History of Storytellers: Doug Gibson's Canada150 tour

For 2017, publisher turned performer Doug Gibson  (see here talking of the diplomat and memorist Charles Ritchie) is launching his third national tour performance/lecture project: stories of great Canadian writers from 1867 to 2017.

Usually, in each decade only one novelist or short story writer in French and one in English will be chosen. Inevitably, this means that the show will be controversial (“How could you possibly leave out X from the 1980s?”), but Doug Gibson will be happy to provoke spirited debate about our best authors. And while the show will be in English, everything on the screen, such as book titles, and their titles in translation (“Kamouraska and Kamouraska , you say?”) will be bilingual. We all may learn more about our great French authors, and about our epic Haida storyteller, Skaay, revealed to us by Robert Bringhurst.

 Shows will tour from May to December, and they invite contacts from show bookers as well as audiences.

Book Review: Kevin Plummer on Chamberlin, The Banker and the Blackfoot

We have a guest review by Kevin Plummer, former pillar of Toronto's Historicist blog, now living in New Westminster, BC., and author of Toronto Lives: Biographical Sketches from the Historicist Archives

J. Edward Chamberlin, The Banker and the Blackfoot: A Memoir of My Grandfather in Chinook Country (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2016)

reviewed by Kevin Plummer

J. Edward Chamberlin's hope in The Banker and the Blackfoot is that, to find a path to reconciliation in the present, we can look to the past. In the Foothills of Alberta, in the years between 1885 and 1905, Chamberlin finds a period of promise, when, as he puts it, "many people, native and non-native, tried to fashion a commonwealth in Chinook country that would accommodate Blackfoot sovereignty and new settlement and would give life to the spirit of the treaty made a few years earlier" (10).

At the centre of Chamberlin's account is the friendship between the author's grandfather, Jack Cowdry, a newcomer, and Crop Eared Wolf, a prominent Kainai (Blood) warrior. A prominent citizen at a time when Fort MacLeod—standing at the convergence of important transportation routes until being by-passed by the railroad—was a bustling town, Cowdry founded a bank, published a newspaper, established a ranching business, and served a couple of terms as mayor during his 26 years in the Foothills. Crop Eared Wolf, already famed as a warrior and horse-thief, would succeed his father, Red Crow, as head chief of the Bloods in 1900.

Upon first meeting on a Fort MacLeod street in the spring of 1885, the two individuals used a mix of words and hand signs to bridge language barriers, finding some common ground in conversing about horses. From that encounter, they forged a decades-long friendship. They shared life's joys—like a comical anecdote about the pair pulling up surveyor stakes to preempt settler incursion on reserve land—and consoled each other over the passing of loved ones.

The Banker and the Blackfoot shows how, by focusing on the seemingly modest stories of local—and even family—history, a skilled historian can illuminate much larger issues of national concern. At its worst, local history is mere civic boosterism that celebrates first settlers, early businessmen, or founding politicians in an unconscious act of erasing the contemporaneous presence of First Nations. Instead, Chamberlin intertwines these histories, showing the Blackfoot's active role in a changing Foothills region as Fort MacLeod was coming of age. In this era of Reconciliation, local historians should follow this example and engage more fully with the impacts had, and perhaps continue to have, on First Nations.

With the intention of focusing on the "people who are not included in the standard storyline" (308), Chamberlin places the Blackfoot, adapting and resisting, at the centre of Foothills history and city life in Fort MacLeod. To the influx of newcomers and the disappearance of the buffalo, they brought "centuries of craft and culture and statesmanship into conversation with new realities and new imaginings" (127). They signed, and upholding, a peace treaty as an alternative to war and, in many cases, adapted to ranching. But the treaty was never agreement to relinquish "their heritage—their religion, their language, their customs, their land" (179).

And, even faced with broken treaty promises, the "social engineering on a national scale" (290) of the Indian Act, and the malice of petty bureaucrats, Blackfoot leaders like Crop Eared Wolf fiercely resisted assimilation or isolation. Stories, both traditional and those adapted to their new circumstances, offered "an imaginative centre" (276) indispensable to efforts to maintain traditions and their sense of identity. "It was stories—boasting and toasting, civil and ceremonial—that sustained Blackfoot pride," Chamberlin writes, "and nourished Blackfoot prosperity during the dangerous years after the destruction of the buffalo" (362).

