Who Speaks for the Forgotten? – Congress 2011 Big Thinking Lecture Delivered by Antonine Maillet.

by Cynthia Wallace-Casey
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick
 
Who speaks for the forgotten? This was the topic of discussion for Antonine Maillet’s Big Thinking lecture held during the recent Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Fredericton, New Brunswick (Canada). The Hon. Antonine Maillet is a well known Acadian author and linguist, whose fictional heroine La Sagouine (The Washerwoman) has come to epitomise the resilience and strength of Acadian heritage in North America.


La Sagouine dominates Acadian popular culture as a stalwart figure. Existing in somewhat contrast to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s romantic Evangeline (made popular by the 19th century epic poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie), La Sagouine does not pine for what has been lost. La Sagouine is strong. She is confident. Pragmatic. Optimistic. These are the descriptors that have transformed Maillet’s character into a symbolic figure for the 20th century Acadian Renaissance. In many ways she also represents the lifeways of many rural New Brunswickers before the introduction of Equal Opportunity social reforms in the 1960’s.


“This is a true story” – states Maillet in the opening line of her introduction to the published monologue entitled La Sagouine (1979). True – in that her character springs from a historical tradition. False, however – in that La Sagouine never really existed as a living person. She is fictional, yet also represents the nameless who will never be found in any archival record. She encapsulates a generation of Acadians who have long-since been forgotten. Who speaks for these people? How are they remembered? This was the topic of Maillet’s Big Ideas lecture.


Interestingly, Maillet’s discussion draws attention to the importance of not limiting historical inquiry to the written word; for just as the vast majority of us will never warrant inclusion in the school textbooks of 3011 and our names may never be found in archival collections (except perhaps by a great-great-grandchild tracing her past), so too are the voices of the forgotten lost to us except within the vernacular history of alternative sources of historical inquiry. How can we hear them calling to us? Antonine Maillet has sought their voices in the oral traditions of Acadia, that span from 16th century France to 21st century Louisiana, Nova Scotia, Québec, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick.


For those who are disempowered in any society, the keeping of oral traditions and the preservation of collective memory is very important. As Maillet points out, “they” can never take your voice. Indeed, our schools could benefit greatly from the humanist agenda of making space in our classrooms for such forms of vernacular history. This is because, with each generation, it is the youth who bear responsibility for perpetuating the essential elements of collective memory that define cultural identity. In the words of Maillet: “C’est vous [les jeunes] qui vont décider le futur de l’Acadie”


In Acadia, the collective identity of the voiceless has been preserved in the dialect and words of a language that is more ancient than the french of modern France. As Maillet so poignantly illustrates in her discussion about the forgotten, the generational links between past and present can be found within the stories and songs of Acadia. Here lie the traces of the voices of the forgotten. As educators, we would do well to never forget this.

Listen to Antonine Maillet's entire lecture here:

Classic Movie #1 - Up The Down Staircase (1967)

Contesting White Supremacy: An Interview with Professor Timothy Stanley - By Yeow Tong Chia

Professor Timothy A. Stanley recently published his new book Contesting White Supremacy: School Segregation, Anti-Racism, and the Making of Chinese Canadians (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011). The launch of this book is timely, as it comes in the wake of Maclean’s Magazine TOO ASIAN article, which stereotypes Asians as nerdy and hardworking and “whites” as fun and party going people. In the light of that, I had an email interview with Professor Stanley on his views on racism, Chinese Canadian history, Asian Heritage Month and his book.To start off, could you share on what motivated you to write the book Contesting White Supremacy? Is there a contemporary message you’d like to address in your book as well?

Read more on ActiveHistory.ca...

What is Historical Thinking?

Watch this introductory video for an overview of ways of thinking inherent in knowing and doing history. Historical thinking is complex and multi-faceted; we focus on five key aspects particularly relevant to the K-12 classroom. These are:

• Multiple Accounts & Perspectives
• Analysis of Primary Sources
• Sourcing
• Context
• Claim-evidence Connection

What resources are available to help with understanding these facets and teaching them to students of all ages? Below are a few of our favorite such resources at Teachinghistory.org.

http://teachinghistory.org/historical-thinking-intro

Who is Crafting our National Identity?

by Cynthia Wallace-Casey
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick

Nationalism is modern but it invents for itself history and traditions. (Eric Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition, 1983)

 
Public institutions in Canada, particularly those with a national focus, are mandated to present a national perspective on the past. Such a mandate raises the essential questions of “Who defines nation-ness” and “What represents a nation’s true identity”.

