Adventures in Archives...and Airbnb

This has been an unusual week. I last posted at the close of my second day in the archives. Since then, I've spent a good many long days there, and scanned and photographed more things than I'd care to count. Some highlights have included materials from the Junior Red Cross, and the notes for an educational psychology research project in 1950 - particularly exciting for me also because my mother is in that field, and when I went home for the weekend, I shared the files I'd found. She'd administered those same tests and was able to give context for the psychology side of things. 

Almost every day, I find something that makes me laugh. An awkward typo, asking for "poets" rather than "posts" to build a fence. A letter with a cigarette burn. A political cartoon inserted between two far more serious documents. The documents I've found haven't quite made me cry yet, and I'm not so sure that's a good thing. In the past two days, I've been looking at a box of restricted material about health in the Sudbury area (a district which included a large chunk of northern Ontario). A mother writes in from a sanatorium, asking to be transferred to the same facility as her son. A bureaucrat denies her request. Two children write letters to their mother in a sanatorium; the mother forwards the letters to the Department of Indian Affairs, concerned that her daughters are being mistreated by their father and stepmother while she is away. 

This week, the archives have been the consistent thing that holds me together. I've had to change accommodation, after my Airbnb rental turned out to be quite disastrous. I've been itching to write it down, and lack a better place to put it, so here goes.

The place looked great in the descriptions and photographs on the Airbnb website. Queer-friendly household, vegetarian, rabbinical student who collects books. They sounded like my kind of people. When I got there, though, the place was in a bit of a shambles. When I arrived on Sunday, I found that the room I'd rented lacked a dresser, so I couldn't put my stuff away, and it was so tiny that with open suitcases on the floor, I really couldn't walk. The host had large piles of her stuff in the corner, so I couldn't even push my stuff out of the way. Despite the description saying that the host was fastidious about cleaning, that turned out not to be the case - dishes everywhere, hair everywhere. Both women who lived there have very long hair, and said hair went everywhere possible - in my bed, all over the kitchen and bathroom. I can cope with a bit of hair, though, or a few dishes in the sink; I'm hardly a neat-nik. 

After remembering that the ad for the room showed a picture of a dresser, I looked again at the Airbnb listing. That's when I realized that I wasn't just awkwardly feeling out of place in a new space - the room wasn't at all like the one in the photographs! It took little time for me to realize that I was living in an entirely different place. They had taken photos in their previous home, then moved to a different apartment in the same neighbourhood. Since I'd decided against previous places because of the lack of either a dresser or desk, or because the room didn't have much floor space, it was frustrating to find myself suddenly in a place that I would have turned down had I known what it actually looked like. The bedroom was small, and I didn't feel like I could hang out in the living room very much, because my host had rented her own bedroom, and was sleeping on her sofa for the month. Airbnb, when I told them about it, let me know that I'd be eligible for a full refund if I had to leave the place.

The other thing that I didn't know about in advance is that my host runs a minyan out of her home, regularly having prayer and study groups in her living room. 

On my second day in the flat, I texted a good friend: "I am moderately concerned that my airbnb hosts want to convert me to more Jewish than I am." It turns out that I was on to something. On my third evening there, they invited me to the Torah study they hold regularly in their living room. I'm generally up for learning something new, so I went. That week's reading was Emor, from Leviticus, and indeed it was interesting stuff. Most of the study group ended up being tangents from the text, which was good, because the text is obviously far more religious than I am comfortable with. My host seemed to figure out, perhaps just from my body language, which parts of the discussion resonated with me - so she offered to lend me particular Jewish texts to talk about various issues. At the conclusion of the Torah study, I felt like I'd learned a lot, and figured I'd go back the following week. I realized later in the evening that something just didn't feel right, though, about this. I've always felt comfortable in how I practice Judaism (generally in my case, it is a culture, rather than a religion, and I am absolutely fine with that). The Torah group made me feel like there was something wrong with what I have been happily doing all my life, and that I need to prioritize doing more, and being more visible. Each of my hosts covered their heads with a kippah, and wore long sleeves and long skirts. In their home, I felt naked, wearing the shorts that I usually do during a heat wave. When they prayed before meals, I felt like I should be doing something, too. It is disconcerting to me, now, that I felt compelled to change something about myself, after just a couple of days - and that I continue thinking about them, six days after leaving their home. My host's roommate, who converted to Judaism quite recently, is preparing a course for Jews who have been out of touch with Judaism and wish to reconnect. We chatted a lot about queer issues, and politics - particularly the Alberta election - but ultimately, every conversation made its way, somehow, to religion. Would I consider a female God? A gender-neutral one?

