Multicultural History Society of Ontario
901 Lawrence Avenue West, Suite 307 M6A 1C3 Toronto, ON, Canada

The Second World War is top of mind today given the 75th anniversary of VJ-Day. Although it’s difficult for us to imagine now, the war had real immediacy for Canadians. For one thing and this is an almost forgotten feature of the war German prisoners of war were incarcerated in camps across the country. Surprisingly, many POWs were employed in low-security labour projects and, as a result, interacted with local populations. One such project was a peat-cutting operation, r...un by the Erie Peat Company, in the Wainfleet Bog near Port Colborne. Although there are few physical remains of this operation, memories and experiences captured through the use of oral history provide rich historical accounts of the POW presence and reactions to that presence. That’s what Brian de Ruiter and Michel S. Beaulieu, a member of the MHSO’s Board, argue in ‘Outside the Barbed Wire Fence: Oral History and German POWs in Wainfleet Township’, a post in the Champlain Society’s blog, ‘Findings/Trouvailles’. We heartily agree! You can access the post here https://champlainsociety.utpjournals.press//outside-the-ba.

It’s the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. As each year passes, our perception of this horrific event deepens. We now readily accept that’s there’s more to the story than the textbook explanation that the bomb saved American lives. It’s fitting that we also develop more nuanced understandings of the incarceration of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Fortunately, there are mechanisms available to us now that can help heighten public engagement with our p...ast. The creative application of digital technologies to the humanities is not only producing new insights, but it’s also enabling the broader dissemination of those insights. We’re thinking specifically of story maps which combine maps and geographic data with text and rich multimedia. ‘Justice Deferred: Executive Order 9066 and the geography of Japanese American imprisonment’ makes effective use of this technology in conveying the scope and violence of forced relocation in the United States. We hope that something addressing the experiences of Japanese Canadians will be produced soon. You can access ‘Justice Deferred’ here https://storymaps.esri.com//2017/japanese-inter/index.html.

Today is Emancipation Day. On this day, we commemorate the moment in 1834 when an estimated 800,000 people of African descent, living in British colonies around the world, were freed from chattel slavery. Ontario has a history of slavery that’s largely unacknowledged. Since there’s been no real reckoning with this history and its implications, we, at the MHSO, are marking Emancipation Day contemplating a past of marginalization, oppression, and violence that’s still fundamen...tally present in our everyday lives and relationships. Atrocities such as slavery aren’t brief and circumscribed periods in history. And they can’t be dealt with, and societies redeemed, by simply getting the facts ‘right’ and admitting selective wrongs. In our view, we must recognize that inequality is a significant dynamic or fault line that permeates our entire past. The lesson of Emancipation Day is that we need to approach the past differently. It seems to us that The 1619 Project provides a model for this urgent task. An ongoing initiative of The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia, it aims to reframe the history of the US by placing the consequences of slavery and the histories of Black Americans at the centre of the national narrative. You can access The 1619 Project website here https://www.nytimes.com//magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.

The Foundation to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers in Canada is holding its Annual Wreath Laying Canada Day Commemoration Ceremony at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow. Dora Nipp, the MHSO’s CEO, is one of the guest speakers. The ceremony pays tribute to the 17,000 men, from Guangdong Province in southeast China, who helped build the Canadian Pacific Railway through the Rockies. Over 4,000 lost their lives due to poor working conditions, landslides, and premature blasts. This year... the ceremony is, not surprisingly, a virtual event. It’s also an especially important occasion. Anti-Asian sentiments have re-emerged in Canada in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Exposing the realities of Chinese Canadian histories and experiences will help counter these sentiments. Here’s the Facebook Event link https://www.facebook.com/events/341333680182669/

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the MHSO and the Ojibway and Cree Cultural Centre (OCCC) in Timmins conducted over 300 oral history interviews with Elders in remote First Nations communities in Northern Ontario. Almost all are in Cree, Oji-Cree or Ojibwe. We digitized the interviews in 2018, and during the last two years, with support provided by the Department of Canadian Heritage, we’ve been working with the OCCC to transcribe and translate them. Now, on one of the last ...days of National Indigenous History Month, we’re pleased to announce that Canadian Heritage has awarded a second grant $200,000 that will allow us to continue this effort. Collaborating with the OCCC, we’ll prepare original-language transcripts and English-language translations for a further 100 interviews. Our long-term goals are to share the interviews with Indigenous peoples and the general public by publishing them online with associated contextual information and materials, and to produce a resource that can be used by the MHSO and OCCC in the development, over the next decade, of innovative educational programming targeted to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences. If you want to learn more about our partner, the OCCC, you can access its website here http://occc.ca/.

