What Role Do Historians Play in ‘Truth and Reconciliation’?

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What Role Do Historians Play in ‘Truth and Reconciliation’?

We are currently in the midst of a national conversation about cultural genocide, recently reaffirmed in the public eye by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As regular readers of Clio’s Current can attest, this blog aims to engage with issues of national and international significance. We have written extensively about Aboriginal history, but have yet to discuss the role historians might play in the future. To assess this question, it is necessary to explore some of the issues in Aboriginal history thus far "uncovered" by historians.

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Politicized Scholarship: Exploring Themes in Aboriginal History, Part II

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Politicized Scholarship: Exploring Themes in Aboriginal History, Part II

A few weeks ago, we published the first post in a short series examining the origins and evolution of Aboriginal history the Canadian context. We traced some of the more influential works in the field to explore the hold of prominent analytic debates, and explored the contribution of recent studies such as James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains. Today, we continue our short series with a brief post on the influence of legal affairs and land claims, examining in particular the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry and the Hawthorn Report.

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Agency and Victimization: Exploring Themes in Aboriginal History

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Agency and Victimization: Exploring Themes in Aboriginal History

In our last post we took a brief look at the historical legacy of Canada’s founding Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald, who historian James Daschuk claims instituted a policy of starvation against First Nations in an effort to “clear” prairie lands for railway construction. Aboriginal peoples were either denied food or given rotten meat and diseased animals. Thousands died as a result, but the Dominion government secured its railway and considered the policy a success. Daschuk’s widely acclaimed book Clearing the Plains is one of the more recent examples in Canadian historical literature to have employed a narrative structure that focuses on the colonial victimization of Aboriginal peoples. Today we offer a quick survey of some of the more influential works on Aboriginal history and Native-Newcomer relations, laying the foundation for a short series that explores the growth and evolution of the field.

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Historians of Canada's First World War: What do we know?

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Recently, the Canadian Historical Review published a series of articles reviewing the state of First World War scholarship in Canadian history. This collection is great for scholars, but probably more difficult for the public to engage with it.  So, we’re going to talk about where Canadian historians stand on the First World War in 2014 – how does it compare to what you’ve read?

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Stuck in Time: A Call for the ‘Transtemporal’ Historian

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Historians are considered experts, not of all history but certainly of a particular subfield. There are those of us who study Canadian history, or British or Japanese history, and within those subfields are additional ‘areas of expertise,’ such as political, environmental, or economic history. The Canadianist is certainly not bound to a Canadian context, nor is she/he restricted to study specific subfields or genres. Nonetheless, and despite recent interest in adopting inclusive modes of inquiry, historians are generally taught to embrace a sense of familiarity in their work that derives from research focused both topically and temporally. Clio’s Current has previously explored issues related to national and regional identities, political and social histories, and inquiry-based methodologies, but given that we recently passed the one-year mark, it’s perhaps appropriate for us to investigate the impact of time on historical writing.

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The Study of History - and its Decline?

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Daniel Johnson has lamented in a recent article appearing in Standpoint Magazine that the study of history has reached an all-time low.  We agree that the ways in which politicians and the public at large value history is problematic, but we would argue that the fragmentation of history—from the grand narratives of Leopold von Ranke and Auguste Comte to the nuanced approaches to historical subjects—affords great insight into our place in the world and those who came before us. 

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