Following the Torah study, I asked my host if she could please move her piles of stuff out of the corner of the room, and set up some sort of a dresser so that I could unpack; it's so hard to feel at home in a place while living out of a suitcase. I'd arrived while she was out of town, and her room-mate had said she'd look into it, but obviously the two women hadn't communicated about the dresser yet. Yes, she said, of course she'd do this, right away while I was at the archives the next day.

I arrived home that evening after a long day in the archives. Nothing at all had changed in my room, and my host made no mention about it. I realized that if she hadn't done anything about it by then, odds are that she wouldn't - and perhaps she never had any intention to. When I first arrived, I'd asked my host's room-mate about locking the doors at night, because I really don't feel safe sleeping when the doors are unlocked. She agreed to, but every night thereafter, I had to do it - and if they put out the trash or something after I'd already locked the front door, they didn't lock it again. The bathroom had no curtain or frosting on the window, and while getting out of the shower, I noticed a person in a window across the backyards. Obviously that sort of thing creeped me out, but I realized that I felt even more uncomfortable with the people who were in the home than the people who were outside of it. I can be an anxious person at times, but I normally have things under control. In this home, I was beginning to panic. It was clear that I had to move. Officially, the reason for the move was the lack of a dresser; of course, that was just the tip of the iceberg.

While packing my belongings, late at night, my host got up from the sofa to use the washroom, and confusedly wandered into my bedroom. Already on edge, I was really unable to handle having an unexpected person stumble in the door. She muttered a bit, then left. I finished packing, and slept terribly. Fortunately, a good friend of mine lives in Ottawa, and was happy to rent me her apartment while she spent time with her boyfriend out of town. In the morning, I took a taxi to her place.

I spent the weekend at my mother's home in Toronto. When I described my hosts to her, she mused that this sounded a bit like a cult. I looked up the rabbinical program that my host had trained in, and it certainly sounds fringey - something along the lines of Hassidic Judaism, combined with Buddhism, and elements of various other spiritual practices, taking a feminist sort of approach. I googled the name of the group, adding the word "cult" to my search. While no list of cult-like religions is infallible, the presence of this group on such a list was enough to make me feel that I'd dodged a bullet by leaving.

At present, my host is messaging me insisting that she will not give a refund. Airbnb has already refunded my money for the nights I didn't stay, and I will not be bullied into giving any of that back. All in all, I probably lost a day of good archive work to dealing with this situation, and found myself even more stressed than I would normally be during a research trip. Worn down, today I took a two-hour nap after breakfast, and I'm hoping that I'm not getting sick.

Now, back to the archives.

Sometimes, all you can do is imagine.

Today I spent some time reading death inquiry reports from two residential schools in Ontario. Nothing that I saw today was particularly surprising, but the documents do weigh on me. Over a period of ten years, ten kids died at one school, and twelve at the other. Each report listed the name of the child; the cause of death; what sorts of medical care was done for the child; whether the local doctor evaluated the death as having been preventable. For every single one of these reports, the doctor determined that the school staff had done everything they could. I can’t time travel—and am not qualified to give a medical opinion even if I were there—but I am skeptical. At any rate, it does say what they may have thought about prevention: one a child had tubercular meningitis, little could be done, but there was no comment in any report about preventing the disease from having taken hold in the first place.

Often what strikes me the most is what remains unsaid in the records I read. The children and families have little voice, here, and I am still grappling with how to address this in my thesis. In this group of death reports, a principal notes that the mother of one small child came to the school to offer her comfort in her final days; a chief wrote to the Department of Indian Affairs to complain that often, communities learned of children’s deaths second-hand, as the school was not reliable about contacting parents. Following this letter, the principal forwarded brief notes to each family, notifying them of his regret and the funeral arrangements for the child. If the parents responded, their letters were not kept in the file. 

