Corps de l’article

Of what value are the Canadian Historical Association’s presidential addresses?

Margaret Conrad, 2007

What can they tell us about the past, about the writing and teaching of history over time, and about the men and women who have led the profession? A lot, in fact. Like any primary document, a presidential address can be read in any number of ways: historically, historiographically, biographically, and sometimes against the grain. Reading them chronologically was at once fascinating, exhausting, maddening — and, in the case of one address, downright eerie[1] — for what they did and did not say. A handful of themes emerged, including continuity and change, nation and region, English Canada and French Canada, in addition to class, gender, and Indigeneity. There have been assertions, calls, and pleas, as well as surprises, silences, and elisions. Some addresses are detailed and well argued; others are more anecdotal. Some are longer; others shorter. Some are better; others worse. But is there a connecting thread or an over-arching narrative? That history matters, perhaps, although that is hardly profound. Or that history has changed over time, although that too is obvious. Naturally, there are plenty of quotations that could serve as the first, or implicative, part of a two-part title. For example, “‘History can never be finally written’: The CHA’s Presidential Addresses, 1922–2022.”[2] Or, “‘Car l’histoire sociale est, de sa nature, totale.’”[3]

In other words, there is no one answer to Margaret Conrad’s question and, as result, I struggled to develop a thesis that was not platitudinous. Perhaps, I thought, I could analyze the addresses by type, but Donald Creighton beat me to the punch when, in 1957, he taxonomized presidential addresses, identifying three types. Most presidents played it safe, he said, and delivered a research paper. A handful took a chance and reflected on the nature of history itself. And a considerable number split the difference between the “prudence” of a research paper and the “daring” of a philosophical treatise in an effort to assess the state of their field.[4] There was, and still is, some truth to Creighton’s taxonomy: Chester Martin researched the causa causans of Confederation;[5] Thomas Chapais scrutinized history as a science and as an art;[6] and Walter Sage asked, “Where stands Canadian history?”[7] But Creighton’s types — the article, the treatise, and the state of the field — were not watertight then and they are not watertight now. In a wide-ranging search for larger truths about Canadian liberalism, Frank Underhill’s presidential address contained elements of all three.[8] Similarly, Arthur Lower mined history, religion, and philosophy to understand what he called the “juxtaposition of two civilizations,” or the whole French-English thing.[9] To complicate further Creighton’s taxonomy, some presidents gave what can be best described as reports;[10] other presidents addressed the teaching of history at the undergraduate and graduate levels;[11] and yet others talked about archives, archivists, and/or access.[12]

Instead of arranging and then studying addresses by type, I considered choosing a handful of key words and ideas to study how the writing of history has changed over time. When was gender first used, for example? (In 1985, Susan Mann delivered a fun and frankly feminist address on gossip in history. Gossip, she argued, has been gendered and denigrated as female speech, but it is vital speech and a useful source for historians because of the information it conveys, the norms it communicates, and the social function it plays.[13]) Or Black? (A handful of presidents have mentioned Black history,[14] but it has not been a focus. Quoting Afua Cooper, Adele Perry told the historical profession in 2019 that it had “failed” Black scholars.[15]) Or LGBT? (In 1994, Veronica Strong-Boag remarked that historians “would have readers assume that Canadians were resolutely, solely, heterosexual in their inclinations and affections.”[16] And in 2013, Lyle Dick discussed his work on male same-sex sexuality in Western Canada and the possibilities inherent in working with LGBT elders to write deeply contextualized Queer history.[17]) Or the environment? (There have been a small number of references to our impact on the environment — from the “virtual extinction” of the sea otter in the Pacific Northwest in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the “quickening pace” of climate change today — but only James Leith talked about environmental history proper and the “growing awareness that we all share the same biosphere” in 1995.[18]) To this end, I created an index of key terms, noting when and where they appeared, but I quickly realized that this approach led to a focus on the last thirty or forty years, leaving the first sixty or seventy years understudied.

Going back to the drawing board, I took inspiration from Penny Bryden who began her 2021 presidential address with an observation from one of her professors “who suggested that the historian was like someone with a net catching butterflies.” Extending the metaphor, Bryden argued that “one of the most important things we do as historians — if not the most important thing — is to weave those nets.”[19] While our nets are universal — we are all bound by the same rules of evidence and a shared obligation to the truth — they are also deeply personal, woven from the threads of our lives, the books we are reading, the news we are following, and increasingly the extreme weather events we are worrying about. In short, our nets are woven from character and circumstance. And they change over time, as we get older, as our interests shift, and as the world lurches from one crisis to the next. Ultimately, what follows is about my net and what it caught across 100 years of presidential addresses, making it — to steal again from Margaret Conrad — all about me, or more to the point, in part about me.[20]

Of all our clashes, who will deny that the deep division between French and English is the greatest, the most arresting, the most difficult?