The nature of storytelling and its importance to humans' sense of self across cultures is a central theme in The Banker and the Blackfoot, and Chamberlin diverts into discussions of Oscar Wilde, John Keats, Huckleberry Finn, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold among others. Chamberlin departs from the central narrative for long periods, and a few tangents—like one into virtual reality—don't seem essential. The book is at its strongest when these discussions are grounded in the specifics of MacLeod and the Foothills, and when Cowdry and Crop Eared Wolf are front and centre.

Importantly, Chamberlin moves beyond the written record to explore storytelling in "writing without words" (8) like beaded belts or carved and painted masks. In this case, the primary object of study is a ceremonial quirt, a riding crop with braided leather tail and decorated in traditional Blackfoot iconography, carved by Crop Eared Wolf and given as a gift to Chamberlin's grandfather. Having the quirt read by a Blackfoot ethnographer at the Glenbow Museum and by a Blood elder, Chamberlin is able to recount Crop Eared Wolf's life and the celebrated exploits in war parties and horse raids it records. It provides a way of recovering Crop Eared Wolf's voice—and keeping the book from being entirely through a settler lens.

Chamberlin characterizes Fort MacLeod, in its early days, as "a good place—not perfect, but full of promise" (236). He acknowledges that the Foothills were home to their share of cattle-rustlers, ne'er-do-wells, and residents with retrograde attitudes towards First Nations. But he focuses his attentions on more positive experiences of those, like his grandfather, who sought understanding and good relations with their Blackfoot neighbours, like the missionary who admiringly considered Blackfoot songs and stories in an early speech for the town's literary society, or the merchants who welcomed Blackfoot customers because they knew their businesses depended upon their purchases with annual Treaty Day payments.

However, Cowdry, Chamberlin's grandfather, does seem exceptional. On the town's incorporation in 1892—at which time he was elected its first mayor—Cowdry insisted that "fort" be dropped from its name. "This territory and this town are not the frontier," Cowdry is quoted as explaining, "but a homeland we are trying to share with the Blackfoot, with whom we have signed a treaty. Macleod is a treaty town." (240) A post-script Chamberlin doesn't mention is that such sentiment was forgotten by 1952, when the name reverted to Fort MacLeod, presumably as a means of celebrating one aspect of its history—while simultaneously erasing other aspects.

In time and on the strength of federal immigration policy, of course, more settlers poured into the Foothills. Where earlier ranchers and merchants often recognized "that their lives and livelihoods depended upon cooperation with the Blackfoot" (42), the newcomers didn't see themselves as treaty peoples. It was—and it remains—easier to see the promises of the treaty were something for the government, not average citizens, to address. The solidarity of an earlier generation was lost.

Although it perhaps falls outside of Chamberlin's focus on positive relationships which can serve as a model today, it feels like there's something crucial that is being under-explored. If there was indeed a critical mass of allies among the MacLeod population, why wasn't there more success in educating newcomers about their own lived experience of cooperation and friendship?

Cowdry certainly tried. He ran for mayor again in 1898 specifically because he was distressed by the rising tide of discriminatory attitudes towards his friends as many townspeople desired to keep the Blackfoot out of town because they were Indian. Whether in his role as banker, mayor, or rancher, Cowdry believed "that he could do something, however modest, to make his town, and the territory, a good place to live for everyone," Chamberlin writes. "A place where everyone's stories mattered, as long as they were told with craft and conscience" (234).

Cowdry is certainly a role model we can learn from today. But how many more of his fellow townspeople instead took their cue from the Gazette newspaper, whose editor, Charlie Wood, promoted "the stereotype of primitive savages and civilized Christians" (280)? And if, with time and changing demographics, some mixed marriages were dissolved so the men could seek new wives, how deep did that early sense of solidarity really go? Chamberlin hints in passing at the pressure to comply with colonialist norms, but doesn't fully grapple with whether or why some of these early allies broke their word.

Stories and storytelling were central to the Blackfoot's sense of place. But, in time, their stories came to be eclipsed by the stories of the newcomers. Whether in novels like The Virginian, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, cowboy songs like "Home on the Range," or Buffalo Bill Cody's reenactments of battles on the American plains, the settlers' stories perpetuated a dangerous and false contradiction: that the plains and foothills were simultaneously empty, unproductive, and ready for settlement, yet full of dangerous, uncivilized Indians needing to be controlled with a firm hand. The false contradiction—Chamberlin labels it as "sheer idiocy" (217)—nevertheless became the story newcomers told themselves, effectively erasing First Nations presence and justifying all manner of bureaucratic interventions in their lives.

