The Shoe on the Other Foot
August 23, 2010 § Leave a comment
Being Canadian, it sometimes feels like we’re the ones on the short end of the stick in global affairs. We’re the ones the Americans invaded during the War of Independence and again in 1812. During World War I, the British used our troops as cannon fodder in battles like the Somme. We have been colonies of the French and the British. Economically, we’re largely dependent upon the Americans. Our peoples are descendent from the colonised of the world (ok, so is the rest of the Western world). In short, I think Canadians like to see themselves as victims, or at least feel like victims far too often. This is why winning double gold medals in hockey over the Americans at the Olympics is such a big deal. For that moment, we’re the winners.
The once-great Vancouver band, Spirit of the West, wrote a song back in the early 90s called “Far Too Canadian.” It’s a lament for our status as hewers of wood and drawers of water, amongst other things. The lyrics:
I’m so content, to stand in line
Wait and see, pass the time
Talk a streak, fall alseep, wake up late, whine and weep
I kiss the hand that slaps me senseless
I’m so accepting, so defenseless
I am far too Canadian
Far too Canadian
…I am the face of my country
Experssionless and small
Weak at the knees, shaking badly
Can’t straighten up at all
I watch the spine of my country bend and break
I’m a sorry state.
A sobering thought, that song. And all the cheesy, stupid, lame-brained Molson Canadian ads in the world (apparently has more square feet of “awesomeness per person” than any other nation on Earth) can’t change it.
That being said, we do have our moments, our victories, and our glories. But we tend to play those down, too (except when they involve gold medals, hockey, and the Olympics). We’re a modest people, I suppose.
So all of this being said, I’m always surprised to find Canadians on the other side, at least historically-speaking. Not far from Charlemont, Massachusetts, is the town of Deerfield. On 29 February 1704, during the War of Spanish Succession, a joint force of 47 French and Canadian soldiers and 200 Mohawk warriors (including the Pocumtuck, who had lived in what is now the Pioneer Valley before the English settlers arrived) raided Deerfield before dawn. The raid was partly in revenge for the settlers’ violent and callous treatment of the Pocumtuck, which culminated in a massacre in what is now nearby Montague Township in 1676.
The combined French-Canadian-aboriginal force caught the settlers unaware before dawn and massacred 56 people. 109 people survived the raid, they were captured and made to march 500km north to Québec, in harsh winter conditions. 21 of them either died or were killed during the trek. Most of those who made it to Québec were eventually ransomed and made their way back to Deerfield. A few, most notably the pastor’s daughter, Eunice Williams, chose to remain. Williams spent the rest of her life at Kahanwake, a Mohawk settlement near Montréal, marring a Mohawk man and having a family with him.
The Deerfield Raid was no doubt a traumatic event for the people of the small settlement. And it has lived on for the past 300 years, it is a foundational story in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. At times, listening to people describe it, reading newspaper stories about the raid, and seeing how it is represented in the pop culture of the Valley, I even get the sense that the trauma of the raid lives on. Certainly, it is strange for a Canadian to realise the Americans were victims of the colonial era. It is even more bizarre to realise that one’s ancestors were the ones who caused the trauma. We are usucally the victims, not the aggressors of historical trauma.
The fact that the 1704 raid lives on in Deerfield, and is largely forgotten in Québec (as France lost that war), is significant. No doubt it lives on in part because Deerfield’s raison d’être today is as a tourist site. Historic Deerfield is a national historic site, and the town’s economy centres around the historical experience there, and the 1704 raid factors heavily into it. It is no doubt the most significant event to have occurred in Deerfield in its 337 year history. And, as a result of the historicisation of Deerfield, the 1704 raid gets played out, reinterpreted, and re-assessed almost daily by the town’s residents, the historical educators, and the tourists who come to visit.
But for me, a Canadian, the first time I visited Deerfield, on a warm, sunny day in late May 2006, I was stunned to find a place that was traumatised by Canadians, at least a place that was not an aboriginal settlement/reserve. And as I took in the colonial American scene in front of me that day, I couldn’t help but feel a shudder of fear imagining that 247-man strong force crawling across the plain along the Deerfield River, coming out of the mist and the snow and laying siege to a small frontier settlement. And every time since that I have driven past, or been into Historic Deerfield, I cannot shake that feeling of terror that the colonist there must’ve felt that cold February morning 306 1/2 years ago.
