Irish Famine echoes

The Irish Famine of 1845, now 180 years in the past, is having a moment. The Champlain Society recently posted a "Finding"  -- a document and commentary  -- focussed on a cache of previously neglected records of Toronto area immigrant agents who were claiming government subsidies for their services to "indigent immigrants" in 1845 and subsequent years.  Laura J. Smith, who wrote the Finding and provides an image of one of them (above), has catalogued 1500 heads of households representing about 5000 immigrants who were aided under this subsidy program  -- a notable record, since relatively few Irish Famine migrants have their names recorded. That 5000 people landed at Toronto and Cobourg alone suggests the impact of the Irish influx upon Upper Canada. In 1847, some 90,000 Irish came to British North America.

Smith notes the chance that led her to these LAC documents, though she had long suspected their existence and had searched for something like them.  Also by coincidence, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography has just published its entry on the Quebec novelist Laure Conan (Félicité Angers), who was born (at La Malbaie) in the Irish famine year of 1845.  The biography of her mentions in passing another indication of the impact of the Irish famine migration on Canadian society:

During her three years with the Ursulines, from 4 Oct. 1859 to 1 July 1862, Félicité was already attracting attention because of her literary talents. There were so many Irish Catholic girls at the convent that she lived in a naturally bilingual environment. (italics added)

My wife's Irish forebears came to Upper Canada in the early 1830s and were already well settled before the Famine migration. My own Irish great-grandfather and great grandmother were born in the depths of rural east Galway in 1839 and 1843 respectively -- and somehow both survived the Famine and lived to ripe old ages in the 20th century. Lots of Irish yet to come....

Book Notes: Robert Lower on the Selkirk Settlers

Would it be fair to say that Robert Lower is something of a self-hating historian?  

The first lines of his new book, Unsettled: Lord Selkirk's Scottish Colonists and the Battle for Canada's West, 1813-1816, declare that the book "is not a history." He goes on to report that as a child in Winnipeg he naturally had no interest in the history of the place he grew up and he still dismisses everything written about it as "dry historical accounts."

In retirement, however, he has discovered an interest in his ancestors, some of whom participated in the migration of Highland Scottish farmers to Red River in 1813-16 under the auspices of the Earl of Selkirk and the Hudson's Bay Company. Indeed, the Selkirk settlers fascinate him enough to have inspired this history of them. 

But instead of realizing he should blame the self-absorption of youth for his long neglect of their struggles and adventures, he insists that all previous work on the topic has been "just facts, a series of incidents that had no power to fire the imagination." The previous works, in other words, were histories. Since he dismisses "history," he has to present his own as something entirely new, a different thing.  

Is anyone else really tired of this trope that historical writing is by definition merely a pedantic recitation of dates and facts -- a history, that is -- but THIS ONE ISN'T?

Unsettled, of course, is a history, despite Lower's protests, and not a bad one at all. It is written exclusively from the correspondence the leaders of the settler group sent to their backer, Lord Selkirk, home in Britain, so it abounds in small personal details of the settlers, including the experiences of Lower's own ancestor, the millwright Samuel Lamont. For the larger sweep of that time and place -- the Indigenous civilizations, the contesting fur trade companies, and the proto-Metis whom Lower calls the Bois-Brules -- a historian with a wider lens would be required. But if your interest is the few score Scots who made the agonizing trek from the Highlands to Hudson's Bay, up the long rivers, down Lake Winnipeg, to set up as farmers thousands of kilometres from any other such European settlement, he's your man.

Lower presents them in a lively close-up narrative, much of it told in the historical present. It should get a good reaction from readers not only in Winnipeg but in Scots-Canadian communities anywhere. And maybe such a response will encourage Lower to start his next book with the thought that he has come to appreciate history a little, maybe to admit he is even becoming a historian himself.

