New Narratives of Work: Increasing Worker and Community Participation at Ontario Worker Heritage Sites
by
Philip Rich
A Thesis presented to The University of Guelph
In partial fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History
Guelph, Ontario, Canada
© Philip Rich, May, 2021
ABSTRACT
NEW NARRATIVES OF WORK: INCREASING WORKER AND COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION AT ONTARIO WORKER HERITAGE SITES
Philip Rich Advisors: University of Guelph, 2021 Dr. Alan Gordon, University of Guelph Dr. Rob Kristofferson, WLU
This thesis explores how historians can support workers and communities in the process of recovering narratives of work in deindustrialized contexts. Public history and heritage are powerful tools for preserving and presenting Ontario’s labour history, as well as organizing labour movements. However, this needs to be done in a transparent and meaningful way. Participatory models of ‘doing’ history are key to democratizing the history-making process. Building better methods for participation in public history is crucial to involving communities in the history-making process and allow for meaningful educational opportunities that support workers and communities through intense changes that are a result of deindustrialization. By examining three existing sites of worker heritage in Ontario it is evident that they have the potential to develop immersive forms of history that are of value when advocating for heritage that prioritizes labour history in Ontario. Involved, community-led approaches to public history and heritage can help them reach this potential.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Dr. Alan Gordon and Dr. Rob Kristofferson, as well as several other professors in the Guelph history department, for their guidance throughout the research and writing process. I’ve learned a lot from them, and their work has been a significant inspiration to me. I take sole responsibility for any errors and interpretations in this thesis.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ...... ii
Acknowledgments...... iii
Table of Contents ...... iv
List of Illustrations ...... v
Chapter 1 Introduction ...... 1
Chapter 2 Immigrant Workers and Community Narratives of Work: A Memorial to Commemorate Chinese Railroad Workers ...... 18
2.1 Commemorating Immigrant Workers in a Changing Urban Landscape...... 18
2.2 Recognizing the Workers of the Canadian Pacific Railroad ...... 23
2.3 Heritage, Resistance, and Community Action ...... 43
Chapter 3 Canoe Building and Narratives of Work: Worker Heritage and Expressions of Living History at Fort William Historical Park ...... 50
3.1 Canoes, Work, and Canadian National Identity ...... 50
3.2 Fort William Canoe Program: Expressions of Living History in Ontario Parks and Historical Sites ...... 59
3.3 Interpretations of Manual Labour and ‘Performance’ at Living History sites ...... 73
3.4 Living History, Labour, and New Educational Models ...... 83
Chapter 4 Community Archives and Narratives of Participation: Grassroots archiving, participatory history, and the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre ...... 86
4.1 Community Archives and Participation in Public History Projects ...... 86
4.2 Labour Archives and Hamilton’s Workers Arts and Heritage Centre: Presenting Industrial History in North America ...... 94
Chapter 5 Conclusion: New Narratives of Work in Ontario ...... 100
Bibliography ...... 102
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1.1: Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial (1989) …………………………………………….21
Figure 2.1: Drawing of Canoe Interpreter at Fort William………….…………………….…………..69
Chapter 1 Introduction
In the middle of a pandemic, I began apprenticing as a heritage stone mason. It was unintentional – a mason needed a labourer, and I needed more work for the summer. I was on a leave of absence from studying history and heritage and the masonry was a good break. I had spent a lot of time in my life working as a manual labourer – construction, farming, landscaping, gardening, janitor, a bike mechanic in greasy shops – and I had spent a lot of time reading and writing about work in my previous studies. But the heritage masonry was different. It focused on bridging the present and the past; intentionally making new renovations look old and learning historical labouring skills in the process. This was an idea I had been exploring for this project earlier in the year and my advisor had encouraged me to explore notions of participatory learning in history. The connection became concrete as I learned to build stone walls, point existing walls, and colour mortar to resemble decades old mortar and stone. ‘Heritage Grey’ is the preferred term, I learned. I was learning about history and work in Ontario by actively participating in the historical process and developing an understanding of how we pass on knowledge, skills, and traditions, and why we think that it is important that we do. Work can help us understand our communities even as they change. It can be a powerful tool for organization and education. It is also important how we present historical narratives of work so that they are not lost or ignored.
This thesis investigates interpretations of labour at heritage sites in Ontario and how work is represented in public history projects. It examines different examples of labour in Canada’s history. It has stories, but it also connects methods of public history, education, and the importance of community as landscapes change. The value of analyzing case studies of worker heritage at Ontario historical sites is to contrast the wide variety of forms that the public preservation of labour histories can take, and how public historians, labour historians, labour
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movements, and communities can properly develop modern education programs in Ontario. In
Canada, histories of labour are often underrepresented in modern instances of public history and commemoration – especially compared to more developed examples of worker heritage in the
United States and Europe. Using a historical methodology, my research investigates the development of sites that publicly commemorate narratives of work in Ontario to determine the roles that institutions, workers, academics and the public play in shaping the final versions of these sites of commemoration, education, and even leisure.
Examinations of three heritage sites that depict different periods of labour in Canadian history will tell distinct stories of de-industrialization, work, and leisure. Additionally, the sites tell these stories through different forms of public history – each with their own set of advantages and inadequacies for communities. The three historical sites that I have identified include a traditional monument, a living history depiction of work and artisanship, and a worker’s museum. When contrasted, they present the differences between traditional commemoration that have guided understandings of history and heritage in Canada throughout the 20th century – such as monuments and standard living depictions of history – and more involved methods of public history like actively participating in living history programming or maintaining community archives. Each site has the potential to develop immersive forms of history that are of value when advocating for commemoration that prioritizes labour history in Ontario. Building better methods for participation in public history is crucial to involving communities in the history- making process, and the heritage process can be therapeutic for working people following the sudden changes brought about by deindustrialization and its dislocations.
The first case study will examine the process of creating the Chinese Railroad Workers
Memorial in downtown Toronto. This example communicates a more industrial form of labour
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than the artisanal depictions of labour that are the focus of Fort William. The memorial was erected in Toronto in 1989 to commemorate the Chinese immigrant workers who played a critical role in constructing the Canadian Pacific Railway amid a debate of multiculturalism and what kind of commemoration could represent the Chinese Canadian community, and what would be accepted in Toronto’s public consciousness. A second case study explores living history depictions of manual labour in early Canadian history at Fort William Historical Park – more specifically its birchbark canoe building program. Fort William’s canoe sheds continue to produce authentic ‘Canots de Maitres’ and ‘Montreal’ canoes as they would have been built by
Indigenous craftsmen and European fur traders when Fort William was the most significant stop along the Northwest trade route. While not an example of industrial labour, the canoe program is unique in that it combines elements of history, work, artisanship, and performance to produce artefacts from both Indigenous and white workers that have become symbolic of Canadian heritage, and continue to be used by visitors to Fort William Historical Park today. Finally, a third chapter will analyze the development of the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (WAHC) in
Hamilton and consider the importance of worker archives and museums to communities that are in the process of changing. Worker archives are not as prevalent in Canada as they are in the
United States. Large worker archives like the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor
Archives at New York University and the Southern Labour archives at Georgia State University document the history of national and state labour movements, while others are local and focus on individual unions or forms of work, such as the Greater New Haven Labor History Research
Center in Connecticut and the Priscilla Shishido Library of International Longshore and
Warehouse Union, Local 142 in Hawaii. But there are few archives in Canada that resemble these examples. While it is not an archive, the WAHC is a good example of an educational
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centre dedicated to Ontario working-class histories and heritage and could grow as an independent, grassroots archive that advances the interests of workers in their communities.
Most importantly, none of the sites have completely fulfilled the goal of collaborative approaches to public history. Each site has focused on building better methods for participation in public history and only partly fostered participation in the commemoration process. They have not fully succeeded in the realization of this goal. The Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial heavily involved the Chinese Canadian community in deciding what to commemorate and how, and it certainly portrays the difficult circumstances for immigrant workers in Canadian history – an important narrative of work. But the organizers ultimately compromised on a monument that commemorates a Canadian national myth of the CPR as a crowning achievement in Canadian history. At Fort William, and Ontario living history museums generally, programming is designed to give visitors an ‘authentic’ historical with opportunities to see and feel the era that is being depicted, but does not provide meaningful historical interactions for visitors and lacks transparency about why the programming was established and the educational goals of the institution. The WAHC is the most involved of the three worker heritage sites being examined.
Its focus on community heritage and collaborative approaches to history is admirable and could be developed further. Therefore, this chapter will use the WAHC as a model of new territories for worker heritage in Ontario that are involved and community oriented.
New ideas of public history research and public engagement through educational programs are imperative to preserve local narratives of work and improve public historical consciousness in communities experiencing rapid industrial changes. Supporting community groups to develop distinct approaches to public history is important. In a 2018 article evaluating the role of art and graphic history collections in public history, Robert Kristofferson and Simon
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Orpana note that “set against the larger backdrop of the deindustrialization of the city, the question for us became how best to move beyond traditional histories that, while useful, might not be as accessible to the next generation of activists or the public more generally in their understanding of the legacy of these struggles.”1 In his celebrated book Theatres of Memory
Raphael Samuel took a similar position, arguing that heritage is an act of recovery that seeks to
“reanimate the historical imagination of our times.”2 He argued against scholars who believe that an overabundance of heritage detracts from the signification of expressions of public history and instead advocates for broadening what we consider ‘history’. This has significant implications for heritage projects. Samuel presented the idea of ‘unofficial knowledge’ and the importance of creating space for unconventionality in public history. Since the concept of heritage can be so widely defined, Samuel called for more inclusive approaches to history that are less esoteric in nature and incorporate a diverse collection of sources and approaches.3 He was interested in expanding understandings of what sources of historical knowledge people use on a daily basis and accommodating as many voices and perspectives as possible into what we consider
‘knowledge’ in history – an important consideration given the focus on marginalized histories that were relegated to the limits of academia until recent decades. This contradicts heritage scholars like David Lowenthal who have argued that heritage becoming overly accommodating has taken away from its influence as a means of education. In some cases, Lowenthal’s cynicism is warranted. However, I argue that in de-industrial contexts, heritage is an important tool to help workers and communities navigate rapid change over time and accommodating their voices
1 Rob Kristofferson and Simon Orpana, "Shaping Graphic History: Primary Sources and Closure in Showdown! Making Modern Unions," Labour/Le Travail, no. 82 (2018): 192. 2 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and present in contemporary culture, (New York: Verso, 1994), vii. 3 Ibid, 3-4; 210. 5
through participatory models of history is crucial to recovering narratives of work and supporting labour movements.
Samuel sought to democratize history and heritage. More specifically, he advocated for democratizing the history-making process – a key part of generating public history projects that I will argue has largely been ignored in Ontario since the public history boom of the 1970s and
1980s. For example, in his discussion of preservation, conservation and architectural heritage,
Samuel posits that heritage is not always determined by institutional power and nationalism, but is instead determined by aesthetics, public agitation, voluntary action, and the public opinion of the time period.4 These different influences on heritage and preservation, and many others, must be accounted for in a transparent way, and accepted into the debates surrounding public history, heritage, and history-making processes in communities. Samuel emphasizes the limitations of having history professionals and institutions occupy so much space in the debates and calls for more inclusion in the history-making process. “If history was thought of an activity rather than a profession,” he writes, “then the number of practitioners would be legion.”5 If the goal of public history is to serve the community and communicate meaningful histories, it is imperative to increase participation. If members of the community do not feel empowered to participate in, or even worse are systemically excluded from, heritage debates then historical education opportunities are wasted. Simply put, history as an activity should be the goal of historians and educators.
By exploring the historiography of labour commemoration, examples of how working- class histories are institutionalized, and the power of participation in public history, we can trace the development of understandings of labour movements and their relation to public memory,
4 Ibid, 210. 5 Ibid, 18. 6
industrial heritage, and symbols of Canadian national identity. This allows us to challenge conceptions of heritage and commemoration in society and consider what the next steps are for the historiography of worker heritage in public history, while also presenting new opportunities for labour movements to organize and properly participate in public history projects related to working class history. Heritage scholars have written about heritage processes where the “past is mobilized to attain socio-economic and political objectives” in public history projects around the world.6 Laurajane Smith calls the historical narratives and debates that arise from this process
“Authorized Heritage Discourse” that are institutional in nature.7 Historians Stephen High and
Stephan Berger write that in changing urban landscapes, heritage often fills a “compensatory function” and Scott Magelssen refers to many heritage narratives as “fiscal narratives.”8 Craig
Heron argues that amidst a boom in public history projects in the 1970s, labour and worker heritage in Canada was an afterthought.9 The majority of public history projects were “highly selective in their form and content”, reflected the “deeply-rooted conservatism” of the time period, and conveyed implicit and overt “elitist lessons about hierarchy, social and civic harmony, ideological consensus, and cultural cohesion.”10 The rise of heritage projects coincided with what Samuel has described as a period of “instant old.”11 While the public and institutions embraced modernity in the post-war period, society started to reject the previous era of modernity and worked to make anything new look old. Samuel dubbed this “retrofitting”, which
6 Hamzah Muzaini and Claudio Minca, "Rethinking heritage, but ‘from below’," In After Heritage Hamzah Muzaini and Claudio Minca (eds), (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018), 1. 7 Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage, (London: Routledge, 2006), 28; 87. 8 Steven High and Stefan Berger. eds. “De-Industrial Heritage,” A Special Issue of Labour 16, no.1, 2019: 20.; Scott Magelssen, “Living History Museums and the Construction of the Real through Performance,” Theatre Survey 45, no. 1 (2004): 77.; Scott Magelssen, Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance, (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 66. 9 Craig Heron, “The Labour Historian and Public History,” Labour/Le Travail 45 (2000): 174. 10 Ibid. 11 Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 77. 7
relies on concealing traces of modernity in an environment while also emphasizing as many historical traits as possible.12 For architecture, city planning, and domestic life in the 1970s, this meant a return to traditional materials and skills in a pursuit of warmth and comfort – to make everyday life seem more “human.”13 For many public history projects, this meant resurrecting
‘authentic’ settings and narratives that that were not necessarily transparent but brought people back in time.
Labour history’s relationship with heritage was even more complicated. Heron notes that it was not until the 1980s that some institutional stewards of public history like museums, historical societies, and historic site developers, recognized the contributions of workers to national, provincial, and local heritage, but in a limited capacity and without collaborating with the labour movement.14 Hero-making in heritage projects is prevalent, and workers are often memorialized as ‘heroes’ and not necessarily commemorated for their important daily contributions to the history of their communities.15 Canadian labour historians have also acknowledged the lack of well-developed workers education programs in Canada when compared to the United States and Europe.16 Both regions have developed successful worker heritage projects that Canada could emulate. New Lanark in Scotland is a converted mill town that is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site but was a planned community from the beginning.
Established by David Dale as a successful Scottish industrial centre at the beginning of the First
Industrial Revolution, Dale designed the settlement from a philanthropic perspective and
12 Ibid., 54 13 Ibid., 62. 14 Heron, “The Labour Historian and Public History”: 175-176. 15 Brian S. Osborne, “Commemorating Nations’ Workers: The Case of the Reesor Siding Incident,” In Heritage from Below, Iain J.M. Robertson (ed.), (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 179. 16 Ian Radforth and Joan Sangster, "A Link between Labour and Learning: The Workers Educational Association in Ontario, 1917-1951," Labour / Le Travail 8/9 (1981): 44.; Craig Heron, “The Labour Historian and Public History”: 172. 8
promoted a community that focused on developing “interpersonal, deferential relations between master and worker” by focusing on work, education, and community to confront mass social change in Scotland.17 Dale’s son-in-law Robert Owen acquired the town in 1799 aiming to develop it into a worker’s utopia that was both a space to implement his paternalistic and political ideals and as an answer to the rapid economic and social changes brought on by industrialization in Scotland at the time.18 The town was restored in stages beginning in the
1970s and is now a major tourist attraction and educational centre. Living history programming at the modern New Lanark depicts the lives of workers in the textile mills in the 18th and 19th centuries and New Lanark has established educational programs with local schools and
American schools about the significance of industry, labour, and community in the mills.19
Similar American projects exist. Cathy Stanton’s The Lowell Experiment and Martha K.
Norkunas’s The Politics of Public Memory explain the social and political processes that take shape when cities and regions are confronted with de-industrial realities in the United States.
They highlight regional differences in de-industrial history, an important comparison when studying the role of space and place in heritage. The development of Monterey, California’s
Cannery Row from an industrial centre to a tourist destination is an example of a commercial approach to heritage and recovery. As Norkunas explains, when the sardine canneries closed in the 1940s, an “opportunity for renewal” emerged and city officials sought to commemorate John
Steinbeck’s 1945 novel Cannery Row to establish a vibrant tourism industry rather than telling
17 Ophélie Siméon, Robert Owen’s Experiment at New Lanark: From Paternalism to Socialism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 13. 18 Siméon, Robert Owen’s Experiment at New Lanark, 1-2. 19 Ian Donnachie and George Hewitt, Historic New Lanark (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1993), 209- 210. 9
local stories or industry and community.20 In Monterey, historical narratives of industry and working-class culture are now largely told through “touristic interpretations of the literature of
John Steinbeck” and not through the lens of the experiences and struggles of workers in the city.21 While references to Monterey’s canning industrial history remain, “shops and pubs have taken their names from the places and characters in Steinbeck's novels, and markers will one day enshrine both fictional and actual people and places.”22
John Tunbridge explores a comparable social discourse around memory, commercial heritage, and how to effectively commemorate industrial histories in post-industrial Canadian contexts. His article about the history and heritage of the Byward Market outlines the transformation of the Market from a centre of canals and industry to a significant tourist attraction and official Heritage Conservation District in Ottawa – similar to the redevelopment of
Toronto’s Railway Lands into a site of leisure that we will see shortly.23 Tunbridge argues that the Byward Market has been developed according to a “festival marketplace model” that prioritizes heritage commodification. This has implications for the market’s community and history, which has undergone difficult transformations. As in the case of Cannery Row,
Tunbridge notes that “distinct voices are locationally or functionally marginal to the core of the
Market; and there, commodification of heritage is not hard to find, its expressions fostering rather than distracting from the business of making money.”24 The voices that are pushed to the
20 Martha K. Norkunas, The Politics of Public Memory: Tourism, History, and Ethnicity in Monterey, California, SUNY Series in Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 51. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 John E. Tunbridge, "Ottawa's Byward Market: a festive bone of contention?" The Canadian Geographer 45, no. 3 (2001): 358. 24 Ibid, 359-361. 10
margins are often excluded from public history debates, and the ones that dominate the conversations surrounding heritage are not necessarily representative of the community.
