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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
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Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice, eds. Creating Historical
Memory: English-Canadian Women and the Work of History, (Vancouver:
UBC Press 1997)
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BRINGING TOGETHER a collection of essays
highlighting the lives and works of women engaged in the writing
and teaching of history over the century spanning the 1870s to
the 1970s, Beverly Boutilier and Alison Prentice address the creation
of historical memory both inside and outside the academy. Through
these portraits of the individual and collective efforts of "amateur"
and "professional" historians, the editors suggest that
because of the responsibilities and constraints associated with
gender, women viewed history from a different perspective than
male historians, addressed topics overlooked by men, and initiated
social, cultural, and regional studies well before these became
acceptable within the academy.
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Divided into four thematic sections,
the book traces what might be viewed as the "evolution"
of historical writing by women of Anglo-Celt background as they
moved from outside to inside the academy. The first section, "Community
Building," looks at the individual and collective efforts
of women engaged in writing nation-building history from a social
rather than political perspective; an approach that allowed them
to incorporate women into the story. Included are profiles of
two Victorian women, Agnes Maule Machar and Sarah Anne Curzon,
whose writings were influenced by their religious and social convictions,
and a study of the Ontario Womens Institutes involvement
in writing local histories. Despite differences, they shared a
common interest in creating a history that would inspire Canadians
to greater feeling for their country.
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The second section, "Transitions,"
profiles historians who, through study and adoption of professional
historical research methods, bridged the gap between "amateur"
and "professional" history, still working outside the
academy but gradually building links to the inside. Women living
within Catholic religious communities engaged in historical writing
in the course of their contemplative and record-keeping practices.
Like the Womens Institutes, their work was collaborative.
Individual women may have been prime movers; however, individual
authorship was rarely acknowledged in publications. Cloistered
women initially wrote to preserve historical memory within their
own communities. It was in their work as educators that they began
to expand their mandate. As their educational institutions strove
to gain standing and recognition in the broader community, these
women were required to go beyond the convent walls for training
in academic disciplines. This process inevitably helped to professionalize
their approaches to history, and also encouraged them to write
for a wider audience.
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Also operating outside of the academy,
Constance Lindsay Skinner and Isabel Murphy Skelton gained a degree
of professional respect and support from some male academics through
their personal affiliations and innovative combination of "scientific"
history research methods, combining cultural and social history.
Self-made and earning her precarious living by the pen, Skinner
scorned much about the academic world, yet depended upon and valued
her connections with those academics who recognized her talents.
Married to Oscar D. Skelton, well-known political economist and
senior public servant, Isabel Skelton was less financially strapped.
However, her desire to engage in research and writing was often
thwarted by family responsibilities. In spite of obstacles, Skinner
and Skelton produced works of originality in content and approach.
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The third section, titled "The
Academy," looks at women either within or on the edges of
the academy, articulating the challenges they faced in being accepted
into the history profession, regardless of training and talents.
Often receiving encouragement in undergraduate study or even at
the Masters level, women found that few professors encouraged
them to go further. The few Canadian women who did obtain doctorates
were almost always passed over for permanent faculty appointments.
Their options were to leave the country for better prospects or
stay for poorly paid sessional work. Others taught in public schools
or worked in archives. Not surprisingly, independent means and
freedom from family demands often determined whether and when
a woman historian could practice her craft.
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The last section, "New Departures,"
looks at the development of womens history as a category
of study within universities during the 1970s. The chapter suggests
that while some of the interest in womens history grew out
of the feminist movement, the relationship between women historians
and feminist activism is not a given, nor is it always a comfortable
one. The essay further suggests that in spite of gains women historians
need to be proactive to both maintain and improve the status of
women in their profession.
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In this collection of historiographical
essays, a number of themes emerge. The authors argue that women
have been involved in historical work for a long time, but that
the professionalization that occurred around the turn of the century
excluded women both from history and the writing of history. Because
gender shaped so much in their lives finances, responsibilities
to family, and restrictions in mobility, for example they
tended to write about events, people, and places within their
local areas whose experiences bore similarities to their work.
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Of the individuals highlighted
in this text, all had some parental encouragement and support
for their intellectual pursuits. These women initially engaged
in collective community history without constraints on their lines
of inquiry or methods. But when faced with the prospect of outside
critical attention to their work, the standards of male scholarship
imposed new rules. In the case of Womens Institutes, there
were internal differences as to how "professional" they
ought to be. In the case of the nuns, as members of their community
gained in academic training, their desire to shape their community
histories for an outside critical audience grew.
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While one of the express purposes
of the book is to "call into question the legitimacy of the
amateur/professional dichotomy as applied to the term historian,"
the implicit message is that progress is measured by womens
attainment of professional status. Contemporary tensions among
women making history inside and outside the academy are only briefly
addressed. This account does not go beyond the 1970s, however.
With the professionalization of womens history, one wonders
whether there is a danger of creating a new canon that excludes
"amateurs": minority women, feminist activists, and
those exploring family and community stories in non-academic ways.
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Nevertheless, this eclectic collection
of essays illustrates how women, because of their lived experience,
recorded history differently from men . In some cases, they initiated
new ways of approaching history through interdisciplinary methods
and erased the false boundaries of public and private worlds.
Without addressing the overtly political topics of male historians,
their act of writing women into history was sometimes political.
This collection does not pretend to be definitive. However, it
does point to the existence of a vibrant alternative stream of
Canadian historiography that grew alongside the professional male-stream
historiography and has yet to be fully explored.
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Sharon MacDonald
University of New Brunswick
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Gerald Friesen, Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication
and Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2000)
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I HAVE BEEN accused by western Canadian
friends of revealing my eastern Canadian sensibilities in my measurement
of distance. When asked the distance between Montreal and Toronto,
I answer five hours, a measure of time linked to my experience
with a specific form of technology, the automobile. The translation
of space into an experiential unit of the time required to drive
the distance gives vast space concrete meaning for me. A given
technology, in this case a car, orders my understanding of time
and space. This link between time, space, technology, and experience
is the focus of Gerald Friesens Citizens and Nation:
An Essay on History, Communication and Canada.
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Gerald Friesen has written a brave
and important book. It is a modern or perhaps more accurately
a postmodern and contemporary project in the older tradition
of national syntheses of W.L. Mortons The Canadian Identity
(1961) or Arthur Lowers From Colony to Nation: A History
of Canada (1946). The book addresses the question of why Canada
is a "public identity" and presents a version of history
emphasizing continuity with the expressed intent of being meaningful
to contemporary society. In Citizens and Nation, Friesen,
a University of Manitoba historian, proposes a radically different
thematic focus and periodization of Canadian history based on
the dominant mode of communication and culture. His chronology
introduces four overlapping periods bridging "time immemorial"
to the present. It begins with an era Friesen refers to as "oral-traditional,"
proceeds to a "textual-settler" period, continues onto
"print capitalism," and concludes with our contemporary
experience of "screen capitalism." The author is especially
interested in how these particular regimes of communication shape
the experience of space and time. Within each of these communication
and technological eras, Friesen focuses on an "ordinary"
individual or a group of ordinary individuals to explore his argument.