After a two-month absence, we’re resuming our Facebook posts. We’ve been prompted to return to virtual space because we want to announce our participation in a Zoom event marking Asian Heritage Month. At 2 p.m. on Sunday, May 31st, the AHM Virtual Digital Workshop Series will be launched. In the inaugural workshop, Dora Nipp, the MHSO’s CEO, and Hillary Chang, an M.A. student in the Film & Photography Preservation and Collections Management Program at Ryerson University, will... give a short talk, The apple box in Aunt Susie’s basement: portraits of Chinese families in Canada. Before the onset of the pandemic, Hillary was serving her second-year student residency at the MHSO. She was immersed in cataloguing, arranging, and interpreting a collection of historical photographs created by a Chinese Canadian family in British Columbia. The talk was inspired by this project. Link https://tinyurl.com/ahm2020-talk1 Password if asked: AHM2020.

So Canada's closing its borders to asylum seekers. In the face of this action, we can’t help but think about histories of exclusion, displacement, and loss. The British Museum recently opened, and then almost immediately closed, an exhibition that draws attention to these themes ‘library of exile’, an installation by British artist and writer, Edmund de Waal. It’s worth looking at the online description of this exhibition, as well as the descriptions of the various events that were scheduled to accompany it. What new memories, stories, and histories will be created out of our present situation? https://www.britishmuseum.org//edmund-de-waal-library-exile https://www.britishmuseum.org//edmund-de-waal-libra/events

A few days ago, CaribbeanTales, a Toronto-based group of media companies that produces, markets, and exhibits Caribbean-themed films, announced that it had begun work on a feature film based on Denham Jolly’s remarkable memoir, ‘In the Black: My Life’. A very welcome announcement! Denham Jolly is a Jamaican Canadian businessman, publisher, broadcaster, civil rights activist, and philanthropist. During the 1980s, he published the African Canadian newspaper, ‘Contrast’ we ha...ve a full run of the paper in our archives and he helped establish the Black Business and Professional Association and the Black Action Defence Committee. However, he’s best known as the founder of Canada’s first Black-owned radio station, FLOW 93.5. The station, which made its debut in 2001, was born out of a long struggle to secure a licence from the CRTC. Milestone Radio, Jolly’s company, first applied for a licence in 1989, but was passed over. It applied again in 1997 and was passed over again. Both decisions sparked controversy. The CRTC’s rejection of an urban-format station (which Toronto didn’t have at the time) in favour of existing radio services was deemed racist. Certainly, the lack of an urban station was a barrier for Canadian hip hop, reggae, and R & B artists trying to promote their music. Luckily the barrier was lifted, at least to some degree FLOW 93.5 has been credited for the significant role it’s played in launching the careers of artists like Drake. You can access more information on Denham Jolly here https://socialinnovation.org/celebrating-black-innovation-/. The announcement is available here https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Denham-Jolly-s-Memoir-T.

Last Tuesday, the Toronto Workers’ History Project hosted a session on one of the most vile actions of the Canadian state during the Second World War the evacuation, internment, and dispersal of Japanese Canadians. Language was an interesting discussion point. ‘Evacuation’ from homes and communities in British Columbia is a euphemism for ‘forced relocation’, and ‘internment’ and ‘dispersal’ are euphemisms for ‘incarceration’ and ‘exile’. All told, the action was nothing sho...rt of, and so should be referred to as, ‘ethnic cleansing’. Of course, those traumatized and damaged by ethnic cleansing must remain the focus of our attention. That brings to mind the interviews that the MHSO conducted with Japanese Canadians who settled in Ontario after the war. Also, the fairly recent announcement that 147 letters, plus postcards and photos, written by teenagers to a former school mate, are now available to researchers. The letters provide a rare and fascinating glimpse, through a teenage lens, into the wartime experiences of Japanese Canadians. There’s an episode on the letters in CBC’s The Doc Project. You can access it, and more information, here https://www.cbc.ca//what-s-on-the-hit-parade-rare-letters-.

