “Best Paper or Article submitted to a Scholarly Conference or Journal.” Her dissertation, “Public Servants or Professional Alienists?: Medical Superintendents and the Early Professionalization of Asylum Management and Insanity Treatment in Upper Canada, 1840-1865,” was supervised by Wendy Mitchinson, along with guidance from committee members Heather MacDougall and Doug McCalla.

Danielle went on to complete a post-doctoral fellowship at York University (2012-2014) that focused on pre-Confederation Upper Canada/Canada West and the history of 19th century mental health care in Canada.

In 2018, Danielle pivoted and undertook a psychotherapy degree at OISE. In particular, she was interested in helping people through those times when life doesn’t quite work out as planned and believed that while you grieved the road not travelled, you also redirected yourself in meaningful ways that helped you adjust and grow.

Danielle was an active member of her church and was able to bring her love for and expertise of history to that community. In 2015, she shared her experiences with the cemetery board at the church. In honour of her contributions and passion for history, Active History is reposting her blog, “More than “Prisoners”: Discovering Welfare History in Holy Trinity Cemetery, Thornhill.”

More than “Prisoners”

Five grave markers

In 2012, I began attending Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Thornhill, Ontario. After learning I was a historian, some church members invited me to join the cemetery board. During my first visit to the church’s historic cemetery, I was intrigued by five concrete crosses marking the graves of eight men, dating from 1928 to 1931. In a poor state of repair, and inscribed only with the names and death dates of the men, they looked nothing like the more elaborate marker that surrounded them, both historic and modern. At the time, I had no idea that over the next year, these crosses would lead me to an investigative journey of the history of early twentieth-century welfare institutions, social policy, homelessness, and unemployment. It was a project that demonstrated the hidden stories and social histories that may be represented through small, seemingly inconsequential artefacts. This article documents my search for answers about these mysterious gravestones.

Built c. 1829-30 on Yonge Street, Trinity Church (as it was formerly known) is the oldest church building still in use in the Anglican Diocese of Toronto. In 1950, the church was moved to Brooke Street, southwest of the original location; however, the cemetery remains at the original site on Yonge. Still in active use, Holy Trinity Cemetery contains several graves of historical significance to the Thornhill and Richmond Hill areas, including the grave of Colonel Robert Moodie, killed on Yonge Street near Montgomery’s Tavern during the 1837 Rebellion.

Holy Trinity Church

This history made me wonder if the five “mystery” crosses occupying a small rectangular plot of land towards the rear of the cemetery were historically significant. Age, weathering, and inappropriate repairs over eighty years had left them in a deteriorated condition; the names and death dates on some were barely visible. I wondered: Why were these graves so different? Who were these men buried in these plots? What was significant about the period 1928-31? Who installed the markers? Why were they not as structurally sound as other markers in the cemetery?

I asked about the graves at a cemetery board meeting and was told the men were “prisoners” from the Langstaff Industrial Farm. The farm, which opened in 1913 as an adjunct facility to ease overcrowding at Toronto’s Don Jail, operated as a minimum-security men’s prison for inebriates and petty criminals until it closed in 1958. It occupied a 386-acre property in the present area of Yonge and Highway 7, approximately 5 minutes drive north of Holy Trinity Cemetery. Inmates of Langstaff spent their days “productively” engaging in farm labour; most food for the institution was grown on-site. From 1915 to 1935 a women’s industrial farm operated at Concord under the same management, and men from Langstaff were transported daily to work its fields. I have spoken with a few senior, lifelong residents of Thornhill who recall seeing groups of uniformed men working in the Langstaff farm fields in the 1940s and 1950s. After the farm closed in 1958, a variety of ideas for using this land were proposed; in the 1960s it was a suggested as a site for the Toronto Zoo, but was rejected in favour of the Rouge Valley area of east Scarborough. The area is presently occupied by Highways 7, 407, rail lines, and shopping malls.

Langstaff Farm. City of Toronto Archives

With my academic interests focussed on Ontario social welfare institutions, I was interested in learning more about these burials, any background information about the men, and how so-called “prisoners” came to be buried in the cemetery. I was a bit skeptical that they were “prisoners,” at least in a criminal sense, since overcrowding was a problem that plagued most municipal and provincial institutions throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Inmates/patients with a variety of problems often coexisted in facilities designed to manage specific problems.