Lower is alert to contemporary matters. He includes in his preface a recognition of and apology for the suffering and injustices his ancestors helped inflict on Sauteaux, Cree, Dakota, and other original inhabitants of the Assiniboine and Red River valley. But having recently read Myrna Kostash's Ghosts in a Photograph, an account of her ancestors' later settlement in a different part of the prairies, I can't help thinking how much and how thoughtfully she has internalized and historicized in detail how settlement actually engaged with indigeneity. That's where the leading edge of historical writing should be taking us today.    

Book Notes: Kostash on family and photographs

Myrna Kostash, since the 1970s our philosopher of the Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora, has a new memoir, Ghosts in a Photograph: A Chronicle, based on her extensive research and focussing on family photographs she has acquired over the years in Alberta and in the Galacian province of western Ukraine, from which her grandfather Fedor Kostashchuk emigrated in 1900.  

Ghosts in a Photograph is unusual among immigrant stories in that it does not present the pre-immigration moment as a complete blank. Kostash reports how she became aware that the homeland was more than some blank peasant anonymity from which the Kostashes emerged to become real people. It was actually more comfortable, and more cultured, than the 160 acres on the North Saskatchewan to which Fedor and Anna devoted their lives. She even discovers she is not the first writer and intellectual among the Kostashes/Kostashchuks. 

Even more vividly, she emphasizes (has done since the 1970s) that the Kostashs did not come to settle a blank and empty landscape. Barely twenty-five years separated Treaty Six and the clearing of northwestern Alberta's original people to "open" the land for settlement by her forebears. Indeed the dispossessed Cree still lived nearby, in 1900 as in 2020. 

She has made this reality a big part of her working life in recent years. The dispossession that made possible the settlement of the Kostashes in Swan Hills is here mirrored against the dispossession of the Kostashchuks from Galicia to make a vital part of this book  -- a process that needs to become a large part of all Canadian immigration and settlement narratives.

The book is built around photographs: of the Kostash family photograph that celebrates all the sons went from the homestead to university -- and neglects the one daughter who stayed home.  Of the young Kostashchuk resistance fighter who died fighting the Soviet Union ... in the 1950s. Kostash gives very detailed "readings" of each photo but has chosen not to include any of them in the book, the better to foreground her own readings of them. 

I remain unconvinced that this was a best possible decision.  I could see the photos and still be enriched by her discussions of them.  But there you are. Myrna Kostash has a very strong commitment to the power of prose.  

Update, June 13:  Myrna is hearing from readers and fans, and she has started posting the photos that are discussed but not shown in her terrific book on her Facebook page. 

This Month at Canada's History: Explorers, Confederation, Mi'kmaw Rights, Immigrant History

 

This month at Canada's History you can choose your cover image.  They have done a split run.

The newsstand cover -- if you can find a newsstand -- relateds to Ken McGooghan's article "Ships of Misfortune" on Jens Munk, one of a long unhappy history of navigators trying to find a Northwest Passage. Social media friends of Ken are already noticing that the image of Munk on the cover looks very much like Ken himself. Canada's History's new podcast supplement has Ken in conversation with senior editor Kate Jaimet.

My own feature story "Confederation or Bust" is inspired by Prince Edward Island's observance of its 150th anniversary of joining confederation in 1873. It's a story less of constitutional negotiations than of land wars, railroad crises, and the remarkable and ultimately tragic career of Island reformer George Coles.  

Maybe for the first time in non-indigenous media, I also took up the question of what the Mi'kmaq Nation of Atlantic Canada (and by extension other First Nations) thought and did about Confederation. That's in the article as well as in the podcast supplement (about to be posted) in which Kate Jaimet talks with Mi'kmaw scholar and law professor Cheryl Simon and me. From the article, Mi'kmaw concerns about Confederation's potential impact on indigenous rights:

The Mi'kmaq Grand Council -- a centuries-old governing body -- raised funds to send a delegate, Peter Cope, to meet with British Colonial Office officials in London. In 1926 Mi'kmaw elder Joe Cope recalled how Peter Cope was assured that as long as any Indigenous person "remained a True Ward of the English Government, so long his treaty rights would be respected and adhered to.  No bye-law can ever alter or change his Treaty Rights and Privileges."