Arthur Lower, 1943

As a BA student at Mount Allison and as a MA student at McGill, I was very interested in English Canadian nationalism and French Canadian nationalism, and how, at different moments, they have clashed, to use Arthur Lower’s word. Given my age, that’s not surprising. In the 1980s and 1990s, I watched, like everyone else, Canada’s constitutional wars, and I assumed that Canadian history was the ongoing attempt to accommodate French and English Canada, making the 1980 referendum, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, and the 1995 referendum variations on a theme. To paraphrase Ramsay Cook, Canada has had too much, not too little, nationalism.[21] Not surprisingly, national unity has been a recurring theme in presidential addresses. In 1922, Lawrence Burpee defined the objects, or goals, of the CHA to include working with “other patriotic agencies in bringing into more perfect harmony the two great races that constitute the Canadian people.”[22] As the CHA became more professional and less amateur in the 1920s and 1930s, presidents dropped the language of “perfect harmony” and “two great races,” but they continued to address the French-English question, or what Burpee described in 1925 as “the clash of racial antagonisms, different tongues, different religions, different manners and customs, a different point of view.”[23]

In 1940, at the start of the Second World War and the prospect of a second conscription crisis, Bartlet Brebner acknowledged Canada’s national unity problem, but it belied, he argued, a shared “Canadianism” that is “made up of over three centuries of successful struggle with a recalcitrant environment, of over a century’s original and successful political adaptation and inventiveness, and of a kind of conservatism which history has shown can be converted by adversity into stubborn, indomitable will.”[24] Speaking in French a year later, Gustave Lanctot maintained that the best historical writing in Canada rose above provincialism, and he hoped that one day the same textbook would be used in schools across the country.[25] In 1943, Arthur Lower disagreed, forcefully, with his two predecessors: “the most resounding note in our history” — its “primary antithesis” — was the “deep division between French and English.” Still, he hoped that Canada’s antithesis could be resolved through forbearance and understanding, especially on the part of English Canada. “Conquest is a type of slavery,” he said, and like slavery, it “probably must be experienced to be understood.” But that did not absolve English Canada from at least trying to understand French Canada. Actually, he added, English Canada had a lot to learn from French Canada: French Canadians were not defensive; they were committed to survival, unlike English Canadians who were increasingly urban, commercial, grubby, acquisitive, in it for themselves, and motivated by the prospect of a new car.[26] Lower also blamed feminism and divorce — which he likened to paganism — for English Canada’s “race suicide.”[27] Where patriots are unambiguous in their love for their country, nationalists are more equivocal because their country can never achieve their idealized version of it, and Lower was a nationalist.

For their parts, George Brown (1944), Walter Sage (1945), Arthur Maheux (1949), and Jean Bruchési (1952) were not as pessimistic as Lower. Brown insisted that English Canada, not less than French Canada, has had a will to survive and that it was Canada’s survival instinct that distinguished it from the United States. And if the national fault line has been tested in the past, neither English Canada nor French Canada had been prepared to throw in the towel.[28] Surveying the writing of history in English and in French, Sage encouraged his colleagues to cross the linguistic divide and he called on the CHA to make more room in its annual program for French-language papers.[29] Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil. Although Maheux elected to speak almost entirely in English[30] — an acknowledgement of his audience and of the CHA’s membership — he emphasized national unity over disunity, and agreement over disagreement. He even drew on a crude racial theory — the idea that the French and the English can trace their respective ancestries to the Normans — to make the point that French Canadians and English Canadians really belong to the same race. Echoing Lanctot, he also referred to the idea of a single textbook: if “difficult,” he said, it is “not impossible.”[31] In fact, a common textbook was impossible, Bruchési countered a few years later, but better textbooks were not. If the history that was taught in schools emphasized what united Canadians, if care was taken “to avoid anything that could stir up hatreds,” then maybe, just maybe, “a true national life” could be realized.[32]

Against the backdrop of Quebec’s independence movement and Canada’s constitutional wars from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s, different presidents addressed the related questions of history, historians, and national unity. For the most part, their interventions were more sophisticated than the paeans to bonne entente-ism in the 1940s and 1950s.[33] In 1960, for example, W. L. Morton delivered an insightful address in which he argued — in explicit opposition to Lower — that there was only one Canadian history, not one French and one British. Morton did not deny French Canada, but he also did not acknowledge its identities when he listed Canada’s four “permanent factors”: its northernness; its economic, strategic, and political dependence on France, Britain, and the United States; its monarchical and parliamentary democracy; and its “psychology of endurance and survival.” Eleven days later, on 22 June 1960, Jean Lesage was elected premier of Quebec and the Quiet Revolution formally began. Suddenly, the idea of “one narrative line in Canadian history” seemed hopelessly out of step with the times.[34] In 1967, as Canada celebrated its centennial, Richard Saunders insisted that historians have a “special obligation to the nation.” After all, he said, a nation is “more than anything else a venture in history,” making the historian a “guide and mentor.” Although historians no longer see themselves as “the keepers of the national experience,” the significance of Saunders’ address lies in its recognition of the “French nation in Canada” and of the “special position of la nation canadienne.”[35] His University of Toronto colleague Donald Creighton never grasped that basic fact, and, as a result, he never understood that Canada was, in effect, multinational.

But blindness has been a two-way street, to mix metaphors. And in 1976, Jacques Monet urged his French-speaking colleagues to study English Canada in the same way that English-speaking historians now studied French Canada.