And Chamberlin offers a powerful example of why the loss of one's stories can be so devastating in the real world. A significant contributor to the trauma and violence of residential schools was that this system "changed the stories, and the storylines, that had held First Nations communities together for generations and had been hard won by their ancestors and hard-wired into their consciousnesses. To change the story was to change the languages and the lives and the livelihoods and the lands...and to replace them with ones they couldn't believe." (274) That system's victims, he argues, were violently robbed of their autonomy to imagine, and build, their own world.

Chamberlin's grandfather accepted the quirt from Crop Eared Wolf, not really knowing why it was given. But Cowdry did not see it as a mere curio or trophy to display on a shelf, but rather a burden of responsibility to a friend. "And the gift signalled something else, my grandfather thought, something about respecting the promise of the past in order to redeem the future. It marked a moment when he realized his friend knew that the future they believed in was in danger of being lost; and the gift was a reminder that together they not forget the promise" (253-254). Cowdry kept the quirt close after moving to Vancouver in 1911 and later into the nursing home where he died in 1947. And, in his very worthwhile The Banker and the Blackfoot, Chamberlin, who inherited the quirt from his grandfather, seeks to continue to honour that obligation and share their experience to inspire action towards recovering the word and spirit of the prairie treaties.

Got some historical chops and would like to review something for us?  Send us an email.

Book Notes: Mellor on Dieppe republished

Vimy @100 is not the only Canadian military anniversary of 2017.

Ron Caplan reminds me that this is also the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Dieppe Raid -- in some ways as central to Canadian memory of the Second World War as Vimy is to that of the First.

Caplan's Cape Breton Books this year republishes John Mellor's Dieppe: Canada's Forgotten Heroes. Given the number of books on Dieppe that appeared both before and after its first publication in 1975, one might quibble with the "forgotten" in the subtitle. But it's good to see work like this returning to print. Good to see reprints in Canadiana anytime, in fact.

Caplan writes, "I am also searching for Cape Bretoners who fought in the raid. I had been told that there were none but have since located two." History continues apace.
 

The news from Vimy in 1917

Our occasional correspondent Libby Toop has been reading what her local paper was writing about the First World War as it happened.  Meanwhile, reading Canada's History she came across something I recently wrote:

It will often be said this year that that Canada “became a nation” at Vimy Ridge. But victory at Vimy only happened because in 1917 Canada was already a nation, one that could raise, equip, and send overseas a fighting force with the leadership and esprit de corps of a national army capable of fighting the Vimy battle.

So she went back to the newspapers:

I checked out the microfilm for the Smiths Falls Record News for April of 1917 once again. The first reference to Vimy was in the paper from April 12th. The news story was short and connected the story to the Allied strategy. The paper from the same date also included an article entitled "British and Canadian Victories in Big Fight Around Arras. Capture Vimy Ridge, Sweep Foe Back on a Wide Front. Take 6,000 Prisoners - Tanks Play Big Part in Triumph." Obviously, the article which accompanied this heading was much more informative than the first one I mentioned. Nothing suggested that this meant Canada was coming of age. The paper routinely signified Canadian actions and involvement in the War as Canadian.

On the 19th of April, the editorial was entitled "The Blow at Arras". The comments here on the Germans are sarcastic. Then - "It is a different kind of news from what we were accustomed to read in the first two years of the war, and it is no super-optimism that foresees a steady growth of British and French superiority and a steady weakening of the German power of defense."

Beside the editorial is a piece entitled "The Battle in the Snow", which concerns military activities directly following Vimy. The piece ends with the following two paragraphs.
"The battle of Arras is another proof of the futility of militarism in the long run. The Germans have been making ready for this war for forty years, and at the beginning of it they were superior. The British began to make ready after the war started and have been at it two years and a half; and already they are superior.

"Canada has a new reason for pride. It was great good fortune for her that the taking of the Vimy Ridge, for which the Allies had poured out so much of their blood, fell in the long run to her. April 9, 1917, will be in Canada's history one of the great days, a day of glory to furnish inspiration to her sons for generations."