Stanton details the transformation of Lowell, Massachusetts. A fading textile mill town in the American Rust Belt, the city undertook a sustainable redevelopment project in the 1970s to ensure it remained economically and culturally relevant. The plan integrated institutions, industry, and the community into its deliberations and used public history as a model for redevelopment goals that focused on “labour, gender, capitalism, immigration, ethnicity, and technology.”25 Working closely with the National Park Service (NPS), Lowell established
Lowell National Historical Park – a historic site that tells the history of work and industry in
Lowell through the perspective of the community. Stanton presents a compelling study of how public history, industry, and labour education can coexist using public historical approaches. A city famous for its textile production, Lowell eventually joined the Rust Belt, suffering from the effects of companies moving their production overseas in a globalizing world and becoming a model for post-industrial economic depression. A depression in the American textile industry caused by a poor market and big inventories beginning in the 1950s, as well as rising costs to maintain factories, also contributed to a steep decline in manufacturing in Lowell.26 As part of a revitalization effort in the second half of the 20th century, the city sought to create a sustainable project that was both economically and culturally relevant - a preservation project that was socially responsible and focused on integrating the community.27 The city wanted to ensure that the local residents who had made Lowell a unique industrial town since 1826 were
25 Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 188. 26 Laurence F. Gross, The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts 1835-1955 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993), 225-226. 27 Stanton, The Lowell Experiment, 188. 11
accommodated in the process – what Andrew Flinn terms “creating independent heritage sites.”28
The blue-collar class that makes up the majority of residents in Lowell since the 19th century was not to be displaced in favour of high rent buildings, unsuitable jobs for locals, and other shortcomings of gentrification. The city also wanted to ensure that the immigrant and minority populations of modern-day Lowell were not excluded from the process.29
Disagreements like those outlined in the example of Monterey, California – the same disagreements that community organizers and the NPS wanted to avoid in Lowell – often arise when commemorating history in communities. Tunbridge and Gregory Ashworth refer to this as
‘heritage dissonance’, which is enabled by the “conflicts and disharmonies that inevitably occur as a result of the relationship between the past and its contemporary users,” often excluding individuals and groups from the heritage debate.30 Gordon notes that these disagreements are really disputes within society about who we are collectively, and who and what values are admitted into the collective identity.31 The result of ‘othering’ during the heritage and commemoration process is critical to the argument for transferring power in public history to workers, and the importance of supporting research and public education projects for groups who are traditionally excluded from authoritative narratives. The cases of Monterey and Lowell provide striking differences when it comes to commemorating working class histories in public heritage initiatives. The result in Lowell, Massachusetts was a cooperative effort between citizens and public historians, as well as the NPS, to transform Lowell through one of the most
28 Andrew Flinn, “Working with the past: Making history of struggle part of the struggle,” In Reflections on Knowledge, Learning and Social Movements: History's School by Aziz Choudry and Salim Vally (eds.) (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 24. 29 Stanton, The Lowell Experiment, 202-203. 30 J.E. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth, Dissonant heritage: the management of the past as a resource in conflict, (Chichester, New York: J. Wiley, 1996). 31 Alan Gordon, "Heritage and authenticity: the case of Ontario's Sainte-Marie-among-the-Hurons," Canadian Historical Review 85, no.3 (September 2004): 510. 12
ambitious public history projects in North America at the time. To bridge the economic and educational agendas of the citizens of Lowell, the present-day ethnic culture of Lowell became one of the central foundations of the public revitalization effort.32 Community-based organization proved to be key to achieving the town’s goals. Local organizers recognized that, for many heritage revitalization projects around the world, control had been taken out of the hands of locals and assumed by larger influential actors who seek economic incentives by investing at a local level. In Monterey, the opposite occurred. The transformation from an industrial city to post-industrial destination was assumed by the city and large development corporations - some of which were from San Francisco rather than Monterey.33 The communities who had worked in Cannery Row for decades, including Indigenous fishermen and Chinese miners and railroad workers, were excluded from modern interpretations of Monterey’s heritage.34
The biggest challenge for my research is defining the term ‘community’. What constitutes a community is a difficult question as the term can be broadly defined and there has been little study of the Canadian context until more recently.35 Raymond Williams has defined community as a collection of similar interests, identities, or relationships that are more immediate than larger systems of social organization like society or civilization.36 He notes that historically, community is used exclusively as a favourable term and I will use it in a similar way. Communities are formed as a way to address “direct common concern” brought about by
32 Stanton, The Lowell Experiment, 90. 33 Norkunas, Politics of Public Memory, 64-65. 34 Ibid, 52. 35 John Walsh and Stephen High, “Rethinking the Concept of Community,” Social History 32, no. 64 (1999): 256- 257; 273. 36 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 76- 77. 13
the intrusion of larger systems of power.37 Encouraging historians to study the concept of community in more detail, John Walsh and Stephen High write that the formation of communities is “something ‘imagined’ and clearly embedded in much broader systems of power.
To study community explicitly, then, is to address key themes of the historical process: governance, production/reproduction, and identity.”38 Williams, Walsh, and High all emphasize the importance of relationships in communities which “[give] space meaning and value.”39
Community is part of a social and spatial process that evolves, and interactions and relationships are an important part of the evolution process. I argue that this fluidity is unavoidable.
Communities change, and the learning that comes from the interactions and relationships that develop from these change is an opportunity to present public historical narratives that preserve the community’s history in transitional periods.
Closely connected to our understanding of community is the concept of de-industrial heritage. As economies and industries change, so do communities. Industries and forms of work move or die out according to technological change and larger institutional policies and decisions.
As a result, work that has existed in communities for long periods of time disappears, as do historical narratives of work that document the development of communities. Assessing the consequences of deindustrialization is often a focus of regional development and renewal as well. This is evident in the existing sites of worker heritage that I will examine. The Chinese
Railroad Workers Memorial was built on decommissioned CN railyards in Toronto’s downtown core as industry and railyards moved to the city’s suburbs and the site was developed into a centre of new office buildings and leisure opportunities. In Thunder Bay, archeological
37 Ibid. 38 Walsh and High, “Concept of Community,” 258. 39 Ibid., 273. 14
excavations revealed that the original Fort William was buried under CN railyards in the city centre. This presents questions about heritage and authenticity in deindustrialized contexts.
Rather than re-construct Fort William at the railyards, the Ontario government decided to build it on a separate piece of land to create its idea of an authentic experience for visitors. This has implications for the visitor experience and the worker narratives which are presented, and is evidence of the for-profit, fiscal heritage narratives that historians have suggested take precedent over accurate, transparent de-industrial narratives
Adapting American economists Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison’s definition of deindustrialization in their book The Deindustrialization of America as a conflict that pits capital against community, High and Berger argue that the study of deindustrialization and industrial heritage has become a critical aspect of public history debates since the 1970s. To commemorate working class histories, the authors outline a process of erasure and recovery for labour movements, historians, and activists, when industrial narratives and memories are silenced as industrial centres deindustrialize over time.40 In their discussion of heritage activism and agency in de-industrial settings High and Berger discuss the many groups of people who are involved in the commemoration process – what they refer to as “heritage labor.”41 In capitalist societies, heritage labour “often fulfills a compensatory function” that serves more influential actors such as tourism and business. Often what emerges are representations of de-industrial heritage that shy away “from representing conditions of work, class conflict, or the structural or symbolic violence of deindustrialization itself,” in favour of more friendly for-profit narratives.42 The cases of Monterey, California and Ottawa’s Byward Market are clear examples of such
40 High and Berger, “Deindustrial heritage,” 7 41 Ibid., 1. 42 Ibid., 20-21. 15
narratives, and we will see evidence of similar processes in the cases of the Chinese Railroad
Workers Memorial and Fort William Historical Park.
Recent literature has advocated for re-thinking heritage processes to emphasize a
‘bottom-up’ approach to commemoration – what some historians designate as ‘heritage from below.’ Iain Robertson writes that heritage from below can act “as both an analytical category and a practice; recognized as both an opportunity for the expression of other heritages and identities, and a possibility for the assertion of a structure of feeling that runs counter to the hegemonic.”43 Heritage from below could substantially impact labour movements and address issues surrounding de-industrial heritage. Labour organisers and community organizations are in a unique position to play a large role in community heritage development. The organizing power of labour has been systematically crushed by anti-union governments, employer reliance on cheap immigrant work, and a rapidly changing economy focused on technological evolution since the 1980s. The past few decades have left worker movements behind, and it is time for labour to catch up. Community and worker participation could facilitate the process and public history and heritage are the tools to do it.
It is this move from more passive, traditional forms of commemoration to more democratic, participatory methods of ‘living with’ history for communities that will be the focus of this project. Workers movements and communities play a crucial role here. Transferring heritage to workers could advance workers causes. It would also help to commemorate local
‘everyday’ histories of work that document how communities change over time and preserve narrative that may otherwise be relegated to books and photographs in museums – or even forgotten. Novel approaches to public history are memorable and deliver an impactful
43 Iain J.M. Robertson, “Introduction,” In Heritage from Below, Iain J.M. Robertson (ed.), (Surrey: Ashgate, 2012), 11. 16
educational experience. Continually reinventing and revolutionizing heritage to move beyond traditional histories as Kristofferson and Orpana and Raphael Samuel argue could ensure that worker heritage remains relevant, impactful, and maximizes educational opportunities. Clearer understandings of worker heritage in Ontario will allow educational institutions, trade unions, community organizations, and local activists to collaborate with communities to work through these processes of change, and support workers in taking a greater role in commemorating working class heritage in their communities.
Involved worker heritage projects can be for communities what stone masonry was for me last summer – a tool for educational outreach about labour heritage and the commemoration of Ontario’s historical narrative of work. More structured analyses of different forms of public history can help communities determine their suitability for preserving working class heritage in more specific local historical contexts. Perhaps more importantly, historical research and educational outreach can help communities develop a firmer understanding of the historiography, theory, and practices of public history as they push for more influence for workers in the debates surrounding heritage and commemoration. The goal of this thesis is not to simply question why there is a lack of worker heritage and education in Ontario, but to also suggest tools and strategies that may be used by scholars, workers, and advocates to affect their communities. This will place workers at the centre of the heritage debate, rather than as an object of exploitative historical narratives, and present new opportunities for labour movements to organize and engage in both formal and informal learning in a historical context.
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Chapter 2 Immigrant Workers and Community Narratives of Work: A Memorial to Commemorate Chinese Railroad Workers
2.1 Commemorating Immigrant Workers in a Changing Urban Landscape
In the 1980s, the City of Toronto underwent significant changes. This included the departure of large-scale industry to the suburbs and the development of the downtown core into the site of non-industrial work and leisure that we recognize today. An often-overlooked part of the redevelopment was the construction of one of Canada’s largest memorials to the history of railway construction. The impetus for this was the decision to build a multipurpose domed stadium on former railway lands near the city’s waterfront. Just north of the development was a neighbourhood of industrial factories and warehouses, as well as Toronto’s largest concentration of Asian-Canadians living in a growing Chinatown centered along Spadina Avenue.
In September 1989, the Committee to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers (now the Foundation to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers in Canada or FCCRWC) unveiled the Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial. The Committee to Commemorate the Chinese
Railroad Workers was established in 1982 as a public history project to promote the
“understanding and awareness of the contribution to Canada by the Chinese Railroad Workers who participated in the construction of the first transcontinental railway (the CPR) that united
Canada geographically and politically [and promote] the awareness of the government's legislation of unjust Immigration Acts against the Chinese pioneers and their families.”44 Its first large-scale project was the Railroad Workers Memorial. A towering sculpture that sits in the shadow of the even more imposing CN Tower, on land made available by building the SkyDome
44 Foundation to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers in Canada. “Ties that Bind History Project.” Multicultural History Society of Ontario. Web. https://www.mhso.ca/tiesthatbind/foundation.php. (accessed October 2, 2020). 18
(now Rogers Centre), the memorial commemorates the “17,000 Chinese recruited by Canadian
Pacific Railways to dig tunnels and lay tracks to make Canada’s national dream to unite the country by rail a reality.”45 As much as it was part of Toronto’s urban renewal, the monument was conceived as part of a broader re-imagining of railroad heritage in the city’s post-industrial landscape. Sculpted using bronze, wood, and concrete and approximately thirty feet tall, the memorial depicts two Chinese labourers lifting a wooden beam above their heads to install a large railroad trestle.46 Adjacent to the trestle sculpture are three pairs of rocks that were transported from the Canadian Rockies to Toronto for the memorial.
The design of the memorial is the result of a competition for designs open to all Canadian citizens and landed immigrants.47 The winning design of Toronto artist Eldon Garnet was selected in early 1987 and the final memorial was completed in 1989. Garnet had recently completed the Metro Police Monument for the new Toronto Police headquarters on College
Street, and his experience with public art in Toronto may have been an important factor in selecting his submission. Sculptor Francis LeBouthillier was chosen to create the physical monument. The scale of the monument is impressive, and the interpretation of the workers represented in the sculpture was curated by Chinese community organizers. The Toronto Star called the finished product a “triumph” and wrote that designer Eldon Garnet’s work is a “piece with great eloquence [and a] work that will endure.”48 Its art critic Chris Hume dubbed the sculpture “dramatic” and argued that in terms of public art, the memorial “manages to enoble
45 Joe Serge, “Memorial honors Chinese workers who built Canada’s national dream,” Toronto Star, September 4, 1989. C8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 46 Eldon Garnet, “Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial,” Artist’s Website. https://eldongarnet.com/chinese-rail- road-workers-memorial/. (accessed December 8, 2020). 47 Christopher Hume, “Artists should let paintings speak for themselves,” Toronto Star, December 19, 1986. D26. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 48 Christopher Hume, “Whirlwind of change hits public art scene,” Toronto Star, August 25, 1989. E16. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 19
labor without getting maudlin or kitschy about it. Artist Eldon Garnett has set a new standard of integrity and accessibility.”49 Rather than depict the workers in authentic outfits from the time period, such as traditional ‘coolie’ hats and putting their hair in pigtails, the Committee decided to present a more modern image of Chinese labourers that ignores stereotypical portrayals of
Chinese railway workers of the late 1800s. James Pon, a long-time chairman of the FCCRWC and the former president of the Mon Sheong Foundation, described the final monument as
“mission accomplished” and explained the decision to present the workers in a new way. The intent was “not to emphasize their Chinese race but rather their role in providing cheap labour to build the railroad,” Pon told journalist Joe Serge around the time of the monument’s unveiling.
“Pig tails and coolie hats have a demeaning effect.”50 The Railroad Memorial’s importance as an interactive piece of art should also be considered. Not only did the community play a crucial role in conceiving and funding the monument, but those visiting it can walk under and around the rocks, trestle, and workers to experience the scale of the memorial. This may be particularly important given its location in a highly trafficked space that has become an important section of
Toronto for locals and tourists alike.
49 Christopher Hume, “A critic’s guide to art on the street,” Toronto Star, August 25, 1989. E16. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 50 Joe Serge, “Memorial honours Chinese workers who built Canada’s national dream,” Toronto Star, September 4, 1989. C8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 20
The story of the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) is a familiar and mythic
Canadian historical narrative – one of a dream to connect several former British colonies by a legendary railway to create a strong, distinct nation. It is the completion of this dream that is commemorated by expressions of public history across Canada, including memorials to Sir John
A. Macdonald, Sir William Van Horne, and the last spike of the CPR. However, the Chinese
Railroad Workers Memorial offers an alternative expression of public history for the Chinese
Canadian community. It was a workers’ memorial that was conceived by Toronto’s Chinese community in a period that focused on representing ideas of multiculturalism. It was also an opportunity for resistance, recognition of their labour and sacrifice, and acknowledgement of
Chinese Canadians’ contributions to Canadian history, even as it presented a historical narrative that was rooted in a Canadian national myth. Like historical commemorations of the construction of the CPR, working class histories can be utilized by authoritative institutions as samples of memory to construct hegemonic narratives of nationalism or patriotism. But by studying the history of the Chinese Workers memorial, we can begin to understand the importance of community participation in public historical education and heritage, and what can be achieved
21
when the Chinese community and descendants of those who were integral in linking Canada from coast to coast are actively involved in the commemorative efforts.
A considerable portion of Toronto’s Chinese Canadian community played an active role in choosing, designing, and funding the monument throughout the 1980s with support from government and private financial aid. To ensure that project prioritized the participation of the
Chinese Canadian community, much of the funding was raised through grassroots efforts. The
Committee to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers pledged to raise over $100,000 from within the Metro Chinese community. The City of Toronto agreed to contribute twenty-five percent of the overall cost of the memorial, and private donors such as Prudential Insurance contributed funds towards the monument as well. In a November 1988 ceremony presenting a
$10,000 donation to James Pon and the Chinese Consul General in Toronto at the SkyDome site,
Ron Barbaro, the President and CEO of Prudential Canada, proclaimed that the company was
“eager to participate in any project that serves to recognize the tremendous contribution made by early Chinese immigrants to the building of Canada.”51 He explained that many of Prudential’s customers and employees were of Chinese heritage and the company was proud to support the
“fitting tribute” of a memorial to Chinese railway workers.52 The community funding effort was so successful that the Committee raised an additional $50,000 which went towards establishing a scholarship fund for students to study Canadian history at Canadian universities. Canadians of all cultures continue to celebrate the monument today. On July 1st every year, dozens of people participate in an official wreath-laying ceremony at the memorial organized by the FCCRWC to
51 Stan Josey, “Gift salutes rail workers from China,” Toronto Star, December 6, 1988. L5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 52 Ibid. 22
recognize the sacrifices made by Chinese immigrant and migrant workers to build the railroad through Canada between 1881 and 1885.53
2.2 Recognizing the Workers of the Canadian Pacific Railroad
Few infrastructure projects in North American history have captured popular memory as much as the building of trans-continental railroad networks across the United States and Canada.
This is evident in representations of railroad history in books, movies, museums, television series, and songs, among others. Popular author Pierre Berton’s book The Last Spike won the
1971 Governor General’s award for non-fiction and has become an important part of Canada’s national historiography. Canadian musician Gordon Lightfoot’s Canadian Railroad Trilogy is one of his most influential musical works. More recently, AMC’s popular cable TV series Hell on Wheels includes the transcontinental railroad in the U.S. and Canada as a central part of its plot, and even an award-winning trans-North American railway strategy board game Ticket to
Ride has sold over three million copies worldwide. Memorials for the ceremonial ‘Last Spike’ of the railway driven in the ground, as well as to Sir John A. Macdonald and Sir William Van
Horne, President of the CPR during the construction of the transcontinental railway in Canada, appear across the country. However, the Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial is not only a memorial to immigrant railway workers, it is also a memorial in the heart of Canada’s biggest city that was established amidst a push for recognizing Toronto’s railway and multicultural heritage as it deindustrialized and transitioned into a centre of work and leisure.
The Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial was a collaborative effort to recognize the
“Chinese railroad workers who helped construct the Canadian Pacific Railway through the
Rocky Mountains of Alberta and British Columbia thus uniting Canada geographically and
53Joel Baglole, “Wreaths laid for railway workers,” Toronto Star, July 2, 1999. B4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 23
politically.”54 The inscription on the side of the memorial explains that more than four thousand workers lost their lives during construction. “With no means of going back to China when their labour was no longer needed, thousands drifted in near destitution along the completed track.” the engraving reads. “All of them remained nameless in the history of Canada.”55
Upon its completion, the CPR linked the east coast of Canada to the west coast, taking lands from the Indigenous peoples who populated the land between the two coasts in the process.
It was part of a vision to unite the nation and a necessity to establish Canada as a strong
Dominion of Great Britain following Confederation in 1867. Sir John A. Macdonald, the first
Prime Minister of Canada, promised British Columbia that a railroad would be built to connect the nation to encourage the pacific colony to join the Dominion of Canada. It would also act as a deterrent for American expansion into the Western territories. However, a bribery scandal involving Conservative politicians, American investors, and Sir Hugh Allan – a Canadian shipping magnate who desired control over the railway – sunk the prospects of the trans-national project. The Pacific Scandal resulted in Macdonald’s resignation from Parliament and the election of the Liberal party led by Alexander Mackenzie. It also meant that the intital CPR was not built for some time. The Pacific Scandal, government instability, and an economic depression delayed plans for a different version of the CPR until 1878 when the project was included in the
National Policy plan that Macdonald was re-elected on.
