This paper examines the debate over the teaching of Canadian history that has been in progress in Canada since the early 1990s. It considers four criticisms: schools do not teach enough Canadian history and students, therefore, do not know it; the history that is taught is no longer sufficiently national; social history has destroyed the old nation-building narrative and dwells on the negative rather than the positive aspects of Canada's past; and child-centred teaching and other pedagogical fashions have led teachers to devalue factual knowledge. Finally, it examines the proposals that have been advanced for the reform of history teaching in Canada.

Teaching history in schools: A Canadian debate

‘Far asunder there are those to whom my name is music’: Nineteenth-century Hudson’s Bay Company families in the British imperial world

This article argues that the (re-)constitution of diplomacy is intimately linked to gender and the practices of exclusion and inclusion of women and men over time. While the big debates in both aca...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14616742.2018.1483206

The gender turn in diplomacy: a new research agenda

In May 1929, the Canadian Department of External Affairs (DEA) formalized diplomatic ties with Japan by opening its Tokyo legation. Although the third of its kind, Canada's Tokyo legation initiated and managed bi-lateral relations with a degree of autonomy unparalleled by those in Washington and Paris. Within this newfound autonomous space was room for each of Canada's diplomats to negotiate, internalize, and perform their roles differently. This thesis investigates how and why First Secretary Hugh Keenleyside, Minister Herbert Marler, and Second Secretary Kenneth Kirkwood – the vanguards of Canadian national self-representation in the Pacific – engaged and employed that personal and national autonomy, studying their reactions to and participation in transnational political and cultural exchanges at the imperial Japanese capital. Their dissimilar experiences meanwhile act to demonstrate the complexities of those exchanges and highlight the various motives and opinions prevalent amongst Canada's late-interwar social political, and intellectual elite.
	By adopting the perspectives of the individual as its primary subject of analysis, this study contributes to an extant literature that has regularly portrayed the DEA and its foreign offices as unitary practitioners of a singular ideology or policy. Furthermore, the individual voices of Canada's first ranking official in the Japanese capital are recovered from the silencing effect of top-down, national-political analyses that have so dominated the field. Finally, it eschews teleological readings of the period preoccupied with Europe, a North Atlantic Triangle, and the 'road to war' narrative, thus providing a new view of an understudied aspect of Canadian international history.

For Empire or Dominion? Prestige or Adventure?The Men of the Canadian Legation in Tokyo, 1929-1933

For over 70 years, a statue of an unnamed Aboriginal scout stood on a pedestal at the base of a monument to Samuel de Champlain at Nepean Point, Ottawa. In this essay, the author details how this monument has been the recipient of various emotional investments by visitors, making the monument a highly ambivalent and dynamic figure. In particular, the scout has been played with as a totem of an imagined Canadian past, defaced as a symbolic casualty of French-English conflicts, and protested as an offensive artefact of racist ideologies. The scout is a figure that is mobilized through expressions of both colonial nostalgia and postcolonial resistance.Pendant plus de 70 ans, une statue d'un eclaireur autochtone sans nom a reside a la base d'un monument rendant hommage a Samuel de Champlain a la pointe Nepean, a Ottawa. Dans cet article, l'auteure decrit comment ce monument a fait l'objet de divers temoignages emotionnels par des visiteurs, ce qui l'a rendu un personnage tres ambivalent et dynamique. En particulier, l'eclaireur a ete percu comme un totem d'un passe canadien imagine, defigure a titre de victime symbolique du conflit entre les anglophones et les francophones, et proteste en tant qu'artefact de mauvais gout representatif d'une ideologie raciste. L'eclaireur est un personnage mobilise autant par des expressions de nostalgie coloniale que de resistance postcoloniale.From 1924 to 1996, a monument of an Aboriginal scout stood on a pedestal at Nepean Point in downtown Ottawa, overlooking the Ottawa River. The monument depicts an Aboriginal man dressed in a loincloth, with a quiver resting on his back, holding an arrow in one hand. The scout was a later addition to a 1915 monument to the French explorer Samuel de Champlain and represents a highly complicated and contested Aboriginal presence in Canada's capital city. In 1996, Assembly of First Nations (AFN) Chief Ovide Mercredi staged protests at the scout monument, calling it a derogatory representation of Aboriginal peoples and arguing that it should be moved (Blyth 1998; Lauzon 2011; Walsh 2008). The statue was removed in 1996, and in 1999 the National Capital Commission (NCC) found the scout a new home in neighbouring Major's Hill Park. In this essay, I ask, How has the scout statue been mobilized through expressions of colonial nostalgia and acts of postcolonial resistance?While some scholars have argued that monuments quickly become objects that enable forgetting (Young 1993; Huyssen 2003), others have noted that monuments can have dynamic and contested lives (Johnston and Ripmeester 2009; Levinson 1998; Whelan 2002-2003; Sturken 1997; Osborne 2002; Gordon 2010; Coates and Morgan 2002). This analysis begins with the premise that monuments are not merely urban objects that depict the ideological sentiments of the state or other monumentbuilding stakeholders; rather, as syntheses of built form, location in public space, and contestable commemorative meaning, monuments receive various affective investments. Monuments often enable contradictory sets of meanings; they are marked by a distinct ambivalence. I argue that monuments have capacities to organize and orient our affective relationships with nations, peoples, and identity. I understand affect as a set of potentialities and capacities for future action located in the body, others, and a temporal moment (Park, Shields, and Davidson 2011, 4). Rob Shields suggests that affect is outside of the symbolic realm and marked by a certain mobility: "its suspended, in-between-ness, hints at the radical ambivalence of affect where transition does not necessarily determine an end state" (2011, 119). We can understand love, loathing, nostalgia, and indifference as affective relationships produced at monuments.The scout monument is involved in a series of affectively charged relationships with other monuments, visitors, and historical moments. Because this essay attends to the "sub-symbolic" (119), I focus on acts of defacement and artistic interventions as indexes to these affective relationships. …

