Invisible histories
Published by Sabotabby July 24th, 2007 in Feminism, Historical Wankery, Shame on you for not being rich white and privilegedThe latest issue of This Magazine has a fantastic article on Canada’s most influential rebellions. From a list of 89, This talks about four in detail: Oka (1990), the Abortion Caravan (1970), the Ford Strike (1945), and the Fraser Canyon War (1858).
Canadian history, as taught in high schools, is intentionally dry, written with the apparent purpose of turning kids off the subject so that they won’t look into it too deeply. Where textbooks depart from the litany of Prime Ministers’ names and colonial explorations, they will mention the Red River Rebellion or devote a paragraph to “the role of women.” Labour history and civil rights struggles, beyond another paragraph on the Winnipeg General Strike, seldom gets a mention at all.
Stories like the following, about the Abortion Caravan, are never told:
Pantyhose were donned. Hair was done. Makeup was applied. More than 30 women put on the camouflage of respectability to infiltrate the House of Commons. In those innocent days before metal detectors, each carried a chain in her purse.
…
Ellen Woodsworth remembers how hard it was to get the chain out of her purse quietly. Once shackled to her chair, she says she looked down at all of the men in the House of Commons and was flooded with a powerful sense of her mission to raise women’s concerns.
…
Just before 3 p.m., one of the women stood up and started giving the group’s speech. As the guards closed in on her, another stood up in another gallery and continued. One guard told The Globe and Mail’s Clyde Sanger that the women were “popping up all over the place.” They shut down the House of Commons, and the Vancouver Sun reported it was the first adjournment provoked by a gallery disturbance in its 103-year history.
Or this one, from 1918:
Just six weeks after the Armistice was signed in 1918, a group of Canadian soldiers mobilized for battle in a brand-new arena of war: Siberia. But on the day of their departure, Quebecois conscripts in the Canadian-Siberian Expeditionary Force mutinied in Victoria, B.C. The soldiers’ resistance to fighting in Russia was reinforced by the radical elements of B.C.’s working class, which had a strong community of support for the Russian Revolution and its ideologies. It was decades before the Cold War, but already, Canada’s west was becoming the battleground for western democracy and communism.
I don’t think there’s a Canadian equivalent to Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States; there really should be. Impressive collections like this are a good start to producing an authentic and comprehensive historical narrative. Go read it!
A whole paragraph devoted to women? Women were only worth a small inset box in our textbook!
A friend of mine is co-writing a book on Nova Scotia and the construction of an anti-modern identity. “In the Province of History” I think is the tentative title. Some really interesting stuff in there, particularly regarding the tourist industry and the advances of capitalism.
Apperception, sometimes you even get a paragraph in several chapters devoted to women. Plus the odd text feature on An Important Canadian Woman, such as Nellie McClung or … ummm … Nellie McClung.
Oh, and I think our grade-10 text had a feature on the Persons Case, in the chapter on the 1920s.
“Canadian history, as taught in high schools, is intentionally dry, written with the apparent purpose of turning kids off the subject so that they won’t look into it too deeply.”
I don’t think they have to try very hard to make Canadian history boring.
Yeah, for us it was something little box off to the side that said, “Meet Molly Pitcher!! Hey!”
And now, back to your regularly scheduled hagiography dead, white, rich, powerful men (with really cool 19th century facial hair).
Seroj, Canadian history, like the history of any country, is the account of what people did, how they did it, what drove them to it, and, how we got into this mess. Like the history created by any group of people, it’s full of stories, some humdrum, some rich and strange, some important only to their principals, some whose outcomes touched the lives of millions, and really contributed to just how fucked up things are right now.
I’m not sure what’s inherently boring about that—what do you find boring about Canadian history, as opposed to the history that accrued in any other place? Or do you just find the study of history inherently dull?
Even if we look solely at shit-disturbances, This Magazine’s list of 89 is anything but boring, and it’s not exhaustive. There are stories enough to keep storytellers, writers, poets, balladeers, and filmmakers busy for a long, long time. And the more recent uprisings have their roots in stories that took place further back in the colony-turned-country’s history.
But, for some reason, educators sticking to the official, approved versions don’t find the stories or the explanations, and stick to what apperception has called the “regularly scheduled hagiography.” (for which term I may have to have his gay internet babies). In doing so, they do students a disservice, not only convincing them that Canadian history is boring, but also erasing its relevance, and not really explaining how we got this fucked up.
Canada’s written history doesn’t go back very far, of course. So if you find anything that isn’t, for example, medieval Europe boring, of course you’re going to find Canadian history dull. Canadian history isn’t an especially laudable history—there’s a lot of conquest and colonialism, bad-faith dealing, crass mercantilism, and Euro-centric policy making.
A few examples of things that rarely get into textbooks, that I’ve been fascinated by:
Contrary to what we’re taught in schools, slavery existed in what would become Canada; most of the very early settlement at Montréal was burned down in a fire that was alleged to have been started by a black slave woman who was trying to escape with her soldier-lover. She was tortured by the French legal system, and burned to death. So torture, too, is a part of Canadian history, which I find sad and gross, but undeniable.
The infuriating, sad way that the entire history of European dealing with aboriginal people reflects prevailing social, political, and cultural ideologies, from first contact through, trade, religious missions, “treaties,” reserves, residential schools, and the current quagmire of land-claims, Indian status, self-government, and Aboriginal policy. It was all exploitive, paternalistic, euro-centric, appallingly effective at destroying the cultural identites of entire peoples. Textbooks touch on this, but rarely delve into the differences in approaches of English and French settlers, missionaries, administrators, traders.
The adaptations that European settlers from relatively developed, industrialized societies made to living in relative isolation in “frontier” conditions. What happens at the intersections of cultures, and how isolation breeds innovation in a way very different from urban innovation—Métis, and Cape-Breton music, for example.
The slow, halting emergency of a national identity and set of shared ideologies (such as they may be) in a country that is a strange, relatively modern pluralistic, artificial construction: how politics, economics, and industry worked (or didn’t) to, for better or worse, create a political entity from a buncha unwanted, expensive colonies. (Note, I pass no judgement on whether our political ideology, such as it is or may be, is of any value to anyone.)
There’s a lot more to Canadian history than the fur trade, Laura Secord and her Cow, Sir John A., and the trans-Canada railway and the town of Frank, buried under half a mountain. Anyone who decries the mess we’re in now really would be well served to look into what people did to creat it.