One of the attractive qualities of this temporal division is its
geographic flexibility, as these different communication systems
occur concurrently in diverse parts of Canada. This method of
periodization permits chronological overlapping to recognize the
variance of place. The dominant mode of communication for Elizabeth
Goudies Labrador of the 1930s is therefore very different
from the urban Vancouver experience of Phyllis Knight during the
exact same years. In addition to proposing a new narrative framework,
Citizens and Nations is also a study of Canadian historiography
itself. As the narrative of national history proceeds, Friesen
explores the ways in which English-speaking, Canadian historians
have attempted to create a synthesized national history from this
vast and diverse geographic space.
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Friesen begins his study with the
examination of a northern aboriginal family through Graydon McCreas
1983 National Film Board documentary Summer of the Loucheux:
Portrait of a Northern Indian Family. This unusual source
is used to explore the "oral-traditional" mode of Aboriginal
peoples to demonstrate how the oral story-telling tradition connects
to historical and contemporary concerns, causing problems of cultural
understanding for those ingrained with the notion of a clear differentiation
between empirical fact and myth. In his efforts to emphasize continuity,
Friesen recognizes Aboriginal people as one of the founding peoples
of Canada but acknowledges that their stories have not been integrated
into the myths of other Canadians.
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The second section, characterized
by what Friesen refers to as the "textual-settler" move
from an oral to a literate society, was marked by the arrival
of European immigrants and spanned the period from European contact
to the 20th century. Friesen uses the example of Elizabeth Goudie,
born in 1902 in Labrador, to represent the last generation of
"pioneers" which stretched according to place from the
17th to the mid-20th century. For this group of people, written
texts supplemented oral communication and Friesen makes an effort
to stress the many social, familial, and economic attributes this
group shared with Aboriginal peoples. While Aboriginals and settlers
shared a common experience of "natural" time and space,
Friesen acknowledges that important differences also emerged in
terms of the role of church, law, and government.
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The third section of the book,
organized under the rubric of "Print-Capitalist National
Societies," will likely be of greatest interest and the source
of greatest contention to readers of this journal. Here, through
the life of Phyllis Knight, a German immigrant whose memoir was
published as A Very Ordinary Life (1974), Friesen turns
his attention to themes such as the alienation of labour, waged
employment, gender, and ethnicity. Friesen also wants his readers
to see this period as a time when ordinary people responded to
new manifestations of time and space, such as waged work and technology,
and adopted strategies and tools to shape their economic, political,
and social worlds. In other words, common people learned to respond
through participation in the institutions of the state and shaped
society through associations such as political parties, unions,
and education. Friesen uses this period to present a historiographical
discussion counterposing "progressive social" and "conservative
political" streams of Canadian history. In a juxtaposition
of the formers emphasis on the transition "from feudalism
to capitalism" and the latters emphasis on the "convergence
of technological and political factors in the creation of the
modern Canadian state," he concludes that they are both "too
narrowly economic, and insufficiently cultural, to convey the
distinctiveness of the Canadian experience." (122) He closes
this argument with the assertion that both these historical traditions
are less relevant today and holds up the cultural turn as a potential
direction which would keep a history of Canada meaningful.
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The final section, entitled "Screen
Capitalism," allows Friesen to bring this story up to the
present. Expanding from oral interviews, Ken Drydens The
Moved and the Shaken: The Story of One Mans Life (1993)
and the memoirs of Simonne Monet-Chartrand, Friesen sees the recent
past coinciding with unprecedented technological changes in the
experience of time as space and the coexistence of "insecurity
and plenty." (168) In this section, Friesen emphases how
ordinary people face globalization, and cast doubt on both their
government and their own agency as citizens, expressing skepticism
about the capacity of any state to govern well.
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This is undoubtedly a clever and
thought-provoking study. It is a case where the enthusiastic reviewers
quotes on the back of the book do not exaggerate. Not surprising
for such an innovative book, I came away with unease. In the first
place, I remain uncertain about the intended audience. Although
it is written in an engaging style, it is not a volume likely
to displace popular (and traditional) general histories such as
Craig Brown et als An Illustrated History of Canada
or Desmond Mortons A Short History of Canada. The
context and narrative of this volume are not sufficiently filled
out or developed to be easily accessible for those unfamiliar
with the general narrative, debates, and themes of English Canadian
history. This book, which Friesen modestly refers to as an essay,
is more creative, more challenging, and for those grounded in
its debates, more interesting. I suspect that Citizens and
Nations with its origins in international communications theory,
economics, and politics will find its greatest, and perhaps most
influential audience in graduate courses.
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The book has other tensions. Friesen
adopts an intimacy with his historical subjects and refers to
them by their first name an easy familiarity I did not
share. The result was some ahistorical discomfort for me as women
such as Phyllis Knight and Simonne Monet-Chartrand became "Phyllis"
and "Simonne." The narrative strategy of focusing on
individuals succeeds as an engaging approach for highlighting
the "heroic" experience of ordinary Canadians, but this
emphasis on individuals is in conflict with the importance of
movements and communities to Friesens arguments and perhaps
even with the notion of a common culture. At the level of culture,
while the book is an important contribution to English-language
Canadian history, despite a conscious and well-meaning attempt
to include Francophone Québec, the bridge is uneasy. There
is a failure to differentiate the great disparity in international
power between the English and French languages in discussions
of globalization and communication. This is perhaps a missed opportunity.
Finally, and most significantly, I was not convinced that economics
and politics or class and gender are in any way less "relevant"
today for understanding the dramatic pace of change in the present
or the past. In the end, despite what he says, and based on what
he actually does in the book, I do not believe that Friesen believes
this either. While I concur with Friesens use of culture
and technology as the means to make history more meaningful to
the current generation of students of Canadian history, I maintain
that it is important to defend the importance of economics, politics,
class, and gender, especially as they were/ are shaped by culture
and technology.
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This is a book which must be read
by anyone seriously interested in Canadian (however you define
it) history. I do not think you have to adopt all of Friesens
conclusions or assumptions to benefit greatly. This is a synthesis
that manages to integrate the presence of Aboriginal peoples throughout
the entire narrative. The incorporation of time and space as changing
historical experiences and the way they connect to the experience
of citizenship has altered the way I see the past. What more can
you ask from a book?
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Suzanne Morton
McGill University
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Bob Russell, More with Less: Work Reorganization in the Canadian
Mining Industry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1999)
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BOB RUSSELL, a well-respected sociologist
whose earlier book was on employment issues, has produced an original
study of Saskatchewan mining and the reorganization it has undergone.