A Scout's Life: English-Canadian Nostalgia, Colonialism, and Aboriginality in Ottawa

Heroines and History: Representations of Madeleine De Verchères and Laura Secord

A neglected part of the history of Canadian foreign policy is the role and contribution of women. Women have been engaged in Canadian foreign policy since the early part of the twentieth century, though they were not formally admitted to the Department of External Affairs until 1947. Women represented Canada at the League of Nations and later at the United Nations, and continue to be engaged through national and international organisations in campaigning on issues that are important for women but are not yet included on the official agenda. My purpose in this article is to bring the women of the Department of External Affairs and the parallel stream of women in non-governmental organisations out of the shadows; and to suggest that Canadian foreign policy as traditionally framed may be changing as a result of the body of gender studies in international relations that has developed since the late 1980s.

Women, Gender, and Canadian Foreign Policy, 1909–2009

On 18 October 2000, a monument to five Canadian women was unveiled on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The five larger than life bronze figures were the first statues of women other than Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II ever to be placed within the precincts of the Parliament of Canada. The five women were honoured with a place at the centre of the Canadian state because they had won the right for women to be appointed to the Canadian Senate. After their success in winning the federal vote in 1918 and the election of the first woman Member of Parliament in 1921, the death of an Alberta senator revived Alberta women's militancy, and together with women across Canada they campaigned to have women appointed to the upper house of the Canadian Parliament. But the federal government said that women could not be appointed to the Senate because they were not 'qualified persons' under the Canadian constitution. The federal government promised action to change the constitution to enable women to be appointed, but they dragged their feet, so Judge Emily Murphy of Alberta decided to take the legal route. This went all the way to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London who overruled the Supreme Court of Canada and pronounced on 18 October 1929 that women were persons and were eligible for appointment to the Canadian Senate.1 The Privy Council ruling was historically important and far-reaching beyond the point at issue. It has been described as 'the event that marked formal sexual emancipation' (Sachs and Wilson 1978: 40). The legal effect of the ruling was restricted to an interpretation of the Canadian constitution and would be binding only in Canada. However, the arguments put forward by the Attorney-General of Canada against the appointment of women to the Senate covered in detail the reasons going back to Roman times why women were not considered to be persons and were under a legal incapacity to hold public office. The Judicial Committee overruled all those arguments, and declared for the first time in history that women were legally persons. Because Canadian law was based in English common law, the pronouncement by the Judicial Committee, which was then the highest court of appeal in the Empire, would have persuasive authority wherever English common law held sway. The case was symbolically important in establishing women's constitutional right to participate in all levels of government in both Canada and the UK. Before the Privy Council ruling in 1929, women were defined in English common law as 'persons in matters of pains and penalties, but not in matters of rights and privileges' (Benoit 2000: 2). In other words, women were persons when it came to paying taxes and being punished, but notwithstanding advances that had been made in women's status in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, judges and legislators could still declare that women were not persons for the purpose of having the right to participate in public and professional life. The Privy Council ruling meant that after centuries of exclusion, women could be admitted in their own right to the hallowed corridors of power. The monument of the Famous Five, as the five women are known, is a public symbol at the political centre of the Canadian state which recognises that women belong in the public sphere. In this article, I will describe the Persons Case,2 as it is known, and how it helps us to better understand the nature and depth of male resistance to admitting women as equals in the sphere of public life, resistance which women still encounter overtly and covertly today. The Persons Case was the vindication of a sixty-year battle which had begun in Britain in the 1860s, and during which women in Britain and in Canada had sought - in vain - for a determination by the courts that they were entitled to participate in public life, from which they had consistently been debarred simply because they were women, even though they otherwise had all the necessary qualifications. …

Vivien Hughes

Papers

Heroines and History: Representations of Madeleine De Verchères and Laura Secord

Women, Gender, and Canadian Foreign Policy, 1909–2009

Women in Public Life: The Canadian Persons Case of 1929