In Les Lieux de Mémore (1989) , Pierre Nora establishes a distinction between real memory and historical memory: Memory is life, while history is the reconstruction of what is no longer; memory is a perpetual bond with the present, while history is a representation of the past; memory is selective in its information, while history calls for analysis and criticism; memory is sentimental, while history is prosaic; memory is bound to a specific group of people, while history belongs to no group in particular and is thus universal; memory takes root in concrete objects, while history is temporal; memory is absolute, while history is relative. As historians, we are taught to be suspicious of memory, for as Nora explains, the “true mission [of history] is to suppress and destroy [memory]” . With the acceleration of history, Nora argues, there has occurred in France a slippage of collective memory (authentic environments of memory). In turn, collective memory has been replaced by “lieux de mémoire” (sites of memory), which serve the people as their official keepers of memory. Thus, these sites of memory constitute France’s national memory, and can be monuments, emblems, commemorations, symbols, rituals, textbooks, documents, or mottos: the material culture of France. Ironically, having destroyed memory, history “calls out for memory because it has abandoned it”, and in its place, nations “deliberately create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and notarize bills because such activities no longer occur naturally”. Such national sites of memory are problematic, in that we must question who is creating the memory site and for what purpose.

Every public institution in Canada has a Collections Management Policy and curators, as well as archivists, must be selective in what they actually collect – so in an indirect way, they are crafting our national memory, or, as Benedict Anderson would indicate, creating our imagined community. Nationality, significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind that are fabricated and imagined. Nationalism is not real: “it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Such imagined communities are perpetuated through the creation of a national consciousness - expressed through such national icons as emblems, maps, monuments, census, official languages, the arts, school instruction, and museums. As Anderson poignantly explains, “no more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers” . Rather than recognizing such monuments as sincere expressions of remembrance, Anderson sees them as tools to bind together our national imagination and somehow justify loss of life for a greater cause of national destiny.

Within such a gamut of national memories and imagined identities, our pursuit of “truth” in history seems ever more evasive. But, if our “national treasures” are the keystones to our national identity (no matter how fabricated this identity may be), they spark our imagination and thus selectively hold us together as a nation. This indeed is a great feat, and so the role of public historians in working with academic historians in crafting our national identity must be valued as a profession of utmost significance.

Les Acadiens et leurs passées - Jeanne Mance Cormier et Hélène Savoie - Musée acadien de l'Université de Moncton - le 20 janvier 2011

Les Acadiens et leurs passées - Jeanne Mance Cormier et Hélène Savoie - Musée acadien de l'Université de Moncton - le 20 janvier 2011

What History? For What Purpose? For Whom?

by Cynthia Wallace-Casey
PhD Student, University of New Brunswick

“In the history courses I took in school in the 1960’s, we read about history, talked about history, and wrote about history; we never actually did history.” (Chad Gaffield, 2001)

Among historians, there really is no doubt that history matters. We are engrained with the essential belief that without knowledge of the past, we are unable to contextualize the present – and it is only through history that we are able to gain insight, and learn from those who lived before us. Most historians agree that history must be evidence-based and that the practitioners must respect established methods of analytical inquiry that are as objective as possible. The controversy arises when one begins to interpret the evidence, and this becomes even more complicated when we consider the how and what of presenting history to students.

As the discipline applies to the classroom, Ken Osborne outlines three distinct concepts of teaching and studying history that continue to be at play in varying degrees within Canadian schools: nation-building, societal transformation, and critical thinking. He also extends his analysis, by suggesting a fourth concept, which he indentifies as historical mindedness.

The narrative of nation building - history from the top down, or bottom up – is something which many of us remember from our own schooldays. This is the history Chad Gaffield recalls in my opening quotation. It is history that is patterned upon chronology, often presented in a way that fosters an appreciation for progress. As J.L. Granatstein suggests, this is the history on which great nations are built:

If Canada is to be worthy of its envied standing in the world, if it is to offer something to its own people and to humanity, it will have to forge a national spirit that can unite its increasingly diverse peoples. We cannot achieve this unanimity unless we teach our national history, celebrate our founders, renew the old and establish new symbols, and strengthen the terms of our citizenship… We have a nation to save and a future to build.