The paper was a Liberal one and came out twice a week in 1917.

You might be interested in knowing that in April of 1917 the paper was giving at least as much attention to the American entry into the War and what they thought the consequences might be. That is a whole different kettle of fish and a pretty interesting one, so far as I've been able to follow it.

Thank you, Libby Toop!

History of Trade and Peace

Apparently there is a thing called Capitalist Peace Theory, drawing on the insight that nations with substantial ties of mutual trade and investment tend not to go to war with each other. The classic summary, I guess, is "No two countries with McDonald's outlets have ever gone to war"  -- a maxim since disproved (Russia/Ukraine comes to mind), but still with a certain appeal.

In the current Policy Options, Andrew Smith argues that an early version of capitalist peace was established between two potential adversaries, the United States and Canada, in the immediate post-confederation years, when Canada opted for harmonious trade relations with the United States rather than a massive military buildup for defensive purposes.

Eliminating border defences made Canada more rather than less safe. In the four decades after Confederation, pressure from business leaders and other taxpayers kept the federal government from creating a substantial military.

Smith draws a contemporary lesson from the confederation-era example. Trade can still avert conflict

 First, trade deals with potential adversary nations should be prioritized. The recently concluded trade deal between Canada and the EU will bring certain economic benefits, but it is probably superfluous from a human security point of view, since war between Canada and the EU is already most unlikely. In contrast, investing Canada’s limited diplomatic resources in reaching agreements with Asian nations, particularly China, could help to build peace by promoting commercial and social exchanges with these countries.

Well, maybe.  As it happens, I have recently been reading Bill Browder's bestselling memoir Red Notice. Browder is the American investment dealer who founded Hermitage Capital to invest in the Russian economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then had the whole thing stolen from him by Russian state thieves under the close protection of Vladimir Putin. In the aftermath, Sergei Magnitski, the Moscow lawyer Browder hired to represent his surviving interests, was jailed and beaten to death, provoking an early round of sanctions against Russia by Western powers.

There was, let us say, a whole lot of cultural and political congruence providing a strong basis for harmonious trade relations between the United States and Canada around 1870. It may be a bit more of a stretch to assume that trade will as easily soothe the authoritarian kleptocrats in China, or for that matter, Saudi Arabia. Maybe even the new Fortress America....

BTW, Browder is either a capitalist who can tell a story, or he has a craftsman ghostwriter who knows the craft.  Red Notice reads easy, and has a hell of a story.

Update, January 29: Andrew Smith replies:

Red Notice is a great book. The case of Putin certainly illustrates the limits of the peace through trade theory, but there are many softer authoritarian regimes to which it applies. Certainly the business community in Iran pushed the regime there to accept Obama's nuclear weapons deal and Western business interests that favour the deal appear to be trying to restrain Trump... not with much success yet though!

This Month at Canada's History

The Feb-March Canada's History is now reaching us subscribers. Saskatchewan lawyer and writer Garrett Wilson looks at Sitting Bull's "visit" to Canada in 1876-77.  There's a profile of Pauline Vanier based on her letters.  There's new artwork on Frog Lake, Alberta and the troubles there in 1885. There's a nice bit about touring Red Bay, Labrador, plus book reviews, comments and sidebars galore.

My own column is about Colonel J.B. Maclean and the long history of his Maclean's magazine, now reaching another in a long series of crisis point with publisher's decision to suspend most print publication and emphasize digital distribution. Canada's History also does digi -- but still offers hardcopy too.

There's also a brief tribute to Rolph Huband, 1929-2016. Rolph Huband was legal counsel to the Hudson's Bay company and eventually a vice-president and corporate secretary, first in Winnipeg, later in Toronto. He was also a visionary. He conceived of having the HBC's vast archives donated to the Archives of the Province of Manitoba, where they have ever since been a keystone of the collection and the basis of a great deal of historic study of "Rupertsland."  At the same time, he oversaw the donation of the Bay's also extensive artifact collection, including the entire replica ship Nonsuch, to the Manitoba Museum, creating another invaluable historical/museological resource.

Rolph Huband OC

The Bay got a handsome tax credit for these donations. With them, Huband oversaw creation of the Hudson's Bay History Foundation. And, since it had become odd for a retail department story company to be publisher of a historical magazine, Rolph Huband spearheaded the creation (and endowing) of Canada's National History Society which became publisher of The Beaver.