The "subscription cover" this month features a memoir by the Canadian artist JJ Lee -- seen here with a photo of her grandfather, about four generations of her immigrant ancestors' experiences and the art she is creating about them.

And reviews, letters, notes, a visit to Baie St-Paul, and more.  If you subscribed like you oughta, it would be on its way to you.

Book Notes: Wanda's War

Recently I had a piece published in the Literary Review of Canada about writing the histories of individuals who pretty much left no record of themselves. I did not realize then that my friend Marsha Faubert was about to publish a book that is dedicated to precisely that task.

Faubert's Wanda's War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal (from Goose Lane Editions) explores the lives of her Polish-Canadian mother-in-law and father-in-law, Wanda and Casey (Kazimierz) Surdykowski during and after the Second World War. They left a few photographs, but mostly they did not talk about the war, or their lives in Europe, or coming to Canada. 

Wanda's War explores how Wanda survived first the Soviet and then the German invasion of Poland and ended up a forced labourer in a factory camp in Germany. Meanwhile, Casey, then unknown to her, had been seized by the Soviet forces after they invaded eastern Poland in 1939. He was shipped off to serve as a forced labourer in a Siberian forestry camp. From there, he followed a very implausible path (which the book explains) to becoming a soldier in the Polish Division fighting alongside British and Canadians in Italy. My own father, serving in the British Army in Italy, must have been nearby at times; he remembered how everyone felt safer when the Polish Division was nearby, because no German attack was going to get past the Poles. 

At the end of the war, both Wanda and Casey became "displaced persons," unwilling and unable to return to Soviet-occupied Poland, unwanted most other places. Wanda reached Canada via a bizarre scheme through which a Canadian businessman was permitted to bring young Polish women from refugee camps to be cheap labour in his factory in rural Quebec. Eventually she fled to southern Ontario, and saw her mother and siblings also reach North America. Casey benefitted from the grudging respect the Western Allies paid to the military service of the Free Polish Army, and was able to join a group of his fellow soldiers being accepted into Canada. He got to Kitchener, Ontario, in the late 1940s, where he met and married Wanda and where they spent the rest of their lives. One of their sons met Marsha Faubert in law school, which is how she became daughter-in-law to Wanda and Casey, who have since died.

They didn't willingly talk about any of their nightmarish wartime history. But Marsha Faubert has pieced together a remarkable amount of information both about them individually and about the world-historical events through which they lived. From family genealogy to pre-war Polish rural society in Eastern Europe, to gulags and slave labour camps, to the military history of World War II, to the intricacies of postwar immigration and adjustment, to the politics of memory, she has got it all in one story.

There's a book launch for Wanda's World tomorrow at Baka Gallery Cafe in Bloor West Village, Toronto. Goose Lane is promoting it on Facebook, so I guess they would not mind if a few of the sophisticated audience of this blog joined in.

A book launch, a real in-person book launch! Imagine.

 

   

History of Ugandan refugees, history of Canada

I read recently that there were just 50,000 people of Indian (i.e., Asian Indian) descent in Canada fifty years ago, in 1972, when Ugandan dictator Idi Amin expelled the South Asian Ugandan population of some 80,000 people in just ninety days.

Canada did not take in all 80,000 -- more like 6,000 or 8,000. But the Canadian response to the Ugandan Asian refugee crisis "marked the first time Canada accepted a large group of predominantly Muslim, non-European, non-white refugees." It's as good a marker as any of Canada's transformation into the society we have become in just fifty years.

Happily, there's a new history of all that. Not just the experience of the migrants but what it meant for Canadian policy about immigration, "multiculturalism," and diversity.