The report that sits with me the most tonight pertains to a little girl named Doris. Despite policies that children were not to be at a residential school until the age of seven, there are a great many cases of children attending the schools younger than that. The report noted that Doris, who passed away late one November, had turned four the previous March. Four. A handful of words on a page describe and rationalize the final days of a small child. 

With no words to tell the rest of the story, my imagination tries to fill in the blanks. For the sake of preserving myself for a month of long days in the archives, I cannot let it - but at the same time, I don’t feel right turning that side of my mind off. 

At the end of day two in the LAC microfilm room, this is where I’m at.

Ottawa

Here I am, in a cafe a few blocks from the archives in Ottawa, waiting for my breakfast. It’s been a slow start to the morning as I get my bearings in a new city, but I’m hoping to be in the reading room by 11 AM. I flew into Toronto last week, and spent a few days catching up with my family before coming here late yesterday. While there, I worked for two days at the Archives of Ontario, mostly looking at microfilms. So far, I haven’t seen anything groundbreaking, but there was an interesting file from the Sociological Committee regarding research on Aboriginal communities in the 1880s, and a file of correspondence on the Bear Island school in the Temagami area, where the provincial and federal governments cooperated to form a reserve school (this sort of cooperation is not particularly common, from what I’ve seen so far).

Dealing with privacy issues wasn’t as complicated as I’d anticipated. There was a good deal of bureaucracy, but shortly before I left for Ontario, a consultant called me from LAC to discuss my needs. I’d initially submitted a regular access to information request, as this was the only option given on the LAC website for gaining access to restricted files. It turns out that, for researchers, there is also an option called 8(2)(j), which lets me access many restricted files, provided that I safeguard the confidentiality of personal information. To get this access approved, I had to submit a formal request outlining how I would protect the information I received, and how I would anonymize it for eventual publication. Storing information on an encrypted and locked external hard drive, and assigning pseudonyms if I refer to an individual case in my writing, was sufficient. On the train yesterday, I received an email approving my request. This was far faster than a regular ATIP request, and it cost me nothing (for an ATIP request, I would have had to pay for the archivists’ time, in excess of five hours, to review the files - and that would have added up quite significantly, since I have a great many files to review!). 

Breakfast now eaten, here I go!

*** 

12 hours later...

My first day at the archives was fun, though overwhelming. The first thing I noticed when I arrived was the impact of the recent cuts to LAC. Four years ago, when I was last here, I came in and straight away got to speak with an archivist about my needs. Fortunately, this time, I am more independent in my research, because I would have had to make an appointment in advance in order to speak with anyone. Even to submit a request for documents and get a self-serve copy request form approved took a lengthy wait. Four years ago, there was a cafeteria. This time, there are merely vending machines, and I was glad to find a coffee shop just two blocks away. Unfortunately, it is closed on weekends. After 4 PM, there isn't a soul to help out. I don't expect research support in the evening opening hours, but I'm certainly glad that I know how to run a microfilm machine. 

The overwhelming part is considering the sheer volume of files I plan to consult. I got through a few microfilm reels today, but there are so, so many more that I have yet to look at. If reels were available through interlibrary loan (as they were until the year before I started my PhD program) I'd be less concerned, but I only have a month to spend in Ottawa this summer. I have many more files to consult in Toronto and Sault Ste Marie in July and August, so more work in Ottawa will have to wait until perhaps the end of the summer, but more likely Christmas, or reading week. That's frustrating.

Fortunately, there are many, many needles in what seems like a haystack of files. Today, I read regulations about school inspections, a few school inspection reports, correspondence about medical matters in residential schools, and instructions from the Department of Indian Affairs to school staff regarding the procedures to be followed, administratively, in case of the death of a student. I've found a fair number of files that will undoubtedly be useful for me - and there are hundreds more, waiting. 

Where am I?

For nearly a year, this blog has been nearly silent. My post-comps world got off to a slow start, but as of the end of February, I am a PhD candidate and ready to start my research.