For these achievements and many other he was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2003.   He died last fall and the Globe published this obituary.

Blog changes coming

A housekeeping note.  The design and layout of my website have been pretty much unchanged since about 2001, to the despair of my web designer, and this blog layout has been static since about 2004.

We are at last working up changes that should acknowledge advances in technology and design. Since the plan is to link website and blogsite more completely, there will be at least a change in look to this blog, and maybe an address change too.  Fear not, loyal readers; we'll keep you forewarned

Meanwhile, a words for the time:

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
                     -- H.L. Mencken, 1920

(Something so appropriate must be apocryphal? Quote Investigator and Snopes have a 1920 newspaper column source for it.)

The Diefentrumper

Denis Smith has been writing about Canadian politics for pushing sixty years, since 1959, indeed. Rock's Mill Press has just brought out an anthology A Dissenting Voice, with selections from that impressive run.

The essay that really hit me between the eyes this weekend is Smith's introduction to a re-edition published in 1973 of Peter C. Newman's 1963 classic of political journalist, Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years . Read this and listen for the echoes:

Newman's thesis about Diefenbaker is, briefly, that ... he was a disappointing "renegade in power - a renegade both to his own cause and to the greater aspirations of the nation he was meant to be governing"; that he might have succeeded if he had taken the advice of the civil service instead of the "political hacks who sought his favours"; that he had "not the least inkling of what he wanted to do when he achieved that high office, and was rendered impotent by the magnitude of the claims its places on its incumbent:" that he cultivated his mystery and isolation and was "preoccupied with... personal stature"; that he always distrusted the establishment and never tried to understand...; that he was administratively inept...: that he could not accept responsibility himself, and constantly found it necessary to shift blame and humiliate his colleagues."

Smith did not accept every aspect of Newman's analysis  -- the "least inkling" part above being one -- and some of his own additions of Diefenbaker are relevant here:

Our task of understanding him is complicated by the existence of a carefully cultivated stage performer. Much of the time, John Diefenbaker was a dramatic performer of great skill... taking and giving great pleasure in the performance... Perhaps we can only know the performer.... The dramatic success may be the real triumph of John Diefenbaker's career.... Dief the public figure was not genuine but a work of art.

By the time he took the party leadership, he was a confirmed outsider, sensitive and lonely in his isolation from the ... establishment, but also conscious that he might use his outsider's status for political advantage.... His outsider's status was a dangerous asset, however, because the cultivated resentment, the jealousy, the distrust that it required could easily overreach themselves...  When his possession of office required magnanimity, he could not manage it.... There was no restraint in it.

Was John Diefenbaker just Donald Trump????

Americans are not outward looking enough to contemplate the possibility that they have resurrected John Diefenbaker to be their new president.  If they were outward-looking, they would never have created President Trump in the first place.

And so they will miss the little sign of hope that Denis Smith left for us in 1973:

John Diefenbaker's career was a spectacular failure.... The government was quite quaintly inept, unable in its confusions even to disguise its ineptitudes...  For the liberal opposition, which expected ten years in the wilderness..., the government's self-inflicted collapse was an unanticipated gift.

HOPE!

Update, January 24:  Denis Smith writes:

Thanks for "The Diefentrumper." I hadn't quite noticed the similarity myself.

and:

Your neat ending of 'Hope!' is more than I can share at the moment, though I hope you are right. Dief's acts in his little sideshow couldn't make much difference to the world. Trump's already do.

Denis Smith, I might note, wrote the major Diefenbaker biography Rogue Tory   And it's  worth stressing the major Dief/Trump differences.  Similar in their self-absorption, their insecurities, their lack of insightor strategic planning -- but Diefenbaker within his limits meant well, respected social norms, and genuinely did aspire to make his country better.  Trump.... nah.

As to hope, President Obama said you don't need to hope when things are going well. It's in the tough times that it comes in handy.

History of dawn in the Canadian winter

Something you notice, going to Edmonton, Regina, and Saskatoon in mid-January. There may be mild weather and snow melting everywhere. But you know you are in the real Canada when it's a month past the solstice, and at 8.30 dawn is just breaking through in the south-east. This ain't the Arctic Circle or anything, but living at latitude 44, you forget....

I was talking last night to a lively crowd at the University of Regina.  Today I'm at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.  Looking forward to it.