In 2013, the deteriorated condition of the crosses brought about an opportunity to research the history of these graves. Under the terms of the Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services Act, 2002 (FBCSA) Ontario cemeteries are required to ensure plot markers do not compromise public safety. It became necessary for Holy Trinity to take down the Langstaff crosses markers before they fell, potentially causing injury. The members of the cemetery board wished to replace the crosses for aesthetic, historical, and practical reasons. It did not seem proper to leave them laid flat, for some had double-sided inscriptions (such that the men’s names would be hidden); doing so also seemed to contradict the intended appearance of the monuments. Historical preservation was important since late-twentieth century redevelopment of the Langstaff property had erased all traces of the farm. These crosses were the only remaining physical indicator of the industrial farm’s history. Although it is my understanding that additional plots were purchased for the farm in other local cemeteries, no grave markers exist to indicate their presence. I suspect Holy Trinity Church installed the markers in its cemetery sometime in the 1930s.

The initial problem faced by the cemetery board was determining ownership of the plots, since the FBCSA requires permission of the plot owner in order to remove or replace any marker. Who owned these plots? The Langstaff farm was an institution under the jurisdiction of the Province of Ontario, but had been founded and funded largely by the City of Toronto. Even so, it was not clear that either the province or the city was the legal owner. Given that the farm closed more than sixty years ago, we anticipated that it might be challenging to establish ownership. Municipal borders have also changed considerably since the 1950s, with the cemetery now situated in the City of Vaughan. Intrigued, I volunteered to try to solve this historical and legal conundrum.

I began by trying to learn more about the men and their relationship to the institution. My first discovery was a November 1930 article in the Globe & Mail about Charles Flowers, one of the names appearing on the crosses. It indicated Flowers was a middle-aged man hit by a streetcar on Yonge Street near the farm; he died en route to hospital in Toronto and his body was sent to the morgue for a coroner’s inquest. The article stated “there was nothing on the man which would lead to his identification” except “a spectacle case found in his pocket, bearing the name ‘Charles Flower’ [sic]”. Since no local person seems to have identified Flowers, it suggested that he was not a Langstaff inmate. Confirmation of this fact would come later in my search.

Clues about the status of the other men emerged in documents related to the industrial farm. A 1926 Royal Commission report following an inquiry into Langstaff’s superintendent and mismanagement at the institution identified one problem to be the number of elderly inmates who “were not really prisoners but [were] sent to the gaol farm to give them refuge.” According to the report the men were “committed for vagrancy but in many instances this [was] only a matter of form to get them to the farm.” In other words, these men were homeless without any other means of support. An April 1931 Globe article about the relocation of Langstaff’s “indigent old men” to “proper institutions” confirmed the persistence of this issue into the next decade.

Using the information available about the graves from the Holy Trinity burial records (Anglican Diocese of Toronto Archives), I submitted a request to access the inmate files at the Archives of Ontario (currently protected under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act). References to admission circumstances, their ages, work history, and state of health led me to conclude that the men on the crosses were from this sector of inmates who had committed no crime other than being infirm and living on the street. They were jailed as a course of last resort when no public housing or sources of welfare support were available. Several of them seem to have been close to death at the time entered the farm.

The inmate records contained no references to a “Charles Flowers”. While this absence confirmed Flowers was not a Langstaff inmate, it more importantly indicated that the plots containing these burials and cross markers may have been purchased specifically for Langstaff’s displaced, indigent population. I believe City of Toronto officials decided to bury Flowers in this group of plots near the site of his death since they that had been purchased by the superintendent of the Langstaff Industrial Farm on behalf of the city.