Je me demande si c’est par réaction à l’accusation de Lord Durham. Nous étions, selon lui, “un peuple sans histoire.” Est-ce que nous compensons maintenant au point d’agir comme si nous étions les seuls à en avoir? De toute manière, nous jouons, sur le plan des études historiques, le jeu de tous ceux qui au Canada anglophone et français veulent renfermer les Canadiens français dans une “réserve” québécoise. Même notre regard ne semble pas vouloir s’élever au dessus de ce mur qui borne nos esprits.[36]

Monet was not interested in cultivating some kind of “perfect harmony” between French and English Canada — i.e., national unity — but he was interested in seeing French-speaking historians write the history of places other than Quebec. Where, he asked, are the French-language histories of Ontario, British Columbia, and Newfoundland? It was a compelling question. Margaret Prang did not attempt to answer it in 1977, but she did share Monet’s conviction that historians should not be in the national unity business. The election of a separatist government in Quebec, she believed, makes it tempting to retreat “into the old, re-assuring nation-building perspectives of central Canada,” i.e., Creighton’s Laurentian thesis. But this is the exact opposite of what historians should be doing, she argued, because those nation-building perspectives can never capture Canada’s “remarkable diversities.”

Is it chauvinistic or unworthy of the profession of history to believe that tho’ we Canadians are less than one per cent of the earth’s peoples, our experience of the varieties of ways of being Canadian, yet living together, is worth understanding and perpetuating, both for ourselves and our children, and for a divided humanity that must share an ever-smaller planet?[37]

In a word, no. Indeed, Prang’s address might be best summarized as a vigorous defence of limited identities, first coined by Ramsay Cook but made famous by Maurice Careless.[38]

On the eve of the first referendum, Desmond Morton picked up, in a bilingual address, where Prang left off: yes, Donald Creighton was wrong.

What place is there in the Creighton vision for the Québécois except as the perennial, parochial foes of the Laurentian vision? How could easterners revel in the National Policy or the Monopoly Clause? I was not born in Calgary nor raised in Regina and Winnipeg to worship at the shrine of the CPR. For working people, their role in the “National Dream” was to labour diligently, accept lower wages than south of the border, and rejoice in a Trade Unions Act of 1872 which was, quite literally, a nullity.

But that did not make Cook and Careless right because limited identities had become hyphenated histories.

When we turn back to our old concern with national identity, we see that there is a price to pay for our engagement with hyphenated history. In the absence of any over-arching sense of what Canada is, each form of history becomes an argument for the antagonisms, the sense of injustice and oppression and victimisation, the memories of past insults and defeats, which classes, regions, and racial groups nourish as the soul of their separateness.

According to Morton’s calculus, historians had a choice: “We can focus on our limited identities and our hyphenated histories, or we can remind our community that countries do not easily or peacefully dissolve.” And it was clear where he stood: “Disintegration would be an inglorious end to the Confederation dream.”[39] Although rightly worried about national unity, Morton had constructed a false choice. It was never either/or. It was always both/and. Freed from national(ist) straitjackets, historians can draw on the liberating potential of limited identities and they can remind Canadians that countries do not easily or peacefully dissolve.

Quebec voted “no” in the 1980 referendum and Pierre Trudeau patriated the constitution with an amending formula and Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, but that did not end Canada’s national unity crisis. If anything, it launched the next rounds: the Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord. Neither became law, but they led to a lot of handwringing, finger-pointing, and soul searching, culminating in the 1995 referendum. In 1987, René Durocher was quick to enter the fray with an apologia for Meech Lake, then just a few months old. In his opinion, Trudeau had broken his “solemn promise” of renewed federalism to Quebec,[40] made at the height of the 1980 referendum, when, a year and half later, the federal government and the nine English-speaking provinces left Quebec “complètement isolé et désarçonné.”[41] Meech Lake’s recognition of Quebec as a distinct society, among its other provisions, was the bare minimum, Durocher insisted. Maybe. Maybe not, because the point is not Meech Lake. The point is Durocher’s presidential address. Passionate, journalistic, and one-sided, it was largely ahistorical, referring almost entirely to recent events and drawing on newspapers, including one that he had read that morning.

Five years later, in 1992, it was Gail Cuthbert Brandt’s turn to address her peers, in French and in English. Speaking in Charlottetown, the so-called Birthplace of Confederation, against the backdrop of Canada’s “constitutional turmoil,” Cuthbert Brandt took her cue from Margaret Prang’s rejection of national history as the only important history, arguing that political history had much to learn from social history. Written from the bottom-up, and with a wider lens, political history can look very different.

Il faut aller encore plus loin, reconceptualiser la politique pour inclure des activités, des acteurs et des actrices que l’on n’incluait guère dans les anciennes définitions et les anciennes hiérarchies de signification. Les syndicats, les regroupements féminins, les mouvements pacifistes, et les organisations ethniques ont toujours eu une dimension politique, car ils se sont penchés sur des questions relatives à la distribution et du [sic] contrôle des resources dans leurs communautés et dans leurs sociétés.