Photo credit

Margaret Evans on the life of women academics

Margaret Evans

Beth Robertson has some reflections on women in academia at Active History

Which reminds me.  I recently needed a little detail about the Mowat administration in Ontario, so I googled Mowat and Professor Margaret Evans, his biographer.

Up came, pretty high on the list, an obituary notice for Margaret Evans, who died, unnoted by me at least, late in 2014... at the age of 100. On the subject of the careers of early women academics, whoever drafted the funeral home obit knew a thing or two.

Attending University during the Great Depression, and being told that her education was a waste because, being a woman, she would get married and then not use it....

...After little more than eight years of marriage, and left with three young children to raise, in addition to returning to work, she also returned to the University of Toronto full-time for a year to do research for her PhD, graduating in 1967. Her thesis has been cited as "the most important work on late nineteenth century political life in Ontario".

Margaret Evans later served as head of the history department at the University of Guelph, the first woman in such a position in Ontario, it says.

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History of immigration and identity

I came across "Once An Immigrant," a charming and kind of incoherent documentary about Canadian identity by the actor Peter Keleghan (also charming), on the Ceeb last night. (You can watch it here.) Keleghan's parents immigrated to Canada in the 1950s. His father turns out to be Stanislaus Krakus, an immigrant from Poland, a Canadian citizen for half a century or so, and convinced this is the best country in the world. Canada is far better than anywhere in Europe, he says, although he's not without some of the scars of spending much of his life as a disdained minority. He's thoughtful, but he's tough too.

In the film, Peter Keleghan takes most of his cues from his mother (at 93, she's even more charming!). She's the Keleghan of the family; son Peter took her name in place of his and his father's when he began an acting career. She (and most of her siblings) left Ireland  in the 1950s, but she still identifies as Irish, still holds an Irish passport, calls Ireland "home." She seems to have had a good life in Canada, but implies she would be gone in a shot if she could get her children to go "home" with her.

Keleghan mostly buys into this as normal and appropriate. In the film he travels with her to Ireland and dutifully pays homage to most of the Irish myths. Back home he organizes and films a backyard lunch with a big crew of actor friends, all immigrants or first generation (Raul Bhaneja, Elvira Kurt, Grace Kung, Ted Dykstra...) and urges them to acknowledge their "home" ties against their Canadian ones.

I was rather glad to see that several of them resisted  On the whole, I found myself irritated by his mother's position -- to the extent one can be irritated by a charming nonagenarian being happily reunited with family. Where does she get off playing the tourist here in the country where her family has done so well, pretending her real home was elsewhere?

I was even ambivalent about her stated reason for refusing Canadian identity and citizenship.  Being Irish and bathed in Irish national mythology, she won't swear allegiance to the Queen of England. She says she'd become a Canadian in a heartbeat if we would only take the Queen off the money.  Well, I can see some force in that critique of Canada's failure to assert its own nationality forcefully enough. But given the disgusting way the Irish have so often treated each other in the past century, I do find this holding a grudge against the English begins to seem a bit old.

I don't think my own immigrant family was ever this conflicted:  all Canadian citizens the moment we were eligible, never had a thought of living elsewhere or identifying as anything but Canadian, I would say. But then we had the privilege of identifying as being of British origin (chosing that more than Irish or Scottish, though we had those options), and probably faced a lot less of those outsider issues that someone Polish or Irish or Jewish or Chinese did. Hmmmm.

Funny documentary moment:  Keleghan, pondering the immigrant identity, muses on how, having inherited all those immigrant insecurities, he naturally grew up desperate for security and prosperity.  "So you became an actor?" his friends all shout at once.

(As I finish this, I find that "immigration," "identity" and "nationality" are all labels I have never previously used to tag entries in this blog.  Hmmm to that too.)

History of the black president

Most interesting thing I have read on things Americanah since the election is Ta-Nehisi Coates's long essay for The Atlantic, "My President Was Black"

You can read the whole thing here on the magazine's site. I started with the online text, but after a while I realized it was going to be a long read. For that reason and others, I wanted an actual copy of the magazine in hand.

When's the last time you bought a magazine at a "newsstand"? It's not that easy any more to go out and buy a single copy of a magazine. Cost me over ten bucks too.  Still, glad I did.