Shezan Muhammedi’s Gifts from Amin documents how these women, children, and men—including doctors, engineers, business leaders, and members of Muhammedi’s own family—responded to the threat in Uganda and rebuilt their lives in Canada. Building on extensive archival research and oral histories, Muhammedi provides a nuanced case study on the relationship between public policy, refugee resettlement, and assimilation tactics in the twentieth century.

Shezan Muhammedi is a policy analyst with the Canadian federal government and an adjunct research professor in the Department of History at Carleton University.  There's another "gift" -- from immigrants and children of immigrants Canada is acquiring a community of historians to match the diversity of the country. 

Omar Sachedina, CTV's chief new anchor, and the son of 1972 Ugandan migrants, reflects on their experience in today's Globe and Mail 

Update, November 7: A less optimistic look at Canadian immigration policy is Containing Diversity: Canada and the Politics of Immigration in the 21st Century by Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Ethel Tungohan and Christina Gabriel, recently published by University of Toronto Press:

This book reflects on how diversity is being "contained" through practices designed to insulate the Canadian settler-colonial state. In assessing the Canadian government’s policies towards refugees and asylum seekers, economic migrants, family-class migrants, temporary foreign workers, and multiculturalism, the authors show the various contradictory practices in effect. Containing Diversity reflects on policy changes, analysed alongside the resurgence of right-wing political ideology and the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, Containing Diversity highlights the need for a re-imagining of new forms of solidarity that centre migrant and Indigenous justice.

History of oaths (updated)

Citizenship by Zoom

I happened recently to be reading Fire and Ashes, Michael Ignatieff's apologia for his brief career in elective Canadian politics. A future blog post may take up some of the weirdness of that career. But for the moment, I'm struck by his description, on first being elected to Parliament, of his discomfort about swearing the MPs' oath, which says nothing of an MP's duty to the constitution or to parliament or to democracy or to the Canadian people he now represented, but only requires loyalty to Elizabeth II.

And then, serendipity, I came across a recent essay by Ashok Charles at the Canadian politics blog Counterweights, about the inadequacy of the citizenship oath sworn by newcomers becoming citizens of Canada. 

Many of those who immigrate to Canada are coming from societies with conceptions of civil rights, freedoms, and responsibilities which are significantly different than our own.

When immigrants have fulfilled the requirements of citizenship, our citizenship oath represents our only opportunity to elicit a formal commitment in regards to how they will conduct themselves as full-fledged members of Canadian society.

It would be prudent to require a pledge to uphold democracy, egalitarianism, secularism and multiculturalism. Each of these principles is upheld by our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and, as such, they are fundamental Canadian values. We benefit when joined by newcomers who honour them.

Instead they, like our Members of Parliament, get the oath of loyalty to a foreign monarch and her heirs and successors.

Somehow, the death of Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, has inspired a lot of commentary about the great value of the monarchy to Canada. We need to remember also the costs we incur everywhere in our public life. 

Update April 15, 2021: Alan B. McCullough responds:

While I happen to be a monarchist, mostly for reasons of tradition, I see some merit in the suggestion that MP’s and citizenship oaths could be revised to make some reference to upholding the constitution and democracy. 

You quote, I presume approvingly, Ashok Charles’ statement that the Charter of Rights and Freedom upholds “democracy, egalitarianism, secularism and multiculturalism.” 

Democracy, egalitarianism, and  multi-culturalism are specifically mentioned in the charter; secularism is not. On the contrary the preamble to the charter reads ” Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.” Although some have argued that the preamble is a dead letter, the general rule is that a preamble is intended to establish a context in which the legislation is interpreted. Furthermore, if one regards the preamble as a dead letter, that also discards the idea that Canada is founded on the principle of the rule of law. Beyond the preamble, Section 2 of the Charter states that freedom of conscience and religion are fundamental freedoms. This can hardly be taken as meaning that the charter upholds secularism although I would argue that freedom of conscience protects a citizen’s right to be an agnostic or atheist.