For example, the organized effort by women to secure equality provisions in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms illustrates, Cuthbert Brandt rightly noted, “how dramatically the dynamics of constitution-making have changed,” something Brian Mulroney and the premiers did not “get” during Meech Lake. They had assumed that the constitution belonged to them, eleven first ministers behind closed doors, when feminists understood that it belonged to everyone. “It was not the concept of Quebec as a ‘distinct society’ in the Meech Lake Accord that gave pause to many feminists,” Cuthbert Brandt said, “but rather the uncertainty surrounding the hierarchy of rights that such a provision in the constitution would create, and the process by which the Accord had been produced.”[42]

Cuthbert Brandt would be the last president to address national unity. After the 1995 referendum, admittedly a near-death experience, the urgency of national unity faded. Moreover, CHA presidents came from a new generation of historians with very different interests. Even before the 1995 referendum, the shift in presidential addresses was apparent. In 1993, Phillip Buckner delivered a deeply learned paper on the place and importance of the British Empire in Canadian history and its relative decline and disappearance in Canadian historical writing.[43] In 1994, Veronica Strong-Boag drew a capacious picture of history that, nearly thirty years later, is still inspiring.[44] In 1999, Greg Kealey located the origins of Canada’s secret police in the nineteenth century.[45] In 2000, Irving Abella highlighted the Jewish contribution to human rights in Canada.[46] In 2003, Mary Vipond talked about the history of mass media in Canada with specific reference to the 1939 Empire Day broadcast.[47] And in 2005, Gerald Friesen acknowledged that Canada had been stretched outward into the world and inward into its local and even virtual communities, but he did not accept that “the nation-state of Canada is doomed,” although it had changed. To understand that change, he offered a terribly thoughtful, three-layered definition of region, a key concept in thinking and writing about Canada.[48]

Clearly, CHA presidents had other fish to fry. And so did I.

At the same time, historians began abandoning the hope that they could separate themselves as persons from the object of their study.

Chad Gaffield, 2001

Although Chad Gaffield did not supervise my doctoral thesis at the University of Ottawa, his 1994 graduate seminar confirmed my interest in history as a branch of knowledge with its own history. I can still picture him discussing routinely generated sources, such as the census, and how much they can reveal about a given moment in time and about change over time. Among other things, the use of routinely generated sources had led him to a new appreciation for complexity and for pluralism. For example, instead of referring to “the family,” he now referred to “families.” I remember too his interest in our personal back stories — where we came from, what universities we had attended, who we had studied with, and even our last names — and in how our stories connected to, and to an extent even explained, our doctoral research. To a green-as-grass PhD student, it was pretty heady stuff. A few years later, what Gaffield had taught in his graduate seminar became the subject of his 2001 presidential address on historical thinking and the new social history. As a result of working with routinely generated sources, scholars, he said, “have become much more comfortable with ambiguities, contradictions, inconsistencies, and unintended consequences both in historical evidence and interpretation.” And they have learned to live with the fact that historians and history cannot be neatly and perfectly separated. “The ideal distinction between historians and history gave way,” he said, “to a recognition that the values, assumptions, and preoccupations of scholars were inherent ingredients of the ways in which the past was analysed and interpreted.”[49]

In other words, history is in part autobiography, the theme of Judith Fingard’s 1998 presidential address. “Does the personal history of the historian,” she asked, “determine the choice of her or his subject matter, approach, and on-going professional development?” To answer her question, she asked the men and women who had received one of the CHA’s major prizes, either the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize, the Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, or the François-Xavier Garneau Medal. Their responses confirmed her suspicions in both fascinating and fun ways: they had family members who worked as trade unionists and wanted to understand the union movement, or they had participated in the feminist movement and wanted to study its early history. Donald Davis — one of Fingard’s respondents and an important mentor to me at the University of Ottawa — reported that his interest in status and status seeking stemmed from watching his father seek social status through a house in Westmount. Later, his interest in the history of public transit in Canada was piqued when, in the dead of winter, he was left to freeze at his Ottawa bus stop: it gave me, he said, “considerable time to reflect on the fact that this bus service, which was letting me down, was winning an award for its superior service.”[50] Nikki Strong-Boag’s interest in women’s work, especially in the home, was very different from Don Davis’s interest in public transportation, but it too stemmed from her personal experience, in her case as a young mother confronting the endless work of apple juice, cheerios, and play dates.[51]

In a sense, each presidential address is autobiographical in that it reveals something about that president. For example, Donald Creighton referred to Harold Innis, his dear friend; he dissed Frank Underhill, his arch rival; he drew on Charles Dickens, his favourite author; he beat up Mackenzie King and Lester Pearson, his least favourite Liberals; and he worried about continentalism and the creeping Americanization of Canada, his worst fears.[52] Meanwhile, Margaret Ormsby spoke, in her words, “as a Westerner”; she made a passing reference to her grandparents who had travelled the length of the country to settle in British Columbia; she quoted Roy Daniells, a British Columbia poet and UBC colleague; and she emphasized that the West, though nominally Canadian, was “a region distinct and separate.”[53] But neither Creighton’s nor Ormsby’s presidential address can be described as autobiographical because they did not talk about themselves or what made them tick as historians.

