This month at Canada's History: Parks Canada on Canada's History

 

Features

THE UNSETTLED PAST

In a stature-toppling era, Parks Canada adapts its retelling of this country’s complex history. by Christopher Moore

This month, the August-September Canada's History leads with my article "The Unsettled Past," investigating how Parks Canada is seeking to shape a new narrative for Canadian history at its sites and plaques all over Canada.

Update, June 23: The full story is now available at the Canada's History website.

Parks Canada's historic sites agency, like other Canadian museums and historical institutions, was put under tough scrutiny by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC's 2025 report shone a painful spotlight on the pervasive neglect of Indigenous history and historical perspectives at Parks Canada's hundreds of sites and thousands of historic plaques, and it called for a fundamental reassessment. 

 And of course there was backlash.

Nearly a decade into that reassessment, I talked to Parks Canada historians and planners, to administrators, to Indigenous consultants, and also to the critics hotly opposed to what is happening to Canadian history at Parks Canada's sites. I think it's an important story, and a hopeful one too. Subscribe, and it should be in your mailbox already. (The online version will come along a little later.) It's a beautiful issue too: Parks Canada's sites photograph well, let us say.

Also in the issue: David Frank on child labour and neglect in New Brunswick; Sophie McGee on our tangled history with orcas; Nancy Payne's spectacular text-and-picture spread on historic lighthouses; and Enid Mallory exploring historic Yukon roads. The lead in the review section features Gerald Friesen's new and important The Honorable John Norquay, about the remarkable career of the 19th century Indigenous premier of Manitoba.  

And more. 

 

History on pod: Parks Canada ReCollections

Slight hiatus there, what with some work things, the Writers' Union AGM online on May 24, and departure the next day for the Creative Nonfiction Collective in-person (and hybrid) conference in Halifax.  How good to be actually going somewhere -- and the conference rocked.

And then last Sunday on the flight home I began to feel unwell, and when I got home my Covid test was positive. The rest of the week has been a bit of a blur, and blogging fell sharply down the priority list (sleep, Paxlovid, sleep), but I can confirm that Covid has not gone away.  Blogging should resume herewith.

In other business, Angela Duffett of Parks Canada got in touch to draw my attention to Parks Canada's new blog ReCollections, a history and archaeology podcast exploring aspects of historic sites research and interpretation from around the country.  It launched in April, and now offers segments from half a dozen sites.

I'd say ReCollections is still finding its feet.  One might expect a natural audience would be among those already with some interest in Canadian history and archaeology, but ReCollections scripts seem to assume no one knows anything (""What you may not know is that one group of Norse explorers were the first Europeans to set foot in North America,") while simultaneouslly plunging pretty deep in the details.  And the big-voice AM radio type announcer/narrator sounds a little at odds with its material.  

But people want podcasts, and ReCollections has lots of scope to find its voice or voices.  Episodes tend to run 30 to 45 minutes, and they are tight -- avoiding that fifteen minutes of material in an hour and twenty minutes of chatter that sometimes the podcast norm.  Take a listen.  

History of "woke"

Rick Salutin:

Conservative academic/journalist Andrew Potter catalogues in the substack The Line why he abhors design changes in the new passport: “The lengthy list of apologies for past transgressions; the acceptance of Canada as a genocidal state; allowing the country’s 150th anniversary to be turned into an orgy of national self-hatred; ordering the national flag to fly at half staff for an entire summer while blithely ignoring, for months, the factors that went into that decision; letting 24 Sussex turn into a ruin; the obscenely casual, almost sabotaging, attitude toward the appointment of a governor general; the general indifference to the Crown, the Royal Family, and what it symbolizes.”

A 20-something I know opines: “I love when he lists all the good stuff Trudeau’s done. As a Canadian nationalist I support every one.” (Try rereading that list with a positive tilt.)

I'm far from being a twenty-year old, but I'm with the kid on this one. It's depressing how often "History" is assumed to be on the side of the reactionaries. 

Meanwhile, Parks Canada is considering revisions to the texts of almost ten percent of the more than 2000 heritage plaques it maintains around the country. So, for instance, old plaques at fur trade posts will now give more recognition to the indigenous role in the trade. It's part of Parks Canada's response to Call to Action #79 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ("to develop a reconciliation framework for Canadian heritage and commemoration").  Frankly, it sounds like this could be routine maintenance anyway: how many historians would not consider reassessing things they wrote fifty years ago when they were being republished?