Mr. Charles also raises expresses some concerns with the concept of multi-culturalism – he writes “It is fair to say that many of those who immigrate to Canada are coming from societies with conceptions of civil rights, freedoms, and responsibilities which are significantly different than our own.” Section 27 of the charter states “This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.” The charter does not support multi-culturalism per se; it supports a specific multicultural heritage. We may have difficulty agreeing on exactly what this heritage is but both Mr. Charles and I might agree that not all cultural practices should be protected by the charter. 

Constitutional drafting is (or should be) a subtle art, and I'm not sure I support precisely the shopping-list formula Ashok Charles has adopted here as the best way to improve the oath. As Alan McCullough says, a phrase about upholding the constitution and democracy -- maybe just the constitution? -- might well be better than risking the complications he mentions.

 

 

History of -- and by -- Chinese railroad workers

For almost 140 years, the voices of the thousands of Chinese who built the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) have been silent.

That's a statement that strikes me as true. In all the writing about the building of the CPR, even by those who wished to say something vivid and detailed about the lives and perspectives of its labour force, first- person testimonies have been scarce. That's the case for labourers of European and North American origins, but even more so for the imported Chinese work force. Even those who may have wished to overcome the neglect and disparagement of the Chinese workers in railroad history, I think, have been hardpressed to present much in the way of first hand accounts. 

But here is a new source. The quotation at the top is from a review by May Q. Wong in the Ormsby Review of the recently published Diary of Dukesang Wong: A Voice from Gold Mountain by Dukesang Wong, translated by his granddaughter Wanda Joy Hoe, in a new publication edited by David McIlwraith.

Editor McIlwraith notes that "pervasive myths tend to dissuade the searcher: the Chinese were illiterate, the Chinese didn’t keep diaries, their diaries could not have survived the decades, it was all destroyed in the Cultural Revolution, and so on." But Dukesang Wong's diary exists, and it is an important find. He was there, and he took notes:

Autumn 1881 — The people working with me are good, strong men. There are many of us working here, but the laying of the railroad progresses very slowly. It seems we move two stones a day!  

Early autumn 1883 — My soul cries out…. Many of our people have been so very ill for such a long time, and there has been no medicine nor good food to give them. Even the strongest of us are weak without medicine to fight against these diseases, which spread very rapidly…. These are troubled times for us Chinese.

  

Response: Levine on refugee history

Allan Levine responds to my post from yesterday:

Boat people at sea, 1979

I would greatly qualify your opening comments in your recent post “Canada’s history of welcoming refugees.” Until about the 1950s, and then in the 1970s, Canada was not exactly a haven for refugees. Most were unwanted. The list goes back to pre-Confederation with victims of the Irish Famine, followed by among others: Russian Jews escaping pogroms in the early 1880s; the Komagata Maru incident of 1914; German-Jewish refugees in the 1930s trying desperately to escape Nazi Germany, only to be confronted by the “none is too many” policy promoted by Frederick Blair who in 1936 became the director of the immigration branch. (Canada did not then have a refugee policy.) Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King followed Blair’s lead mainly because it was politically expedient to do so (there were those seats in Quebec to consider). And, after the Second World War, King and his officials made it very difficult for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust to come to Canada. As he articulated in a May 1947 speech, Canada’s post-war immigration policy was aimed at preserving the “fundamental composition of the Canadian population”—that is, white, Christian, Western European. “I wish to make it quite clear,” King declared, “that Canada is perfectly within her rights in selecting the persons whom we regard as desirable future citizens. It is not a ‘fundamental human right’ of any alien to enter Canada. It is a privilege.” That policy applied to refugees as well.