In the last two decades, presidential addresses have become more autobiographical. Greg Kealey opened his address on secret policing in Canada with a story of spying on the part of the RCMP at the Fredericton Learneds in 1977, originally uncovered by Steve Hewitt. A subsequent Access to Information and Privacy request by Kealey confirmed that he had been a target and that the RCMP informant had described him as “easily the most active academic at the conference.”[54] Irving Abella referred to his father who arrived in Halifax in 1925 as “a bewildered 15-year-old from Eastern Europe escaping the bitter pogroms and vicious anti-Semitism that would soon engulf his world and destroy it.” And he referred to his wife, Rosalie Silberman Abella, who arrived in Halifax in 1950 as the four-year-old daughter of “survivors of concentration camps who had lost everything — friends, fortune, and family, including a two-year-old child — to the murderous Nazis.”[55] Mary Lynn Stewart recounted her experiences as the daughter of an extended working-class family in Western Canada who got to go to university, found her niche in French history, and went to Columbia where she did a PhD on silk workers in Lyon, participated in anti-war demonstrations, and discovered women’s history in an off-campus, non-credit, life-changing graduate seminar led by Gerder Lerner and Joan Kelly Gadol.[56]

The most explicitly autobiographical address belongs to Craig Heron. Indeed, “Harold, Marg, and the Boys” may be the most creative presidential address.

In May 1945, a young Canadian couple exchanged wedding vows and began a half-century of life together. Harold, age 23, was still in his Royal Canadian Air Force Uniform, but would soon be donning the work clothes of a manual worker in a series of relatively low-skill jobs. Marg, age 21, gave up her position as a telephone operator and started to set up the family household before Harold was finally released from the Air Force. Over the next few years, they helped launch the Baby Boom by having two sons, whom they raised in a small house perched on the outer edge of suburban Toronto.

From here, we follow Harold and Marg and their decisions, large and small, on everything from where to live, when to have children, and what to buy, all on a tight budget. Long story short, they made do, and then some. Emphasizing a working-class respectability, they ensured that their boys had a roof over their heads, went to school, and were launched into the world. That working-class respectability, Heron acknowledged, was also “acutely conscious of ethnic and racial difference.” For example, the Herons did not understand the Civil Rights Movement in the United States — what is all the fuss about, they asked? — while the growing number of Caribbean Blacks in Toronto “made them increasingly uneasy.” Like all families, the Herons were at once unique and yet part of much larger demographic, social, and economic patterns in post-1945 English Canada. And it is those patterns that Heron, not as a son, but as a historian, wants to discern. Drawing on a range of thinkers and scholars from Karl Marx and E. P. Thompson to Joan Scott, Joy Parr, and Franca Iacovetta, “Harold, Marg, and the Boys” is ultimately a consideration of class as a category of analysis and what a complicated thing working class history is when race and gender are added to the mix. These three “forces,” Heron wrote, “worked together, simultaneously, to produce distinctive experiences, for example, for a male Italian-Canadian construction worker, a female black Caribbean-born domestic worker, or a white anglo-Celtic female secretary like Marg.” Bottom line, he insisted, historians must retain a commitment to materialism at the same time as they must be willing to incorporate complexity. “If we do, unassuming people like Harold and Marg will find their rightful place in history.”[57]

The relationship between historians and the history they write — from Donald Davis freezing at an Ottawa bus stop to Mary Lynn Stewart coming into her intellectual and political own in New York City — is deeply personal. After all, few historians will undertake years of research on public transit after a miserable experience with public transit. But most historians, in some shape, way, or form, and to a greater or lesser degree, have been impacted by Canada’s ongoing conversation on residential schools, truth, and reconciliation.

What it means to be a historian of Canada has been changed by these events and these discussions, and it couldn’t be any other way.

Adele Perry, 2019

Living in this moment, I have become increasingly interested in Indigenous history, both in my teaching and in my writing. Riffing on Adele Perry, how could it be any other way? Not surprisingly, I am especially interested in how Indigenous Peoples have been, and how they have not been, included in Canadian historical writing.[58]

Since 1922, Indigenous Peoples have moved from the distant perimeter of presidential addresses to the near centre. In 1923, Lawrence Burpee defined history along “the broadest possible” lines to include ethnology,[59] a now dated term meaning the “analysis or study of a human society and culture, and its development; a work of social or cultural anthropology.”[60] Although he did not refer specifically to Indigenous Peoples when he cited ethnology, Burpee proceeded to report that the CHA had worked with the British Columbia Historical Association in “the protection and preservation of certain Indian petroglyphs,” or “prehistoric pictures,” near Nanaimo. Indeed, he called on the federal government to adopt a policy of “withdrawing from settlement and turning into reservations areas containing prehistoric or Indian memorials.”[61] A year later, Burpee referred again to the preservation of petroglyphs, this time in Bella Coola, and the creation of an Indian village, with lodges and totem poles, in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. But when he listed a series of lecture outlines for high school teachers being prepared by the CHA, he did not include Indigenous history. Instead, he focused on great men, great events, and great topics, like Jacques Cartier, the Siege of Quebec, and the Growth of Responsible Government.[62] However, the following year, Burpee suggested that a history of the portage would make an “extraordinarily attractive” book because of its obvious connections to “the Indian and his bark canoe” and its “romantic associations with daredevil voyageurs.”[63]

And so it went: Indigenous history was either mentioned in passing, marginalized, or ignored altogether. In 1930, for example, Rodolphe Lemieux made a handful of references to Indigenous history in an address to mark the “discovery” of Canada in 1534, but he treated them as people waiting to receive the light of Christ. He described Cartier as “le premier historien des nations indiennes du Canada et leur premier apôtre.” To this end, “Jacques Cartier plantait sa croix de bois, ‘haulte de trente pieds,’ entre ses ‘mariniers,’ les humbles ‘laboureux’ de la mer, et les Indiens naïfs et étonnés.”[64] Naïve and surprised? Hardly. When Cartier erected the cross at Gaspé Harbour in 1534, he was met with “a long harangue” on the part of Donnacona, the Stadacona chief: “he pointed to the land all around about, as if he wished to say that all this region belonged to him, and that we ought not to have set up this cross without his permission.”[65] Lemieux also insisted that wherever Cartier met Indigenous Peoples, “il les accueille come un père, comme un missionnaire, pourrait-on dire; il leur parle le langage de la foi et celui de la charité.”[66] Faith and charity? Again, hardly. As Ramsay Cook argued, Donnacona discovered Europe the hard way when he was kidnapped by Cartier and taken to France where he died.

