Canadian History Revisited - HMS NANCY Project

Killing Canadian History
Or
What History?
Who’s History?
Which History?

One of my friends and long time dedicated supporters of the “NANCY Project” Jack Granatstein [one of the Curators of the National War Museum in Ottawa and long time historian] wrote a treatise on Canadian History in 1998 titled “Who Killed Canadian History” published by Harper Books of Canada. This book and mantra bears oft repeating, and should be required reading by all Canadian History teachers and professors prior to taking their degrees or their positions and most certainly before espousing their views to other newer and more impressionable minds in the class room, especially those who were foreign born, many of whom have in my mind and those of other Canadians a decidedly jaundiced opinion of the topic especially if they are Liberal and have been part of our Grandfather’s decision as to whom they will or will not let into the Country so many years ago. So with Jack’s permission I will espouse and re-visit portions of the first chapter in his book and for those who claim interest in the subject, I’ll leave the rest of his treatise to their devices, and will quote liberally [with some editing of course] as follows:

Conservatives falsify the past, socialists falsify the future, and liberals falsity the present, so someone once said. It may even be true – in most countries, Canada is different. Ours is a nation where everyone – conservative, socialist and liberal – seems to be engaged in an unthinking conspiracy to eliminate Canada’s past. The public schools and high schools scarcely teach history, so busy are they fighting racism, teach sex education, or instructing English as a second language for recent immigrants. Fewer and fewer university and college professors write history in anything but undigestible small chunks of history of interest only to themselves or to specialists and more often that not, in order to justify their tenure in a publish or perish mentality. [The history of the H.M. Schooner NANCY easily falls into this category] The media [both print and electronic mediums not to be outdone in this regard] use history only to search for villainy [to satisfy their imagined viewers needs] if they use it at all, or else they mangle it beyond all recognition [and out of context] to prove a perceived contemporary argument. [To them] there are no heroes in our past [as there most certainly are] to stir the soul, and no myths on which a national spirit can be built – or so we are told. The ordinary Canadian citizen, inundated by American media [and school texts] and Fourth-of-July rah-rah patriotism, vastly skewed films and media scarcely knows that Canada has a past. Wasn’t George Washington Canada’s first Prime Minister? Didn’t Davy Crocket settle the west? Weren’t the Iroquois our enemy?