Labour was needed for such a grand project and foreign workers would play a significant role in filling the labour pool. While not necessarily adhering to our modern conceptions of temporary foreign work, the hiring of Chinese immigrant labourers is certainly an early instance
54 Committee to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers. Inscription on Memorial. September 1989. Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial. Toronto, Canada. (accessed October 12, 2020). 55 Ibid. 24
of mass immigration encouraged by the government and employers as a form of cooperation to fill a need for labour. In Pierre Berton’s histories of the Canadian Pacific Railway The National
Dream and The Last Spike, he argues that to fill positions that were considered hazardous work, the Canadian government and individual contractors overseeing the construction of the railway lobbied for the employment of Chinese immigrant workers in order to build the railway more quickly and to cut costs.56 This was especially important for private railway contactors to win bids from the federal government for the construction of different sections of the CPR.57
In his social history of the Chinese immigrant experience in Canada, Anthony Chan notes that particular railway contractors employed thousands of Chinese workers, including labourers, miners, gardeners, and domestic servants.58 Andrew Onderdonk was one of these contractors. Onderdonk was granted the contract for constructing the most difficult section of the
CPR – laying roughly 355 kilometres of mountainous track to connect Port Moody, B.C. and
Kamloops Lake, B.C. Faced with a shortage of white labour and dangerous working conditions,
Onderdonk worked with the government to recruit thousands of Chinese labourers to complete this section of the CPR.59 American railroad contactors had already established this practice for large infrastructure projects. Chan explains that many workers who were recruited did not intend to stay in Canada. They sought a form of temporary foreign work where they could return home for parts of the year. However, once they arrived, the majority remained in Canada and eventually established thriving Chinese communities throughout Western Canada. As both
Berton and Chan discuss, health implications for workers on the railway were staggering.
56 Pierre Berton, The Last Spike: The Great Railway 1880-1885 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), 194; 197. 57 Anthony Chan, Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1983), 60-62. 58 Ibid, 64. 59 Berton, The Last Spike, 194-195. 25
Chinese workers were more likely to be assigned work that posed an exceptional occupational risk according to today’s standards – including working with explosives and working without proper ventilation or on unsafe grading sites in the Canadian Rockies – and received half the wages other workers made on the railway.60 Once completed, the railway became part of a particular founding mythology and identity as a nation – fulfilling the grand narrative of a
“National Dream” propagated by 20th century popular writers and historians like Pierre Berton,
John Murray Gibbon, and Ned Pratt.61 In this version of history, the CPR is Canada’s first significant national project historically tied to nation building and was a “great Canadian tradition […], a magnificent technical achievement and one of the enduring symbols of Canadian identity.”62
Mythmaking of the CPR persisted in academia as well. In A History of the Canadian
Pacific Railway (1927), celebrated Canadian Historian Harold A. Innis hailed the construction of the CPR as a “landmark in the spread of Western civilization over the Northern half of North
America.”63 He argued that national unity could not be achieved without economic unity, and the
CPR achieved this goal.64 The boom in public history projects of the 1960s and 1970s that Craig
Heron describes as “highly selective in their form and content” and reflecting the “deeply-rooted conservatism” of the day were largely influenced by economic histories like A History of the
Canadian Pacific Railway that connected economic development and a strong Canadian national identity. Innis wrote several other influential histories of Canada – notably The Fur Trade in
Canada (1930) – that significantly impacted the development of Canadian national identity and
60 Chan, Gold Mountain, 61. 61 Daniel Francis, National dreams: myth, memory, and Canadian history (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997), 15- 17. 62 Ibid., 15. 63 Harold A. Innis, A History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1927), 1. 64 Ibid., 75; 96. 26
public history projects like Fort William Historical Park in Thunder Bay. 20th century historians that followed Innis made similar claims. Henry Stanley Ferns called Innis’ economic history of the CPR a “fundamental text” that held up under the scrutiny of new economic historians throughout the 1900s.65 In 1977, W. Kaye Lamb wrote that the CPR was politically and economically essential and that “no single organization has contributed to the country’s development in the ninety years since the vital line linking East and West was completed.”66
These conceptions, along with publications from popular authors and journalists during this period, began to influence Canada’s national public consciousness. Given its professed importance in Canadian public consciousness, investigating why a memorial to Chinese railroad workers was chosen as a symbol of Chinese heritage in Canada is an important step in examining the myth of the CPR in more detail.
While it occupies a large piece of Canada’s perceived national heritage, historians have become critical of the myth of the CPR in national memory. They raise issues such as the role of immigrant workers in building the railway, the necessity of British financial support to complete the work, and the usefulness of the CPR for Britain as a new route to the Pacific. The CPR could be considered as much a British accomplishment as a Canadian one. In National Dreams: myth, memory, and Canadian history Daniel Francis argues that the common view of the completion of the CPR as a symbol of Canadian nationalism is flawed. In reality, the “great ‘Canadian’ achievement” was built by Chinese coolies, used lands that belonged to Indigenous peoples and supported by significant British capital investment in the project.67 Even though myths about the
CPR have grown over time, there are examples of public history that express the work of
65 H.S. Ferns, “Reviewed Work: History of the Canadian Pacific Railway by H. A. Innis,” The English Historical Review 89, no. 350 (1974): 223. 66 W. Kaye Lamb, History of the Canadian Pacific Railway (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 436; 438. 67 Ibid. 27
Chinese labourers on the railway. The most notable one is a Historica Canada Heritage Minute from the early 1990s titled ‘Nitro’, which depicts the dangerous working conditions experienced by the Chinese railroad workers. It illustrates the lengths Chinese workers may have gone to take on the most dangerous tasks on the railroad, and the power imbalances between immigrant workers and railway foremen during this period. For instance, the main character in the clip is promised hazard pay and passage money to bring his family to Canada by a site foreman in exchange for setting chemical explosives in a tunnel through the mountains, and almost dies when using the unstable chemicals. The video finishes with a Chinese grandfather – the same worker who experienced the explosion and lived – explaining to his grandchildren that for every mile of track built on the CPR, one Chinese labourer’s life was lost.68 Although his statement is exaggerated, it is sincere. It is estimated that over 4,000 Chinese labourers died building the CPR and 12,500 miles of track were laid. The dead workers became part of the group of workers who the monument in Toronto recognizes as the “nameless in the history of Canada.”69
More recently, the Ontario Coalition of Head Tax Payers and Families organized a cross- country train ride with VIA Rail to hear Prime Minister Stephen Harper issue an official apology in Parliament for Canada’s head tax policy for Chinese immigrants beginning with the Chinese
Immigration Act of 1885 and continuing through the mid-20th century. Susan Eng, then co-chair of the Ontario Coalition of Chinese Head Tax Payers and Families, told The Globe and Mail in
2006 that the campaign’s goal was to clearly connect the history of building the CPR with discriminatory legislation like head taxes.70 A policy meant to discourage Chinese immigration
68 Historica Canada. “Nitro.” June 1992. Video. Online. 69 Committee to Commemorate the Chinese Railroad Workers. Inscription on Memorial. September 1989. Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial. Toronto, Canada. (accessed October 12, 2020). 70 Tenille Bonoguore, “All aboard the Redress Express: Next stop, an apology in Ottawa: 'Last Spike' in hand, Chinese Canadians aim to close books on hated head tax,” The Globe and Mail, June 21, 2006. A7. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 28
to Canada, the price for immigrating increased from $50 in 1885 to over $500 in the early 1900s.
The 2006 ‘Redress Train’ was “full” and included former labourers who maintained the railway in the early 20th century, Doug Hum, an organizer for the FCCRWC, told Julia Lum in an oral history interview for the Multicultural History Society of Ontario in 2010.71 His father was forced to pay a head tax to immigrate to Canada in 1912. “[The Redress Train] was organized by the Ontario Coalition of Head Tax Payers,” Hum continued. “There was the symbolic last spike that was donated to the effort by […] Pierre Berton. He donated to the redress effort and we carried the last spike all the way to Ottawa and delivered it to the Prime Minister.”72 He said the government’s apology for the head tax policy was significant for many Chinese Canadians, including himself, as it “was finally a recognition that there was an injustice here.”73
What makes the Railroad Memorial unique compared to educational initiatives like the
Nitro heritage minute and the Redress Train – which was organized in response to the federal government’s decision to issue a formal apology – is that it was constructed as a symbol of
Chinese heritage in Canada by a community-led effort to memorialize its past in a de- industrialized context. Like the Chinese Canadian National Council (CCNC) Redress Campaign that was launched in 1984, the Railroad Memorial originated within a community that sought to confront an injustice. However, by deciding to build a monument to workers as Toronto’s downtown core transformed, they chose a space that was a focus of the city’s urban renewal, signalling to Canadians that the Chinese community was just as essential to the development of the nation as any other community in Ontario. Exploring the story of the commemoration of these workers in an expression of worker heritage is critical to understanding the choices that
71 Julia Lum, “Oral History Interview with Doug Hum.” 2010. Chinese Canadian Women, 1923-1967: Inspiration- Innovation-Ingenuity’ Project. Multicultural History Society of Ontario Archives. Audio file. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 29
communities make when commemorating their heritage in public spaces, and the motivations for identifying particular sites, expressions of public history, and historical narratives. Why did the
FCCRWC choose to memorialize railway workers rather than other labour roles that Chinese immigrants have filled in Canada? Why did they do so in Toronto and not in Western Canada?
The answers are not always clear, but historical context can help uncover connections between multicultural heritage and narratives of work in Canada in recent decades. The first significant public history project for the Committee to Commemorate the Chinese Workers, it is important to ask why the committee desired a memorial to railroad workers in Toronto, when the Chinese workers had been instrumental in completing the Western section of the railway through the
Rocky Mountain range in British Columbia and Alberta. One reason might have been the recent celebration of the CPR’s centennial anniversary in 1985, further emphasizing the role that the
CPR has played in the nation building myth in Canada. Another reason could have been the timing of the founding of the committee coincided with emerging debates about public history and heritage occurring within Toronto’s Chinese community at the time.
Asian immigration to Canada increased dramatically throughout the 1970s and 1980s and many settled in and around Toronto.74 Additionally, the early 1980s marked an important period for immigrant communities in Canada and brought an intense focus on Canada’s multicultural heritage in both political and popular discourse. In October 1971 Canadian Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau announced Canada’s official policy of multiculturalism as a “direct response” to minorities communities expressing dissatisfaction with the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism reports published between 1967 and 1970, and Canadian Parliaments
74 Na Li, Kensington Market: Collective Memory, Public History, and Toronto’s Urban Landscape (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 34-35. 30
throughout the 1980s would continue to draft legislation focused on acknowledging the nation’s multicultural heritage.75
Unclear rules about immigration and changing federal immigration policies had led to public debates about the role of immigrants in Canadian history, and their inclusion in public politics, education and heritage. A full page letter from the federal government published in
November 1981 in Canadian multicultural media publications – which reached an estimated readership of three million Canadians at the time – declared that the government would prioritize
“opening the doors of Canada to the deserving” and “closing the loopholes to the cheaters” by increasing immigration to Canada and remaking immigration policy.76 The right to equal opportunity for all Canadians had been a focus of the 1982 Constitutional Amendments and minorities worked to assert this right. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms officially included equal rights in the Constitution and recognized Canada's multicultural heritage. Section
27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms specifically calls for the “preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.”77 Similar legislative goals focused on multiculturalism continued throughout the decade. In 1985 the federal government established the House of Commons Standing Committee on Multiculturalism. In 1986 Parliament passed the
Employment Equity Act and in 1988 the Canadian Multiculturalism Act became law with unanimous support from all parties.
As David Harvey has noted, the influence of immigration legislation, neoliberal policies and a rapidly globalizing world radically shifted understandings of culture, history and heritage
75 Sarah V. Wayland, “Immigration, Multiculturalism and National Identity in Canada,” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 5, no. 1 (1997): 46. 76 Government of Canada. “Open letter.” November 1981. Modern Times Weekly. Microfilm # 899 Chinese- Periodicals. Multicultural History Society of Ontario Archives. 77 Department of Justice. “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.” Government of Canada. Web. https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/pdf/charter-poster.pdf (accessed February 16, 2021). 31
as they became commodified in the 1980s.78 This, paired with mass migration in a globalizing world, proved to have an important impact on local heritage movements.79 David Lowenthal has argued that modern preoccupation with heritage in North America has increased exponentially since 1980, and that the commemoration “impulse” has become Western in origin, language, and leadership, and is now truly global.80 He points to the influences of globalization, mass migration, and nostalgia as reasons for Western society “feeling uniquely accountable not to let the past become remote.” The spike in modern interest in local heritage has significant implications for labour history. Lowenthal provides the example of heritage in France, which in the 1980s “legitimated a wide range of working-class legacies” and began to present heritage as an everyday experience.81 Similar changes to cultural heritage occurred during this same time period in Ontario. The growth of immigrant communities in Canada significantly impacted federal, provincial, and municipal policy, as well as community heritage and labour commemoration. Craig Heron notes that heritage institutions did some “soul-searching” in the
1980s to design programming that reflected “greater diversity in the past” in response to pressure from a “blossoming” interest in multiculturalism for non-British ethnic groups in Canada.82
While significant steps in favour of multicultural domestic policies were passed in
Ottawa, local immigrant communities pushed to ensure that this legislation was not simply symbolic. A 1985 editorial in Toronto’s Chinese community newspaper Modern Times Weekly called for a “dedication to the culture and politics of local society” to effect change and advocate
78 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 166. 79 Patrick Manning, Leo Lucassen and Jan Lucassen, Migration History in World History: Multidisciplinary Approaches (Leiden: Brill, 2010), vii, 6; David Lowenthal, "The heritage crusade and its contradictions," In Max Page and Randall Mason (eds), Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2004): 14. 80 Lowenthal, "The heritage crusade and its contradictions," 14; 22; David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (London: Viking, 1996), 119-122. 81 Ibid., 14; 18. 82 Heron, “The Labour Historian and Public history,” 174-175. 32
for the inclusion of Chinese Canadian voices and equal opportunity in public decisions.83 The editors argued that to assert rights against injustice and celebrate their heritage, Chinese
Canadians had to “bear the responsibility and obligation to understand and acknowledge this country if we are to live here. Following these ideas do not mark the dismissal of our heritage.
Retaining our heritage while absorbing outside nutrients are not only non-antagonistic but also complimentary. If we want our voice loud and be heard easily by the other people, then participation in politics is a must.”84
Public education was one way that immigrant communities sought to enter local politics and promote multiculturalism in and around Toronto, and the topic of language played a key role. To preserve the cultural heritage of immigrant communities in the Greater Toronto Area
(GTA), multicultural heritage advocacy groups organized and called for government action.
More specifically, they wanted a Heritage Languages Program introduced into public school classrooms. Community organization drew attention from the mainstream news media on the issue of cultural heritage and resulted in a significant increase electoral participation within the
Chinese Canadian community. Following the 1987 provincial election, local NDP candidate
David Kho took out an advertisement in Chinese community newspapers to congratulate
Ontario’s Chinese Canadian community on becoming “an active part of the Canadian mainstream.”85
In October 1987, the Scarborough Multicultural and Race Relations Committee published an open letter to Ontario Premier David Peterson advocating for the inclusion of a Heritage
83 Editorial Board. “Editorial,” Modern Times Weekly, June 10, 1985. Microfilm # 899 Chinese-Periodicals. Multicultural History Society of Ontario Archives 84 Ibid. 85 David Kho, “Open Letter,” Modern Times Weekly, September 12, 1987. Microfilm # 899 Chinese-Periodicals. Multicultural History Society of Ontario Archives. 33
Languages Program in the Scarborough public school system. The letter was published in the
October 2 issue of Modern Times Weekly and widely circulated in the Chinese community. “It is the policy of multiculturalism – officially adopted by both Federal and Provincial governments – which ensures that every Canadian, regardless of cultural and ethnic origin, is treated equally before the laws and provided with equal access to opportunities,” the Committee wrote. “The
Multiculturalism Policy aims at promoting mutual respect and appreciation among all cultural groups and communities. […] What we also support, and firmly believe in, is the right and indeed desirability of the various cultural and ethnic communities preserving their respective cultural heritage and language. We firmly believe that it enriches the sociocultural fabric of our common society and adds immeasurably to the strength and resources of Canada.”86
The debate about the language program quickly gained steam in local and provincial media, and the Ontario government engaged in community discourse. Speaking at a town hall-style meeting several days later, Alvin Curling, Ontario Minister of Skills Development, affirmed the government’s commitment to a cultural languages program and its goals of preserving cultural heritage in Toronto, and Ontario as a whole. “The government that governs best is the one that encourages the full expression of all of its people, that taps their strengths and appreciates the unique contributions of all,” Curling explained. “The people who have come here this evening have come to speak about values that are at the core of our national identity…. About culture, about heritage and about language.”87 Similar ideas were presented by the federal government.
That same month a full-page advertisement from Prime Minster Brian Mulroney’s government appeared in multicultural media publications as immigrant communities grew concerned with
86 Scarborough Multicultural and Race Relations Committee, “Languages Curriculum,” Modern Times Weekly, October 2, 1987. Microfilm # 899 Chinese-Periodicals. Multicultural History Society of Ontario Archives. 87 Alvin Curling, “Town Hall Meeting Transcript,” Modern Times Weekly, October 9, 1987. Microfilm # 899 Chinese- Periodicals. Multicultural History Society of Ontario Archives. 34
multiculturism and immigration laws. The advertisement declared that the Meech Lake Accord – a series of amendments to the 1982 constitution negotiated between the federal and provincial governments beginning in 1987 – sought to “reaffirm the multicultural character of Canada” and reassure that, like the 1982 patriation, the Meech Lake Accord would continue to assert the right to equal opportunity for all Canadians regardless of their cultural heritage.88
Like the federal government’s open letter, Curling’s local message was clear, and positive. But it lacked historical context. Curling touted Canada’s advertising of “our cultural diversity to the world” and argued that hundreds of thousands of tourists from around the world were “drawn to our shores by our cosmopolitan cities, our restaurants and art galleries and festivals that reflect our citizens of so many backgrounds.”89 However, he refrained from examining the power structures that benefit from this progress, and much of the labour who enabled these advancements. “We are, finally, a nation that shines as a beacon of hope to people in a hundred different oppressed countries,” he continued, “a nation that holds high the promise of a new beginning, or equal opportunity, to all who have earned the right to call themselves
Canadian. That is the kind of nation we are. That is our common heritage.”90 There was no mention of the importance of Chinese immigrant and migrant workers to the history of Canada, and the challenges and oppression these workers faced. As Kay Anderson has noted, Chinese workers, notably on the west coast of Canada, were consistently given the “lowest occupational tasks” in many economic sectors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, excluded from more lucrative job opportunities like working in gold fields, and subjected to violent harassment from
88 Government of Canada, “Full page advertisement,” October 16, 1987. Modern Times Weekly. Microfilm # 899 Chinese-Periodicals. Multicultural History Society of Ontario Archives. 89 Curling, “Town Hall,” Modern Times Weekly, October 9, 1987. Microfilm # 899 Chinese-Periodicals. Multicultural History Society of Ontario Archives. 90 Ibid. 35
white labourers and employers.91 Nor was there any discussion in Curling’s town hall of the head taxes families had to pay to settle in Canada. In February 1984, the Chinese Canadian National
Council (CCNC) launched its Redress Campaign to seek reparations for being forced to pay a head tax to immigrate to Canada. Some members of the Chinese community in British Columbia even kept their proof of payment and sought to be reimbursed by the federal government.92 It is this heritage of being categorized as aliens and systemically oppressed that sections of the
Chinese community in Toronto sought to commemorate. To achieve equal opportunity in the public discussion of education and heritage, and ensure full participation in Toronto’s multicultural policy development, the historical context needed to be clear and transparent for both community organizers and the larger institutions involved in the public history debates.
Historical understandings play a significant role in facilitating heritage discourse, and the history of work in Canada is an important narrative to include.
This leads to a second reason for selecting downtown Toronto as a public space for a memorial to Chinese workers. Some prominent members of the community recognized the challenge of facilitating heritage discourse in Toronto and using historical narratives of work to their advantage. Debates surrounding public education and heritage played a significant role in political discourse during this period, and Chinese community organizations, as well as the City of Toronto and the Toronto Historical Board, were working to present Chinese heritage through broader approaches that appealed to both the Chinese community, and Canada as a whole. As scholars like Kay Anderson and Lisa Rose Mar have outlined, Chinese immigrants had a long
91 Kay Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: 1875 to 1980 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 36-37. 92 “Redress Campaign,” Road to Justice. http://www.roadtojustice.ca/redress-campaign. (accessed December 17, 2020). 36
history of organizing their communities in Canada.93 However, organizing Toronto’s Chinese community would prove to be a challenge. While a Railroad Workers Memorial dedicated to the
Chinese labourers who helped build the railroad would be the final outcome of these debates, other statements of Chinese heritage in Toronto were considered at the time, leading to tensions within the community for several years.