In 1932, Frederic William Howay spoke about the maritime fur trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century in what is now British Columbia. Adventurous, romantic, practical, drab, and shameful, it led to the introduction of alcohol into Indigenous communities. And if Howay acknowledged that European traders could be “high handed,” he also infantilized Indigenous Peoples when he described them as “whimsical” and “fickle” traders. Later he erased them when he used the language of emptiness to describe the Northwest coast.[67] In 1933, J. Clarence Webster made a series of references to the “Indians” in Acadia, or what is now the Maritimes, but only insofar as they appear in the chronicles of explorers, traders, and missionaries. In effect, he implied that Indigenous Peoples were simply part of the region’s geography and natural history.[68] In 1939, Reginald Trotter described the Iroquois in the same way he described the Appalachian Mountains, as a “barrier” to settlement for the English on the Atlantic seaboard. He also referred to the Iroquois as a “menace” to New France.[69] In 1940, Gustave Lanctot, in his opening sentence, cited the three great periods in Canadian history: Indigenous, French, and British. But Indigenous history and Indigenous Peoples quickly and quietly disappear.[70] Only once in the first four decades of the CHA was an Indigenous person actually named when Fred Landon listed the Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson as one of several Canadian poets to emerge in the 1880s.[71]

Two decades later, in 1960, Bill Morton talked about the Eskimos — now the Inuit — in a roundabout way when he talked about a frontier’s need for a metropolitan centre.

That is, the whole culture of the northern and maritime frontier, to succeed as well as survive, required from outside a high religion, a great literature and the best available science and technology to overcome its inherent limitations. Those very limitations of climate and of material and human resources made the frontier dependent on a metropolitan culture for those essentials. The alternatives were extinction or complete adaptation to the lowest level of survival in northern conditions. Was not the basic difference between the north European and the Eskimo that the former had a central and metropolitan economy and culture on which to draw, while the latter had none until very recent times and lived in a wholly and wonderfully self-subsistent culture? [Italics added for emphasis].

In a footnote, he added this:

And is not the extraordinary readiness with which the Eskimo adopts the techniques and implements of modern culture an indication of how necessary such a metropolitan culture is for a life of more than survival in arctic conditions? Surely contemporary anthropology has no more fascinating study than that of the fusion of the Eskimo culture with that of the Canadian frontier which is proceeding in the far north today. One may hope that Canada is at last giving those wonderful people the central base they lacked for so many unrecorded centuries.

On the one hand, Morton admired the Inuit, admittedly in a condescending way; but on the other hand, he implied that they were lucky to have been discovered and lifted from the “lowest level of survival.”[72]

In 1964, Marcel Trudel — Mr. New France as he was affectionately called by his friends[73] — studied bilingualism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when bilingualism meant something very different. “Le problème du bilinguisme est encore plus ancien au Canada : il se pose dès que les Européens du seizième siècle veulent établir les relations avec les indigènes.” By any definition his address was and is a tour de force. Delivered in English but published in French, it is the first presidential address to take Indigenous history seriously. For example, he called it like it was when he said that Cartier also kidnapped Domagaya and Taignoagny, Donnacona’s sons, in an effort to create a French-Iroquois lexicon. And he acknowledged that bilingualism’s tentative first steps — “ses premiers balbutiements” — were largely a failure. “Les indigènes n’avaient pas besoin d’apprendre la langue d’un client qu’ils tenaient à leur merci.” After all, Huron was the commercial language of the Great Lakes and the weak — in this case, the French — learn the language of the strong. But if ground-breaking, Trudel’s address also contained what is now an offensive joke. Referring to the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazanno, Trudel stated that he kidnapped an eight-year-old child and that he attempted to kidnap a young woman, “qui, selon lui, était de haute stature et très belle : Verrazanno ne nous dit si c’était pour lui enseigner la grammaire.”[74] The following year, in 1965, Mason Wade made a handful of equally offensive attempts at humour when he referred to the Six Nations in present-day New York in his presidential address on Canadian-American relations. “It has also been my sad experience,” he said, “during these past ten years in the Canadian missions of upstate New York, that the Six Nations are still ‘loyal’ (i.e., in British pay), for if they are not squatting on the New York Thruway … or proposing to take over the State of Vermont, they exhibit all their old wiliness through their front organization, Mohawk Airlines, in preventing the white man’s passage to or from Toronto.” He even described the efforts of the “undaunted Red Men” as a contemporary iteration of Pontiac’s Conspiracy.[75]