During my prospectus defence, my supervisor - knowing that I thrive on metaphors - suggested one for helping to keep my work manageable. Think of a stone that you lift up, she said; underneath it are many different types of bugs. You might want to know where every single one of them are going, but that’s not feasible. You can only follow one or two bugs at a time.

“One bug at a time” has been a sort of motto as I’ve waded through catalogues of files, trying to decide what, when, where, and how I will read this summer. And so I have playfully subdivided my list of primary documents that I have yet to read into “bugs” - categories, really - so that the list does not become too overwhelming. That’s not precisely what she was suggesting in this metaphor, but I do feel that it’s in the same spirit. 

I’ll be spending this summer in archives in Toronto and Ottawa. At the beginning of the month, I sent out privacy requests for swaths of files; I have yet to gain access to any of them. Fortunately, I have a few hundred non-restricted documents to pore over first. Some of these are online, so they’re a good place to start while I’m in BC. In a sense, I’m alternating between two bugs right now - the Department of Indian Affairs annual reports (I am tweeting snippets of these, sporadically, at @DIAreports) when internet access is not reliable, and various letters and memoranda from the Red Series when I do have a good connection and can view digitized image files. 

Yesterday, I read a handful of letters pertaining to custody issues in the Northern Superintendency. One of the files I reviewed was quite lengthy, and also troubling. A little boy had gone to live in the home of a white settler in a village near his reserve. This settler had pulled the child out of school, in favour of tutoring him privately. I hope that I am seeing euphemisms where none exist, but to me, the Indian Agent’s condemnation of the man sounded like an allegation of sexual abuse. In any case, the man was deemed an unfit guardian, and the Department of Indian Affairs sent the child to the Shingwauk school, a significant distance from their home. Notably, there was another residential school far closer to the reserve; this was one of thousands of cases where interdenominational rivalry severed a family. The child’s family was neither absent nor deemed unfit by any of the officials involved in deciding his fate; the Department of Indian Affairs objected to a settler man adopting the child because the man was a "very peculiar sort of a fellow” - they made scant mention, however, of the boy’s mother and grandparents who were raising him. 

Today, I read still more files where the fate of a child was decided by white officials, far away. The files are full of words, yet blank when it comes to what I feel matters so much - the children themselves. In one case, the adults argue over jurisdiction, and whose responsibility it is to pay for the costs of a child’s maintenance in a reformatory, but behind all this documentation is an eleven-year-old who has been sentenced to five years in an alien environment, as punishment for misbehaving and running away from a residential school. In another file, the Department swiftly agreed to pay for the transportation of a little girl who was to travel to Toronto to have her foot amputated; for the surgery, she spent two months away from home. While my research is on policy, I am aching to see how children responded to the politicking that severed them from their homes, severed their limbs. From the thousands of pages of microfilm, spanning decades, I hope we have not severed the children.

The Orpheus choir, and the "End of Innocence"

I am usually reluctant to attend Remembrance Day proceedings. I am not merely jaded, but also skeptical of the commemorative impetus behind many official ceremonies that, in my opinion, celebrates war, rather condemning it. However, while visiting Toronto last month, I had the opportunity to attend the Orpheus Choir’s Remembrance Day concert, “The End of Innocence.” The choir’s slogan is “expect something different” and my sister, a choir member, had told me how the concert would involve a multimedia presentation and dramatic readings in addition to the music. So many Remembrance Day observances feel faded out after years of repetition, but this, as promised, was different – a poignant recognition of the day, and also among the most memorable and evocative concerts of my adult life.

The performance was impeccable. It was less a commemoration than a story of the First World War through image, drama, and music, mourning the end of the “age of innocence” by using music to create a wrinkle in time between the audience and the dramatized primary sources. Sandwiched between a prelude and postlude were images, music, and texts that juxtaposed consonance and dissonance, moving through the emotions of the period. The musical, visual, and textual selections of Robert Cooper, Joan Nicks, and Mary Barr braided together perfectly. For example, Edward Moroney’s “King and Country,” a medley of popular music from the period, reflected the upbeat mood following the armistice – and that is when the visuals moved from black and white images of the war to brightly coloured movie posters. Stratford Festival actors Bethany Jillard and Mike Shara executed a narration comprised of a series of letters and diary entries from the war – clearly selected after extensive research.