Yet people who should know better -- including a former Parks Canada VP, Heritage Conservation quoted in the article -- declare "a new woke perspective is being imposed on what was formerly an apolitical ... process."  Yeah, right.

I'm an old Parks hand myself (Historic Sites Branch, natch), and I've often noted Parks Canada's long held grasp of "commemoration, not celebration." The first of my (very few) ventures into drafting text for plaques was at Louisbourg, when a plaque about James Wolfe was being reviewed to make it a little less "Rule Britannia" in spirit.  Parks Canada, from administering sites like the Plains of Abraham (and Batoche) has long had opportunities to consider the pitfalls of picking sides, and it's good to know that process continues.

Book Notes: Butcher on visiting the National Parks

Marlis Butcher's Park Bagger: Adventures in the Canadian National Parks recounts the author's travels to every national park in Canada, save the one that was created just as she finished the book -- and she has plans for that one too.

I am the true Canadian park bagger, having visited every one of our national parks. Rocky Mountain Books just published my book Park Bagger - Adventures in the Canadian National Parks, in which I "share the park experience" with my readers. There's a chapter on each and every park - even a short bit on our newest park.

Thaidene Nene NP was opened late in 2019. Unfortunately next to no one from outside the NWT has been able to visit since the COVID-19 shut-downs. So I keep rebooking my visit to that park.

I don't know Marlis, but I'm honoured that she discovered a 2017 post from this blog (long forgotten by me) that looked a little dubiously upon another park-visit collector.

National Historic Parks (and sites) seem to be beyond the purview of this book -- with reason, as there are about 250 of them against 49 nature parks. I've seen a fair few of the historic ones, but not 250. The American National Geographic published a good guide to them some years ago. 

Book Notes: Passfield on Upper Canada's Tories

That dissertation you abandoned in order to pursue another path --can you ever go back to it?  Here is a hopeful tale.

Robert Passfield started as a student of engineering, switched to history, and started a doctorate in the intellectual history of early Upper Canada/Ontario. In 1974, however, with his dissertation incomplete, he joined Parks Canada's historic site service and began applying both his historical skills and his earlier knowledge of engineering to historical studies of Parks Canada's heritage canals. He became part of the "Parks Canada School" of what is sometimes called industrial archaeology, working in research teams with restoration architects, engineers, draftsmen, and others in generating full cultural/historical/architectural studies of canals and other 19th century Canadian sites.

Passfield had a highly productive and successful thirty-year historical career with Parks Canada. His publications ranged from the Rideau Canal to the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Red River Floodway and the historical contexts associated with engineering, construction and technology in early Upper Canada. (My own time at Parks Canada overlapped briefly with Passfield's, but as far as I know we have never met.)

Sometime after he retired (at the highest level a historian can reach in the Canadian public service), he went back to his dissertation project on the ideas of Tory Anglicans in Upper Canada.

Et voilà: in 2018, he published The Upper Canadian Anglican Tory Mind: A Cultural Fragment. on "the constitutional, religious and educational ideas and worldview of the Upper Canadian Anglican Tories who governed the Province of Upper Canada (Ontario) for two decades following the War of 1812."

It is the contention of this study that the Upper Canadian Anglican Tories were true philosophical conservatives who evolved a unique variant of English Anglican Toryism, and who were committed to defending and strengthening the traditional political order, loyalty to the Crown, and the unity of the British Empire, in the Loyalist asylum of Upper Canada.

Perhaps there are some other historical studies with an equally long gap between conception and delivery, but this seems a remarkable achievement in both scholarship and perseverance.  (Note: I have not read the book.) It's hard not to think that Passfield may have had at least as useful, productive, and satisfying a career as a public service historian than as a specialist academic scholar in Upper Canadian thought.

Passfield maintains a website. It includes blog posts on current political and social issues that suggest Passfield retains something of the Tory mind, as well as most of the biographical material I have summarized here.

Weird Canada 150 projects: Honderich on parks

Haven't been here? Good for you.