Working closely with Toronto’s Chinese Canadian Community, Alderman Gordon Chong led a proposal on Toronto’s city council to erect a public statue of Dr. Sun Yat-sen in January
1981. The proposal was met with support and resistance in the Chinese community. Yat-sen led the 1911 Revolution and founded the modern Republic of China, and popularized the ‘three principles of the people’: Min Tzu (Nationalism), Min Ch’uan (Democracy), and Min Sheng
(People’s Welfare) which have influenced Chinese national doctrine since the early 20th century.94 For many people in Toronto’s Chinese community, Yat-sen was a national hero and educational role model worthy of public commemoration as the community actively sought a symbol that signified the “significant contribution that the Chinese community has made to
Toronto.”95 For others, commemorating a Chinese “foreign” political figure on public lands in
Canada carried “serious political implications” that would not be representative of the community’s immigrant heritage.96 A May 27th public meeting about a public statue commemorating Yat-sen was contentious. Members of the community accused the supporters of
93 Anderson, Vancouver’s Chinatown: 1875 to 1980; Lisa Rose Mar, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada's Exclusion Era, 1885-1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 94 Yu-long Ling, "Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Doctrine and Impact on the Modern World," American Journal of Chinese Studies 19, no. 1 (2012): 1-2. 95 Janet Chan, “Controversy opens some old wounds,” Toronto Star, March 20, 1981. A9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.; Sol Little, “Chinese Seek Symbol,” Toronto Star, March 7, 1981. B4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.; Donald Y. Hsu, “Statue Would Mark the ‘Power of Education’,” Toronto Star, March 20, 1981. A9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 96 James Pon, “Respecting differences is backbone of society,” Toronto Star, June 12, 1981. A9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 37
the statue of Yat-sen of “disgusting” conduct and described the discourse about the memorial as overly political, vicious, and vindictive.97 One Toronto Star reader claimed that erecting the statue would expose the “divided political loyalty of the Chinese Canadian.”98
Political interpretations of a Yat-sen statue were influenced by the occurrence of the 1948
Communist Revolution in China that established the People’s Republic of China in 1949. An older, more conservative faction of the Chinese community favoured the commemoration of the heroic leader Yat-sen. However, a left-leaning, younger portion of the community argued that honouring his political ideologies was not in step with China’s communist foundations and that the supporters of the memorial were “sympathetic to the anti-communist regime in Taiwan” at the time.99 As an alternative to a Yat-sen memorial, many in the community called for a memorial that would immortalize the sacrifices made by the immigrant and migrant Chinese workers who built the CPR. Such a commemoration had a greater chance of uniting the Toronto
Chinese community. In a letter to the Toronto Star in June 1981 Toronto resident and future
FCCRWC chairman Doug Hum argued that a proposal for the memorial to the railway workers has nothing to do with politics.100 He lamented that Alderman Chong had “made [planning a monument] a political issue in Chinese Canadian Society” and a memorial to railway workers was a non-partisan proposal that the majority of the community could support.101
Community politics aside, an impactful public space for the Railroad Memorial was essential. A section of land in front of Union Station had been approved for a public memorial to
97 Doug Hum, “Statue of Sun Yat-sen ‘wrong choice’,” Toronto Star, March 20, 1981. A9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 98 Chang Keng Yu, “Wrong impression is feared,” Toronto Star, March 20, 1981. A9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 99 “Ruling on Chinese Statues may worsen split,” Toronto Star, July 17, 1981. A3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 100 Doug Hum, “Statue of Sun Yat-sen ‘wrong choice’,” Toronto Star, March 20, 1981. A9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 101 Ibid. 38
Toronto’s multicultural heritage and Francesco Perilli’s statue ‘Monument to Multiculturalism” was chosen for that space.102 Perilli’s memorial was unveiled in 1985 and received much criticism from the art community for being “gaudy”, “silly”, and was considered by some to be one of the “low points in Toronto public art.”103 The Committee to Commemorate the Chinese
Railroad Workers envisioned a similar site for their memorial that would be visible and maximize educational opportunities, but have a more impactful design. The memorial would be included in the CN railyards development to capitalize on traffic beside the SkyDome and CN
Tower where “tens of thousands of sports fans must go through it to gain entry to SkyDome’s west end gates.”104 James Pon told the Toronto Star in September 1989 that the location of the memorial was chosen “specifically because of the large pedestrian traffic and because it’s next to a railway corridor.”105
The proposal for a railroad memorial at the CN railyards coincided with the City of
Toronto’s interest in commemorating its railway heritage in the early 1980s. The city had commissioned a historical study to examine the “ongoing concern for the preservation of
Toronto’s urban past, and more specifically of the city’s railway heritage” during this period and plans to redevelop the CN railyards included a railway museum and permanent exhibitions.106
Beginning in the late 1800s, Toronto’s rail yards were the centre of shipping and manufacturing in Ontario as it slowly became connected by rail to the Great Lakes and cities like Montreal,
102 Christopher Hume, “Artists should let paintings speak for themselves,” Toronto Star, December 19, 1986. D26. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 103 Christopher Hume, “A critic’s guide to art on the street,” Toronto Star, August 25, 1989. E16. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 104 Joe Serge, “Memorial honors Chinese workers who built Canada’s national dream,” Toronto Star, September 4, 1989. C8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 105 Ibid. 106 Christopher Andreae, “A Heritage Study of Toronto’s Railways,” Historica Research Ltd. Toronto: Urban Design Group, 1983. Print. McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph.; Derek Boles, “The Toronto Railway Museum: 80 Years of History and 80 Years of Progress,” Branchline: Canada’s Rail News Magazine 54, no.2 (February 2015): 3. 39
Buffalo, and Chicago. The first rail lines in the city ran along the Toronto waterfront and the various railroad companies who operated the lines, as well as the first Union Station, quickly bought up real estate north from the waterfront to expand their shipping capacity. A second
Union Station was built in 1873 due to increasing industrial demand. But by the early 1900s it too could not handle the demand of Toronto’s rapid growth and was replaced with the current
Union Station which became operational in 1927.107 The 1873 Union Station stood on what is now the Skywalk which connects today’s Union Station with the Rogers Centre, CN Tower, and the site of the Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial, as well as other places of leisure at the redeveloped train yards.108
The Planning and Development department’s Urban Design Group hired Historica Research
Limited to complete the research study. A final report titled A Heritage Study of Toronto’s
Railways was submitted to Stephen G. McLaughlin, Commissioner of Panning and Development for the City of Toronto on April 14, 1983. The goal of the study was to develop policies to preserve Toronto’s railway heritage and funding was supported by the Heritage Canada
Foundation, the Ontario Heritage Foundation, Wintario, and the City of Toronto.109 The report explains that “railway growth and technological change has created shifts in land use in
Toronto’s railway properties. Although the modern landscape is significantly different from those of previous eras, many vestiges of early rail activity in the city remain.” The Historica report recommended that the city develop a heritage policy to preserve the railway structures and
107 Parks Canada, “Union Station (Canadian Pacific and Grand Trunk) National Historic Site of Canada,” Canada’s Historic places. https://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu.aspx?id=6299&pid=0. (accessed March 30, 2021). 108 Derek Boles, “Toronto's 2nd Union Station - 1873 to 1927,” Toronto Railway Historical Association. https://www.trha.ca/2ndunionstation.html (accessed March 30, 2021). 109 Andreae, A Heritage Study of Toronto’s Railways, Introductory Letter; Andreae, “A Heritage Study of Toronto’s Railways: Summary and Recommendations, 3. 40
the former industrial landscapes of the city. It also endorsed the inclusion of displays, publications, public trails, preservation, and documentation to commemorate Toronto’s railway heritage in Toronto public history projects and supported building a transportation museum in the Union Station coach yard.110
Other railway heritage advocates also supported a museum. Derek Boles, Chief Historian for the Toronto Railway Museum and Toronto Railway Historical Association (TRHA), writes that beginning in 1968, Canadian Pacific (CP) and Canadian National (CN) began to pursue real estate deals for their downtown train yards.111 By 1978, many of their train servicing yards had moved out of Toronto and the “transformation of the grimy industrial railway lands into a massive redevelopment of condominiums, office buildings, and entertainment venues” was set to begin. However, it would be almost a decade before this transformation succeeded. The John
Street Roundhouse, a National Historic Site that now hosts the Toronto Railway Museum, Steam
Whistle Brewery, and the Rec Room entertainment complex, was transferred to the City of
Toronto by CP in 1986 and a collection of historic steam engines and train cars were included in the transition. The SkyDome opened in June 1989 and the Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial shortly after. Over the next decades several urban planning initiatives occurred to establish a railway heritage museum at the Roundhouse. In 2010 a railway museum finally opened with the support of the city, the TRHA, and revenue from the inclusion of private businesses like Steam
Whistle and Leon’s furniture store in the development plan. Roundhouse Park, which connects the different sections of the railyards site including Rogers Centre and the Chinese Railroad
110 Ibid., 1-3. 111 Boles, “The Toronto Railway Museum: 80 Years of History and 80 Years of Progress,” 3. 41
Workers Memorial to the John Street Roundhouse, was also established as part of the planning initiative.112
The combination of a memorial to one of Canada’s traditional founding narratives, and the focus on the importance of immigrant labour to Canadian history, is what makes the memorial a powerful educational opportunity. It is also an effective, and non-contentious, way of commemorating a multicultural history that pleases the majority. Local columnists considered the memorial a compromise that wouldn’t be as “controversial” as the Sun Yat-sen statue proposal. Toronto Star columnist Christopher Hume wrote that the Committee recognized its
“responsibility to the entire community and have acted accordingly. In the past, groups and individuals proposing public monuments have taken it upon themselves to choose the art and the site.”113 Instead, he argued that the Committee’s plan was an example of how the commemoration process should work in Toronto. Incorporating the entire Toronto community, as well as pushing for a grassroots funding effort and contributing to the redevelopment of a former industrial centre, ensured that the “entire community gets a chance to voice its concerns; artists get a chance to enter the competition and the sponsoring organization gets its monument.”114
Perhaps more importantly, community involvement in commemorating narratives of work in
Ontario has the potential to act as a check on the power of institutions. The next section of this chapter will examine the impacts that community-centered heritage – like the work of the
FCCRWC in Toronto – can have on the stories we tell in changing urban landscapes.
Communities can play an even greater role in commemorating worker histories and should not
112 Ibid., 3-5. 113 Christopher Hume, “A critic’s guide to art on the street,” Toronto Star, August 25, 1989. E16. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 114 Ibid. 42
necessarily compromise on their public history memorials, or present histories that are part of traditional historical narratives of Canadian history. For marginalized and multicultural communities, as well as labour movements, grassroots activism can push heritage in a direction that provides dynamic public education and sustainability for communities. However, meaningful participation from the community is imperative to achieve these goals.
2.3 Heritage, Resistance, and Community Action
As urban landscapes change, both physically and demographically, methods and representations of heritage also change. The debates that arise as a result of deindustrializing urban landscapes are an important component of the historiography of worker heritage and commemoration, particularly the example of the Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial. In the case of the Railroad memorial, the City of Toronto’s downtown core was rapidly shifting in the second half of the 20th century. As industry moved out of the city and to the suburbs, a space emerged for communities, corporations, and institutions to express their histories and ideologies.
The SkyDome site was not only planned as a site for leisure, but also a space for new forms of work and public education. Originally the CP railyards and the CN Tower, it has transformed into a site that currently hosts the Chinese Railroad Memorial, Rogers Centre (SkyDome),
Ripley’s Aquarium, a Marriott Hotel, and the Steam Whistle Brewery, and has included retail businesses such as a Leon’s Furniture store. When private and public interests compete for space, conflicts of heritage and commemoration emerge. It is here that High and Berger’s description of the processes of erasure and recovery in de-industrial settings is important. These are the conflicts that pit capital against community. In the case of the Railroad Workers Memorial, there is an attempt to recover a founding narrative of early Canadian industrial history and establish a space in the public history discourse of Toronto as it changed over time. The Railroad Workers
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memorial presents an interesting case study of heritage activism, and the importance of the different roles in creating a public memorial that presents Canada’s railway history in a post- industrial landscape.
Perhaps more important to the case study of Toronto’s railyards is their examination of how industrial cities transform from centres of industry and production, to sites of tourism and leisure as industry moves away. A similar process of de-industrialization and recovery to what
Stanton and Norkunas present in Lowell and Monterey occurred in Toronto’s downtown core. As industry and modern railway yards moved to the suburbs and the downtown railyards were transformed into a place of leisure, the presence of its industrial heritage remains but in different contexts. The representations of this heritage can be found in the transformed space. In some cases, Toronto’s railway heritage has been acknowledged to the advantage of private developers like the CN Tower, Steam Whistle Brewery, Leon’s Furniture, and Cineplex. In others, the city’s railway and multicultural heritage has been maintained through a community-centered, cooperative effort to stake out a space for memorial to labour and industry as evidenced by the
Toronto Railway Museum and the Chinese Railroad Worker Museum. To present historical narratives that otherwise might be simplified or ignored, and to avoid having heritage fill a compensatory function, the integration of the community into the development of public history projects is imperative – what we can refer to as the ‘Lowell model’. If worker heritage projects are meant to present narratives of the people and their importance to Ontario’s history, communities must play a significant role in identifying worker histories that are not a part of the dominant culture or pre-existing national stories.
Recent literature has focused on community-oriented heritage. Archival studies and oral historian Andrew Flinn writes that research, exhibitions, archives, publications and other public
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projects resulting from the activities undertaken by local advocates and activist initiatives are intended “not only to create ‘useful’ histories of past struggles which support campaigning and struggles in the present, but also to challenge and subvert the orthodox historical narratives which misrepresent or ignore other histories and presences.”115 This process of collectively creating knowledge and learning from the past is what he refers to as ‘history activism’. Here we can see the value of the Chinese Railroad Memorial occupying a very public space on a site of leisure. It is not relegated to the margins like Tunbridge remarks about other voices in his study of the Byward Market. The Railroad Memorial, and the narrative it tells, is a central part of the
SkyDome site. Although it presents a historical narrative of work that is perhaps too agreeable, it is still an expression of public history that tells a story about workers, immigrants, and multiculturalism as much of the Chinese Canadian community wanted. As James Pon explained to the Toronto Star, thousands of fans, tourists, and workers walk under the monument every day. This is an important first step in transferring the practise of heritage to workers and the communities that they live in. It is in these contexts that notions of heritage dissonance and contested spaces allow for occasions of resistance and community action. The public disagreements that arise from historical commemoration can provide the opportunity for collective organization and informal learning. In the context of achieving emancipatory learning through public history, the organizational aspect of collaborative education initiatives is crucial in opening up discussions surrounding working class histories, power dynamics, and hegemonic narratives. Popular and Indigenous education scholar Griff Foley considers this a form of learning that is incidental. He writes that emancipatory learning “occurs when groups of people struggle against oppression - allowing them to work out what is happening around them and
115 Flinn, “Making history of struggle part of the struggle,” 21. 45
create a plan of action.” It can be “complex and contradictory,” but by analyzing the learning dimension of people’s lives and struggle, ideas surrounding power relations and changing labour in a globalizing world become clearer.116
Flinn suggests that by placing history “more directly to the service of activism,” communities can more effectively engage in historical activity that includes archival research, producing publications, exhibitions and “other educative or consciousness-raising public history activities aimed at promoting a collective engagement with and understanding of a ‘useful’ past, often of past struggles for the purposes of contributing to challenging the present and changing the future.”117 Organizations like the FCCRWC that seek to establish public historical narrative of immigrant or marginalized communities can continue to push for more radical forms of heritage that are impactful and encourage collective management of de-industrial landscapes.
But, as historian Linda Shopes has explained, it needs to be a meaningful process firmly rooted in the community.118 Shopes worked with other academics, community activists, and government workers on a community history project in the late 1970s and early 1980s to document the history of a working-class Baltimore neighbourhood through oral history and community learning programs. Shopes writes that the project was born of a “desire to democratize the historical record, not only by documenting the daily life experiences of ordinary people, but by doing so from ‘the inside,’ from the perspective of the people themselves.”
At times, the Baltimore Neighborhood Project ran into issues establishing a community- led history-making process. The most significant of one was a lack of enthusiasm community history “as a formal aspect of our culture.” For many people, our histories are our own; to be
116 Griff Foley, Learning in Social Action (London. Zed Books, 1999), 9. 117 Flinn, “Making history of struggle part of the struggle,” 21. 118 Linda Shopes, “The Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project: Oral History and Community Involvement,” Radical History Review 25 (1981): 27. 46
shared with our family and friends and “not easily directed into projects and institutional frameworks.” Consequently, Shopes argues that there needs to be significant time, commitment, and substantial efforts to ground the project in the community itself for community history projects to be successful.119 This was evident in the FCCRWC’s effort to commemorate Chinese workers outside the SkyDome. The process was lengthy and heavily debated within Toronto’s
Chinese community. It also sits in a space that is heavily contested by private companies which continually seek to develop a space of leisure in downtown Toronto’s post-industrial landscape.
However, what emerged is an impressive memorial that is seen by thousands of people each year. Although it may represent more of a national myth than a Canadian achievement, the monument undoubtedly presents an important narrative of immigrant workers and the struggles and oppression they faced building the CPR in Canada. More importantly, the Chinese community played a distinct role in conceiving and funding the monument – a significant change from the institutional approaches to public history and heritage in Ontario in the 1960s and 1970s that Craig Heron has outlined.
Even though it is seen by thousands of visitors each year, we need to question if the memorial is noticed. Being noticed is the challenge with monuments as an expression of public expression. They remain static once completed and act as political symbols that preserve and celebrate “official stories.”120 Monuments preserve the past but also contextualize the present – a physical representation of the politics and historical context of the period in which they were established.121 They can serve many purposes including recognizing historical progress and
119 Ibid., 28; 43. 120 Dora Apel, “Memorialization and Its Discontents” America’s First Lynching Memorial,” The Mississippi Quarterly Special Issue on Lynching and American Culture 61, no. 1-2 (2008): 218-219; Christopher Stride, Ffion Thomas, and Maureen M. Smith, “Ballplayer or Barrier Breaker? Branding through the Seven Statues of Jackie Robinson,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 31, no. 17 (2014): 2186. 121 Apel, “Memorialization and Its Discontents” America’s First Memorial to Lynching”: 217. 47
historic individuals, contesting master narratives or, like in the case of the Chinese Railroad
Workers Memorial, representing changing urban demographics and the cultural pluralism of cities.122 As evidenced recently, they can also launch public debates about history, heritage, and collective memory. But some scholars have suggested that monuments are simply token gestures that do not address systemic issues.123 They are symbolic and do not provide the opportunity to revisit the narrative being presented by the monument. Once completed, they can be celebrated but are difficult to revise and easy to ignore. This limits educational opportunities for the community and visitors to the space. Worker history and heritage may help overcome these challenges should a similar public history project occur in Ontario.
Labour’s history is a collective one. Collaboration, unity, and organization are ideas that much of the labour movement is founded on. By providing a foundation for understanding the power of heritage and commemoration through history activism and resistance – and using labour history as a dynamic, collaborative tool to support communities to share their histories and memories of their community – workers can challenge accepted norms in history and heritage. The experiences of workers could serve as a springboard for greater labour representation in public history, and the struggle to reconcile work and leisure in de-industrial contexts. This would inform their sense of historical consciousness and help compliment hegemonic narratives that may have lacked in properly discussing working class histories and historical struggles of labour. If community participation in public history and heritage can bring history to ‘life’ for communities, historians and heritage experts must consider approaches to commemorating labour in Ontario that are participatory in nature and democratize the history-
122 Jaime Shultz, “Contesting the Master Narrative: The Arthur Ashe Statue and Monument Avenue in Richmond,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 28, no. 8-9 (2011): 1248. 123 Ibid., 1248. 48
making process. Some provincial heritage sites have tried to achieve this in the context of worker heritage. Chapters two and three will respectively examine Fort William Historical Park in
Thunder Bay and the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre in Hamilton. Both offer educational programming that emphasizes visitor participation. They both also draw from many voices in the community. But as sites of worker heritage, they do not maximize their opportunities to offer more hands-on approaches to doing history. The following chapters will explore why this might be the case and theorize ways that worker heritage can become a powerful educational tool for changing communities.