At times, the concert felt like it was a single piece, perhaps an oratorio with several composers, rather than a more traditional choral concert. Most of the characters lived in the narration; however, at one point, a young man rose from the chorus for a solo in Howard Goodall’s “Do Not Stand At My Grave.” Scarcely older than the soldiers who died in the war, the lyrics took on the air of his letter home to a family for whom he could never have truly died; most families could never have afforded to visit a grave overseas. Instead, their loved ones disappeared into the mud of an unknown place. How real could death be, without a tangible body? The chorus was a canvas for these sorts of characters; at times, the choir sat or knelt, with the book lights they used to see their music only slightly illuminating their faces. From my pew at the back of the church, they looked like they were praying.

After this praise, it may seem peculiar that my main criticism of the concert is actually its very premise: was World War One really the end of the “age of innocence”? This is, certainly, the assumption of the Canadian public – what we have been taught in high school history classes for generations, and what people during the war (to my knowledge) declared. Notably, however, we repeatedly make such assumptions that our era is exceptional. The program noted the Ottawa attack, just a few weeks previously, and I immediately thought about how the CBC portrayed that shooting as an unprecedented change. Given the colonial violence through which Canada was founded, the idea that Canada ever had its innocence is a tremendous erasure of history. Perhaps each successive war has been chipping away at “innocence” – in which case, since it did not exist in the first place, we are left with an ever-expanding vacuum.

Last year, I was a teaching assistant for History 102, Canada since Confederation. For the lecture on the First World War, the professor set up a slide show of photographs of some of the most gruesome parts of trench warfare: men with parts of their faces missing, severed limbs in the mud, that sort of thing. For the second half of the two-hour lecture period, he read a memoir (I have unfortunately forgotten the name or author) about life in the trenches. It was emotionally overwhelming, seeing those photographs while hearing about the experiences of a man, younger than our students, who faced a reality where he would be killed if he did not kill other men, often at close range. Neither the memoir nor the photographs spared any details – appropriately, since the goal of the lesson was to instill the horror of war in the minds of a group of young adults who, almost invariably, had only seen such images in video game animations. This was the most effective lecture about a war that I'd ever seen. However, in the tutorial following that lecture, some of my students reported having had nightmares. At least two had exited the lecture hall in tears. I wondered afterwards how to create a balance, showing students the horrors of war, but without so horrifying them that they might be reluctant to study history further.

My students comprise a very different demographic from the Orpheus choir members or audience. The audience for this concert was overwhelmingly white middle-aged people or seniors, seated in an Anglican church in an exclusive neighbourhood – this is standard for the Toronto choral scene. This group was very clearly moved, and I wish I could see how the young, multicultural students whom I have taught might react to such a concert. Most of my students are unversed in classical music, which might be the ticket to bringing the power of both war and peace into their understandings of history.

Just over a month later, the notes and images of this concert have not faded from my mind. Usually, I attend a choral concert expecting just that – a concert. In this case, I indeed experienced something different: a service, a haunting, a lesson, a reverie, and a collective fear of death and celebration of life.

Post-secondary class privilege: an open letter to Margaret Wente

Dear Margaret Wente,
In a recent column in the Globe and Mail, you argued that the affordability crisis in post-secondary education, in which Canadian students pay high tuition fees and thus take on significant debt, is a "myth." In a nutshell, your argument is that, because half of all students graduate without any debt whatsoever, the debt crisis is not real. You make this argument by citing the misleading perspective of Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates:

“In net terms, Canadians pay zero tuition,” Mr. Usher says. “We’ve got free university and we don’t even know it.” So much for the affordability crisis.