Yet, as noble as this sounds, such narratives of nation-building are what Benedict Anderson would dismiss as pure fabrication – an imagined community and “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” … crafted by the author to serve some higher purpose.

In the 1970’s, there emerged a greater interest in the social, cultural and gender aspects of history. In the classroom, history became a tool for societal transformation in which students learned about the past within the context of current public issues. As Osborne observes, “history became less a chronological survey of the past and more the examination and analysis of problems, themes, and concepts in which chronology was largely ignored.” Considered more of a social studies approach to teaching history, this methodology is still very common, as the events of the past are interpreted in ways that make them more relevant to the present. Much like Maurice Halbwach’s analogy of a self-portrait, history is built around fundamental themes, such as family, community, and nation – starting with the most immediate connection of “me” and extending out into a broader historical perspective - so that the here and now is a living part of a collective memory. In this way, history is presented not as a line of chronological events, but as a web of effects that are interconnected and applicable to the present.

In the 1990’s, a third dimension of teaching history was added to the mix, in that students were encouraged to develop critical thinking skills. Through the adherence to formal methods of historical research and objective analysis, students are permitted to arrive at their own conclusions. Thus, they are trained in the process of doing history. They learn the fundamental skills of historical thinking; question the evidence; and ideally learn how to think for themselves. Through this inquiry process, students role-play as professional historians by adopting “forms of knowledge” (modeled after R.G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history) that are identified in Canada as The Benchmarks of Historical Thinking:

• Establish historical significance;
• Use primary source evidence;
• Identify continuity and change;
• Analyze cause and consequences;
• Take historical perspectives; and
• Understand ethical dimensions of history.

The focus here is more upon developing the habits of mind that come from following a disciplined process of inquiry, rather than adhering to a particular genre of first-order interpretation.

In addition to the three distinct concepts of nation-building, societal transformation, and critical thinking in teaching and studying history, Ken Osborne has also identified a fourth concept which is more subjective: historical mindedness. This concept, he describes as a “way of viewing the world that the study of history produces”. Historical mindedness combines the traditional narrative and knowledge of the past, with relevance to the present and broader social issues, while also adopting the discipline of historical thinking. Thus, historical mindedness combines the three previous concepts of nation-building, societal transformation, and critical thinking, while placing the past within a continuum of time that is connected to the present as well as the future. Ultimately, Osborne suggests that there is room in the classroom for all three concepts of teaching and studying history (nation-building, societal transformation, critical thinking), and when these three are combined in an instructional plan, the end result is an overall instilment of a fourth concept: historical mindedness.

Although rooting the past in some aspect of the present can be beneficial when teaching basic principals to young people, such an approach can also be problematic in that the past becomes too easily consumable. As Sam Wineberg explains, by “viewing the past through the lens of the present”, the past becomes a useable commodity that is easily dismissed without much thought:

… by viewing the past as useable, something that speaks to us without intermediary or translation, we end up turning it into yet another commodity for instant consumption. We discard or just ignore vast regions of the past that either contradict our current needs, or fail to align tidily with them. The useable past retains a certain fascination, but it is the fascination of the flea market… Because we more or less know what we are looking for before we enter this past, our encounter is unlikely to change us or cause us to rethink who we are. The past becomes clay in our hands. We are not called upon to stretch our understanding to learn from the past. Instead we contort the past to fit the predetermined meaning we have already assigned it.

Wineberg describes the study of the past as existing between two polemics - that of the familiar and the foreign - in which either extreme has its pitfalls. It is through the achievement of mature historical thought and understanding (an intellectual process which comes about through the reinforcement of habits of mind) that the study of the past can become most beneficial. To this end history matters because it educates in the deepest sense: it teaches “humility in the face of our limited ability to know, and awe in the face of the expanse of human history”. Thus, it is of fundamental importance to every human being.