In 1966, Margaret Ormsby did not attempt humour at the expense of Indigenous people. Instead, she displayed real sympathy when she acknowledged that their presence on the prairies was a vital question that acquisitive and “land-hungry backwoodsmen and urgent, exploitive railroaders, shipbuilders, lumbermen, bankers and merchants” never asked. But in the same breath, she also described Indigenous people on the prairies as “static,” “alien,” and “primitive” and she referred to the land having been free, when, of course, it was only free because it had been taken.[76] Meanwhile, Lewis Thomas made a similarly sympathetic and problematic observation in 1973. “The society planned for the new West was not one which the Indian and the metis could easily find congenial or even acceptable but mixed blood in itself did not constitute a barrier to successful adaptation to it.”[77]

Indigenous Rights, Indigenous nationalism, and disputes over resources, pipelines, and land claims in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s led to the emergence of a new and vital field in Canadian history in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. In 1985, Susan Mann urged her colleagues to listen to other voices, including Indigenous voices.[78] Four years later, in 1989, Cornelius Jaenen did precisely that when he turned New France on its head: Indigenous people were not the “other”; the French were. “Il me semble que ce sont les Français — les newcomers de Bruce Trigger et les colons vertueux du chanoine Groux –— qui sont les véritables autres.” Moreover, Indigenous people took a dim view of the French, who Jaenen called intruders.

De fait, par rapport aux Amérindiens, les Français paraissaient chétifs, faibles et décharnés. Des “jambes de laine” quand il fallait traverser les grandes forêts canadiennes et des “cervelles de lièvre” en ce qui touchait à la petite guerre. Cet “autre” était généralement faible d’esprit, orgueilleux, vantard, bruyant, d’humeur querelleuse et, par-dessus le marché, sans courage et peu honnête. Voilà le stéréotype du Français colonisateur.

Indigenous people, Indigenous women in particular, took an equally dim view of Catholicism, Jaenen added. They understood that “their persons and their social roles were the objects of a two-fold attack on the part of the missionaries — first as women, and secondly as natives.” As one Indigenous woman told a priest, “I do not recognize any sins.”[79]

In the 1990s and 2000s, CHA presidents no longer relied on simple stereotypes of Indigenous people when they acknowledged Indigenous history, although they did not follow Jaenen’s lead in making it the focus of their address.[80] In 1993, Phillip Buckner acknowledged that the British emigrants “who poured” into British North America had “limited sympathy” for Indigenous people and he acknowledged the dispossession of Indigenous Peoples in his near-forensic reading of both Canadian and British historiography of the second British Empire.[81] But he used a narrow definition of violence when he added that Canada’s history of dispossession was less violent and less dramatic and therefore less interesting to historians than the histories of dispossession in other parts of the Empire.[82] In 1994, Veronica Strong-Boag mentioned Indigenous people and Indigenous history on several occasions, including the “indifference” and “lack of action” on the part of authorities to “repeated complaints by Aboriginal parents about the treatment of their children in residential schools such as those at Fraser Lake and Kamloops in British Columbia.”[83] In 1997, J. R. Miller referenced Shawnadithit, the last known Beothuk, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and a 1995 controversy over an Ottawa statue of Samuel de Champlain and its depiction of a Native pathfinder.[84] In 2005, Gerald Friesen used the example of the Ojibwa to explain what he meant by denoted, instituted, and imagined regions.[85] And in 2007, Margaret Conrad conducted an experiment in public history when she looked at ten “big moments” in Canadian history and their Wikipedia entries. In addition to the War of 1812 and Confederation, she included the Indian Act, an inspired and inspiring decision.[86]

The events of the last decade, especially the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015, have centred Indigenous history. Four of the past five presidential addresses have drawn on an aspect of Indigenous history, albeit in very different ways. Emphasizing the importance and possibility of local history and local historical knowledge, Lyle Dick discussed his collaborations with Indigenous Elders in Grise Fiord, Nunavut.[87] Dominique Marshall took a different tack when she studied children’s drawings and humanitarian aid. Among her examples were the drawings done by children at the Alberni Residential School in British Columbia. Art classes literally saved one little boy: because they were coincident with early bedtime, he was spared the predations of a dorm supervisor who was later named a “sexual terrorist” by the courts.[88] Taking aim at a historically complicated and politically charged question — settler colonialism and the need to unsettle Canadian history — Joan Sangster studied the Indian Eskimo Association and its early attempt to create an alliance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The IEA was not perfect; it could be and often was paternalistic. But it wrestled with Canada’s colonial pasts, much like we are now. On that note, Sangster gently but wisely urged her colleagues to check their moral and political perfection at the door and to remember their obligation to historical methodology and truth.

We should beware of history conceived as an engine charging forward in a linear direction of ever-increasing political sophistication, with current scholars patting ourselves on the back for our very superior anti-colonial insights. Historians are inevitably judgemental, and I am no exception, but I do believe, methodologically, we try to walk a tightrope between presentism and relativism, interpreting the past with both skeptical distance and empathetic insight, however tall an order that is.[89]

Finally, Adele Perry wondered what Canadian history would look like if we started with water. Like the over-incarceration of Indigenous people in federal and provincial prisons, water “is a marker of how Canada is structured to destabilize, impoverish, and ultimately imperil Indigenous life.”[90] To this end, she looked at Winnipeg’s water supply, specifically the aqueduct built in 1919 to connect the growing city to Shoal Lake in southeast Manitoba, and its implications for Shoal Lake 40 First Nation, which included the legal dispossession of 3,500 acres of their reserve lands, its transformation into an artificial island, and a drinking water advisory that lasted more than two decades.[91] Clearly, Perry said in 2019, “the language of reconciliation is unable to meaningfully grapple with the structural and material conditions of an ongoing colonial project that provides resources to settler communities and impoverishes Indigenous ones.”[92]