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Chapter 3 Canoe Building and Narratives of Work: Worker Heritage and Expressions of Living History at Fort William Historical Park
3.1 Canoes, Work, and Canadian National Identity
In 1990, Ontario public television broadcaster TVO began airing a series of historical short films on its network. Like the ‘Heritage Minute’ sixty second documentary format many
Canadians are familiar with, these snippets of Ontario heritage introduced the audience to new places and people that have contributed to the province’s history. A May 1992 episode “Places of
Ontario – Old Fort William” features a canoe-building interpretive program hosted at Fort
William Historical Park in Thunder Bay, Ontario. The five-minute segment portrays the traditional tools and methods used by Dave Brown, Fort William’s recently retired master canoe builder, to build birch bark canoes practically the same way since Indigenous peoples first used them centuries ago. Recognizing their suitability for navigating the rivers and lakes of the
Northwest fur territory, French and British fur traders continued to build and use these styles of canoes as part of their work. It was Brown’s job to authentically build ‘Montreal’ canoes,
‘Canoes de Maitre’, and the smaller ‘Canots du Nord’ using materials such as spruce gum, pine resin, spruce root, birch bark, and lard – a process which can take several years to complete.124
The TVO episode also depicts the historical re-enactments of the fur trade that occur at the park today, and the outdoor leisure opportunities for visitors to the park that the birch canoes are used for.
124 TVO. “Places of Ontario – Old Fort William.” May 1992. Video. Online. https://www.tvo.org/video/archive/places-of-ontario-old-fort-william; TVO. “Places of Ontario – Old Fort William.” May 1992. Transcript. Online. https://www.tvo.org/transcript/375001/places-of-ontario-old-fort-william 50
The canoe as a vessel has long been connected to Canadian heritage and national identity.
For many historians, it is symbolic of the foundation of Canada’s economic and national identities since the colonial period. In media and popular culture, the canoe represents a mode of escape from daily life in urban centres. Perhaps most importantly, it is one of the few historical artefacts that successfully connects past understandings of work and leisure in Canada. Canoes inspire feelings of nostalgia and Canadiana, giving them an important role in public portrayals of Canadian history today. The canoe is included in heritage programming across Canada, including living depictions of Canadian history at Fort William Historical Park – a reconstructed fur trade fort located in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Public exhibitions of the importance of the canoe to Canadian history like at Fort William are not uncommon – several museums have exhibitions on the birch canoes used by Indigenous people and fur traders, and Ontario even hosts the
Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough. But Fort William’s interpretation of the canoe presents a much more comprehensive, and novel, form of historical learning.
This chapter investigates the use of Ontario living history sites to tell stories of work and promote opportunities for leisure in de-industrial settings with the goal of determining the roles that institutions, academics and the public played in shaping the final versions of sites of commemoration, education, and leisure. I will use the case study of Fort William Historical Park to analyze living history interpretations of labour, notably its birchbark canoe building program.
Fort William’s canoe sheds continue to produce historically accurate ‘Canoe de Maitres’ and
‘Montreal’ canoes as they would have been built by Indigenous craftsmen and European fur traders when Fort William was the most significant stop along the Northwest trade route. The canoe making program is unique in that it combines elements of history, work, artisanship, and performance to produce artefacts that are symbolic of Canadian heritage and continue to be used
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by visitors to Fort William Historical Park today. Like the CPR that followed it, the importance of the East-West fur trade to Canadian history and heritage – and by extension the canoe – has been thoroughly documented by historians. Examining the influence of the fur trade on Canada’s economic and national identities since the colonial period, and questioning why Ontario has chosen to commemorate labour roles in the fur trade as a symbol of Canadian national identity at living museums like Fort William Historical Park, will be the focus of this chapter. It will also explore how de-industrial settings can influence goals of authenticity for provincial heritage projects. As opposed to the Chinese Railroad Memorial, which occupies the de-industrial space that was abandoned by the exodus of industry from Toronto, the Fort William project was forced to move away from a similar space to pursue a more ‘authentic’ setting for its living history programming. It is still closely linked to a de-industrial landscape but is an example of a different kind of relationship between de-industrialization and worker heritage projects.
Living history acts as a way of presenting narratives that reinforce notions of performance and ‘play’.125 At Fort William, this practice of public history is largely dedicated to resurrecting narratives of the fur trade in Canada in a novel way. As such, this chapter will develop understandings of performance in living history at Fort William Historical Park to explore why exactly we choose to depict historical examples of artisanal work and manual labour in living history sites across Ontario. How we adapt to future conceptions of work, worker heritage, and 21st century representations of living history in Ontario leaves many questions for public historians. As society continues to globalize and embrace technological development,
125 Graham K. Henning, “The guided hike in Banff National Park: A hermeneutical performance,” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 16, no.2 (2008): 183; Scott Magelssen, Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 11. 52
heritage as a study and a practice has become much more prevalent.126 Technological changes continue to create uncertainty for our future, especially as we are presented with new understandings of work and changing economies in our communities. Some historians argue that history and heritage provide stability and direction in the present, so that we do not lose our bearings as we move into the future.127 I hope that this chapter – and my thesis as a whole – will provide a better understanding of why we turn to living history and performance as forms of heritage, and why we choose to commemorate expressions of manual labour and artisanship in these living history contexts.
The canoe has long been embraced by Canadians as a symbol of their national heritage.
The early 20th century saw the publication of many influential histories in which the canoe played a central role. These histories formed the basis for a new interpretation of Canadian history; one that emphasized economic developments during the colonial period, largely the fur trade, as being the most important factor in shaping Canadian national identity. Led by seminal works by Harold A. Innis and Donald Creighton, historians in the first half of the 20th century argued that the East-West fur trade – and by extension the canoe as a necessary tool for
Indigenous groups and the voyageur fur traders to facilitate exchanges of goods – was fundamental to Canadian history and heritage. Like Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis and the notion of America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ popularized by John O’Sullivan, historian John
Jennings has argued that the canoe was an essential part of the development of the Canada’s distinct identity. He refers to this concept as the “canoe frontier.”128
126 David Lowenthal, "The heritage crusade and its contradictions,": 14; 22; David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, (London: Viking, 1996), 119-122. 127 Francois Hartog, “The Present of the Historian,” History of the Present 4, no. 2 (2014): 203-219; Geoff Eley, “The Past Under Erasure? History, Memory, and the Contemporary,” Journal of Contemporary History 46, no. 3 (2011): 555–573. 128 John Jennings, The Canoe: A Living Tradition (Richmond Hill: Firefly Books, 2005), 29-30. 53
One of the earliest influential historical narratives of Canada as a nation is Harold A.
Innis’s ‘Staples Thesis’. Building on the work of economist William A. Mackintosh, Innis argued that the trade of staple resources of regions in Canada was critical in organizing the nation and developing a distinct national identity. His book The Fur Trade in Canada points to changing markets and varying export values of furs in the Northwest fur trade as having an important impact on Canada’s geographic, economic, and social development. In order to harvest the furs, a “sweep of economic development and settlement” occurred, including establishing sophisticated transportation networks and focusing on market organization.129
Geography was an important part of this economic development. “The collection of large quantities of raw furs was dependant on long rivers with extensive tributaries draining wide areas,” Innis writes. “The importance of these strategic points was a factor responsible for the numerous wars between nationalities and the close relationship between the joint stock companies [like the HBC] and the governments concerned.” Fur trading posts such as Fort
William and Grand Portage, as well as the voyageurs, Indigenous workers, and the canoes that they used, were consequently vital for accessing and transporting these resources. Describing the importance of the historical background of the fur trade to the development of the modern
Canadian economy, he noted that long distances that the voyageurs were forced to travel required significant capital investment and the creation of a complex transportation system. The canoe was consequently was an important tool to develop the colonial economy.130
Innis’ foundational economic narrative of Canadian history, like his history of the CPR, proved to be significant, as historians continued to build on the Staple Thesis throughout the 20th century. In The Commercial Empire of the St-Lawrence 1760-1850, Donald Creighton provided
129 Harold A. Innis, The Fur-Trade of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Library, 1930), 49; 127-128. 130 Ibid., 127-128. 54
a new perspective on the Staple Thesis. His interpretation would eventually become the
‘Laurentian Thesis’, widely accepted by historians as a foundational narrative of Canada for much of the 20th century. While Innis prioritized geography and the fur trade as the most influential element in the development of Canada as a nation, Creighton argued that this development was not inevitable. The emergence of a strong nation required establishing a political and commercial empire by harnessing the commercial power of the St Lawrence waterway and controlling exports of material goods. Creighton describes this empire, which began under the French regime, as a “distinct North American system, peculiar to Canada” that was based on the foundation of the fur trade. As he notes early in his text, the fur trade, and the
Laurentian commercial empire the emerges from the fur and timber economies, was a “major architectural style of Canadian business life” that would dominate Canadian growth for centuries.131
He dismissed the influence of workers on the development of Canada as a nation and did not value the role of labourers in Canada’s fur trade history. According to Creighton, it was the industrious British merchants who built the fur trade in Canada, not workers. Coureurs de Bois, voyageurs, trappers, and canoe builders, among other trades from the time period, were not emphasized in his grand historical narrative of the nation. As we will see, this had implications for the development of living depictions of labour at Fort William Historical Park. These histories were published at a time of intense Anglo-Canadian nationalism and spurred by a desire to unite the country through economics and history. Lower’s Colony to Nation: A history of
Canada and Careless’ Canada, A Story of Challenge were also fundamental in developing a national historical identity that focused on labour and economic progress, alongside historians
131 Donald Creighton, The Empire of the St Lawrence (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2nd ed, 2002), ix; 14. 55
like Innis and Creighton. These national narratives were influential in determining the importance of restoring significant fur trade centres such as Fort William and Grand Portage as heritage sites in the mid-20th century and incorporating forms of work and artisanship into their living history interpretation programs.
Misao Dean’s careful analysis of the canoe and Canadian national identity explores similar themes from a modern historical perspective. According to Dean, narratives of the canoe traditionally represented it as a symbol of national identity and a means of physically accessing the nation. She argues that the effect of these histories is to “fetishize” the canoe as a direct means of patriotic national transformation and this is problematic when examining both
Canadian and Indigenous history.132 Bruce Erickson also contests histories that present distinct historical narratives that situate the canoe as the “founding vehicle of the modern nation of
Canada.”133 He argues that the canoe, both as a vessel and a renewed symbol of Canadian heritage, embodies a distinct colonial legacy. Historically it has acted as a tool of hegemony and colonialism in Canada, firstly to support nationalist economic policies, and secondly as a
‘whitening’ of Canada’s wilderness and outdoor recreation through the establishment of a heritage and hegemonic institutional narrative that influences our collective memory.134
Like Erickson and Dean’s arguments about foundational narratives of history and heritage surrounding the canoe, histories of work are also utilized by authoritative institutions as samples of memory to construct public narratives of nationalism or patriotism. David Lowenthal has argued that framing hegemonic heritage practices as a form of secular religion that stifle
132 Misao Dean, Inheriting a canoe paddle: The canoe in discourses of English-Canadian nationalism (Toronto: Scholars Portal, 2013), 46-47. 133 Bruce Erickson, Canoe Nation: nature, race, and the making of a Canadian icon (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), 69. 134 Ibid., 31; 154. 56
rational inquiry and curiosity about the past. He writes that the “worship of a bloated heritage invites passive reliance on received authority” and ultimately replaces “unpleasant [realities] with feel-good history [and] all too often it ignores the needs of local habitants” whose involvement in local heritage projects is essential to continuing important cultural practices.135
These tensions often guide the development of significant heritage projects and, as this chapter will present, the case study of Fort William is no exception. Lowenthal’s contributions to the field of heritage studies are important in the sense that living museums like Fort William are deliberately invented to depict historical narratives that suit the purpose of provincial institutions
– the selective, fiscal narratives that Heron, High, and Magelssen have presented.
Workers can be an important foundation for authoritative heritage narratives that establish “a continuity with a suitable historic past.”136 In her case study of the historical development of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial’s visitor interpretation centre, Teresa
Bergman notes that public heritage at Mount Rushmore is meant to commemorate American idealism, including conceptions of patriotism, traditionalism, and citizenship. She describes this process as the “ongoing construction of public memory.”137 Bergman presents the case of one of the interpretation films shown to visitors at Mount Rushmore, The Shrine, as a clear example of worker heritage being appropriated by institutions of power to project patriotic sentiments. She posits that the film is “much more triumphalist about U.S. capabilities” and portrays the skills of workers as the main component of Mount Rushmore’s patriotic symbolism.138 “No longer is Mt.
Rushmore the creation of a single man [Gutzon Borglum],” Bergman writes, “it is now the
135 Lowenthal, “Heritage crusade and its contradictions,” 25. 136 Hobsbawm, “Inventing Traditions,” 1. 137 Teresa Bergman, "Patriotism Carved in Stone: Mt. Rushmore’s Evolution as National Symbol," in Teresa Bergman, Exhibiting Patriotism: Creating and Contesting Interpretations of American Historic Sites. (Walnut Creek: Routledge, 2012), 172. 138 Ibid., 165. 57
triumph of myriad U.S. workers, […] grounded in individual Americans’ abilities and not in individual great men or its leaders.”139 Building on Anthony Smith’s The Ethnic Origins of
Nations – although rejecting its ethnic determinism – Alan Gordon argues that Canadian public history helps support national identities through the concept of ‘mythomoteur’, or a “constitutive political myth” that serves Canadian nationalism by connecting public memory, myth, with the shared past experiences of individuals.140 He points to public rituals, festivals, and celebration as ways of bringing together the “members of the imagined national community” and constructing curated narratives, which can be argued have the ability to normalize labour systems in many contexts.141 Heron and Penfold describe this process as “carefully orchestrated ceremonies dedicated to cultivating citizenship in a stronger nation-state.”142 These notions of process, ritual, and ceremony – and their limitations from an educational perspective – take on more significance later as we examine representations of work, artisanship, and performance in living history contexts.
There is a difference in the labour that is represented and celebrated by these curated historical narratives, and this is not always communicated clearly by the educational programming. Part of the heritage recovery process at Mount Rushmore was to tout the skills used by the workers to create the monument and communicate the value of these skills at the time through a nationalist perspective. Evidence of the commemoration of unskilled work is apparent in different monuments around Ontario but they are often static representations that use workers to explain a region’s history. These explanations lack depth and transparency. The
139 Ibid. 140 Alan Gordon, Making public pasts: the contested terrain of Montréal's public memories, 1891-1930 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001), 9. 141 Ibid. 8; 10. 142 Craig Heron and Steven Penfold, The Workers' Festival: A History of Labour Day in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 4. 58
Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial commemorates a form of work that was certainly dangerous, but not considered ‘skilled’ or artisanal labour at the time, and the context of the work is not clearly communicated through the monument. Monuments commemorating canal builders, miners, and loggers dot cities, highways, and small-town squares throughout the province, but they also do not communicate the contexts of different forms of labour in Canadian history. They also often represent interpretations of pioneer myths. Historical context is an important part of understanding the value of labour and this does not always translate in living history programming. Living depictions of historically unskilled workers like farmers, voyageurs, and loggers are not separated from historically skilled labour like blacksmiths, tailors, or cobblers. Instead, their skills are lumped together as ‘historical’ work which reduces the opportunities for discussions surrounding the history of work in Canada. Ontario’s living history projects provided the government with the ability to tell stories that combined elements of history, work, artisanship, and performance to produce artefacts and experiences that are symbolic of Canadian heritage, and not necessarily accurate, transparent narratives of the value of different kinds of work in different periods of Canadian history. Fort William is no different.
3.2 Fort William Canoe Program: Expressions of Living History in Ontario Parks and Historical Sites
Fort William Historical Park is one of Ontario’s most important living history museums.
This is largely due to its historical and economic significance to the development of Canada.
Formerly ‘Fort Kaministiquia’ under the French regime, Fort William was always an important stop along the East-West fur trade route. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Grand Portage, in modern day Minnesota, was the most significant fur trade depot in North America. Located down the shore of Lake Superior from Fort William and just on the other side of the modern U.S.-Canada border, Grand Portage was a “key exchange point where tough, fast-moving Western [fur trader]
59
brigades met the weighty canoes from Montreal partners crammed with supplies.”143 However, following territorial and economic changes brought about by the American War of
Independence, Fort William became the “great Ontario fur headquarters” instead of Grand
Portage in 1802.144 170 years later, the combination of a need for regional development in
Northern Ontario and the significance of Historic Fort William to Canada’s development as a nation drove the provincial government’s desire to reconstruct the fort, and the influence of the economic histories published by Innis, Creighton, and other notable 20th century academics cemented the government’s perspective for promoting Canada’s national heritage. The official project announcement to the Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce by Ontario Premier John
Robarts occurred in January of 1971. Robarts promoted a grand vision for a region of Ontario that was suffering economically in the 1970s and early 1980s. He promised a new economic and social vision for the Lakehead region that emphasized the importance of Northwestern Ontario to
Canada’s national historical identity. As we will soon see, Old Fort William, and now the city of
Thunder Bay (formerly Fort William and Port Arthur), has long been considered the “hinge” of
Canada, connecting both coasts economically, socially, and culturally.
As Gordon notes, the introduction of Canadian living historical sites – what he defines as the “animation of historical sites with period costumes and crafts” – began in Canada at fur trade sites and military relics like Fort William. These initial “salvage efforts” of Canadian history began at the turn of the 20th century as heritage movements emerged to confront perceived changes in national values. They focused on recovering historical narratives that were largely rooted settler histories as a means of preserving and promoting their British values. Early on it was national leaders and governments who were concerned with protecting and preserving sites
143 J.M.S. Careless, Ontario: A Celebration of our Heritage (Mississauga: Heritage Publishing House, 1991), 33. 144 Ibid. 60
that were considered sacred to Canada’s historical development.145 But by the mid-20th century, other factors played in a role in determining what historical sites to preserve as living history sites. This included heritage ‘experts’, tourism boards, local businesses, and larger corporations.
Building on a strong post-war economy and rapid increases in American and Canadian middle- class wealth and tourism, governments sought to develop living history sites as both educational heritage sites, and tourism experiences.
The reconstruction project at Fort William, for instance, was part of a greater urban planning initiative for the newly incorporated City of Thunder Bay. The cities of Fort William and Port Arthur were amalgamated in 1970 and the Lakehead Planning Board sought how to effectively zone new land development for Thunder Bay and the surrounding area. The Lakehead
Official Plan (1970) focused heavily on tourism and set aside land for recreational use and outdoor leisure, including parks, conservation areas, cottages, and local recreational facilities, as well as for the “preservation of building and urban space of historical significance.”146 The province had recently completed similar historical reconstruction projects at Upper Canada
Village in 1961 and St-Marie Among the Hurons in 1964, and a project like rebuilding Fort
William as an interpretive living museum fit several of the categories laid out in the official planning study.147 The public proposal and timeline for the reconstruction of Fort William called for the project to be a communal effort for Thunder Bay. This included distinct roles for the mayor and council, MPP Jim Jessiman, local TV stations (who updated their logo to a symbol
145 Alan Gordon, Time Travel: Tourism and the Rise of the Living History Museum in Mid-Twentieth Century Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016), 50. 146 Lakehead Planning Board, “Lakehead official plan,” 1970. Print. Government of Ontario, Ministry of Tourism and Information. Print. Minister of Tourism and Information’s Old Fort William restoration files. Archives of Ontario. RG 47-63. 147 James Auld, “Correspondence to Office of John Robarts,” Government of Ontario, Ministry of Tourism and Information. 1970. Print. Minister of Tourism and Information Old Fort William restoration files. Archives of Ontario. RG 47-63. 61
representing the fort’s heritage), and local high schools. The proposal also outlined the importance of hosting lecture series from economists, historians, clergy, scientists, and medical professionals about Fort William’s progressive role in North America during the 18th and 19th centuries.148 The building of a case for Old Fort William’s significance to Canada’s history and heritage had begun.