Indeed, it sometimes seems that those Canadians [in charge of disseminating our history and setting what is left of history curriculum] have deliberately deconstructed our past, sacrificing it for the good of some ersatz mythical past hauled into the present. The French Canadians were brave voyageurs along with the Hurons who fought the English and their Iroquois allies, and posing in the middle of it all for Cornelius Krieghoff just long enough to paint their picture. The United Empire Loyalists were slaving holding Anglo-Saxons white males whose anti-democratic instincts were all too evident. Confederation was a scheme by railway investors to protect their profits for the east at the expense of the western farmers. The efforts to put down the Riel rebellion were attempts to thwart the efforts to crush the idyllic civilizations of native peoples and traders under the weight technology and speculators. If Canada participated in the two foreign world wars, it should not have, because Canadians are peacekeepers by nature. This ignorance [on a grand scale] bowdlerization, where it has any intention at all, serves a nation that today sees itself as a bilingual, multi-cultured, pacifist, and committed to social injustice, [at best for the very few at the expense of the great many].
These are not evil national goals, to be sure, however though they scarcely represent the Canada that most Canadians know and love. Even though each generation always writes its own additional chapter; the past is not supposed to be twisted completely out of shape to serve present ends at the expense of the whole for the sake of the very few. To do so, mocks the dead [our ancestors who built this country over hundreds of years for the most part] and truly makes fools of those who have inherited the land in the eyes of those who have newly arrived from Countries which have a rich history of their own. For Canada, it reduces the past to a mere perspective on the present; and it imprisons history in a cage of consciously constructed quasi-fabrications. As Germans, Japanese, and Russians surely know, nations have to overcome their histories.
Canada, thank heavens, to some has a relatively benign history, but where we consider it at all, [some take it upon themselves as they] struggle against the [perceived] past as if our forebears who had [in their personal view point gained abroad] committed atrocities and innumerable evils [in matters of immigration and the treatment of foreigners at times of wars] and regularly practiced genocidal behaviors [as viewed from the high-noon mentality of American westerns]. The obvious task then of the current generation(s) is to build on the past, to understand it [within its proper context], and, where necessary, to triumph over it. Most certainly not to ignore it. If we cannot, the fault is not what happened, one, two, or three centuries ago, but in ourselves.
History, [more often than not as it is seen in the mind of the beholder] is important because it helps people know themselves [their past and their Country]. It tells them who we were, [the thought processes of our previous generations of Canadians, and their concerns and worries for their Country and more importantly the world they lived in, and amongst others nations and our responses to what they were doing at the same time.] It also tells of the collective memory of humanity that situates them in their time and place; and it provides newcomers with some understanding of the society [which built this Country from scratch] in which they have now chosen to live in, having left their olde Country behind which they see as a “failed state”. [Hence the very reason not to support their old culture here in Canada, which is not a failed state!] Of course, the collective memory undergoes constant revision, restructuring, and re-writing only where necessary, but whatever its form it reveals anew to each generation [once assimilated] a common fund of knowledge, traditions, values, and ideas common to the whole to help explain our existence and the very few mistakes of the past along with the great many success stories of the past.
But what of the Canadian ethos, and what makes us tick? What is the reason for the current self-imposed vacuum in teaching Canadian history? To most Canadians, it is a fact that today’s students don’t talk about current events around the dinner table the way previous generations did. All we see on television these days are recent immigrants to Canada from around the world, claiming Canadian citizenship, and demanding that Canada do something to help their “homeland” and their “failed state” from which they have just immigrated from to do something. Or in many cases, new immigrants to Canada going back to their “homeland and failed state” to cause trouble, claiming that as Canadian citizens, that it is Canada’s duty to rescue them from their stupidity. This is not the Canadian way. The simple truth of the matter resulting in the above, is that Canada’s public schools and high schools [separate schools included] have not only stopped teaching most world history [context for Canadian history], but have also clearly given up teaching anything we might call or consider Canadian or National history.
[This give rise to the sentiment that if Canada doesn’t have or even espouse a history [culture] to newcomers, then why should I come here and give up mine. They are right, hence the rise of multi-culturalism. If you don’t want your, then why not take ours, and ours, and ours etc etc.]
As a result, a great many Canadian museums have lost their raison d’etre around the countryside and have been closing, one by one after years of being starved of either public attendance [or by public policy, or public funding as they “are no longer relevant to the public, and their mind’s eye/] It is little wonder then, that raising funds for Canadian cultural and heritage projects is a lost cause from the get-go. Canadians have always believed in “peace order and good government” as a public policy.
By extension, and summary of this brief extract then, this policy also means, and is equated to, that if anything of value is to be done in this area of history, culture and heritage, as certainly there is no corporate support for large scale projects such as is the case with the NANCY Project, then let the Government do it. But we already know the answer to this, don’t we.
The situation in Canadian universities is only and at best superficially better – certainly there are more Canadian historians employed and in training than at any other time in our past. Still, though, the survey courses increasingly reflect professional interests, and those whose interests tend away from national and political history – the basic nuts and bolts of Canadian historical knowledge – towards such areas as gender, labour, and regional or local history. As a result, national history is increasingly been left to journalists, publish-or-perish professors fighting for tenure to established private Foundations [such as the NANCY-GRIFFON Foundation Inc] to promote in the media [papers, radio and] on television to deal with Canadian history, and much of it correcting what was written and was not written or what was largely creative and non-factual.
One of the many supporters for the NANCY Project has been the Charles Bronfman Foundation through their support of the “Heritage Minutes” programme and their sister organization the Samuel and Saidye Bronfman Foundation through their own heritage programme. These programmes were along with a few others designed to overcome Federal and Provincial complacency about Canadian history and its companion course in Canadian civics. All Canadian school aged children, and by corollary, all immigrants must study Canadian history, geography and civics in order to be a fully functional Canadain citizen and to participate in its national ethos.
In 1997, the Dominion Institute Survey, released in November of that year, showed that forty-five percent of Canadian adults questioned could not meet the standard requirements of the citizenship test for immigrants – to answer twelve of the twenty questions correctly.
Finally, as a historian, [of some fifty years of experience, and some thirty years as Director of the NANCY-GRIFFON Foundation Inc], I truly believe that an understanding of our history is important in and of itself [as a basic tenant of citizenship and as a basic instrument of public policy]. But history has a public purpose too, in creating Canadians who know where they want to go, and where they want to take their Country in the coming years because they [fully] understand where they have been. [To know their past is to know their future, as is oft quoted]. I believe that the achievements of the past, and even those years as having failed in some eyes from years gone by, can be a source of strength to meet not only today’s challenges but tomorrows too. If written and taught properly, history, our history is not myth or chauvinism, just as national history is not perfervid nationalism, but rather, history and nationalism are about understanding the Country’s past, and how the past has made our present and is shaping our future.
I believe moreover that the past can unite us without its being censored, purposefully being ignored, being made inoffensive to this group or that, or white washed to covered up some perceived sins of our forefathers in distant lands, from previous national affiliations, or deemed preferential immigration policy. If our history is to achieve this great national purpose [as it does for any other Country of note] then major changes are needed [in terms of policy and curriculum] in our schools, colleges and universities. One small step in this direction would be to remember the story and support the NANCY Project.

Included in the Nancy Project for the Bi-Centennial of the War of 1812 in 2012 is the request to the Royal Canadian Mint to have the image of HM Schooner NANCY on the Canadian Quarter [Coinage] to help raise the awareness of the NANCY which is Canada's most internationally famous vessel from the War of 1812. Thank you.

Support the replica program for HM Schooner NANCY and send your donation today.