He interrogates his subject with a sophisticated understanding
of labour process, theory, and methods. For the most part the
book is accessible to a general audience but most suitable for
graduate students or other researchers. Senior undergraduates
would be challenged by the specificity of the debates and research
techniques. As a contribution to the scholarly community on work,
it is excellent. He uses novel evidence and intensive research
to power his analysis.
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The mining industry has been transformed
from a labour-intensive to capital-intensive production with the
mechanization of underground and automation of surface operations
(milling, smelting, and refining). This process has been underway
for some time and much of the attention dedicated to this industry
has focused on the political economy of equipment replacing people
in direct production, and the weakness of linkages to equipment
manufacture. The staples tradition has also focused on market
fluctuations for resource products. Bob Russell has chosen to
focus on work re-organization, including developments in managerial
strategies associated with new production systems. That is not
to say he has totally neglected the traditional issues. He notes
that the mines he examines are on the edge of underground robotics
since potash production lends itself to this, and rich uranium
deposits in highly risky areas provide enormous inducement. Computerization
certainly has a key role in the mills he examines. In common with
earlier work, he notes what he graphically calls "job hemorrhaging,"
indicating workers concerns about seniority and bumping-rights
in light of these forces.
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Russell organizes his analysis
around the paradigms of the transformations contained in the abstractions
of Fordism to post-Fordism and industrial to post-industrial work
as forms of industrial governance. His main finding, and title
for the book, is "More with Less," by which he means,
the common theme regardless of the managerial "packaging"
is more work for fewer workers who receive, relatively, less pay
for more work expected. His focus is on four mining companies
with five mine sites in Saskatchewan, four producing potash and
one uranium. These companies and mines provide a natural experiment
made messy by rapid corporate restructuring, including extensive
privatization of crown corporations. His mode of analysis is not
case studies but comparisons of sites and occupations. Russell
claims the comparisons come from variations in the cultures of
employment each provides with respect to the post-Fordist and
post-industrial trajectories.
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This mode of analysis is related
to the practices and implications for workers experiences
as derived from extensive questionnaire-based interviewing. The
unit of analysis is the workplace, not the community (as with
Meg Luxtons More than a Labour of Love, 1980).
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Russell analyzes the extent
of post-Fordism, characterized by competitive flexibility, leading
to an intensification of work effort whereby multi-skilling of
workers is at the expense of the de-skilling of jobs. Given the
range of cases in his comparison and rapid changes they undergo
over time, at best there is a hybridization of Fordist models
in use, as revealed by his comparison of five sites. Job reassignments
and job expansions are common experiences for the reduced workforces
at all sites.
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Post-industrialism Russell associates
with two processes: "the social division of labour (what
is produced) and changes in the technical division of labour (how
items are produced)." (10) His study allows him to investigate
only the second of these, which he equates to changing occupations
and their requirements (operationalized as operator versus maintenance
occupations in either mines or mills).
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He concludes: "The post-Fordist
firms and the post-industrial occupations in our study show no
more consistent propensity to adopt those practices that have
been singled out as being responsible for the reskilling of labour
than their counterparts. What then is behind the common trend
pertaining to skill that runs across both occupational categories
and employers managerial strategies?" (158) The common
answer is job expansion as expressed in multitasking. With this
insight, he casts new light on the complex concept of skill and
the labour process debates surrounding it. He also addresses implications
for production politics in the form of grievances, disciplining
workers, union activism, sabotage, and job harassment. One of
the most novel features is the remote mine at Key Lake which is
characterized by "radically spacialized industrial relations"
as workers shuffled in and out on two crews who work twelve-hours
shifts for a week at a time.
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More with Less is recommended
as a key reference work for those interested in post-Fordist and
post-industrial debates about labour processes, skill, and managerial
practices. It provides a strong base for these discussions and
reveals the complexity of theoretically-informed empirical research,
especially when the ground beneath our feet shifts so rapidly.
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Wallace Clement
Carleton University
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Gordon Hak, Turning Trees into Dollars: The British Columbia
Coastal Lumber Industry 1858-1913 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press 2000)
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GORDON HAKS BOOK is a welcome study
about British Columbias forest industry during the 19th
and early-20th centuries. The work begins with the impetus for
substantial lumbering in British Columbia the 1858 gold
strike. It concludes in 1913 with the United States lowering its
tariff barriers to wood from Canada, thereby opening a new era
for provincial timbering. Largely an economic and political history,
Professor Hak corrects popular misconceptions, refines the staples
interpretive paradigm, and addresses the inadequacies of previous
provincial forest industry studies. Framed within a capitalist
paradigm, Hak weaves his history around the interrelated relationships
of market exchange, government and lumber company policies, timber
technologies, workers, and conservation impulses.
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Turning Trees into Dollars
opens with a sound introductory overview. Chapters 1 to 3 look
at the lumber industry from the perspective of mill owners. Chapter
1 shows the unfolding significance of local, continental prairie
West, and international markets in framing the provinces
timber industry until World War I, and the governments role
in shaping those three markets. The following two chapters focus
on the structure of the lumber industry. Hak finds that coastal
timber production was not so much characterized by monopoly capital
as by entrepreneurial capital, ownership instability, and a wide
variety in the sizes of mill companies. In terms of mill ownership,
Hak discovers a significant pattern of British control until the
1880s, after which central Canadian entrepreneurial and local
ownership became more pronounced. Paralleling the varieties and
decentralized nature of mill ownership was the volatile, competitive
nature of the industry that neither state aid nor trade associations
were ever able to surmount.
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The next three chapters examine
more closely the relationship between business and government
in framing commercial lumbering. Chapter 4 looks at the limited
role the Dominion government played in British Columbia forestry,
but the importance the provincial government exercised over the
provinces forest lands and industry. Retaining forest land
ownership, except for the railway belts, meant the provincial
government set the framework for the timber industry most directly
through timber leases and licenses. Hak shows how the government
also shaped the industry through such means as fire regulations
and log-scaling policies.
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Chapter 5 discusses early social
and political critics of forest use and practices in the province,
as well as how and why those voices gave way to a scientific conservation
movement in the 1890s. Here, as elsewhere in North America, the
conservation movement grew from utilitarian fears about a timber
famine, climate changes, streamflow, and the need to safeguard
urban watersheds. To turn-of-the-century forest conservationists,
waste created by timber theft, fire, and inappropriate cutting
practices would be replaced by wise, rational, scientific management
for sustained use. It was a position that the progressive wing
of the lumber industry could and did support in their pursuit
of stabilized markets.