It is in this context that the provincial and municipal governments began to emphasize narratives of work as being an important component of the region’s historical identity. Typically, work at Canadian living history museums meant depicting the labour of early white settlers in
Canada, as well as the use of handicrafts, tools, and artifacts by interpreters to accentuate the historical processes being animated.149 Manual labour and artisanal skills were used to present historical accuracy and authenticity. At fur trade forts like Fort William, programming depicted the lives of the European fur traders and officials who ran the forts, and to a lesser extent, the contributions of First Nations communities to the fort’s historic operations. At sites like pioneer heritage villages, living portrayals presented the “labours and achievements of the province’s early settlers” as past narratives of work without conflict. Gordon notes that performances of work “represented an easy and reproducible point of interaction between visitors and museum staff” given their “obvious and readily reproduced scripts revolving around the process of the task.”150 For Fort William, identifying what kinds of work to portray in the living history programming involved emphasizing the crucial role that fur traders, artisans, and professionals played in developing a new nation during the 17th and 18th centuries, as highlighted in the
148 Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce, “Public Proposal and Timeline for Fort William Historical Park.” City of Thunder Bay, 1970. Print. Government of Ontario, Ministry of Tourism and Information. Minister of Tourism and Information’s Old Fort William restoration files. Archives of Ontario. RG 47-63. 149 Gordon, Time Travel, 112; 148. 150 Ibid., 148-151. 62
proposed lectures and associated educational initiatives organized to promote the fort’s reconstruction
It also consisted of building on the influential histories of Innis, Creighton, and Lower.
Officials started to incorporate symbols of the fur trade and histories of work into their vision for a renewed regional heritage, and the canoe may have seemed like an obvious depiction of this heritage. In July 1970, for instance, a “Voyageur great canoe containing a North West company agent and his paddlers,” and an individual voyageur with his canoe paddle, were prominently included on the new coat of arms for the City of Thunder Bay.151 Several years earlier the
Centennial Voyageur Canoe Pageant from the Rockies to Montreal occurred to celebrate
Canada’s 100th anniversary – another example of a turn to the canoe as a renewed symbol of regional and national heritage. The teams racing canoes passed through Fort William on July 24,
1967. Government tourism promotion and media coverage in the 1950s began to emphasize the fur trade and outdoor recreation as an attraction for visitors to the region, and the birch canoe began to play an essential role in marketing Fort William Historical Park, and the Lakehead as a whole, to visitors across North America once the first phases of construction on the fort began.
This focus on tourism is evident today when making the drive to Thunder Bay along the Trans-
Canada highway. Driving along the highway is like driving through a postcard; filled with lakes, trees, cliffs, and high peaks. The only clues to urban life along the highway are small towns advertising faded motels and gas bars, as well as billboards promoting isolated fishing and hunting lodges and recreational wilderness outfitters. When approaching Thunder Bay, motorists begins to see signs advertising Fort William Historical Park, “Northern Ontario’s Premier
151 Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal. “Coat of Arms”. July 1970. Government of Ontario, Ministry of Tourism and Information. Print. Minister of Tourism and Information’s Old Fort William restoration files. Archives of Ontario. RG 47-63. 63
Entertainment Park”. Canoes are apparent in much of the advertisements along the way, alongside hunting, fishing, and hiking opportunities.
Hamilton-based historical reconstruction specialist National Heritage Limited was tasked with leading the rebuild of Old Fort William. The company was a leader in the field of historical consultancy during this period, but came under criticism for a lack of transparency in historical research, financial irregularities, and political favouritism.152 In its initial research study and proposal for reconstructing Old Fort William, Hinge of a Nation (1970), National Heritage argued that Fort William was an important historical artefact. It noted that the fort had been the
“command post of a great commercial enterprise […] served by the skill of French craftsmen, by the experience and daring of French canoe-men, by the woods-lore of the Indian, by the canny, long-rang scheming of the Scottish merchants, and by the suppliers and hangers-on of every racial identity.” As the report discussed, the goal of these individuals was to get furs from the
Northwest to Montreal, but their “great outpost” became the “hinge of a nation.” Writing with even more hyperbole, the report argued that “no other historical site in our possession, if fully restored, could teach us so much about ourselves.”153
Local and provincial government officials also recognized the fort’s potential as a spot for economic development and tourism; describing it as “one of the largest historical parks in one of the most attractive settings on the continent.”154 In his report to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario at Queen’s Park, the representative for Thunder Bay Jim Jessiman wrote that the decision to reconstruct Fort William was the “happy result of the dreams and dedicated work of
152 Gordon, Time Travel, 221; 224-226. 153 National Heritage Limited. Fort William, Hinge of a Nation. Toronto: National Heritage, 1970. Government of Ontario, Ministry of Tourism and Information. Print. Minister of Tourism and Information’s Old Fort William restoration files. Archives of Ontario. RG 5-14. Foreword. 154 Jim Jessiman, “Hinge of a Nation: Fort William 1805-1971,” (Toronto: 1971). Print. Toronto Reference Library, 2. 64
many individuals and associations in our community.” He argued that the reconstructed fort “will boost our community’s development through creating many new jobs and attracting tourists. It will also be an exciting link with our country’s history. Once again, our community will become the Hinge of Nation.”155 James Auld, the province’s Minister of Tourism and Information and the man responsible for the reconstruction project, expressed similar support for the re-building of Fort William. He observed that it would have “important and wide-ranging implications for an area [Thunder Bay and the Lakehead] that has felt itself cut off from the mainstream of development” while the rest of the province had developed at a quicker rate. “The fort will become the repository or museum for the fur trade and for those early explorers who travelled through the area on voyages which opened up this continent,” he wrote in correspondences with other ministers in the government and representatives of National Heritage Limited. “It will be unique in this respect.”156
Distinctiveness is a theme that runs through much of the reconstruction process. Fort
William was not only considered unique due to its significance to Canada’s history and heritage, but National Heritage and the Ontario government sought to make the experience of visiting the fort as distinct as possible. This required the historical site to be faithful to the original Old Fort
William. Its historical significance, as well as its authenticity, quickly became a problem that dogged the government and National Heritage. The problem was two-fold. Firstly, the Ontario government was forced to change the location from its original site in Fort William. The original site had been sold to CP Rail and transformed into railyards that were eventually decommissioned. However, it was considered too costly to decontaminate and remove the rail
155 Ibid. 7. 156 James Auld, “Correspondence to Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce,” Government of Ontario, Ministry of Tourism and Information 1970. Print. Minister of Tourism and Information’s Old Fort William restoration files. Archives of Ontario. RG 47-63. 65
lines, and unrealistic to reconstruct the fort as a living history museum in the middle of modern
Thunder Bay. It would be inaccessible to traffic and tourists, and not allow for proper living history programming, such as the fur trade re-enactments and paddling the birch canoes due to the urban landscape and de-industrial transformation of the city core.
At the same time, petitions from the citizens of Thunder Bay and letters to the government from the Thunder Bay Historical Society advocated for restoring the fort on its original site and many were “surprised” it would not be built there. They all agreed that it would also revitalize an area of Thunder Bay that was “deteriorating.”157 However, it was ultimately decided to use available land at Pointe de Meuron for Fort William Historical Park, due in large part to its ability to depict period life at Old Fort William without the intrusions of noise and smell from the city. James Auld explained his decision to the Minister of Revenue in a letter dated January 5, 1971, writing that constructing the fort at Pointe de Meuron was a necessity as the original setting would “detract from the authenticity of the fort, rather than somehow enhance it.”158 Archaeological digs were still completed on the fort’s original location to provide historical details for National Heritage Limited’s construction plan.159
The second challenge of authenticity was the implementation of a sophisticated – and more importantly ‘authentic’ – living history program. National Heritage’s December 1972 proposal Fort William: Interpretative Planning explained that it “should thus be clear that the restored Fort William is not to be a lifeless museum piece, a mere collection of buildings
157 Thunder Bay Historical Society. “Letter to James Auld, Minister of Tourism and Information.” 1970. Government of Ontario, Ministry of Tourism and Information. Print. Minister of Tourism and Information’s Old Fort William restoration files. Archives of Ontario. RG 47-63. 158 James Auld, “Correspondence to Minister of Revenue,” Government of Ontario, Ministry of Tourism and Information. 1970. Print. Minister of Tourism and Information’s Old Fort William restoration files. Archives of Ontario. RG 47-63. 159 Gordon, Time Travel, 225. 66
furnished with replicas of what was to be found in the generations ago. This aim is to make history live again, so to speak.”160 The report proposed designing living history programming around fifteen distinct themes, largely developed from conceptions of work and artisanship that had been a part of the fort’s daily routine. These themes included “Indians at the Lakehead,”
“Building of a fur trade fort,” “Medicine at Fort William,” “Crafts and Craftsmen,” and “The
Voyageur,” among others. The voyageur theme was the interpretative program that was intended to focus on the building of the Great Montreal Canoe, and was expanded to include smaller canoes such as the ‘Canots du Nord’.161
It is important to note that the canoes themselves were significant to this project. There are dozens of people throughout North America, including several Indigenous communities, that continued to build authentic birch bark canoes throughout the 20th century, and still do today.
What is more important to examine is the emphasis on trades and artisan activities in depictions of daily life at a historical site, a feature that Fort William has in common with the myriad of living history villages in Ontario. For instance, demonstrations of canoe construction and the exhibition of canoes and equipment were to be part of the “animation and demonstration” of crafts and work portrayed at the park.162 The City of Thunder Bay’s public proposal for a living museum envisioned “Carpenters, coopers, smiths, and armourers […] plying their trades in their respective shops. In the canoe-yard, we shall see the great Montreal canoe taking shape, under the skilled hands of Indian craftsmen, alongside the smaller ‘Canots du Nord’.”163 Using ground plans for Fort William from 1816-1817, the archaeological team and National Heritage identified
160 National Heritage Limited. Fort William: Interpretative Planning. Toronto: National Heritage, 1972. Government of Ontario, Ministry of Tourism and Information. Print. Minister of Tourism and Information’s Old Fort William restoration files. Archives of Ontario. RG 47-63. 2. 161 Ibid., 3. 162 Ibid. 163 Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce, “Public Proposal,” 1970. 67
that the canoe sheds, the agret store (the warehouse for the storage of canoe equipment that supplied the canoe brigades), and the canoe yards were located along the northern wall of the fort, alongside the carpentry, blacksmith, and tinsmith workshops, and the Saw Yard. This made up a section of the fort that is now considered “Trades Square”, an integral part of the living history exhibitions of work and artisanal skills. A preliminary archaeological investigation led by
Kenneth C. Dawson recognized “spacious yards and sheds for the shelter, reparation, and construction of canoes.”164 Blueprints for the canoe sheds were completed between October 1972 and November 1973 and the sheds were built as part of the second phase of construction at Fort
William.
In the case of the canoe exhibition, authentic materials and traditional forms of labour such as steaming and bending the canoe’s ribs, spreading the birch bark, cutting bark to shape, positioning gunwales and sewing the bark to the frame, and ‘gumming’ the canoe were to “be made by a demonstrator over a period of years” to show the six main stages in the construction of the birch bark canoe – the same process depicted by Dave Brown in the TVO video. The canoe maker and their assistants, usually summer students hired by Fort William as interpreters for the tourism season, build the canoe using traditional tools and methods over a summer, or for larger canoes, several summers. The canoe sheds were stocked with proper materials drawn from
Lord Selkirk’s personal audits of the fort in the early 1800s, as well as Hudson’s Bay Company journals, and the journals of those who worked for the North West Company. The designs for construction were pulled from a book that has inspired birch canoe builders across North
America. Compiled by Edwin T. Adney for the Smithsonian Institution, The Bark Canoes and
Skin Boats of North America contains the materials, techniques, and specifications for building
164 Kenneth C. Dawson, “Excavation of Fort William in Northwestern Ontario,” Historical Archeology 4 (1970), 46. 68
authentic birch canoes. It formed the basis for much of National Heritage’s interpretative planning for the canoe demonstrations and exhibit. The company also researched similar canoe building program at the Grand Portage Stockade Museum, and Indigenous builders in Quebec who have built many of the birch canoes housed in museums across Canada. Grand Portage
Historical Monument continues to have a birch bark canoe living history program like the one at
Fort William.
Investigating the development of the living programming history at Fort William through the framework of the birch canoe program reveals the influence of the economic histories of
Innis and Creighton. As Gordon notes, National Heritage’s research in preparation of Fort
William’s reconstruction was “replete with the historiography of its day,” and Creighton’s
69
Laurentian Thesis is particularly dominant in the Hinge of a Nation study.165 The fifteen themes of the living programming portion of the park were sorted into “dominant” and “contingent” themes during Fort William’s planning stages.166 The sorting process emphasized the presentation of a historical perspective at the fort that prioritized economic and nationalistic historical narratives. Dominant themes, for instance, were considered an “essential element [that] typifies the historical role of Fort William as a command post of the Northwest.” Dominant themes were considered to be “nationally significant” due to their economic importance to
British colonial, and later Canadian, history. Interestingly, it was decided that the canoe program and similar boat repair programming would be relegated to a contingent theme. “Canoe building, for example, was apparently [also] carried on at other posts,” the 1972 National Heritage Limited report notes. “From an economic point of view, such activities as canoe building, schooner building, and agriculture could never be financially feasible [in the early 19th century].”167
In the end, the canoe sheds and the other forms of work and artisanship at Fort William in neighbouring ‘Trades Square’ were believed to be “not of themselves nationally significant and which achieve their importance in relation to a dominant theme.”168 Although it was not deemed
‘nationally significant’ and considered a contingent theme in planning documents, Trades Square has remained a relevant part of Old Fort William’s programming thanks to the fort’s workers.
Shawn Patterson, Fort William Historical Park’s current curator, explained that the early curators of Fort William were instrumental in ensuring that the trades were recognized as necessary to the fort’s educational value, and received adequate funding. Without the work of the early curators,
Patterson fears that the trades would not occupy the important role that they have played at the
165 Ibid. 166 National Heritage Limited, Interpretative Planning, 4. 167 Ibid., 5. 168 Ibid. 70
fort; from both an interpretative perspective, as well as maintaining the authenticity of the fort buildings by repairing existing structures with authentic materials and building techniques over the years.169
It should be questioned why the exhibitions in Trades Square, as well as the canoe building programming, were relegated to the roles of contingent themes by National Heritage and the Ontario government. In the contexts of living history, heritage, and performance, the birch canoe program should be classified as a dominant theme and is certainly significant to the park’s stated goals. It is one of the only living activities at the park that visitors can actively participate in and has become a critical part of the region’s heritage. More importantly, it represents a lack of effort on the part of National Heritage and the Ontario government to effectively facilitate discussions surrounding historical labour and artisanal roles at the fort with visitors.
Historical scholarship shows the importance of often-overlooked labour roles in the fur trade. Carolyn Podruchny notes that voyageurs in the fur trade were “stereotyped by their masters as loyal ‘beasts of burden” due to their unskilled attributes such as their strength and determination. However, examining their actual work habits shows that voyageurs were competent, highly skilled laborers who performed skills that we would consider trained and valuable today. Other labour roles in Canada have been similarly misrepresented in history.
Podruchny explains that labour historians studying the social construction of skill among presumably unskilled workers – like loggers, shanty men, or sailors – have made evident a pattern of certain historical jobs being labeled as unskilled “simply because a large pool of men had learned the required manual skills in boyhood.” In reality, these positions required highly
169 Shawn Patterson (Head Curator) in discussion with the author. Thunder Bay, September 26, 2020. 71
processed skills, especially when compared to the labour skills we learn today. Canoe making and ship repair like that at Fort William presents an interesting case study. According to
Podruchny, significant time and energy at interior posts like Fort William was dedicated to canoe building and maintenance, and those who could complete the work. It was often First Nations artisans who were hired to build majority of canoes, but voyageurs who learned the skill of building canoes were “held in high regard by everyone in the pays d’en haut.” Voyageurs would learn the building process through constantly repairing their canoes, or with the support of their
Indigenous wives. Some voyageurs became well known for their canoe-making skills, and their expertise was requested by officers running other interior posts.170
Instead, the interpretative programming plan produced by National Heritage largely ignored the value of canoe-makers and the provincial government incorrectly evaluated the historical significance of living interpretations based on economic definitions, and not social or cultural significance. Building on the histories published in the early 20th century by Innis,
Creighton, and others, it focuses on the economic development of Canada, and not the lived experience of workers at Fort William from the fur trade to the present day. This raises many questions regarding how living history programs have been developed at Ontario historical sites like Fort William Historical Park. Why do we frame working class histories in the context of historical economic processes? Why does no one tell the complete story of Dave Brown, or any of the Indigenous and white master-canoe builders that preceded him, rather than an abridged version that focuses on the canoe as a vessel of revenue for the fur trading companies? The following section will evaluate the importance of performance in public education and examine
170 Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press: Scholarly Publishing Division, 2006), 87; 241-242. 72
how public and living history can properly facilitate discussions surrounding labour roles and worker narratives in Canadian history.
3.3 Interpretations of Manual Labour and ‘Performance’ at Living History sites
In 1984, a group of Lakehead University students, instructors, and faculty traveled by
‘Montreal’ birch canoes from Lachine, Quebec to Fort William Historical Park, tracing perhaps the most important fur trade route in Canada’s history. The goal of the project was to celebrate the bicentennial of the Province of Ontario, and the founding of the North West Company in
1779. Besides paddling into Fort William on Canada Day to recreate one of Fort William’s Great
Rendezvous – a tradition which continues to be part of the park’s programming today – the 1984 voyage allowed the Lakehead ‘voyageurs’ to present fur trade stories to communities along the modern-day incarnation of the trade route.171 Four subsequent Lakehead trips have been made along the route, all instances of taking an active role in depicting an important part of Canada’s history.172
Not unlike Civil War re-enactments, living history farms, and historic steam engines that still offer rides, living history museums such as Fort William can rely on the participation of visitors to depict a time period, as much as they do on the workers and volunteers that are a part of the programming. As part of a public history and living history education program, these projects encourage interactive and performative elements. Public and living history can be a performance - one that is the presentation and reception of meaningful action in which
171 Eric Cline, “Rendezvous Fort William 1984,” Lakehead University Outdoor Education Department. Website. https://www.lakeheadu.ca/users/C/ecline/rendezvous-fort-william (accessed April 11, 2020). 172 Anonymous, “30 Years Later,” Thunder Bay News Watch, July 5, 2014. https://www.tbnewswatch.com/local- news/30-years-later-398068. (accessed April 11, 2020). 73
participants also engage in the history.173 It can include “subject matter, performers, setting and subjective interpretation, and their resonances past, present and into the future.”174
Reconstructing and performing a historical narrative consequently becomes a fundamental element of living history museums. This is what canoe makers like Dave Brown and the Fort
William canoe project do daily construct historical artefacts for visitors to observe and enable visitors to paddle birch canoes on a fur trade route and participate in a representation of Canadian heritage. This ultimately results in forms of historical education that can be derived from the voices and experiences of the participants in the projects. Nina Simon argues that those participating in public education projects often “feel a high level of ownership and when their participation is tied to the project’s success. This pride doesn’t have to be individual; many contributory projects support a sense of shared ownership and community.”175 As such, performance and participation in living history allows visitors to embrace the role of the historian in a collective setting. However, many living history sites in Ontario like Fort William tend to encourage passive visitor observation, not active participation.