Coates makes one powerful point with his long opening scene of crowds of hip-hop artists and other black musicians arriving at the White House one night for a concert. Black Americans will no doubt find themselves invited to the White House in future, but it may be a long time before they feel so much at home"

The ties between the Obama White House and the hip-hop community are genuine. The Obamas are social with Beyoncé and Jay-Z. They hosted Chance the Rapper and Frank Ocean at a state dinner, and last year invited Swizz Beatz, Busta Rhymes, and Ludacris, among others, to discuss criminal-justice reform and other initiatives. Obama once stood in the Rose Garden passing large flash cards to the Hamilton creator and rapper Lin-Manuel Miranda, who then freestyled using each word on the cards. “Drop the beat,” Obama said, inaugurating the session. At 55, Obama is younger than pioneering hip-hop artists like Afrika Bambaataa, DJ Kool Herc, and Kurtis Blow. If Obama’s enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country’s first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop’s foundational generation.

History of leadership

Elections wonk Eric Grenier has a longish piece at CBC News sorting out how the Conservative Party and the New Democrats are organizing their leadership contests.  Shorter version (that he won't give you): the "rules" are notably different but always byzantine and ever-changing. Both parties are using the race to finance themselves. The "races" are still essentially vote-buying contests.

I recall, by way of contrast, the New Zealand process last month that picked a new party leader (for the governing party, hence a prime minister) in about three days, with perfect accountability, and a budget of zero.

Michael Chong, who used to work to make leaders accountable to MPs, is in the thick of the Torypalooza, and he is proposing all kinds of new rules to compel Parliament to do this and to do that.  Dale Smith is right to take him down on all of them. All these problems would be solved by MPs taking control of the party caucuses. All they need in order to do that is to hire and fire their own leaders, without regard to the extraparliamentary party's love of long, slow, expensive, incomprehensible, corrupt leadership "races."

Book Notes: The Bank of Montreal at 200

Canada and Vimy Ridge and the Maple Leafs are not the only institutions with anniversaries to mark in 2017.  The Bank of Montreal, founded 1817, is older than any of them, and while it wants to be "BMO" these days, it evidently does have an historical sense. Its bicentenary is being marked by a history by Laurence Mussio, business historian at York University, published by McGill-Queen's with the support of the bank.

History of the decline of the Globe & Mail

The complete text of Saturday's op-ed pages:

• the centrepiece is Margaret Wente's complaint about how hard it is to use an iPhone and to have young people patronizing her.  
• Above her, a worry piece about Justin Trudeau by some guy who was influential in the 1990s.
• Below her, a sneer at Barack Obama by some guy who was important in the 1980s.  
• Opposite, a full page editorial complaining that official commemoration of Canada's 150th anniversary is "pork."

What century are these people in? The fake-news onslaught confirms how important credible news will be, but that's gonna be hard to find in this nostalgia fest paper.

Update, January 10:  Jerry Bannister writes from Halifax:

Happy New Year. Just wanted to say that you hit the nail on the head with your piece about the Globe.

History of serious monarchists

Last month a National Post columnist opined about the "pathology" of Canadian republicanism.  You know, don't even talk about it, no daylight on magic, something like that.

The opening paragraph complains that we should not even have polls that ask Canadians their opinion on monarchy or if they like the idea of a Canadian head of state.

On Boxing Day, polling giant Ipsos released a year-end poll for Global News surveying Canadian opinion about the monarchy. If you’re a serious monarchist you are of two minds about this sort of thing. You recognize the necessity of occasionally taking the pulse of the institution, just as a human of great age will have their vital signs measured from time to time. You also know that to present the Canadian monarchy to the public as a free choice, a fashion we can discard when it suits us, has the effect of encouraging republican fantasies. (emphasis added)

 Actually the Post columnist has it precisely backward.  The Constitution Act 1982 makes it clear that Canadians have the perfect freedom and a clear constitutional process to follow, whenever they do conclude that the British monarchy is indeed "a fashion we can discard."

It's a high threshold. A fundamental change to the office of the monarch would require the unanimous agreement of the federal government and all the provinces.  But that would be a substantial change in Canadian government and practice, so it should not be taken lightly or on a narrow base of support.

Still the constitution of Canada is clear. We can abolish the monarchy whenever we choose.  The monarch cannot abolish us at all.  A more succinct definition of popular sovereignty can hardly be imagined.