I rather admire John Honderich, longtime publisher/CEO/imagemaker of the Toronto Star.  But his Canada 150 project -- to visit every national park in Canada and write about it in the Star -- gets odder and odder, as the latest (and last) demonstrates.

A lot of parks are remote, as they should be, and Honderich is a busy guy.  So many of his reports describe how he chartered a small plane and had his pilot fly over several adjacent parks, so he could return speedily to Toronto to write about how great they are.

But you know, surely the vital thing about Canadian wilderness is the experience. If you go, the point is being there. Honderich must spend most of his time just getting there, and he seems to get less out of most of the parks he "visits" than someone on a "if this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium" package tour.

Sometimes, in fact, the point about Canadian wilderness is not being there. Some of the most important parks in the system are wildlife preserves. They are intentionally devoid of road access, campsites, hotels, restaurants "visitor centres," and the like.  They exist for the animals; they need for you not to go.  So when Honderich buzzes Vuntut National Park, a prime caribou herding zone in northern Yukon, he reports:

It is described as one of the least visited parks, which is a shame for its rolling hills and nearby mountainous terrain were stunning, if daunting.

This is not a shame.  Obviously Honderich was not there long enough to learn why a park like Vuntut exists -- and it ain't for drop-in tourism. (No tourists is what's best for the park and the animals.) But why does he write about it as if he actually had visited, and tell his readers precisely the wrong thing about why these parks exist.

Update, October 16:  Should have noted that Star travel editor Jennifer Bain's parallel reports of her visits to various National Parks (this one for example) this year are better -- simply because she actually goes, and stays -- though she too privileges the nature parks over the historic parks, even in this Canada150 series.  Oh well.

The CHA on the latest Parks Canada cuts

uniform for the beaver underground

 From Voxhistorica, its letter to the minister:

Limiting the hours of operation, the personalized services offered to visitors and the production of teaching materials projected in the current budget cuts threatens key components of the long-term work of the Agency. As professional historians, our members know that without these foundations, the specific commemoration activities that have been given new funding by the government, sums that are far superior to the savings generated by the cuts, will have less of an impact on the historical knowledge of Canadian citizens.

But you can buy sweats and T-shirts now.  (Actually I kinda like them.)

Returning the Voices -- a Kouchibouguac blog

Historian Ronald Rudin of Concordia and others have launched Restoring Returning the Voices, a video-audio website and archives of memories of the creation of Kouchibouguac National Park in New Brunswick and particularly the evictions of residents that went hand-in-hand with park creation.

Rudin also has a book forthcoming on the subject: Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance, and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park.  

Three ways to celebrate one hundred years of Parks Canada

If you are not busy with plans to meet your maker in Toronto on May 21, you may be interested in the big shindig at the CN Tower/Rogers Centre celebrating the Parks Canada centennial (the actual anniversary is May 19, but that's not on a weekend.)  Somewhat ironic to be celebrating parks at an urban icon cum mega-auditorium, but of course Parks Canada hasn't been just about parks for a long time, as the list of activities implies.

If you go you can :

• plan your next unique Canadian getaway at the Visitor Centre;
• capture yourself in Viking gear [ed note: ?];
• see Anne of Green Gables herself [ed. note: this one doubtful];
• participate in historic period games;
• meet the new Parks Canada mascot;
• take in the Critters Corner and visit with species at risk;
• keep step with pipes and drums;
• get your face painted and hands tattooed [ed. note: assuming this is henna or otherwise temporary]; 
• collect mementos [ed. note: hmm...] 
• gaze in awe at some of the most unique and breathtaking film footage from across the country;
• have an evening campout in Rogers Centre (purchasing tickets at bluejays.com/campout)
• and enjoy Mud Men, Sweet Thing, Malajube and Apostle of Hustle.

Or if your taste runs to the less frenetic, NiCHE and the University of Calgary Press have just published a book of collected essays exploring various aspects of Parks Canada's history, edited by environmental historian Claire Campbell of Dalhousie University, aptly entitled A Century of Parks Canada, 1911-2011. So you could celebrate by reading that.

And if you would prefer a yet more passive way to celebrate, you could listen to podcast no. 22 at Nature's Past, which is an interview with Campbell and two contributors to the volume, George
Colpitts and Gwynn Langemann.