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Chapter 6 largely explores the
maturation of the scientific conservation perspective and its
embodiment in the Forest Act of 1912. Rather than viewing the
Forest Act as a reform measure, however, Hak argues that the act,
and conservation measures in general, remained securely within
a dominant cultural paradigm where market imperatives and business
interests trumped biological considerations and where scientific,
technological, and political decision-making followed suit. Still,
Hak makes clear that although government and industrial lumbermen
allied by the early 20th century to increasingly structure a more
integrated and consolidated lumber industry in corporate hands,
independent logging companies continued to be a viable and significant
economic and political presence. Not until the 1930s would corporate
capitalism exercise hegemony over the British Columbia timber
industry.
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The final three chapters detail
the growing industrialization of the timber industry, and the
interplay between technology and labour in the production process
for both milling and logging operations. Hak shows that industrialization
not only increased production but speeded up labour exploitation
as well as job-related accidents. In addition, he delineates the
structure of the industrys job hierarchies, including its
ethnic and racial make-up; the marital status and the lifestyle
of workers; why there was a notable lack of union and political
activism among loggers and millworkers before 1913; and how and
why the scientific management of people and machinery proceeded
hand-in-hand.
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Like any study, Turning Trees
Into Dollars cannot be all things to all people. Some readers
will probably wish that Hak had been more attentive to environmental
history. To have more thoroughly discussed environment attitudes,
practices, policies, and consequences, and to have linked up more
concretely resource and labor exploitation would have significantly
strengthened the work. In addition, Hak could have done more with
railroads, which seemed here, as in the Pacific Northwest United
States, to be fitting symbols and agents of changes in the 1880s.
Although he does discuss government subsidization for the Canadian
Pacific Railway and the Esquimault and Nanaimo Railway, and the
role both played in timber holdings and regulations, railroads
did even more. The rails brought people, capital investment, new
technologies, and business forms of organization, increased market
access, and integrated British Columbia ever more tightly into
structures of power beyond the provinces borders. Finally,
other readers may be disappointed that although Professor Hak
claims that the United States Pacific Northwest offers parallels
to the British Columbia forest industry, his monograph does not
seriously pursue a comparative perspective.
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Nonetheless, Turning Trees Into
Dollars has achieved a great deal. Professor Hak set out to
provide a history of the timber industry in British Columbia from
the 19th to the early-20th centuries. He has done that, and in
the process has offered interesting revisionist interpretations.
Readers now have a sound preliminary work to Richard A. Rajalas
Clearcutting the Pacific Rainforest: Production, Science, and
Regulation (UBC Press, 1998), which
focuses on the post-World War I to 1965 era when corporate capitalists
used changing technologies, management structures, harvesting
practices, and influence over government forest policies to impose
a factory management system on regional forests and the lives
of workers. What Dr. Hak has accomplished will allow others to
build on his work, and hopefully begin to construct comparative
histories not only for the Greater Pacific Northwest but also
between Canada and the United States.
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Robert Bunting
Fort Lewis College
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Kerry Badgley, "Ringing in the Common Love of Good":
The United Farmers of Ontario, 1914-1926 (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queens University Press 2000)
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IN SPRING 2001 thousands mobilized to protest
the Free Trade Area of the Americas conference in Québec
City. Following the "battle in Seattle" in 1999 and
protests in Europe, a new anti-capitalist current has arisen.
It is a current that includes some inspired by democratic socialism,
but mostly includes a new generation inspired by some form of
populism, radical liberalism open to refinement as either anarchist
or socialist.
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Kerry Badgleys study of the
United Farmers of Ontario (UFO) seems a
long way away from Seattle or Québec, but his study of
rank-and-file populism is clearly linked to the debates of the
new activism. In particular, Badgley focuses on the radical experimentation
of Ontario farm progressives in co-operation; the development
of an autonomous farm womens movement (the United Farm Women
of Ontario-UFWO); and the rise and fall
(due to the hegemony of traditional forces and a conservative
UFO leadership) of an independent UFO
politics through a brief provincial government (1919-1923); and
the election of 24 federal MPs in 1921.
To give force to his positive evaluation of the UFO
experience, Badgley examines rank-and-file members in three counties:
Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark.
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There are a number of positive
features about this study. It is the first to seriously address
the local dimension of the farm progressive challenge to Canadas
bourgeois elites through co-operative enterprises, the
church union movement, and moral debates about prohibition and
betting; as well as from a spontaneous revolt against military
conscription in 1917 to develop an independent politics breaking
from the parliamentary clientelism of Conservatives and Liberals.
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This emphasis on the local has
the merit of stressing how central self-activity and self-organization
were in creating the energy and force to challenge bourgeois norms.
By studying the UFWO and the many local
farm co-operatives, Badgley also does a valuable service in stressing
that farm progressives had a substantive radical practice that
went beyond the more short-lived and contradictory politics of
the UFO.
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What is also to be welcomed is
Badgleys sharp posing of the arguments about the meaning
of the farm progressive movement then and now the first
mass break from bourgeois politics in Canada and the relevance
of direct democracy to any radical project today. In Badgleys
opinion, the UFO movement was "unconsciously
anarchist." For Badgley, what activists today can do is make
the core political principles of the farm populist experiment
a conscious challenge.
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As a Marxist, and as someone who
has studied the UFO through the leadership
of W.C. Good (one of three key figures in the movement along with
E.C. Drury, farm premier, and J.J. Morrison, provincial co-operative
secretary), I had a number of points for debate.
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First, Badgleys account of
the rise and fall of the UFO as a means
to examine local organisations in Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark
needs to be fleshed out. Where does it fit with C.M. Johnstons
account of the UFO government or the stories
of the United Farmers Co-operative Company and the Ontario
federal farm progressive caucus from the Good study? How did local
UFO mobilization link with election results?
(Appendix R) There is a powerful dialectical relationship between
rank-and-file action and provincial leadership and structures;
one cannot be examined without the other.
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Secondly, in rightly stressing
the need for local studies of the farm progressive challenge,
Badgley appears to have omitted arguments about context and how
to make local choices to test that context. The central interpretive
argument about UFO leadership from my Good
study is that there were three (not two) currents: a reform
from above argument by E.C. Drury about making the UFO
a peoples party within existing market and parliamentary
rules; a radical reform from below argument by W.C. Good
to extend direct democracy methods in co-operation to politics
through the single land tax, free trade, modest government economic
intervention, and a transformed parliamentary system through a
variety of direct democracy reforms like proportional representation
and the single preferential ballot; and thirdly, a purely negative,
sectional argument by J.J. Morrison for occupational self-defence
through narrowly conceived co-operative action. Arguably, it was
Morrison who triumphed as the sole leader remaining after 1926.
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Badgleys accounts of local
activist initiatives in co-operation and politics appear to illustrate
all three of these tendencies as well as confirm how economically
and socially representative UFO membership
was. If anything, his local studies confirm anecdotal evidence
in leadership studies about the importance of the single land
tax to the most radical populists, the relative youthfulness of
UFO activists, and the importance of pro-Union
Presbyterians influenced by the Social Gospel.