The legal issue concerning replacement of the markers was greatly simplified by the indigent status of the men. Consultations with City of Toronto legal and real estate service divisions, and other city cemeteries revealed that in the case of indigent graves, all issues pertaining to plot and marker maintenance are the responsibility of the cemetery management. To this end, Holy Trinity had full freedom to decide the appearance of replacement markers. For advice concerning the appearance of the new markers, I contacted Marjorie Stuart, formerly Cemetery Co-ordinator for Toronto Branch of the Ontario Genealogical Society, and now Cemetery News editor for the Ontario Historical Society. Following her recommendations, the Holy Trinity cemetery board opted to create replicas of the original crosses with the same inscriptions. The only changes to be made on the new crosses – to be installed in the spring of 2015 – are corrections of some death dates, since the archival records revealed errors on the original crosses. A photo record has been taken to preserve the history of the former crosses, which were removed in September 2014.

Replacing the crosses

Yet, the indigent status of the men was important in ways that extended beyond the practicalities of marker replacement. No longer were the crosses only memorials of industrial approaches to prison management and the Langstaff farm as a penal institution. The grave markers were now historically significant as representations of the problems of unemployment and inadequate welfare provisions in Toronto during the early twentieth century. After World War I, unemployment had risen sharply with the collapse of wartime industries and the return of thousands of servicemen. It was a problem that would continue to worsen throughout the next two decades: an initial economic depression in 1920-21 brought numerous job losses, which multiplied after the crash of 1929 and the beginnings of the Great Depression.

By the 1920s, public employment bureaus could secure employment for only half of registrants, in Toronto leaving 3,000-15,000 men without work. In an era before unemployment insurance or other modern forms of support, social workers observed that many families were slowly starving. As the epidemic of unemployment spread, homelessness abounded. Toronto’s House of Industry – the city’s only “poor house” welfare institution – did not have the resources or space to accommodate all of the city’s homeless residents. Many indigent persons refused to enter the facility due to its reputation for harsh conditions and regimens of demanding, physical labour. By 1925, with no other options available, 16,500 people were housed in city jail cells, many of them unemployed ex-servicemen. Typically, these individuals were charged with vagrancy and given sentences of 3–6 months as a temporary housing measure. Such cases demonstrate how legal loopholes, however flawed, provided short-term solutions to prevailing welfare problems.

The elderly were particularly vulnerable once age or poor health rendered them unemployable. Family support systems had declined with the urbanization of the early twentieth century. Geographical distance of kin, the decline of farm inheritance, and poverty all contributed to old age becoming a much more precarious stage of life. Canada’s first old age pension scheme was not introduced until 1927 by the Liberal government of William Lyon Mackenzie King. The abundance of elderly men residing at the Langstaff Industrial Farm by the mid-1920s illustrates how common it was for elderly people to find themselves alone without a home or any source of support. Although not explicitly stated, the government commissioners investigating the farm’s management in the 1920s and 1930s were concerned that the farm was no longer primarily functioning as a prison, but rather as an old age home and rudimentary palliative care facility. Such was the case for the men in Holy Trinity’s plots, for whom old age pensions came too late since Ontario did not participate in the plan until 1929, which was then limited to persons over 70 years of age.

Given this social context, the decision to install these concrete crosses in Holy Trinity cemetery may be read as an act of dignity and grace, offering the men respect in death that was not given to them in the last part of their lives. From a present-day perspective, the Langstaff graves are a reminder of the persistence of homelessness and social isolation as cultural problems, and the continuing (and growing) need for support networks for seniors. Reflection on the attempted welfare and pension solutions of the 1920s and 1930 should lead us to ask ourselves what assistance or solutions we might contribute to alleviating this issue.

Danielle Terbenche completed a Ph.D. in History at the University of Waterloo in 2011 and recently finished a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at York University.

Further information:

To mark the church’s 185th anniversary and replacement of the markers, a special service celebrating the cemetery’s history will take place in Holy Trinity Cemetery on Sunday, May 31, 2015 at 1:30pm. Tours will be given after the service to identify graves of historical significance, including the Langstaff crosses. For further information please see the list of events on the church website.

Bryan D. Palmer and Gaetan Heroux, “‘Cracking the Stone’: The Long History of Capitalist Crisis and Toronto’s Dispossessed, 1830-1930”, Labour/Le Travail, 69 (Spring 2012).

James Struthers, The Limits of Affluence: Welfare in Ontario, 1920-1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994).

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.