(I do acknowledge it was disconcerting to read of the Queen's illnesses over Christmas and New Year. Even "serious monarchists" should know the monarch has no exemption from mortality, but a world in which the Queen of England does not reign remains hard to imagine.  Long may she reign... in Britain.

The birthplace of confederation... in Fredericton?

The terrific and prolific New Brunswick journalist and author Jacques Poitras is intrigued by the campaign of the New Brunswick government to have us all come to New Brunswick this Canada150 year to "celebrate where it all began."

Confederation began in New Brunswick? Poitras looks into it a bit, and hey: it's Donald Creighton who authorised the claim.

The very first line of historian Donald Creighton's seminal 1964 book The Road to Confederation says: "It was the enthusiasm of Gordon of New Brunswick that gave the movement its real start."

That's a reference to Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, who became lieutenant governor of New Brunswick in 1861.

"I suspect someone in the New Brunswick government must have come upon that line in the book and said, 'Hey, there's a slogan for us,'" says historian Christopher Moore, author of 1867: How the Fathers Made A Deal.

 Poitras remains a bit sceptical:

Everyone knows that Charlottetown was the birthplace of Confederation. It said so on Prince Edward Island's licence plates and on signs leading into the city. Sir John A. Macdonald is even depicted on one of the city's craft beers.

New Brunswick might respond that it was a founding province, when Prince Edward Island wouldn't even join.

I kinda like how an anniversary can spark a bit of historical controversy on idle questions like these. And for the record I'd be happy to spend a bit of the summer in either province. But if New Brunswick doesn't blow its own horn, no one else is likely to do it for them.

And I do like the notion of someone in the New Brunswick promotional office sitting in the library reading The Road to Confederation. Or possibly they were even reading me in their classes at Mount A or wherever, since I noted Creighton's first line in my own book.

David Farr 1922-2016 RIP

I never met David Farr, historian and professor, but I used to ... encounter his tracks.

• I was once hired by Microsoft's CD-ROM encyclopedia Encarta -- who remembers when that was a thing? -- to update some of its article "Canada." And the text they were working with, from an older encyclopedia, was by David Farr.
• His name used to be on the list of directors of the Carleton Library, that pioneering publisher of Canadian documents and scholarship, still in existence at McGill- Queen's Press.
• I needed to pursue some wrinkle about the confederation process, and the likeliest source seemed to be Farr, The Colonial Office and Canada, published by the University of Toronto Press way back when UTP books were essentially bound typescripts. (1955.) It was damn good: immensely researched, carefully argued, well written.  Somebody knew just what I needed.
• I was looking for the reconstructed Canadian parliamentary debates for the 1867-75 period when there was no official Hansard. Not that long ago, a team of scholars built an unofficial one from newspaper transcripts and such, and there was David Farr again, one of the guiding lights.  

So I googled David Farr. Still active? Still alive? How old would he be? What else had he written?

Up popped Duncan McDowell's admiring "Lives Lived" from barely six weeks ago in the Globe and Mail:

There was something quintessentially old-fashioned about Professor David Farr, as if he had emerged from a novel by Kingsley Amis or Stephen Leacock. Clad in tweed jacket, shirt and tie, he puffed on his pipe and answered the phone with a brisk “Farr here.” Some misread him as an echo of a bygone academic culture. He had, after all, done a doctorate at Oxford on the British Colonial Office, hardly the stuff of trendy, modern historiography. But beneath this veneer lay an intellectual integrity and meticulousness that typified Canada’s postwar universities.

He died at 93 in Ottawa, last October.

My part in Confederation 150

My own contribution to the 150th anniversary of confederation -- beyond that book I published in 2015 and the new Story of Canada, ahem -- is a small but growing speaking tour.

I'm off to Saskatchewan to talk about the Canadian constitution as a living tree at both the University of Regina (January 19)  and the University of Saskatchewan (January 20).  Then at McMaster University in Hamilton in April.  Working still on other dates and places for this spring, and more events for the fall of 2017 too.

If your school or institution has not yet sorted out how it's noting the anniversary, well, get in touch.

Norman Hillmer OC

On the new year's list of new appointments to the Order of Canada, the only historian I noticed was Norman Hillmer, the prolific scholar of foreign affairs, diplomacy, and politics at External Affairs (now Global Affairs) and Carleton University "for his contributions to the study of Canada’s foreign policy and international relations in the 20th century."  Congratulations.