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Another contextual question is:
why choose Lambton, Simcoe, and Lanark Counties? Badgley offers
two reasons: their geographical representativeness and available
evidence (the degree of local organization in Lambton, the only
extant club records being for Simcoe, and the number of local
papers in Lanark). However, as noted in the Good study, from a
farm production system point of view, there were four regional
farm economies in Ontario: the dairy belt (divided between eastern
and western Ontario Lanark being in the first); a mixed
livestock system (Lambton and Simcoe); a few specialized areas
such as the fruit farmers of Niagara or Prince Edward; and the
agro-forestry system of Northern Ontario. The selection of local
studies can be refined and tested further.
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Thirdly, what about interpretation?
Badgley does a good job in summarizing how Ontario historiography
has marginalized this mass, radical challenge to its dominant
political culture. But he has to simplify the Marxist narrative
and critique to deny there is a meaningful organizational and
social context for local responses, which included all tendencies
from Simcoe Countys F.W. Webster and his explicit
mention of anarchism to argue single land tax and radical electoral
reforms, to the mainstream co-operative and political practice
of most Simcoe UFO members who were led
by E.C. Drury locally, to the negative sectionalism of
Leslie Oke and the Lambton farm co-operative association.
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Despite these criticisms, this
is a valuable book for two reasons. First, the Ontario farm progressive
challenge was a radical, mass break from Canadian capitalist politics.
The farmers achievement is well worth repeated, careful
study from a variety of points of view.
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Secondly, the farm progressive
challenge was more than a break from bourgeois politics. It also
put forward a mass, democratic debate in practice on what will
replace it. As a Marxist, I have argued that the nature of that
break and alternative has to be class situated. A petit-bourgeois
populist movement did challenge for power but it did not conquer
it. Activists of the 21st century have to ask why.
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Robin Wylie
Douglas College
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Peter Campbell, Canadian Marxists and the Search for a Third
Way (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University
Press 1999)
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PETER CAMPBELL invites us to reconsider
the legacy of Canadian Marxists active in the first decades of
the 20th century. He asserts that these Marxists "comprised
one of the most important groups of thinkers and activists in
Canadian history." (4) Campbell is particularly interested
in those Marxists of this era whom he views as having defined
themselves through their rejection of both the revolutionary politics
of the Communist International and the gradualism of Canadian
social democracy. The defining feature of Campbells "Marxists
of the third way" was their commitment "to the heart
and soul of Karl Marxs historical materialism, his belief
that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of
the working class itself." (4) He believes that the important
"theoretical contributions" of these Marxists, especially
their analysis of the "relationship between worker self-emancipation
and the leadership question..." has been unfairly ignored
by historians of the left. (9)
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The perspective of Campbells
Marxists of the third way was rooted in British Non-conformism
and the gradualist, positivist mechanical Marxism of the Second
International. This was a Marxism that constructed revolution
as an inevitable product of the internal contradictions of the
capitalist order. Its adherents came to Marx through the classical
texts: Darwin, and Spencer, rather than Lenin. Campbell adds the
Hegelian Marxism of Italian Antonio Labriola, to this lineage.
Through Labriola Marxists of the third way were drawn to a theoretical
concern with ideas and consciousness as dynamics in the historical
process. A close study of the Marxism of members of the Socialist
Party of Canada reveals "a marked Hegelian and idealist influence."
(21) Campbell links the Hegelian Marxism of Labriola (and the
long shadow of Gramsci) with book notices contained in Cottons
Weekly and Hank Bartholomews columns in the Western
Clarion. Campbells claim that Marxists of the third
way bequeathed a distinct body of Marxist theory poses a number
of questions. What prompted them, rather than others in the Canadian
Marxist tradition, to theorize the logic of worker self-emancipation
and to evolve a voluntarist Marxism against the grain of existing
determinist accounts? How did they apply the classical texts to
their time? What evidence exists that the Hegelian legacy of Labriola
liberated these Canadian Marxists from the thrall of a doctrine
that posed few superstructural questions? How did their account
of proletarian revolution differ from that embraced by militants
who stood with the Communist International? Finally, did Campbells
Marxists evolve an idiom and inflection of their own making?
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Campbell advances his argument
through biographical accounts of the public careers and private
lives of Socialist Party of Canada (SPC)
activist William Pritchard, One Big Union (OBU),
and Winnipeg General Strike leader R.B. Russell, west coast labour
activist Ernest Winch, and Ontarios Arthur Mould. Campbells
selection of subjects turned on the question of whether their
"political practice" was "derived from theoretical
formulations in a conscious manner" and whether the activist
left a "significant body of personal correspondence or writings
in labour papers." (10) Such considerations were important
because Campbell intended to treat "consciousness as an historical
agent" and "to deal directly with Canadas Marxists
of the third way and their ideas, to take them seriously as thinkers."
(10) Despite Campbells claims, readers expecting a book
of close textual exegesis will be disappointed. This is not a
book preoccupied with theory. Campbells emphasis is on practice.
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In the case of Ernest Winch, for
example, Campbell explains that an account of Winchs life
provides an opportunity to "assess more thoroughly how effective
Marxists of the third way were at involving rank and file workers
in the process of creating a broad-based socialist movement, thereby
putting their theory into practice." (31) We learn a good
deal about Winchs career in west coast labour and labour
political organizations from 1910 to 1940. Yet the voice of Winch
is largely absent from this narrative. Rather than textual analysis,
Campbell offers speculation. On the fundamental question of the
utility of the general strike, for example, Campbell asserts that
Winch and other "Marxists of the third way supported industrial
unionism and the general strike as a response to the repression
of the capitalist state and the mobilization of the rank-and-file
workers, but they were skeptical about its long-term benefits."
(41) This finding is not disclosed and amplified through a consideration
of texts containing the theory of Winch and others on this question.
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William Pritchard is credited with
exercising great influence through "his ability to interpret
and critique capitalist society, present the case for socialism,
and convince workers of the need for education and organization."
(74) How did Pritchard theorize his practice as an intellectual
of the left? Though Campbell indicates a preoccupation with exploring
the "consciousness" of his subjects, he provides no
account of Pritchards theory of the role of intellectuals
in the process of worker emancipation and the passage to a proletarian
order. Pritchard supported a resolution at the Western Labour
Conference in Calgary endorsing "the system of industrial
soviet control" but, Campbell observes, everything Pritchard
said or wrote before or after 1919 suggested that he did not agree
with replacing parliamentary institutions with soviet-style government.
No explanation bearing on his theory as a Marxist of the third
way is offered for such apparent contradictions. Campbell contends
that Pritchard was convinced that constitutional action could
bring about socialism. What was needed was a "working-class
majority ready and able to accept the responsibilities of power."