 In net terms. The trouble is that for many Canadian students, the net is irrelevant. Even Usher himself acknowledges that there are tremendous inequalities in this "net zero" tuition, and that it does not mean that Canadians are going to school for free. For the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the affordability crisis is not a "net" matter so much as an equity issue. "Eduflation," their portmanteau to describe the disproportionate increase of tuition in relation to income, disproportionately affects middle- and low-income families. Ms. Wente, your analytical oversight is in misinterpreting the net to be representative of a general experience, and mentioning inequalities but dismissing them as a paltry matter because they average out.
Nearly half of students approaching university age in Canada, you claim, have RESPs. By extension, however, over half of that demographic does not have this. If you throw a party and give cake to just under half the guests, regardless of the average amount of cake distributed being satisfactory, your guests will be disappointed. Or, for a more visual representation, consider this image, which has been making rounds for some time on social media. While the net height of the boxes in relation to the height of the children enables the net child to see over the fence, it is plainly apparent that there is a significant practical difference in their experiences: 

Equity vs. Equality

RESPs help students whose parents have money to invest in their education. For those students, it's a great resource. The trouble is that it is not a universal - not even close. The same issue goes for scholarship money, which you note has increased significantly since the 1990s. "Merit" is not exclusively a facet of innate academic ability, but also a reflection of a lifetime of the advantages students gain from privilege. My work as a teaching assistant during my PhD has introduced me to a number of undergraduate students from various backgrounds, hammering home the ongoing impact of my own privilege.  

As an undergraduate student, I was comfortably within the upper middle class. My sister and I benefited from significant privileges due to our economic background, and our mother's position as a university faculty member, and these outgrowths of our privilege continue to help me through my graduate career. Many of my students clearly lack these advantages. My intention here is not to boast about my current position or achievements; indeed, while I worked hard to get what I did, from an equity perspective I certainly would not say that I deserve it. In essence, I climbed an academic ladder that less privileged peers were holding up. The merit-based awards I used to support my education are the product of my class privilege.

From early childhood, we had access to whatever resources we needed to do well in school. When the school didn't have enough textbooks for every student (not uncommon in Ontario schools during and since the Mike Harris years), my family could afford to purchase our own copies.  Rather than working part-time and during the summers through high school, my sister and I could volunteer, or participate in leadership programs at overnight camp – the sort of experiences that impress scholarship judges.

With a parent already enmeshed in the world of post-secondary education, I knew the importance of applying for scholarships. In grade twelve, I spent several hours each week crafting applications and personal statements, which my mother proofread for me, encouraging me not to undersell myself. This writing skill was instrumental for my later graduate school and funding applications. Being part of a university family had another advantage in familiarizing me with academic norms: visiting office hours was natural to me as an undergraduate, after a childhood of trotting around a university department on school PD days, and I was intimidated only by the gruffest of professors. Many of my students will only come to office hours when they are already desperate, and lose the advantage of having cultivated an academic relationship throughout the semester.

My mother could afford to let me live at home, rent-free, which meant that while I worked full-time during each summer as an undergraduate, I worked only limited hours part-time during the school year, and could scale back my hours when my academic work necessitated it. I earned very good grades as an undergraduate, helping me win ongoing scholarships and funding my graduate education. I was obsessive about my academic work not just because of my personality, but also because I could afford to be. I've had students fail to hand in a paper on time because their work schedule interfered, or doze off in class after working a night shift. Some of my students work full-time to support their families, alongside a full course load. Merit-based awards can snowball - winning one means having less financial need and therefore less need to work to offset educational costs, and being able to get the grades needed for more awards. These awards meant that my student debt was relatively low, so I could pay it off while living under my mother’s roof during a gap year.


Ms. Wente, I, like you, benefit from significant privilege. The economic and social advantages of being upper middle class through childhood and adolescence meant that student debt was a navigable obstacle rather than a crisis for me. That does not mean that it is not a crisis for those who are struggling to pay it off, or who fear the costs of higher education so much that they do not pursue it in the first place. In essence, try telling the child who cannot see over the fence that the sight-lines are just fine.

In your autobiography, you say that "a stint of manual labour gives children of the middle class a first-hand taste of how the other half lives."  I would like to respectfully suggest that you take a taste of how so many of today's undergraduates live. At my university, Student Services estimates costs of tuition and living expenses at $7675 for the average domestic undergraduate. Try covering those costs for four years, working at or barely above minimum wage, and still getting good enough grades to win the scholarships you mention. Try doing all of this without drawing on any savings or family resources. Try this without taking on a penny of debt, and then get back to me.