Examples of performing historical narratives that are evocative of Canadian history and heritage through the canoe – like the ones undertaken by the different groups of Lakehead students and faculty – do exist. For Canada’s centennial celebrations, the Centennial
Commission organized the Centennial Voyageur Canoe Pageant; a four-month canoe and portage race from the Rocky Mountains to Montreal between teams from eight provinces and two territories that passed through Fort William. The British royal family visited Fort William in
173 Evelyn B. Freeman and Linda Levstik, “Recreating the Past: Historical Fiction in the Social Studies Curriculum,” Elementary School Journal 88, no.4 (1988): 330. 174 Henning, “A Guided Hike in Banff National Park,”: 182. 175 Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010), 207. 74
1987 and Prince Andrew and the Duchess of York paddled one of the birch canoes.176 Even as recently as September 2019, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau prefaced an announcement for increased funding to provide low income children the opportunity to get “out of big cities and into the wild” by paddling a canoe at the Lake Laurentian Conservation Area in Sudbury while campaigning for re-election.177
As evident in the Lakehead University re-creation of a fur trade canoe run, performance is imperative for living history programming to effectively separate past and present historical narratives. As Trimm notes, a living history museum’s use of artefacts, storylines, and demonstrators work to present a divide that distinguishes the “stark contrast” between a previous historical period and the present. The sites, characters, and tasks are familiar, but only to
“underline a greater scrubbed simplicity in the past.”178 Jay Anderson argues that historical understandings are transferred to visitors to living museums through active participation and their senses. When participants can see, hear, and, most importantly, feel the historical context, it becomes an important historical simulation.179 When visitors enter the canoe sheds or agret store at Fort William, they can smell the birch, pine resin and spruce root used to build the canoes, and see Dave Brown, and his predecessors, carefully shape the canoes. When they paddle the canoes on the bay that Pointe de Meuron sits on, they can feel the way a birch canoe slices though the water, “planing [it] with much momentum and glide”, perhaps comparing it to the canvas or aluminum canoes that a synonymous with modern canoeing; maybe even envisioning themselves
176 Rob Bull, “Pulling together,” 1987. Photo. Toronto Star Archives Collection. Toronto Public Library. Website. https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDMDC- TSPA_0123471F&R=DC-TSPA_0123471F (accessed April 11, 2020). 177 CTV News. “Liberals promise free ‘camping’ credit if re-elected’,” CTV News, September 26, 2019. Website. https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/liberals-promise-free-camping-credit-if-re-elected-1.4611923 (accessed April 11, 2020). 178 Ryan S. Trimm, “Taking You Back: Region, Industry and Technologies of Living History at Beamish.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2012): 543. 179 Jay Anderson, “Living History: Simulating Everyday Life in Museums,” American Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1982): 296. 75
as voyageurs entering Fort William for a historical Rendezvous.180 The fort has marketed these opportunities for decades through travel brochures, Trans-Canada highway billboards, and on their website. It offers programs for students to become a voyageur for a night, allowing them to take an active role in the living history programming. These trips are often a culmination of a longer period of in-class learning. Students learn about voyageurs and the North American fur trade with their teachers, and then get to try their hand at the historical roles they have been learning about on an overnight trip to Fort William. As we will soon see, these simulations can also be misleading.
Anderson stresses the importance of the educational opportunities that both performance and participation bring to historical sites – a revolution in the field of museology in the 1960s and 1970s.181 It is difficult to ignore connections between performance and the importance of the theatre in living history; what some historians and tourism scholars consider “theatrical representations” of the past.182 The importance of performance, simulation and ‘play’ to produce a unique and authentic experience for visitors to living history museums is significant.183 It also popularizes history within communities; removing it from academic settings. Anderson theorizes that living history programs “have brought together university professors and laymen, representatives of the great and little traditions. The "play" aspect of simulation has often appealed to both groups and relationships have thus formed.”184
180 John McPhee, The Survival of the Bark Canoe (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., 1975), 11. 181 Anderson, “Living History: Simulating Everyday Life in Museums”: 290.; Scott Magelssen, “Living History Museums and the Construction of the Real through Performance,” Theatre Survey 45, no. 1 (2004): 64. 182 Ariel Gratch, “The Angel of Living History: Theatricality and Representations of the Past,” Tourist Studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 125-126; Anderson, “Living History: Simulating Everyday Life in Museums,” 291. 183 Jay Anderson, Time Machines: The World of Living History, (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1984), 12. 184 Anderson, “Living History: Simulating Everyday Life in Museums, 306. 76
The ecotourism industry presents an analogous model of living depictions of history with similar understandings of performance. The reconstruction of Fort William, and the inclusion of the birch canoe interpretation program, coincided with an increase in popularity in outdoor tourism and eco-tourism in Ontario. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Ontario government began to advocate for outdoor education public programming. In his official project announcement to the
Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce, John Robarts emphasized the importance of recreation to the provincial and municipal governments’ long-term planning goals for the Lakehead region.185
Hiking, fishing, canoeing, and related outdoor activities are emphasized in tourism brochures for
Canadian and American tourists during this period. Additionally, leisure activities on rivers, lakes, ports, and docks take a prominent position in much of the tourism marketing for the
Lakehead region throughout the second half of the 20th century. Conservation areas in Ontario also organized to integrate environmental conservation, such as watershed management and human impact on the environment, with historical preservation and educational programs for visitors during this period.186 The Parks and Recreation Federation of Ontario and the Ministry of
Tourism sought to encourage outdoor experiences to “foster environmental sensitivity” including hunting, fishing, camping, and family vacations.187 Like the development of living history sites in Ontario at this time, the period after the Second World War saw governments focus on developing outdoor tourism and ecotourism opportunities in Ontario as middle and upper-class
North Americans began to seek out outdoor vacations. As David Fennell notes, an increase in disposable incomes, more of a focus on family vacations in outdoor settings, and the time for this
185 John Robarts, “Address to Thunder Bay Chamber of Commerce,” January 20, 1971. Government of Ontario, Ministry of Tourism and Information. Print. Minister of Tourism and Information’s Old Fort William restoration files. Archives of Ontario. RG 47-63. 186 Gordon, Time Travel, 112-113. 187 Parks and Recreation Federation of Ontario, The Benefits of Parks and Recreation: A catalogue. (1992). Print. Toronto Reference Library, 81. 77
kind of travel, led to an unprecedented demand for parks in the post-war period and saturated many of the most popular Ontario parks.188
Planning for Ontario outdoor recreation projects continued to develop throughout the
1980s and 1990s.189 The Parks and Recreation Federation of Ontario document The Benefits of
Parks and Recreation: A catalogue (1992) cites studies from the 1980s and early 1990s which touted the effectiveness of outdoor interpretative field guide trips for students and travellers to
Ontario. “Field trip visits to an historical site can significantly impact school children’s attitudes towards preservation, conservation, and visiting parks and historical sites,” the document explains, “travellers are attracted to education-oriented experiences provided by cultural and historical sites.”190 The development Jim Jessiman and James Auld sought for the Thunder Bay region when pitching the Fort William project was a similar goal to promoting outdoor and ecotourism in the 1950s and 1960s. Outdoor recreation, as well as cultural and historic community festivals, events, and competitions, was one of the fastest growing areas of tourism in
North America and a “boon to community-based tourism,” ultimately acting as a way to support local outdoor recreation facilities, parks, and historical and cultural sites.191
An educational format we can look to for participatory historical approaches that also integrates outdoor recreation and eco-tourism is the folk school model. Tourists often seek unique experiences and folk schools offer the kind of leisure experience many tourists visiting the Lakehead region might desire. Part of the attraction of Fort William is the setting and the outdoor activities that are a possibility in the regions like hunting, fishing, camping, and paddling a canoe on the Kaministiquia River. Folk schools take participatory history and outdoor leisure
188 David A. Fennell, Ecotourism Programme Planning (Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK: CABI, 2002), 38. 189 Ibid., 67. 190 Parks and Recreation Federation of Ontario, Benefits of Parks and Recreation, 81. 191 Ibid., 84. 78
one step further. Based on a concept advanced by Danish writer and philosopher Nikolaj
Grundtvig in the early 19th century, folk schools are now institutions that offer adult education courses centered on learning historical labour skills from experts in their community. Often operated as a non-profit organization, folk schools pass on traditions that are a part of a region’s history and heritage to members of the community and tourists. At the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota, for instance, people can register for intimate courses with local experts, such as Nordic ski construction, smelting, basketry, and, yes, birch bark canoe building.
Folk school courses let people participate in the heritage-making process. They learn skills and interact with local historical narratives, rather than consuming them as a visitor. Folk school programming benefits from the regional history and heritage, as well as members of the community who seek to pass on traditions and knowledge; many of whom may not have been part of the institutional decision-making process which resulted in much of the living history and heritage we have today. It also introduces different interpretations of performance than traditional living history programming.
Shawn Patterson believes that North House could provide an interesting blueprint for Fort
William Historical Park’s future. Few folk schools exist in Canada but folklore and cultural narratives of ‘local tradition’ have long been part of provincial tourism marketing.192
Historically, romanticized conceptions of rural traditions, skills, and simpler lifestyles – which
Ian McKay dubs “The Folk” – were packaged by “urban cultural producers” to promote tourism and an idealized experience of the ‘authentic’ in provinces like Nova Scotia.193 Like the historical narratives presented at Fort William, The Folk lacks transparency. It was a means of
192 Ian McKay, The Quest of the Folk: Anti-modernism and cultural selection in 20th Century Nova Scotia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 4; 76-77. 193 Ibid., 4; 274-275. 79
shying away from urban narratives of industry and struggle to present simpler, tourist friendly narratives of life and work in Nova Scotia’s history. Folk schools also focus on these rural traditions, but with more transparency. In Ontario, they could bridge the gaps between developing regional tourism, recovering traditional skills and narratives of work, and organizing local communities. More importantly, by implementing a folk school structure at larger institutions like Fort William, folk school programming has the potential to remove the barriers that separate demonstrators and visitors, allowing for a more meaningful educational experience and the continuation of regional traditions of work and leisure in a more impactful context.
While performance is an integral aspect to presenting living historical narratives, recent literature criticizes the implications of a living history museum’s choices of performance for the collective memory of a region. In the case of Fort William Historical Park, these choices can challenge a national collective memory. Scott Magelssen connects the concept of performance in living history to a historical site’s pursuit of authentic historical narratives. He argues that living history theories and practices are full of contradictions, and a wide variety of understandings of what performance can mean has significant implications for presenting histories.194 When organizing living history programming, historical interpretation can fall short of presenting accurate narratives. He questions what is omitted from these narratives, noting that while character performance is heavily researched, interpretative choices at living history museums leave a “hole” in the historical narratives being presented.195 The holes often reflect the
“atrocities, erasures, events allowed to happen but not chosen as worthy of record, or events that were never allowed to happen by the existing order of things”196 He considers these “fiscal
194 Scott Magelssen, Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 45-46. 195 Magelssen, “Living History Museums and the Construction of the Real through Performance,” 71-72. 196 Ibid, 72. 80
narratives” – choices of content and performance which are not necessarily historically accurate, but derived from the political and economic motivations of the time period that the sites were conceptualized – and calls for living history museums to “re-examine their institutional goals and historiographic practices [as] the institutional representation of the past as realistic, living milieu is increasingly divergent from the many modes of visitor reception and play.”197 Identifying historical connections and trends with contemporary issues becomes more difficult due to the simpler narratives being presented, at times separating the history from the ‘real’ so distinctly that it is detrimental to the historical authenticity. “In presenting a sole time period and perspective of industrializing,” Ryan Trimm argues in his case study of the Beamish industrial living history village in England, “the museum dramatizes a world appearing to have arisen all by itself, without any need for innovations, products, raw materials or labor from a hazily sketched outside.”198
Definitions of performance also have implications for those who facilitate the interpretative programming at historical sites. Trimm argues that the concept of performance in living history museums must be analyzed from the perspective of those performing the historical narratives such as Dave Brown and the others who work as interpreters in Fort William’s Trades
Square. Trimm questions how these sites value those who work as performers at the park, arguing that it is the demonstrators who “shape the movements of visitors, who orient and frame objects and tasks, [and] who spin a narrative to position the ensemble.” The relationship between the demonstrator and the visitor is perhaps the most important part of living history programming. At living history museums, visitors spend significantly more time with
197 Magelssen, “Living History Museums and the Construction of the Real through Performance,” 71; Magelssen, Living History Museums: Undoing History through Performance, 66. 198 Trimm, “Taking You Back,” 542. 81
demonstrators than with objects and artefacts from the period. What differentiate these museums from traditional museums that house objects for visitors to look at is the presence of demonstrators, who present skills and crafts as part of educational programming that “undoes an understanding of heritage as simply material.” Trimm disagrees with how a living history site like Beamish categorizes those performing the historical interpretations as ‘demonstrators’, rather than considering them as ‘character interpreters’. He contends that simply considering the workers as Beamish demonstrators “disavows employees’ active role in shaping and guiding visitor understanding of a display. Rather, the stress is on a simple presentational role: a demonstrator demonstrates period objects gathered in a recreated tableau or shows visitors how a particular activity was performed.”199 Instead, Trimm argues that living history sites should place a greater emphasis on the ‘interpretation’ aspect of performance to create a more meaningful interaction between visitors and the historical narratives being presented.
Building on the arguments advanced by Magelssen and Trimm, we can reflect on the provincial government and National Heritage’s commitment to prioritizing the living history programming at Fort William. In defining different parts of Fort William Historical Park as
‘dominant’ and ‘contingent’ themes, we can see how government and National Heritage officials prioritized the significance of different performances to portray a certain narrative. The interpretative programming study commissioned by the province incorrectly evaluates the historical significance of living interpretations based on economic definitions largely derived from the historiography of the time period, and not the social or cultural significance of the work being portrayed at the site. While Fort William presents a different context than the one in which
Trimm and Magelssen frame their arguments, it still scales down the complexity of life for many
199 Ibid., 536. 82
18th and 19th century workers at a fur trading depot in favour of presenting visitors with simpler, tourist-friendly, narratives of work. It also de-emphasizes the current workers who are a part of the interpretive programming, and work to maintain the fort’s authenticity through manual labour and designing interpretative programming.
When visiting Fort William for a day, visitors may watch the canoe builder shape one rib of the birch canoe, see them sew a part of the gunwale, or maybe even try the canoe on the lake.
However, these experiences are a short glimpse of a long, laborious process that may not be effectively conveyed to visitors. Public historians, educators, heritage specialists, and community leaders must innovate participatory models of historical learning for the 21st century to pass on narratives of work that are a critical part of Canadian history. Effective participatory learning models can revolutionize community education; revitalizing worker heritage and unlocking historical narratives that interpreters and experts like Dave Brown can teach to those interested in
Canadian history.
3.4 Living History, Labour, and New Educational Models
While the living history model at Fort William was innovative in its early development and still preserves important narratives of Canadian history and heritage, there are clearly limitations to its value as an educational experience. Further inquiry by public historians into the topic of Fort William’s programming could frame the Fort William canoe program in the context of more effective labour educational models. The model of the ‘postmodern museum’, for instance, advocates for not only presenting the living history programming at museums, but also the “lights and wires” of the institution – a method of public history that challenges the retrofitting that Raphael Samuel presents as problematic in Theatres of Memory. John Urry explains that, since the late 1980s, postmodern museums have focused on using the institution as
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a “means of communication” of local heritage, rather than as a collection for scholarly use. This has ushered in an era of telling stories about the ordinary, or ‘mundane’, lives of people and locations. These stories are often worker histories. One way that postmodern museums achieve this is by revealing “how a particular exhibit was prepared for exhibition, and in some cases even how it was made to appear ‘authentic’.”200 I argue that transparency is important. Expanding the story of the Fort William canoe builders to include why the canoe program exists, the additional roles at the fort that the canoe builder fills (building maintenance, special event preparation, and other tasks), and how the program benefits the fort’s educational mission, could be an essential step towards enhancing historical narratives of work in a living history context.
Like living history sites and folks school, the next chapter will explore the physical public spaces available for workers in Ontario and how they can be adapted for active participation in the history-making process; particularly community museums and archives which offer both the opportunity and the space to organize, document, and teach public historical narratives. To achieve transparency and provide insight into the lights and wires of institutions, it is important to democratize the history-making process as Raphael Samuel advocates.
Establishing living history programming the emphasizes meaningful visitor participation – rather than passive observation – could be key to effective public history education. As historians, governments, and community leaders continue to develop understandings of commemorating worker histories in public settings, we must prioritize the stories we want to tell and investigate the most effective ways to tell them. Building birch bark canoes is good. Telling the story of canoe builders is better. But learning to build canoes, learning stories about the canoe’s role in
200 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London: SAGE Publications Ltd., 1990), 129-131. 84
the fur trade, and paddling them on the Kaministiquia River like Indigenous peoples and fur traders once did, might be best.
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Chapter 4 Community Archives and Narratives of Participation: Grassroots archiving, participatory history, and the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre
4.1 Community Archives and Participation in Public History Projects
A landmark event in space exploration that saw NASA launch a deep space probe containing a ‘golden record’ with a curated selection of audio that was destined to reach the edge of our solar system, the Voyager space program is one of my favourite parts of history. This is largely because it is a leading example of the convergence of science, history and popular culture, mostly thanks to Carl Sagan, whose career was defined by making science accessible to a public audience. A collection of the earth’s sounds, music, voices, and cultures, the Golden Record is an example of a different kind of archive – one that does not simply hold books, photos, and documents, but a wide variety of audio primary sources that present the ways that we have interpreted history and culture. Archives can take many forms and technological development has had a significant influence on how archives have changed. Digital archives have become more prevalent and historians have begun to evaluate their importance. The internet’s many archiving pages and applications have established communities of the like-minded. Strava, for instance, allows users to track their cycling rides and archive their ride history, while also sharing routes, elevation, times, and other details with fellow cyclists. The iNaturalist application allows users to identify plants and animals and archive their findings in different local community groups. The benefits of using online communities and archiving tools such as Reddit to complement peer-reviewed literature has also been advocated for by scientists and social
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scientists.201 While digital archives have become more prominent, physical archives have also been re-evaluated by scholars as a space for public education and radical change.
So far in this project we have examined various forms of public history, including monuments, depictions of living history, videos, music, and participatory education programs like Folk Schools, and the impacts that they can have for communities and their historical consciousness. In this chapter, I will investigate museums and archives as perhaps the most common spaces of history and heritage in communities, as well as spaces that have the potential for new approaches to developing novel public history projects like the Golden Record.
Museums and archives are ubiquitous in towns and cities across Ontario. They are valuable research resources for historians and are an effective way of making history and education accessible to the general public. They also present a terrific opportunity for advocacy groups and communities to engage in heritage debates. This chapter will also be a critique of stagnant forms of heritage. The Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial was certainly a significant achievement for
Toronto’s Chinese community, but it is still a static representation of history. Fort William is another example of not capitalizing on its potential for visitor participation and meaningful interactions with history. History is meant to be revised, and heritage should be continuously re- evaluated. Introducing new narratives of work in Ontario through more participatory, transparent forms of historical learning is crucial to ensuring that historical narratives of labour in Ontario – and across Canada – are not lost. Physical space is important, and a hands-on approach to the history-making process is key to unlocking the potential of public history and heritage as an educational tool. It can also help workers organize by working through the history-making
201 Rory P. Tannebaum, “Reddit and the Social Studies: Exploring the r/Democratic Curriculum,” Social Studies 109, no. 3 (May 2018): 167-175; Noriko Hara, Jessica Abbazio, and Kathryn Perkins, "An emerging form of public engagement with science: Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions on Reddit r/science," PLoS ONE 14, no. 5 (2019): 1-11. 87
process collaboratively. Grassroots labour archives may help capture worker heritage in a meaningful way.