(94) Yet, such an assertion discloses little about Pritchards
adaptation of the classical texts to his time. Campbells
account of Pritchards trial in the winter of 1920 incorrectly
claims that criminal charges against Pritchard and the other strike
leaders were based on "a spur-of-the-moment, trumped-up amendment
to the Criminal Code." (93) The charges were based on the
unamended Criminal Code in force in June 1919. Campbell seems
ultimately disappointed with Pritchard as theorist. He notes that
by the early 1920s, with the decline of the SPC, Pritchard "had
little else to offer in its place beyond an unquestioned belief
in worker agency that at times seemed more like a kind of religious
faith than the product of an historical materialist reading of
the state of the working class in Canada and elsewhere in the
1920s." (100)
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The road signs in Campbells
account of the political pilgrimage of Arthur Mould are ambivalent.
"It is not clear why" he became involved in the labour
movement. (136) His changing political affiliations are attributed
by Campbell to misplaced "faith he placed in J.S. Woodsworth
in the early 1930s, and in Joseph Stalin in the ensuing years...."
(167) Campbell offers the unflattering assessment that Mould was
"a man who sometimes overlooked or chose not to see that
he himself was at times incapable of the discernment he expected
from the workers themselves." (167) Existential rather than
theoretical imperatives appear to have settled his final turn
to the left. However, even here we remain on the terrain of speculation,
not theoretical exegesis. Campbell reports that Mould never provided
an explanation for his turn to Communism and that it was unclear
if he ever embraced Leninism. Still, he concludes that Mould embraced
Communism because in Moulds view the Communists were the
only party "making a serious attempt to put the ideas of
Marx and Lenin into practice." (160)
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The account of R.B. Russell centers
on 1919. Russell did not see the strike as a prelude to a proletarian
order. Russell "recognized the tremendous amount of educating
and organizing of the workers left to do." (188) Broadening
his argument, Campbell offers the view that for Russell, and other
Marxists of the third way, 1919 was "only a moment of revolutionary
potential in that much longer evolutionary process Marxists of
the third way saw as the basis of all change in the organic world
and in human society." (189) Yet on this important point
it remains unclear who would educate and organize the workers,
why education was needed, or how the education and organization
of workers would threaten capitalist hegemony and lay the foundations
of proletarian rule.
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Campbell asserts incorrectly that
Russell was singled out for special prosecution in 1919. Like
Pritchard, he was charged with seditious conspiracy under the
Criminal Code in place in June 1919 and arraigned for trial with
the other strike leaders. However, on 27 November 1919, the Crown
chose to try Russell separately because A.J. Andrews was concerned
that the available jury panel might be exhausted before a jury
was selected if the defence exercised all the peremptory challenges
at its disposal with eight defendants. Undaunted, the defence
sought to extend its number of challenges by having Russell tried
under the amended Criminal Code, assented to on 7 July 1919 and
in effect since 1 October 1919. Conviction under the amended code
could mean a sentence of twenty rather than two years for Russell.
The threat of a longer sentence entitled the defence to greater
peremptory challenges. The Crown rejected the defence bid.
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Marxists of the Third Way
does not achieve the ambitious goals set out by its author. Nevertheless,
it is a book well worth reading and thinking about. Campbells
preoccupations remind us of the need to interrogate the theory
bequeathed to the contemporary left and to consider how it has
shaped our understanding and interest or misunderstanding
and disinterest in the nature of capitalist hegemony. Such
introspection is essential in thinking about and accounting for
the historical possibilities and realities Gramsci alluded to
when he asked, "What can an innovatory class oppose to this
formidable complex of trenches and fortifications of the dominant
class?"
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Tom Mitchell
Brandon University
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Jim Egan, Challenging the Conspiracy of Silence: My Life as
a Canadian Gay Activist, compiled and edited by Donald W.
McLeod (Toronto: The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives and Homewood
Books 1998)
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JIM EGAN, Canadas first gay activist,
died at the age of 78 on 9 March 2000. In 1949 Jim broke the silence
on gay rights in Canada when he started to write letters to newspapers,
magazines, and government committees defending gay men and lesbians.
At first, only the scandal sheets would accept his letters and
columns, but by the 1960s some of the more "respectable"
publications began to print them. Later, in the 1990s Jim and
Jack Nesbitt, his life partner, took the Canadian government all
the way to the Supreme Court in a major same-sex spousal benefits
struggle. This was the case that led the Supreme Court to declare
that the Charter of Rights includes sexual orientation protection.
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I met Jim a number of times throughout
the 1980s and 1990s and learned a great deal from him. This review
is written in memory of Jim, in celebration of his activism, and
to claim him as a working-class hero. In Challenging the Conspiracy
of Silence, gay historian Donald McLeod has skilfully woven
together a series of interviews with Jim, informed by Jims
own writings and other sources, to provide a rich and detailed
account of "the social and personal circumstances that allowed
Jim Egan to become Canadas earliest known public gay activist."(13)
In this autobiographical oral history Jims spirit comes
through loud and clear. For those who knew him Jim comes to life
in these pages as we again hear and feel his voice and passion.
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Jims early experiences were
very much working class in character. He was born in Toronto in
1921 and his father was a fine cabinet maker. He recalls excitement
when he went swimming naked with other young men in the Don River.
Jim remembers that "I certainly had that feeling that many
gays have that I was somehow different from the other boys."(17)
He became somewhat of a loner and as he describes it "an
absolutely omnivorous reader."(17) He became a largely self-taught
working-class young man. His mother, who became the main force
in his life when his father died, never questioned his reading
and he devoured Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, and eventually discovered
Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and other references to same-sex passion
and desire.
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When he was 13 or 14 Jim tells
us:
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I realized I was sexually attracted
to males. Id never heard the words "gay" or "homosexual."
I think it must be difficult for someone today to believe that
young fellows then had never heard these words, but it was certainly
true in my case and amongst the boys I knew in working class,
east end Toronto ... I became sexually active with some of the
boys on the street ... when I was thirteen, somehow or other,
... we started sexual experimentation with each other.... One
of the things I quickly discovered was that while they all liked
to fool around, they certainly did not want to talk about it.
And I realized fairly early on that it was something that could
not be discussed, but it was a fun thing that you could do anytime
the opportunity arose. (19-20)
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Here we get a sense that Jim in his youth may have been participating
in the type of largely pre-homosexual, working-class sexual culture
that George Chauncey writes about in Gay New York. At the
same time we get a sense of the early development of prohibitions
on homosexuality as a topic of discussion and form of identification
in working-class communities.
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When the war came, Jim tried to
join the Army but was rejected because of a corneal scar. He then
worked as a technician with the Toronto Department of Zoology
where he learned how to preserve animal specimens, and as an assistant
at Connaught Labs.
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He joined the merchant marine for
the last two years of the war. As in the experiences of many others,
and as Allan Berube describes in Coming Out Under Fire,
it was the war mobilization and its shifting of the contexts of
gender and sexual life that opened up new erotic possibilities
for Jim. He discovered the gay world in various ports that he
visited. For instance, he describes picking up an Army guy in
Piccadilly Circus in London in 1944 or 1945.