Sincerely,

Privileged and Angry in Vancouver

Reading Lists

Canada

Political History

Jeffrey McNairn, The Capacity to Judge. Tina Merrill Loo, Making Law, Order, and Authority in British Columbia, 1821-1871.   
Sean Mills, The Empire Within.
Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812.
Donald Fyson, Magistrates, Police, and People.
Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People.
Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State.
Jack Little, State and Society.
Gordon Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics.
H.V. Nelles, The Politics of Development.
Matthew Evenden, Fish versus Power.
Sean Cadigan, Newfoundland and Labrador.
 

Social History

Joy Parr, Sensing Changes.
Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire.
Naomi Griffiths, From Migrant to Acadian.
Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women.
Mary-Ellen Kelm, A Wilder West.
Timothy John Stanley, Contesting White Supremacy.
Sharon Wall, The Nurture of Nature.
Denyse Baillargeon, Making Do.
Willeen G. Keough. The Slender Thread.
Steve Penfold, The Donut.
Allan Greer, Peasant, Lord, and Merchant
Joy Parr, The Gender of Breadwinners.
Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks.
Jack Little, Borderland Religion.
Sherry Olson and Patricia A. Thornton, Peopling the North American City.
Roydon Loewen, Hidden Worlds.
Béatrice Craig. Backwoods Consumers and Homespun Capitalists.
Cole Harris, Resettlement of British Columbia.
Tina Loo, States of Nature.
John Sandlos, Hunters At The Margin.
 

Cultural History

Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint.
Keith Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto.
Christopher Dummitt, The Manly Modern.
H. V. Nelles, The Art of Nation-Building.
Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk.
Greg Gillespie, Hunting for Empire.
Stuart Henderson, Making the Scene.
Gillian Poulter, Becoming Native in a Foreign Land.
Karen Dubinsky, The Second Greatest Disappointment.
Patricia Jasen, Wild Things.
Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada.
Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble
   

Sex and Gender 

Gender, Sexuality, and the Law 

Backhouse, Constance. Carnal Crimes. 
Sangster, Joan. Regulating Girls and Women.
Erickson, Lesley. Westward Bound.
Mayeri, Serena. Reasoning from Race.
Chenier, Elise Rose. Strangers in Our Midst.
Myers, Tamara. Caught: Montreal’s Modern Girls and the Law, 1869-1945.
Laite, Julia. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens.
Bettina Bradbury, Wife to Widow.  

Gender, Sexuality, and Violence  

Dubinsky, Karen. Improper Advances.
Wiener, Martin. Men of Blood.
Steven Stowe, “The Touchiness of the Gentleman Planter”
Elliot Gorn, “Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch”
Willeen Keough, “Now You Vagabond Whore”
Wamsley and Kossuth, “Fighting it out in Nineteenth-Century Upper Canada/Canada West”
Humphries, Mark. “War’s Long Shadow”
Amnesty International. No More Stolen Sisters
Burtch & Haskell. Get That Freak.
Jasmin Jawani. Discourses of Denial.
 

Constructing Heteronormativity and the Normal Family 

 Jackson, Paul. One of the Boys.
Lewis, Carolyn Herbst. Prescription for Heterosexuality.
Kinsman and Gentile. The Canadian War on Queers.
Sarah Carter, The Importance of Being Monogamous.
Nancy Cott, Public Vows.
Gary Kinsman. “‘Character weaknesses’ and ‘fruit machines’”
Margaret Little “The pecker detectors are back”
Jane Nicholas “Celebration of the Jubilee”  

Creating Knowledge about Gender and Sexuality

Jensen, Robin E. Dirty Words.
Freeman, Susan Kathleen. Sex Goes to School.
Meyerowitz, Joanne J. How Sex Changed.
Hayden, Wendy. Evolutionary Rhetoric.
Katz, Jonathan. The Invention of Heterosexuality.
Warsh, Cheryl Lynn Krasnick. Gender, Health, and Popular Culture.
Laura Mulvey. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Change”
Paoletti, Jo Barraclough. Pink and Blue.
Gleason, Mona. “Psychology and the Construction of the “Normal” Family”
Marshall, Barbara. “Climacteric Redux?”
Belisle, Donica. “Crazy for Bargains”
Findlay, Deborah. “Discovering Sex”  