While museums have clearly been developed as a space of leisure and education for locals and tourists alike, archives have historically been undervalued as a potential space for public engagement and a broader opportunity for historical education. Throughout this thesis I have argued that community participation is key to a democratic process of public history in Ontario.
In terms of worker heritage, it is essential that communities – and the advocates, worker organizations, trade unions, labour movements, political parties, and individuals that support workers in the community – explore new opportunities to document the local labour history and provide a space for debate and historical education. These final pages will examine archives as an untapped source of public historical education in Ontario. Labour archives are prevalent throughout the United States, but seemingly absent from Ontario institutions. Building on recent literature on the impact of community archives and their importance as a radical space for advocacy, I argue that community archives could play a powerful role in presenting historical narratives that are more reflective of a community’s labour heritage, as well as its collective values and goals. Like physical memorials and folk schools, archives are another tool for communities to participate in heritage discourse and organize workers through historical education.
Worker archives are not as prevalent in Canada as they are in the United States. Dozens of
American archives exist to document the history of organized labour movements, and to support their efforts in organizing. These efforts are more important than ever given the weakening of trade unions since the late 20th century, the transformation of the global economy into one that emphasizes technological development, and the rise of the gig economy. Some American labour
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archives are independent. Others work in conjunction with universities. These archives are meant to connect archivists, librarians, academics, and union members to identify and ensure the preservation of material that is of significance to labour movements, as well as provide access to these materials. The Labour Archives Section of the Society of American Archivists, for example, works to “promote communication among archivists, labor organizations, researchers, and institutions concerned with records in the field of labor, to advocate for the preservation of and access to labor records, and to develop and advance cooperative strategies and guidelines for ensuring comprehensive documentation of the labor movement.”202
Large worker archives like the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at
New York University and the Southern Labour archives at Georgia State University document the history of national and state labour movements, while others are local and focus on individual unions or forms of work, such as the Greater New Haven Labor History Research Center in
Connecticut and the Priscilla Shishido Library of International Longshore and Warehouse Union,
Local 142 in Hawaii. Many are also housed in museums of labour and industry. Canadian examples of worker archives are not as widespread. Schools like York University and McMaster
University maintain labour holdings, Simon Fraser University’s library hosts the Labour
Archives Fund, and there are countless labour holdings in provincial archives and at Library and
Archives Canada. However, many of the fonds and collections documenting the history of labour movements in Canada are buried in larger archival collections.
Large worker archives are undoubtedly important as a tool for public historians to document and preserve history. But in terms of participation for workers, smaller unions, and communities, local and independent archives are key to a move involved role in worker heritage for these
202 “Mission Statement,” Society of American Archivists, Labour Archives Section. https://www2.archivists.org/groups/labor-archives-section. (accessed January 14, 2020). 89
groups. If historians and heritage experts should encourage heritage activism in communities, as
I argue in the first chapter on the Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial, independent archives are an essential tool for communities. They are also an ideal tool to overcome the lack of transparency for historical narratives presented as worker heritage as in the case of Fort William.
Much of the literature on independent archives for communities and marginalized groups has emerged recently. Andrew Flinn writes that establishing public archives and museums is particularly significant. These forms of history activism “strive to make an active intervention in an authorised heritage narrative which [marginalized groups] perceive to be discredited and full of absences and erasures,” Flinn argues, “With the understanding that such interventions in challenging the authorised heritage will impact positively in different ways on members of their class, community and group.”203 Recent literature has highlighted the growth of independent, grassroots archives. Grassroots archives allow communities to document their history on their own terms to achieve the narrative interventions that Flinn describes. This is a position that is more participatory and a powerful historical and educational tool. Rather than consuming traditional forms of public history such as monuments and museums, participants can create, contribute, and manage archival collections, achieving the goals of heritage transparency for changing communities that I have advocated for.
Important studies of the benefits and limitations of grassroots archives for communities have emerged in the past decade. Scholars argue that communities often seek to establish and preserve identity, and address their desires and needs, through records.204 Many consider archives – which maintain, curate and present these collections of records – to be a versatile approach to public
203 Flinn, “Making history of struggle part of the struggle,” 35. 204 Jeanette A. Bastian and Ben Alexander, “Communities and archives – a symbiotic relationship,” In Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory, Bastian and Alexander eds. (London: Facet Publishing, 2009), xxi. 90
history as they are able to fulfill the varying needs of a community, as well as the varying definitions of ‘community’.205 Given their size and community-centered approach to documentation and preservation, grassroots archives are particularly valuable for unserved communities and marginalized groups. Community archive advocates posit that grassroots archives can “directly address” the priorities and needs of local communities more effectively than established university or government archives like the York or McMaster holdings, and are
“often positioned as alternative venues for groups that have been marginalized, ignored, or shut out of mainstream institutions to seize the means by which to document their own pasts and engage in self‐representation, identity construction, and empowerment.”206 Studies of independent archives attribute this unique position to community-based archivists clearly
“identifying as activists, advocates, or community organizers, [which] shapes their understandings of community archives work and the missions of community archives.”207
Like Flinn’s arguments in favour of archival projects that improve communities, other researchers have made similar connections between community archives, public history, and activism. Grassroots archives not only provide flexibility, but they allow activists to advance social justice causes on their own terms. The first step is to recognize the “absences in national histories” and identifying why these narrative are not represented.208 The second step is recognizing that collecting and preserving documents is inherently political.209 The final step is to establish a cooperative process that uses the advantageous tools that archives provide to push
205 Ibid. 206 Michelle Caswell, “Community‐centered collecting: finding out what communities want from community archives,” Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 51, no.1 (2014): 1-2. 207 Marika Cifor, Michelle Caswell, Alda Allina Migoni and Noah Geraci, “What We Do Crosses over to Activism”: The Politics and Practice of Community Archives,” The Public Historian 40, no. 2 (2018): 69. 208 Andrew Flinn, “Archival Activism: Independent and Community-led Archives, Radical Public History and the Heritage Professions,” Interactions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies 7, no.2 (2011): 5-6. 209 Ibid, 1; 5. 91
for change in the community itself. Consequently, professional archivists and heritage workers are required to “make this active engagement a part of their professional ethos and to shift their focus from a solely custodial and institutional approach to something which is equally concerned with significant archival and heritage collections inside and outside the walls of their archive.”210
This cooperation could be particularly helpful for labour movements working to improve working conditions. Connecting public history and advocacy requires institutions to pursue a more collaborative approach to helping communities document their history. A collaborative
“active and activist approach” to community archiving projects “encourages professional archivists and other heritage workers to engage more fully with a range of external activities and all sections of society whilst seeking better to reflect diversity in the archive” writes Andrew
Flinn.211 Collaboration, participation, and a unifying goal supports communities, trade unions, educators, activists, and workers to pursue public history projects that present narratives that are locally significant. Learning and preserving a community’s history can be a powerful statement of public history and is a significant step in addressing issues in communities that workers live and work in, including environmental issues, gentrification, and racial injustice.212
Archives also provide a distinct space for groups to organize. Digital history archives are innovative and connect people across regions and borders and are a good beginning structure for grassroots archives given their accessibility and low operating costs. But they are limited.
Physical archives offer a place to organize, interact, and learn. Studying histories of work has helped immigrant worker organizations to organize and assert their rights in the past and could support workers in Ontario to assert their rights and participate in public history debates now and
210 Flinn, “Archival Activism: Independent and Community-led Archives,” 16. 211 Ibid., 1. 212 Cifor, Caswell, Migoni, and Geraci, “Politics and Practice of Community Archives,”” 86-88. 92
in the future. The FCCRWC, for example, has evolved from relying on the Railroad Memorial to tell the story of Chinese immigrant workers to maintaining an online archive on its Ties That
Bind website in conjunction with the Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO) for the documentation of its work. This includes a timeline of the organization’s achievements, a collection of oral history interviews on the Chinese immigrant experience in Canada, and historical information and primary source excerpts. The physical oral history files, as well as other Chinese Canadian holdings, are maintained by the MHSO. What the FCCRWC digital archive does not provide is a space for the Chinese community to interact and work on public history projects collaboratively. The Railroad Workers Memorial was, and continues to be, the space for Toronto’s Chinese community to celebrate its heritage and role in Canadian labour history. In 2016, a community-built Chinese Canadian archive was established at the Toronto
Reference Library. Contributions to the archive came from the community and the public history project won the 2018 Heritage Toronto Award for Public History.213 However, the collection is maintained by the Toronto Public Library staff. The opportunities for community participation are limited, and the meaningful interactions with history and heritage that emerge from an in- depth participation in archiving projects is not realized to its fullest extent.
While historians and archivists have the expertise, a more comprehensive collaboration between historians, archivists and librarians, unions, and communities, could develop archives into a space for organization and social change while also documenting important narratives of
Ontario’s labour history in a central space; much like the Labour Archives Section of the Society of American Archivists in the United States mandates in its mission. A similar critique can be
213 “Chinese Canadian Archive.” Toronto Public Library, City of Toronto. https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/chinese-canadian-archive/. (accessed January 12, 2021 (accessed January 14, 2021). 93
made for Fort William Historical Park’s visitor programming. Visitors can access the fort and its associated historical archive, but engaging with the living history programming, artefact inventory, and educational programming in a meaningful way is often not encouraged. A more passive, traditional interpretation of regional – and national – worker heritage is what is emphasized. The Workers’ Arts and Heritage Centre (WAHC) in Hamilton, Ontario is perhaps the province’s closest semblance of a community museum and archive. Subsequent paragraphs will explore the WAHC’s development as a worker’s museum and heritage institution and consider its potential as a worker archive that focuses on community participation.
4.2 Labour Archives and Hamilton’s Workers Arts and Heritage Centre: Presenting Industrial History in North America
Worker archives are not as prevalent in Canada as they are in the United States, but the
WAHC is a good example of an educational centre dedicated to Ontario working-class histories and heritage. Opened in November 1996, the WAHC was founded as an organization with the goal of opening a worker’s museum to commemorate Ontario’s industrial history. The centre was supported by funding from the City of Hamilton and a $1.3 million grant from the NDP government led by Premier Bob Rae to renovate and operate the Custom House – a National
Historic Site and still the WAHC’s current location.214 The community engagement and collaboration that Andrew Flinn and other heritage advocates for community archiving projects call for is evident in the WAHC structure and missions. The initial project began in 1988 when a group of “labour representatives, artists, curators, teachers, archivists, community activists and academics” began to coordinate and document “changing relationships between communities and unions,” including narratives of women and work, immigrant workers, and racialized labour
214 “Workers' museum opens in Hamilton,” The Globe and Mail, November 9, 1996. C6. Canadian Business & Current Affairs Database. 94
in Canadian history.215 The Ontario Worker's Arts and Heritage Centre was officially established shortly after.
In 1991 the organization proposed a heritage centre “devoted solely to labour [that] would be the first of its kind in Canada” following two years of negotiation with the provincial government.216 While it was partly envisioned as an archive for labour memorabilia and exhibits tracing the history of the labour movement in Ontario, the heritage centre would also provide a space for marginalized groups to document their histories. In an interview with The Globe and
Mail that same year, McMaster University labour studies professor Robert Storey, then the
President of the Ontario Worker's Arts and Heritage Centre, explained the “urgent need to protect materials that are being lost or ignored by other institutions.”217 It also set a goal to differentiate models of storytelling, placing a greater emphasis on art, media, and community participation. Its programming has included conferences, education programming for schools, historic city walking tours, community outreach, journals and newsletters, offering travelling exhibits, and producing oral histories of local labour movements.218
Hamilton’s de-industrial history can be traced to the 1960s and 1970s. While Lowell’s manufacturing was focused on textiles and Monterey’s was focused on fishing and canning,
Hamilton is one of many heavy industry cities that experienced an industry exodus as manufacturing moved to developing countries and was slowly replaced by an economic re- structuring that prioritized the service and financial sectors. Beginning in the late 1960s cities
215 Mary Keczan-Ebos, “The Ontario Workers Arts and Heritage Centre: art, communities and unions,” Cultural Geographies 9 (2002): 349-350. 216Jeff Moriarty, “Museum for labour proposed, Group appeals for funding,” The Globe and Mail, February 18, 1991. C1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers 217 Ibid. 218 Mary Keczan-Ebos, “Art, communities and unions,” 393-394; Moriarty, “Museum for labour proposed, Group appeals for funding,” The Globe and Mail, February 18, 1991. C1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 95
like Hamilton began to consider how to adapt to the changes – what Tracy Neumann calls “urban renewal eras.”219 Unlike steel cities like Pittsburgh, Hamilton’s factories did not completely collapse which made for a slower process of de-industrialization.220 Some remained open through the 1980s and 1990s, and STELCO continues to manufacture steel in Hamilton today.
By the 1990s urban renewal projects had been under development for decades and coalitions of business, political, and community interests were working to support the city as it underwent economic and social transformations.221 The WAHC emerged from these debates as a voice for preserving worker heritage in Hamilton, and Ontario as a whole.
The importance of the everyday labourer experience in Hamilton is crucial to understanding the WAHC and its mandate. Its collections include pins and flags that were the symbols of unions and advocacy groups from Hamilton, Ontario, and other provinces, and a permanent exhibition details the founding of Hamilton and the importance of industry and labour movements in developing the city. Its first major program, the Workers’ City project, was designed to document places in Hamilton that were significant to workers and their daily lives.222
Following the announcement of the city’s support of the Custom House acquisition in 1995,
Wayne Marston, President of the Hamilton and District Labour Council at the time, remarked on the ability of the city council to “share the vision of ordinary people."223 Its inclusion of art, culture, and community emphasizes the importance of the everyday contributions of everyone in the community. The WAHC does something that other institutions do not: it clearly presents
219 Tracy Neumann, Remaking the Rustbelt: The Post-Industrial Transformation of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 22. 220 Ibid., 6 221 Lachlan MacKinnon, “Coal and Steel, Goodbye to All That: Symbolic Violence and Working-Class Erasure in Postindustrial Landscapes,” Special edition of Labour/Le Travail 16, no.1 (March 2019): 116. 222 Robert B. Kristofferson, "The Past Is at Our Feet: The Workers' City Project in Hamilton, Ontario," Labour / Le Travail 41 (1998): 181-182. 223 Lee Prokaska, “Labor heritage centre put into capital budget: New life for historic Custom House,” The Spectator, March 10, 1995. B3. Proquest Historical Newspapers. 96
labour movements and working-class histories as the foundation of Ontario’s development by focusing on the everyday lives of the community and how different interests in the community shaped Hamilton and continue to preserve its history. Understanding Hamilton’s everyday past also helps everyday people make sense of current workers struggles. Tony Bennett has argued that museums in the post-World War II periods have largely become institutions that present these everyday, working-class histories as consumers of heritage seek relatable experiences.
Museum programming began to present the lives, habits, and customs of contemporary working classes or working classes of pre-industrial societies. However, the interest in including these stories in museum programming is flawed. Bennett writes that the representation of these social classes lacks the complexities of the reality of their everyday lives. They are “mortgaged to the dominant culture” and present an idealized depiction of daily life that “[stalks] the middle-class imagination.”224
Recent literature has also indicated that everyday heritage plays a significant role in placemaking for communities, allowing them to express a distinct identity that is representative of their place in urban landscapes.225 In the case of the Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial, the goal of community organizers was to commemorate the everyday experiences of workers building the CPR and to recognize their personal experiences as immigrants in Toronto. At Fort
William, the goal of the living history programming is to literally present how those involved in the fur trade lived their daily lives. Worker heritage presents historical narratives that are important, and relatable. It is subsequently a logical place for communities to become involved
224 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. (London: Routledge, 1995), 109-110. 225 Saruhan Mosler, “Everyday heritage concept as an approach to place-making process in the urban landscape,” Journal of Urban Design 24, no.5 (2019): 778-779. 97
in the history-making process and commemorate their own histories. Grassroots, community archives might be the place to start.
While it maintains collections that document the history of local, provincial, and national labour struggles, the WAHC is primarily museum. It keeps a small archival collection but instead focuses on educational programming, its permanent exhibits, and a series of rotating exhibits.
The WAHC’s educational programming has historically been creative and hands-on. Arts workshops, historic Workers’ City walking tours, and Zine-making workshops, among others, all have visitors and members of the community participating in a wide range of ways to ‘do’ history. A next step for the heritage centre could be to create a space for a permanent grassroots, community archive. The WAHC has produced excellent community archiving projects before.
Its recent exhibition on the former Hamilton neighbourhood of Brightside – a neighbourhood that was home to Italian, Polish, and Ukrainian immigrant families in the early 1900s and slowly disappeared over time – was put together by collecting sources directly from people who lived in
Brightside before it was subsumed by highways and industry. The exhibit featured decades of photos, letters, maps, and news articles of a neighbourhood which no longer exists. Putting the design and production of archiving projects like the Brightside one directly in the hands of the community, with the support of experts, could lead to an even more meaningful participation in the history-making process.
The benefits for workers could go beyond documenting their histories. Labour movements are founded on organization and solidarity. Neoliberalism, globalization, and a rapidly changing economy have forced organized labour to the margins. As Flinn argues, collective, community education projects like archiving could be the most effective way to document voices on the margins and bring labour movements back into a greater role in
98
communities and public consciousness. Community archiving projects would use public history to facilitate the organization of workers in a non-traditional way. Worker community archives could serve communities in multiple capacities: documenting their histories as urban landscapes change, organizing workers and local industry, increasing community educational opportunities, and building understandings of the theories and practices of heritage in Ontario.
If the goal of new educational models for public history is to increase participation in the history-making process, the WAHC could also explore the folk school model of learning.
Organizing courses led by local experts that teach industrial skills that were important to the development of Hamilton could present new opportunities for the community to learn and organize. This may be a trickier to implement than the courses taught at the North House Folk
School given the large-scale industry that influenced Hamilton’s development and the funding and equipment required to run the courses. However, the centre already focuses its programming on collaborative learning approaches using the expertise of different groups in the community including performance artists, teachers, graphic artists, and local unions. It is consequently one of the few spaces in Ontario that has the foundation to introduce a high-quality folk school model of historical learning successfully. The WAHC excels at teaching visitors about the history of work locally, provincially, and nationally. Continuing to work collaboratively with the community and re-inventing the WAHC’s historical programming through more participatory methods of ‘doing’ history could be a powerful step towards establishing meaningful, transparent narratives of work in Ontario.
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Chapter 5 Conclusion: New Narratives of Work in Ontario
As economies shift and communities change, revitalizing labour movements and heritage in Ontario should be prioritized. Some of the examples of worker heritage sites in Ontario that I have presented including the Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial and Fort William Historical
Park have not revised their programming to make it relevant today, or compromised on their narratives of work that they are telling in order to fill a larger, institutional plan for work and leisure in a changing urban landscape. Others, like the WAHC, continue to re-invent their programming to meet the needs of the community and should continue to do so in a more involved way – one of which could be permanent community archiving projects. History is meant to be revised, and so is heritage. Introducing new narratives of work in Ontario through more participatory, transparent forms of historical learning is crucial to ensuring that historical narratives of labour are not lost. Physical space is important, and a hands-on approach to the history-making process is key to unlocking the potential of public history and heritage as an educational tool.
Physical space can also help workers organize by working through the history-making process collaboratively. Creating heritage programming that is more involved for communities and placing the heritage-making process directly in the hands of workers and their communities, could facilitate these revitalization efforts. Most importantly, living with heritage is more impactful than relegating heritage to fill the role of leisure and there are different public history models that could achieve this goal, and many more for labour historians and public historians to investigate. Both the folk school model and community archiving projects would be a good place to start. Interactive, community-based heritage must be embraced by institutions, historians, and community activists if we want to tell authentic stories of labour in public history contexts.
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Participating in the history is an impactful way to learn about history and that is what finally clicked for me when working with stone masons. I also learned that people like to stop by the work site and chat about history and labour, and it was always fun to listen to their thoughts on history and heritage in their community and why its history is important to them.
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