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In 1947 he came back to Toronto
and began to investigate the local gay world that had expanded
during the war years. Although he had many sexual adventures,
Jim wanted to meet another man and settle down. He met Jack Nesbitt,
a hairstylist, in 1948. Later, in 1949, Jim and Jack moved to
Oak Ridges to work for a man who owned a biological supply business.
This began Jim and Jacks love for living in more rural areas
that would often take them away from larger urban centres.
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The late 1940s and the 1950s were
a difficult time for many gay men with widespread police harassment
and entrapment and media coverage marked by silence on homosexual
experience in the mainstream media and heterosexist sensationalism
in the scandal sheets. Jim stresses that even though "there
was a homophobic climate during this period that cried out for
change, I think it is important to note that the situation was
not entirely bad."(43) Jims "fury" at the
heterosexism in media coverage is what propelled him into major
letter and article writing campaigns that took place in a series
of waves from 1949 until 1964. As he put it, "There were
never any articles published from the gay point of view, which
in my mind equalled a conspiracy of silence on the true nature
of homosexuality." (43) Jim set himself the task of breaking
this silence.
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While the mainstream print media
ignored his onslaught, some of the scandal sheets began to print
his letters and articles. He had a series of columns published
in True News Times called "Aspects of Homosexuality"
and later in Justice Weekly titled "Homosexual Concepts."
Jim wrote about the Cold War purges of homosexuals in the US
State Department, the Kinsey Report, and the "causes"
of homosexuality. In these columns Jim showed himself to be a
profound gay working-class intellectual. Jim had contacts with
the emerging homophile movement in the US
and continued his "omnivorous reading" of materials
relating to homosexual experiences.
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Although Jim later stubbornly resisted
the insights of social constructionist approaches to sexuality,
he was able to write to a Parliamentary Legislative Committee
in 1955 such powerful lines as: "The Negro problem
was created by the white majority; the Jewish problem
by the Gentile majority, and the homosexual problem
by the heterosexual majority who alone can take the necessary
steps to bring this problem to a speedy end."
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Jim was also very aware of class
divisions within the gay community. Here is his description of
the "levels" in gay life:
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Gay life in Toronto in the 1950s and
1960s was on a series of levels, with your opera queens and the
highly educated university types at the top, and the ribbon clerks
at Simpsons at the bottom. While there may have been a certain
amount of overlap, we didnt associate with anybody except
from what we might refer to as the "lower orders." And
I say that in the kindliest way, because we were part of it.(70)
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Jim also challenged class relations
within gay community formation when he assisted Sidney Katz in
1963 in his articles on the gay community for Macleans.
This public visibility for the gay community challenged the comfort
of some middle-class gay men who lived most of their lives in
the closet. A friend was asked to arrange a meeting for Jim with
a man "who was just oozing money, position, and power."
(84) Jim was asked to end his collaboration with Katz since "if
you keep on publicizing this the way you are, it wont be
possible for any gay man to be safe. People will begin to get
suspicious and gay men will be recognized as living a gay life."(84)
Jim, of course, refused to end his collaboration with Katz since
he had no investment in the relations of the closet and in contrast
he wanted more publicity for gay experience. This points to our
need for more historical work investigating class divisions and
struggles within gay communities.
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Jims impressive activism,
however, was at this time not actively supported by other gay
men and he laboured largely in isolation. As McLeod points out,
Jims activism "went in waves" often related to
the dynamics of his relationship with Jack and in 1964 his early
career as a gay activist ended when he and Jack decided to move
to British Columbia. (11) This interaction between activism and
our relationships is another area that needs much more focus in
our theorizing of activism.
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Challenging the Conspiracy of
Silence is a wonderful celebration of Jims life. Those
who are interested in Jims life of activism should also
consult: Jim Egan: Canadas Pioneer Gay Activist,
compiled and introduced by Robert Champagne (Toronto: Canadian
Lesbian and Gay History Network 1987); and David Adkin, Jim
Loves Jack: The James Egan Story (Toronto: David Adkin Productions
1996).
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Gary Kinsman
Laurentian University.
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Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing
in British Columbia 1900-1950 (Vancouver: UBC
Press 1998)
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THIS WORK EXAMINES Aboriginal peoples
bodies as sites of attempted colonization in a number of ways.
The most interesting contribution that the author makes is in
examining multiple sites of the attempted colonization of Aboriginal
people. In her work, Kelm goes beyond attempted colonization as
a personal or institutional tool to include colonization as situational,
personal, institutional, and political, depending upon the perpetrators.
The least effective portion of her work deals with Aboriginal
peoples bodies as objects.
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In examining colonization as a
situational response to factors inherent in settler societies,
Kelm relies heavily upon oral histories and testimony provided
by Elders in First Nations located in the territorial confines
of British Columbia. In using Elders as historical sources to
draw from, the author establishes the veracity of oral traditions
as a given fact. This is valuable, respectful, and reinforcing
of the understanding that First Nation historical traditions and
the traditional preservation of histories are valid and useful
tools.
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While the first chapter of this
work does not rely heavily on these sources (dealing instead with
government-generated population and mortality rates, and hospital
admission information) the second chapter deals with the impact
of colonization on Aboriginal diet and nutrition. It is important
to note that Kelm examines not only the impact of colonial mentality
on policy development and the intrusive nature of this policy,
but she also makes sure that she addresses Aboriginal peoples
responses to the same. She writes of First Nation lobbying and
Aboriginal leaderships negotiations, petitions, and responses
(19, 47, 56, 152) in the face of attempted colonization. This
is an essential part of the story of colonization that has been
overlooked in many discussions of imperialism and its impact on
First Nations. By choosing to examine the political response by
Aboriginal leadership, Kelm demonstrates that the situational
response is as important as the sites of colonization. Importantly,
the story of colonization takes form not only in the recounting
of colonial history, but also in the reconstruction of Aboriginal
peoples personal and political responses to colonialism.
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Kelm also analyses colonization
as personal. Aboriginal peoples health and illness are examined
in terms of their impact on families, clans, and nations. (10)
In this way, the story of attempted colonization is not one that
details just the impact of disease and settler response to disease.
The work becomes broader and studies not just the pressure exerted
by health care and governmental officials on families but also
the familial response to these impositions. This effort is laudable.
The ripple effect of ill health and the political construction
of Aboriginal health extend to the people impacted by both. By
examining health policy in this context, Kelm is able to explore
the effect on Aboriginal people as a collective. In assessing
the ripple effect on the collectivity, Kelm handily defuses studies
of disease that either individualize its causes or consequences,
and/or attribute it to "cultural" factors divorced from
political context.