Historical Consciousness
July 13, 2010 § Leave a comment
So, I’m reviewing and revising a textbook right now (not mine, I’m just the outside expert). In this textbook, in the Introduction, I have come across the following passage, which I find amusing. I’m not sure I agree entirely with the idea, but it is an intriguing one for someone who lives in Québec and is a citizen of Canada and who studies Irish history:
In essence, reflecting on human reality means reflecting on ourselves, since we are all humans and nothing in the human experience is completely foreign to us. In this sense, history is to groups of people what psychology is to individuals. Imagine an historian talking to his “patient”:
You suffer from a colonization complex, compounded by a repressed rebellion and a weak constitution. I recommend that you go through a major political crisis every ten or fifteen years over the next 100 years. Then you should feel a bit better. But your past will follow you until the end of your days, in one way or another. You’ll be better off if you accept it right away.
French Culture in Downtown Montréal
June 22, 2010 § Leave a comment
One of the most persistent complaints of the linguistic nationalists of Québec is about the fate of the French language in downtown Montréal. They claim it’s an English centre again, that they can’t get served in their own language anymore. It’s true to a degree, you hear more English in downtown Montréal than anywhere else in the city, but it’s not just because of the old Anglo business class. It’s also because downtown Montréal is where the tourists go, along with the old city. And the tourists, largely Americans, like to be served in their own language. But you want service in French, it’s there.
But there is a creeping Anglicisation going on here, culturally-speaking anyway. The downtown movie theatres don’t show French-language films, and if they do, they’re subtitled in English. There are no French-language bookstores downtown. There is an Indigo, a Chapters, a few Coles, and Paragraphe, which, despite its name, is an English-language store. There was a Renaud-Bray near Concordia University, but it closed a few years back and is now a chicken restaurant. The big Archambault in the old Eatons store is now a clothing store. The French-language music section of HMV downtown is wanting. And French-language DVDs there? Forget about it.
Yesterday, I was on a mission. I wanted to find a québécois film, le 15 fevrier 1839, about the plight of a few Patriote rebels and their execution in prison by the British on 15 February 1839. Anyway, this was a big film when it came out a few years back, caused a lot of controversy. One idiot writing in The Hour even claimed the Patriotes were génocidaires. So, I thought it would be easy to find. HMV doesn’t carry French-language films, though it does have a big section of French-language TV DVDs. The movie store in the Carrefour Industrielle-Alliance, its “Section française” is about 3% of the store. Indigo, forget about it. So I walked to the Renaud-Bray in Place-des-Arts. Nope, its film section is all English-language movies. So, for sure, the big Archambault at the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Berri would have it, correct? Nope. Its film section is also about 95% English-language films. Their québécois section is tiny, and shoved into the back corner of the store.
I don’t get this. Québécois cinema is the only one in Canada that is actually watched. People go to québécois films here, they make money, and so on. But don’t try t0 find québécois films on DVD in downtown Montréal, my friends. Because they’re not there. In the end, I had to go up the rue Saint-Denis to Boîte Noîre to find my film. The Plateau, that is.
The Apocalypse is Nigh
May 16, 2010 § Leave a comment
We interrupt regularly scheduled programming here on Spatialities to bring you the following developing news: this weekend, the Théâtre Corona, here in Montréal, held a 2-night tribute to Phil Collins: Dance into the Light: Le Meilleur de Phil Collins. The Phil Collins impersonator is Martin Levac, billed as “the best impersonator of Phil Collins” in the world, and his show spent last spring at Le Capitol in Québec before embarking on a 20-city European tour.
Yes. Phil Collins merits a tribute show. I always thought that in order to merit a tribute, an artist had to be, well, an artist. A Phil Collins tribute. WTF?!?
The Irish & Crime in 19th Century North America
May 4, 2010 § 7 Comments
WordPress lets me see what search terms lead people to this site. Usually, they’re predictable, people searching my name, or Griffintown, or things along those lines. But today, there is this term: “explain the strong association between the 19th century irish diaspora and crime?” So, explain I shall.
Yes, this is a stereotype. But behind this stereotype is some kind of truth. Yes, the Irish, especially Catholics in inner cities, tended to find themselves in trouble with the law in disproportionate fashion in the 19th century. This was particularly true in port cities: Montréal, Saint John (NB), Halifax, Boston, New York, Philly. 19th century sailors were hard-living men. And the consequence of that was an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of police stations in those cities. And, yes, a lot of those sailors were Irish Catholics.
There was also the matter of labour violence. The Irish tended to do the kinds of jobs that no one else would, but they also tended to guard their employment jealously, in that if someone else wanted to do their work (free blacks in the States, French Canadians in Québec), they would protect their right to work. Oftentimes with violence when others threatened to undercut their wages (and the Irish tended to do work on very thin margins to start with).