History is of fundamental importance to citizenship as well. As James Loewen summarizes, history “is about us”; and whether that us be “wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we arrived at this point”. In Great Britain, the us of history is reflected within the current “Britishness” debate which Sir Keith Ajegbo introduced in the 2007 curriculum report on Diversity and Citizenship. Ajegbo recommends the introduction of a history element to the citizenship curriculum as a way of understanding what it means to be British:

While it is important for young people to explore [contemporary] issues as they affect them today, it is equally important that they understand them through the lens of history. It is difficult to look at devolution without understanding how we became the United Kingdom. Can immigration be debated properly without some knowledge of the range of people who have arrived on these shores over centuries? We are certainly not advocating that Citizenship education should be conflated with history. However, we are strongly of the opinion that developing an appreciation of the relevant historical context is essential to understanding what it means to be a citizen of the UK today. 

Such an approach supports the thinking of historians who participated in the British Institute of Historical Research Conference “Why History Matters” in 2007, where the utility of history was recognized as a powerful citizenship tool. In this sense, history is seen as a basis for understanding similarities as well as diversity; learning about the source of common belief systems and values; making connections to local, national and international identities; and ultimately gaining an appreciation of what it means to be human:

School history has to do much more than confirm or enhance an individual’s identity. It has to be about the bigger picture and a wider world because to study history is to grow up and move beyond ourselves. 

Many of these same assertions hold true in Canada as well. Recognizing that history education has moved beyond nation-building to embrace citizenship training in Canada, Christian Laville describes a duality that strives for a unified sense of shared memory on one hand, and independently-minded historical thinking on the other. Historical thinking equips students with the intellectual tools needed to exercise their civic responsibilities, while historical mindedness creates a common identity that serves to build unity. This common identity is what Ken Osborne would call the “big picture” of Canada’s past; and historical thinking is the ‘intellectual self-defence’ needed to participate in a democratic society. Osborne presents seven (sound) arguments for history as self-defence:

1. History armours us against all those people who claim to know it and are only too anxious to tell us what it proves;
2. It releases us from the grip of the past, which so easily holds us captive and shapes our ideas;
3. It teaches us how to be constructively skeptical (but not cynical or blindly rejectionist) when faced with appeals and arguments;
4. It protects us from being misled by the taken-for-granted conventional wisdom of our own times;
5. By showing us a wide variety of alternative beliefs systems, social practices, cultural norms, and the like, it enlarges our awareness of alternatives and choices;
6. It helps us understand and take part in debates that are going on around us about the future of Canada and of the world more generally, debates that are going to affect us whether we like it or not;
7. And, finally, it makes us less short-sighted and narrow-minded than we would otherwise be by helping us situate the present in the context of the transition from past to future so that we are not governed solely by the short-term imperatives of the here and now. 

With intellectual self-defence, comes intellectual freedom – and an ability to make informed choices and effect change in the present.

As an extension of citizenship training, history is also fundamentally important in establishing a shared sense of identity. It binds us together, by providing a broad framework in which every citizen must be able to find their stem of acceptance; and without this acceptance – a sense of belonging – citizens have no shared identity. In the words of J.L. Granatstein, history is important “because it is the way a nation, a people, and an individual learn who they are, where they came from and where they are going, and how and why their world has turned out as it has”. But shared identity, as Britain’s Diversity and Citizenship curriculum report shows, must be broad enough to embrace cultural and ethnic diversity, respect differences, and bridge commonalities. Such is the global nature of citizenship in the twenty-first century.

Living within a complex backdrop of globalization, students need to be equipped with the tools to think critically about the past and the present. As Stéphane Lévesque cites scholars Ken Booth and Tim Dunne: “we cannot assume, for the foreseeable future, that tomorrow will be like today. The global order is being recast, and the twists and turns will surprise us’. Teaching students to think historically can, as Levesque explains, “be a valuable contribution to the short and long-term challenges awaiting them”.

But, as Margaret Conrad has illustrated, history in the age of Wikipedia also requires new rules of engagement for historians. As the printed page is overtaken by cyberspace, Marshall McLuhan’s vision of a global village becomes ever more apparent and citizenship is no longer restricted to geographical boundaries. Within the “seamless web of experience” that the Internet has since availed, McLuhan predicted that the student would need a “do-it-yourself kit” in order to master the new global media. Perhaps The Benchmarks of Historical Thinking can provide students with the do-it-yourself kit that McLuhan predicted for the 21st century: the habits of mind that can enable Canadians to be full participants in today’s global society.