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In examining the personalization
of colonization, Kelm is able to scrutinize both the role of missionaries
and the benefit accruing to missionaries as a result of Aboriginal
illness. Faced with diseases Aboriginal cultures and doctors had
never before experienced, missionaries were able to make a name
for themselves with their "humanitarianism colonialism."
(146) More specifically, the author effectively establishes that
Aboriginal illness enabled missionary staff to administer spiritual
and medical assistance - with the end goal being the disruption
of the relationship between First Nation people and First Nation
medical practitioners. (104)
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The author examines not only the
role of individuals who earned their livelihoods from treating
Aboriginal illnesses but also the position of medical staff who
were "reluctant, even disinterested, colonizers." (135)
This is an essential contribution to the colonization dialogue,
particularly in an era when the attribution of responsibility
is so often linked only to intentional acts. Kelm observes that
action and inaction, and not intent, are essential components
of a colonial condition.
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Beginning with Chapter 2, Kelm
examines colonization as an institutional mandate. Initially,
she reviews health and ill health in the context of the reserve
systems impact on traditional foods. What follows is an
incredibly detailed discussion of the impact that the reserve
system had on Aboriginal peoples ability to maintain health
and fight foreign diseases. She addresses the poor soil provided
and the exclusion of cultivated gardens in the selection and allocation
of reserve lands. She also describes the impact that the immigration
of non-Aboriginal trappers, provincial legislation dissociating
water rights from land ownership, and fishery regulations had
on Aboriginal peoples ability to maintain the health standards
present in their communities prior to non-Aboriginal settlement
in their territories.
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Predominant in the discussions
of colonization via institutions is Kelms examination of
the role of residential schools (Chapter 4) in creating and perpetuating
illness in Aboriginal people. She writes that the establishment
of residential schools was "predicated on the basic notion
that First Nations were, by nature, unclean and diseased."
With this in mind, "residential schooling was advocated as
a means to save Aboriginal children from the insalubrious
influences of home life on reserve. Once in the schools, the racially
charged and gendered message that Aboriginal domestic arrangements
threatened physical, social, and spiritual survival was reinforced
through health education." (57) Clearly evident in this comprehensive
analysis are the high morbidity rate of Aboriginal youth in residential
schools and the attempted "salvation" of the First Nation
students who lived at the residential schools. Kelms approach
to this topic is an interesting one. She examines not only the
physical toll, but the emotional, cultural, and mental toll that
residential schooling took on First Nation students, their families,
and their communities. She draws our attention to the institutionalization
of racially and culturally determinative and imperial understandings
as they were entrenched in the residential school organizational
structure. From health education and its role in cultural invasion,
to the enforced application of western standards and its impact
on Aboriginal societal standards, Kelm leaves no stone unturned.
(62) She does not exonerate government or missionary societies
from our understanding of this bureaucratic brutality. Government
and missionaries are viewed as complicit with the residential
school bureaucrats in this imperial intrusion which killed one
quarter of the prairie First Nation students on residential school
rolls. (64)
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Colonization as political will
dominate Chapter 7 of this work. Disappointingly, the author is
not as able with this research as she is with the research related
to the role of missionaries and residential schools in the attempted
colonization of Aboriginal people. Perhaps it is because it is
difficult to gauge the impact of governmental policy from oral
sources or because the political will and manipulation of the
time is not evident in the records. In any event, Kelm seems unable
to make the link between governmental and political decision making
and policy, on the one hand, and the illness that swept through
First Nations between 1900 and 1950, on the other. She does condemn
the Department of Indian Affairs; Kelm states that the Department
did not hire adequate staff and that they did not actively recruit
experienced doctors. (129, 131) However, given the evidence related
to the federal governments obligation (treaty and/or fiduciary)
to provide health care, Kelm does not make a thoroughly convincing
case for the clear abrogation of responsibility by the settler
government.
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Referring in passing to a lack
of proactivity, Kelm never seems to make the link between disease,
ill health, and Aboriginal peoples deaths and the inactivity
of the government of Canada with much vigour. She refers to societal
responses as "a society that sought control through knowledge
and the creation of a colonizing archive of data, rather than
overt displays of force" rather than governmental
non-responses in attributing responsibility for Aboriginal peoples
health crises. (120) This tentativeness is unexpected and diminishes
the strength of the work evident in earlier chapters.
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There is, however, a significant
discussion of the role of departmental field matrons, which broadens
the readers understanding of the shifting perceptions related
to Aboriginal women/motherhood.
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Although she refers to disease
as differentially understood by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
people, Kelm does review the attempted colonization of Aboriginal
people in light of the understandings that non-Aboriginal people
had and have about health and wellness. Disease is perceived as
situational and in a Western context, isolated from holistic health
and reviewed on a case-by-case basis. In addition, there seems
to be an ill fit between the intellectual acceptance of and personal
respect demonstrated towards Aboriginal healing. The author demonstrates
an implicit acceptance of the fact that Aboriginal medicine exists,
is effective, and is sometimes superior to Western medicine. However,
there are three notable "tells" that seemingly establish
that the author does not have a full understanding of the respect
that should be accorded to Aboriginal health research grounded
in Aboriginal understandings related to wellness and medicine.
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Just as some pictures and ceremonial
accoutrements are not to be photographed in Aboriginal traditions,
some stories are not to be related out of context. I am not certain
where this line should be drawn as my history and knowledge of
such stories may be unduly influenced by the fact that we had
to send our sacred traditions underground or risk losing them.
The fundamental understanding that comes from this is: if you
do not know the protocol, then do not take responsibility for
sharing the information. There are a few instances in this work
where I was uncomfortable with the degree of information provided
about sacred ceremonies. Because our education and health are
intricately tied together and are based on experiential and protocol-governed
teachings, those descriptions seemed contextually orphaned.
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Secondly, frequent references to
Aboriginal "witchcraft" in the context of a discussion
of medicine and curative and harmful powers de-legitimizes the
skill as something less than medicinal.
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The third point corresponds to
the monomania of Western medicine and its preoccupation with "curing
the disease." In the holistic tradition of most Aboriginal
societies, health was balanced with the alternative. Helpful powers
balanced with disruptive. Because the goal of Aboriginal health
was to live a good/balanced life, the eradication of one disease
is not good health. The work makes passing reference to this but
reviews and interprets health in the context of eradication of
disease. Perhaps, in the Aboriginal context, the disease is the
symptom and living out of balance is the disease. In any event,
while this imbalance is referred to, a detailed examination of
the Aboriginal understanding of health would have enhanced and
grounded the work. In many Aboriginal societies, disease is perceived
as animate and as an entity in and of itself. It is an indicator
of a larger problem. As well, there is some discussion and separation
of the human and non-human realm in this work. Perhaps the larger
understanding, and one which would have provided context for the
discussion, is that they cannot be separated effectively in an
Aboriginal conception of health. As the connection between past
and future is understood in a discussion such as this, so should
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