Theory 

Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 1, The Will to Knowledge.
Maynard, Steven. “Queer musings on masculinity and history.”
Tosh, John. “What Should Historians do with Masculinity?”
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble.
Jagger, Gill. Judith Butler
Hood-Williams, J. and Cealey Harrison, W. “Trouble with Gender”
Marcel Stoetzler, “Subject Trouble: Judith Butler and Dialectics”
Callis, April S. “Playing with Butler and Foucault: Bisexuality and Queer Theory.”
Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’
Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”
Gisela Bock, “Challenging Dichotomies: Perspectives on Women’s History”
Joan Sangster, “Beyond Dichotomies”
Dubinsky and Marks, “Beyond Purity: A Response to Sangster”
Joy Parr, “Gender History and Historical Practice”
Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes
Michael Kimmel. Manhood in America
Downs, Laura Lee. Writing Gender History.  

 

Gender, Sexuality, and Colonialism

Pickles and Rutherdale. Contact Zones. (edited collection)
Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”
Van Kirk, Sylvia. Many Tender Ties
Brownlie and Korinek. Finding a Way to the Heart (edited collection)
Stoler, A. L. (Ed.). Haunted by Empire (edited collection)
McClintock, Imperial Leather
Anderson, Kay J. Vancouver's Chinatown
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow.
 
 

Indigenous Peoples

Residential Schools

John S. Milloy, A National Crime.
Jacobs, Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race.
Tsianina K. Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light.
 

Native-Newcomer Relations

Lutz, John S. Lutz, Makúk.
Richard S. Hill, State Authority, Indigenous Autonomy.
Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian.
Daniel Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse.
Susan Neylan, The Heavens Are Changing.
Pekka Hamalainen, The Comanche Empire.
Richard White, The Middle Ground.
William & Mary Quarterly special issue “Revisiting the Middle Ground,” 63: 1 (Jan. 2006):
Susan Sleeper Smith, “Introduction,” 3-8.
Richard White, “Creative Misunderstandings and New Understandings,” 9-14.
Philip Deloria, “What Is the Middle Ground, Anyway?” 15-22.
Catherine Desbarats, “Following ‘The Middle Ground’,” 81-96.
Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians.
 

Health/Healing/Welfare

Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies.
Gordon Briscoe, Counting, Health, and Identity.
Suzanne Alchon, A Pest in the Land.
Judith Raftery, Not Part of the Public.
Hugh Shewell, “Enough to Keep Them Alive.”
James B. Waldram, D. Ann Herring, and T. Kue Young. Aboriginal Health in Canada.
Raeburn Lange, May the People Live.
T. Kue Young, Health Care and Cultural Change
David H. DeJong, "If You Knew the Conditions" and Plagues, Politics, and Policy
Maureen K. Lux, Medicine That Walks.
Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls.
Kristen Burnett, Taking Medicine.
Laurie Meijer Drees. Healing Histories.
 

Legislation/Policy

Frank Tough, “As Their Natural Resources Fail.”
Robin Brownlie, A Fatherly Eye.
Keith D. Smith, Liberalism, Surveillance, and Resistance.
 

Treaties/Land

Douglas Harris, Landing Native Fisheries.
Peter Keith Kulchyski and Frank J. Tester, Kiumajut (Talking Back).
Coll Thrush, Native Seattle.
Keith H Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places.
Hans M. Carlson, Home is the Hunter.
Paige Raibmon, Authentic Indians
 

Resistance/methodologies/Indigenous Knowledge

Lina Sunseri, Being Again of One Mind.
Keith Carlson, The Power of Place, the Problem of Time.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies.
Janet Elizabeth Chute, The Legacy of Shingwaukonse.
Cole Harris, Making Native Space.
Gail D MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements.
Margaret Kovach, Indigenous Methodologies.
Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? 
Philip Joseph Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places.
 

Gender

Gunlög Maria Fur, A Nation of Women.
Robertson Standing up with Ga’axst’las
Bonita Lawrence, “Real” Indians and Others.