Here’s an interesting story passed on to me by Irving Abella, co-author with Harold Troper of the ground-breaking 1982 book, None is Too Many. In 1979, the two had published an article in the Canadian Historical Review based on their research for the book. They sent the article to Ron Atkey, the immigration minister in the newly elected government of Joe Clark. It came with a cautionary note: “We hope Canada will not be found wanting in this refugee crisis the way it was in the last.” At the time, Atkey was trying to figure out a proper response to the emergency precipitated by the Vietnamese “boat people” fleeing from North Vietnamese Communist rule. Canada had taken in only about 6,000 of an estimated 130,000 refugees. Atkey’s deputy minister, John Manion, read Abella and Troper’s article about Mackenzie King’s closed-door policy and passed it on to the minister with a warning: “This should not be you.” Atkey spoke to Clark about it, who agreed to a dramatic shift in the government’s position. Working with a large network of volunteers, the Conservatives opened Canada’s doors wide enough for more than 50,000 refugees to come to the country. But that was in in 1979.

History of build that wall: Francophones in New England

19th century New Englanders torch a Catholic church in Bath, Maine

Franco-American historian David Vermette has a notable piece on the Smithsonian History website about the time when the invasion of French-Canadians from Quebec was seen as a dangerous threat to New England.

In 1892, the New York Times suggested that emigration from Québec was “part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith. … This is the avowed purpose of the secret society to which every adult French Canadian belongs.”

The New York Times reported in 1881 that French-Canadian immigrants were “ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world. … They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.”

In Canadian and Quebec historiography, the movement of some million francophones out of Quebec and into New England to rebuild the textile industry workforce after its Civil War collapse has mostly been recorded as a crisis for Quebec -- with the Catholic clergy being prime movers in colonization projects in the Saguenay, the Laurentians and other areas intended to prevent the draining away of francophones from Quebec.  Perspective is everything, I guess.

Vermette is the author of A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans. published by the Quebec (English-language) publisher Baraka Books.

Image: US National Gallery of Art, via Smithsonian History

History of terror and migration

Sometimes the old world seems not so far away.  CBC Radio reports on a group of Manitoba Mennonites who took a river cruise to the Ukrainian territories their grandparents emigrated from -- and found themselves gaining access to the KGB reports from the 1930s that documented the arrests, interrogations, probable torture, and executions of forebears whose travails provoked the flight of the survivors to, eventually, Manitoba.

"The interrogator kept asking about his counter-revolutionary activities, but my grandfather kept insisting that after his stint in the White Army, he had not been involved in any,” Braun said.
“The interrogator responded that they had information that he had been. My grandfather requested the names of his accusers. That statement was not recognized.
"After each entry, my grandfather had to add his signature."
Braun’s grandfather was questioned again on Feb. 28, 1938.
"'You insist on hiding facts from interrogators. Tell the truth,'" Braun read from notes she took of the translated files.
In them, her grandfather replied: "'I told the truth about my activities in the German community in which I lived.’”
At the end of the session, he pleaded guilty to counter-revolutionary activity and being a member of a rebel group.
All of the men questioned during that time were sentenced to be shot to death, and all their property was appropriated.

Book Notes: Robert Vipond on one world, one school

Rob Vipond teaches political science, including Canadian constitutional matters, at the University of Toronto.  He has also been a parent at the local Toronto public school, Clinton Street Public School.  One day the principal said to him, You are interested in history, aren't you? and drafted him for a school history project.


Well, it grew. Vipond's recently published Making A Global City: How One Toronto School Embraced Diversity explores a century and more of the impact of urban diversity on one city school, and how that one school has dealt with it over the years.  Early in the twentieth century there was "Jewish Clinton." By mid-century there was "European Clinton." More recently it's been "Global Clinton."

Vipond created a research course on Clinton Street School, so his book is data-driven.  But he acknowledges he's not a scholar of education, or multiculturalism, or urbanism -- it's still the story of his daughter's remarkable ordinary school as well as a treatise in Canadians dealing with the promise and problems of immigration and diversity. Timely!

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.)