Last Thursday, the Ontario Heritage Trust bestowed one of its ‘Excellence in Conservation’ awards on the Guelph Museums exhibition, ‘Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario.’ The exhibition brings the difficult histories and dehumanizing experiences of eugenics to light, focusing especially on the stories of survivors. Of course, eugenics, which was once actually considered a science, endorsed and spread the deeply damaging idea that it’s possible, and desi...rable, to better the human race through selective breeding. It targeted marginalized and racialized peoples, and it was pursued through marriage and immigration restrictions, segregation, and institutionalization. Through the first half of the 20th century, the eugenics movement had close ties to post-secondary institutions. It was taught in universities in Southern Ontario, including the Macdonald Institute and the Ontario Agricultural College, two of the three founding colleges of the University of Guelph. ‘Into the Light’ is co-presented with ‘Bodies in Translation’, a research project of ReVision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph. We’re impressed. The exhibition is a welcome critical response to the call for universities, disciplines, researchers, and knowledge producers generally to grapple with the profoundly negative impacts in this case, forced confinement and sterilization that can ensue from the knowledge they produce. Unfortunately, the exhibition closes on March 1st. You can access more information here https://guelphmuseums.ca//into-the-light-eugenics-and-edu/ http://bodiesintranslation.ca/.

To mark Black History Month, the St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre is publishing a series of posts in its blog on the Howe Report. The posts present, and reflect on, testimony that was included in the report. The three posts that have been published thus far are fascinating, undoubtedly because they’re based on such an extraordinary document. The Howe Report presents unfiltered, first-hand evidence of the overt anti-Black racism that permeated everyday life in C...anada in the 19th-century. All was not well for freedom seekers. The Howe Samuel Gridley Howe of the Howe Report was an abolitionist. In 1863, after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he was appointed to the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission to investigate the condition of former slaves and make recommendations on how they might be assisted in their transition to freedom. During the course of his work, he interviewed African Canadians in various cities and towns in Canada West (Ontario). On several occasions, the MHSO has used the testimony of Francis Griffith Simpson, a prominent Black resident of Toronto’s St. John’s Ward. You can access the posts using these links: https://stcatharinesmuseumblog.com//bhm-the-howe-report-p/ https://stcatharinesmuseumblog.com//bmh-the-howe-report-p/ https://stcatharinesmuseumblog.com//bhm-the-howe-report-p/

Although it’s quite old by today’s standards, we think that the online exhibition, ‘In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience’, is still worth a look, especially in the context of Black History Month. When it first produced the exhibition, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture proclaimed that it was presenting a new interpretation of African American history essentially, the past shaped and revealed in terms of migrations. It argued that, through ti...me, movement and mobility coerced, voluntary, and everything in-between have characterized the lives of peoples of African descent. This ‘in motion’ interpretation is no longer new, but it remains under-appreciated. We have ready access to compelling narratives and enduring images of Africans as transported commodities in the transatlantic slave trade, but we haven’t fully explored the voluntary movements of Black men and women seeking to remake themselves and their worlds. The MHSO is drawn to ‘In Motion’ not only because it focuses on these journeys, but also because it pays attention to lesser-known migrations, such as migrations to Canada. You can access the exhibition here http://www.inmotionaame.org/home.cfm.

The MHSO is one of several partners in a multi-year, SSHRC-funded project led by Professor Lorne Foster, Director of York University’s Institute for Social Research. The project is focused on the first-hand perspectives and multiple voices of peoples of African descent in Canada. It’s investigating how their experiences have been shaped by intersecting social, political, and economic factors, and it’s identifying promising approaches to, and strategies for, alleviating anti-B...lack racism. More importantly, from our perspective, the project is intent on generating positive change through the establishment of knowledge-sharing partnerships and a public policy network. Today and tomorrow, a conference related to the project ‘Blackness in Canada Policy Networking Conference: Critical Issues for Building Robust Community-Academic Alliances’ is being held at York. It’s exciting to see serious acknowledgement of community efforts. We also applaud the linkages drawn between activist scholarship and community development. You can access more information on the conference including the agenda here http://www.yrdsb.ca/hr/Documents/BCPNconference-Feb2020.pdf http://www.yrdsb.ca//Doc/BCPNconference-Feb2020-agenda.pdf

Chinese New Year officially began on January 25th. Just two days prior, ‘the chrysanthemum has opened twelve times’, went on view at the Koffler Gallery in Toronto. We think this exhibition will intrigue anyone who’s interested in gaining deeper understandings of the everyday places that are evocative of community histories. The artist, Karen Tam, is renowned for creating installations that not only re-imagine and explore ‘authentic’ Chinese spaces in early 20th-century Nort...h America restaurants, opium dens, karaoke lounges, and curio shops but also challenge Western perceptions and stereotypes. This exhibition focuses on the photo studios that served Chinese Canadian communities. For us, it’s very timely because we’ve just embarked on a project to arrange, describe, and digitize a collection of photographs depicting several generations of a large extended Chinese Canadian family in Victoria. A significant number of the photographs are studio portraits. You can access more information here https://kofflerarts.org//Gal/Gallery-Exhibitions/Karen-Tam.