Two years later, in 2021, the CHA released a Canada Day statement declaring that the “long history of violence and dispossession” experienced by Indigenous Peoples constituted genocide.[93] Some historians agreed. Others did not.[94] The statement also led to an important, difficult, and ongoing conversation on the purpose of a professional association.[95] Is it to represent, in this case, the interests of history and of historians? Is it to take public positions on contentious matters? Or is it both?[96] As the vice president of the CHA, I find myself thinking a lot about these questions.[97]

The Canadian Historical Association must be better organized and more active than ever before; it must drive home the point that it is concerned with teaching and research in all fields of history; it must through the teaching and writing of its members convince our present-minded generation that our past is inescapably with us and that when responsibly treated it will present valuable lessons for the understanding of the present and the future.

Ivo N. Lambi, 1972

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the CHA, Ivo Lambi struck a series of celebratory and cautionary notes. On a shoestring and without administrative support, the CHA had increased its membership, expanded the program of its annual meeting, published an academic journal every year for fifty years, and launched a second publication project, the historical booklet series. In addition, it had established relationships with archivists, and it had consistently championed academic freedom. But, he said, it must do more to represent the interests of historians in Canada, not just historians of Canada, to defend curiosity-driven research, and to protect the autonomy of history in universities bent on rationalization. In short, he said, “the Canadian Historical Association has to be more effective than it has ever been before.”[98]

Lambi was surely right, especially when it came to driving home the point that, yes, the CHA really is “concerned with teaching and research in all fields of history.”[99] From the very beginning, the CHA has defined itself as the Canadian Historical Association, not the Canadian History Association. “Its purpose,” Lawrence Burpee said in 1923, “is to encourage historical research in every field, here and elsewhere, ancient as well as modern.” Indeed, “If we can measure in any degree up to the standard of the American Historical Association we shall not have lived in vain.”[100] The CHA has not lived in vain, but it has not become the AHA either, a fact Lambi conceded when he reported that non-Canadianists “find it more useful to maintain their membership in the American Historical Association than in the Canadian.”[101]

It was a familiar refrain, because Lambi was neither the first nor the last president to comment on the Canadian focus of the Canadian Historical Association in particular and of historical research in Canada in general. In 1937, Chester New reported that “too much emphasis” has been placed on the study and teaching of Canadian history. In 1946, Frank Underhill argued that Canadian historians have confined their research to Canadian history, a sign, he said, of our colonial-mindedness. In 1950, A. L. Burt described the profession’s focus on Canadian history as its “besetting sin.” In 1962, Richard Preston conceded the need to include what he problematically called “exotic fields of history,” although he also worried what that would mean for our faith in Western civilization and our identity as Canadians. In 1981, Pierre Savard urged his colleagues to welcome into the fold those scholars that we “ungraciously dub ‘non-Canadianists.’” The following year, John Kendle cited the emphasis on Canadian over non-Canadian research and graduate supervision. In 1989, Cornelius Jaenen insisted that the CHA needs to be “the professional association of all historians in Canada.” And in 1995, James Leith reminded his audience that for all the new lines of historical inquiry that have been opened up in the past half-century, the Canadian historical profession had narrowed in both time and space. “Unfortunately, the membership of the Canadian Historical Association and its annual program reflects this foreshortening of the past all too clearly.” Leith’s address is learned, humane, and exceedingly generous. “I see the possibility of travelling imaginatively through space and time as a deeply humanizing and liberating experience,” he said. “By offering our students a longer view of history and a more global scope, we could be offering them this deeper understanding of themselves, as well as a better preparation for our multicultural society and an increasingly global world.”[102] Finally, Margaret Conrad echoed Lambi:

During my term on the executive, I frequently heard the comment from historians in fields other than Canadian history that the CHA had little to offer them. My response, borrowing from John F. Kennedy, is that it is not what the CHA can do for members, but what members can do to keep the CHA relevant and engaged. Membership is, in short, a professional obligation.[103]

But when Lambi insisted that the CHA “must be better organized and more active than ever before,” he did not say that it must be more activist. After all, CHA presidents were a conservative lot in the 1970s and 1980s, having come of age before the 1960s and its many social movements. Still, Lambi opened the door to activism when he acknowledged that “our past is inescapably with us.”[104] In other words, the past is the present, and if historians cannot speak to the present, who can? To quote Desmond Morton in 1979, “The time has come for this generation of historians in Canada to speak with public voices, for we have much to tell.”[105] Two years later, Pierre Savard wondered if historians were up to the task.[106] Yet to not speak with public voices is to risk invisibility, Jim Miller added in 1997.[107]

What then is the role of a professional association? Is it to represent its members? Is it to take a position on a contentious question? Unwittingly, Lawrence Burpee offered a way of thinking through these questions in his very first presidential address when he cited the CHA’s “opportunities for useful work.”[108] At the very least, all historians can agree that meaning changes over time, that “useful work” meant something very different in 1922, and that it will mean something else in 2122.