Honours watch: Dumont and Vaugeois, CM

Not a stellar showing for historians, at least those writing in English, in the recent Order of Canada appointments. But Micheline Dumont, professor and scholar honoured for her work in women's and educational history, was appointed. And Denis Vaugeois, honoured for promoting history and making it more accessible.

That's him right there.

Vaugeois may be best remembered as a passionate cabinet minister in René Lévesque's PQ government in 1970s Quebec. But he was a historian before that, one of the founders in the 1960s of Boreal-Express, a lively and sensationally successful "newspaper" treating events of New France and early Quebec history as if they were news stories. And a historian after that, too, with unlimited interests and enthusiasms and a long list of publications.

One of his enthusiasms was promoting Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau.  The United States had produced a dollar coin featuring Sacagawea, famed in the US as guide to Lewis and Clark. Vaugeois delighted in pointing out that the child Sacagewea was carrying on the coin's portrait of her was in fact young Jean-Baptiste, a Quebecker and the son of a fur trader -- the only Canadian ever to appear on American money, he enjoyed saying.