Connected to this was ethnic/racial violence. For example, the Bowery B’hoys Riot of 1857 in the Five Points of Manhattan, where the Irish Catholics who had recently settled there were attacked by the nativist gang, the Bowery B’hoys. Or in York Point, Saint John, in 1849, when the ultra-Protestant Orange Order insisted on marching through an Irish Catholic neighbourhood on the Glorious 12th. Or more internecine battles in places like Philadelphia between black and Irish workers.
As an aside, this has led to one of the most simplistic arguments I’ve ever come across. Noel Ignatiev, in his overly dramatic How the Irish Became White (in order to “become white,” you have to first be considered something other than “white,” and I’m not convinced that the Irish were ever seen this way), argues that slavery essentially lasted another generation in the United States because the Irish Catholic immigrants to New York and Philadelphia, poor working-class immigrants, I might add, refused to throw their lot in with the free black populations of those 2 cities prior to the US Civil War. Had they, he argues, slavery would’ve ended. So, in essence, Ignatiev argues that the Irish “became white” by siding with the Anglo-Protestant hegemons in the United Sates against the blacks. Of course, to have expected anything different is just, well, simple. Why would the Irish side with the blacks? The blacks were the only other group of people down near the bottom of the socio-econo-cultural totem pole with the Irish. So, obviously, they’re going to try to distance themselves.
Anyway, I digress. Political violence. Well, politics were corrupt in the 19th century, pure and simple, whether it was Tammany Hall in New York, or battles against Anglo-Protestant hegemony in Montréal, corruption was everywhere, and violence was a common tactic by all sides. The Irish got their shots in just like everyone else.
But the most common reason why the Irish found themselves in trouble with the law in North America wasn’t any of this. It was the drink. The Irish were a disproportionate number of public drunks in North American cities, at least in the northeast of the US and Eastern Canada, for much of the 19th century. But, before we get into stereotypes of the Irish and the drink, let us remind ourselves of something else: they were the working-classes, they lived hard lives of unsteady and dodgy employment in the factories, ports, and canals of these cities. Their lives were defined by insecurity, in terms of employment, finances, housing. Inner-cities of Boston, Montréal, New York, Baltimore, in the 19th century were, in many ways, worse than they are today. Housing was worse, social conditions were worse, welfare states were worse. And so, not surprisingly, people tended to distract themselves from their problems with alcohol. And not surprisingly, this means that they ran afoul of the law and ended up getting arrested. And the Irish, well, they were a significant chunk of the urban working-classes in these cities. So, no surprise that they appear so frequently in the crime statistics.
Years ago, I was reading a book by my MA supervisor, Jack Little, about state formation in the Eastern Townships of Québec in the mid-19th century. As the Grand Trunk Railway was being built between Montréal and Portland, ME, in the 1850s, Irish navvies flooded the Townships. A rash of crime broke out along the rail line, and Stipendiary Magistrate Ralph Johnston was dispatched out to Sherbrooke to investigate. The results of his investigation surprised him, and in his report to his bosses in Québec City, he stated that the crime was actually committed by non-Irish Catholic, non-navvies. In short, by locals. And the Irish-Catholics got the blame. “In the eyes of too many,” Johnston wrote, “their crimes are to be Irish and Catholic.”
Yup, racial profiling existed in the 19th century too.
Positive Feedback
March 27, 2010 § Leave a comment
A few months ago, I published an article in a book edited by John Chi-Kit Wong of the University of Western Washington in Bellingham. The book was entitled, Coast to Coast: Hockey in Canada to the Second World War (University of Toronto Press, 2009), and my article was entitled “‘Scientific Aggression’: Class, Manliness, Class, and Commercialisation in the Shamrock Hockey Club, Montreal.”
Today, John forwarded the authors a review of the book from the H-Arete listserv, which deals with sport history, written by Jason Blake, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Blake had this to say about my article:
A few chapters show a keen interest in narrative, examining individual newspaper reports and trends in sports reporting. In “‘Scientific Aggression’: Irishness, Manliness, Class, and Commercialization in the Shamrock Hockey Club of Montreal, 1894-1901,” John Matthew Barlow argues that reporters in Montreal “became less concerned with the idea of fair play” and “more interested with winning and losing” (37) long before the amateur debate died. In a special subsection, Barlow provides cogent Ð almost literary Ð readings of individual press accounts. Important, too, is his highlighting of how self-consciously the journalists created stories of games. Consider this 1900 pronouncement: “Narrative in the superlative can only convey an imperfect sense of the paragon of perfection and sensation detail of this, the last and premier exhibition of a week’s great hockey” (64). It’s a shame Aethlon was not around then.
Very nice to get such good feedback on my first publication.
Remembering the Montréal Massacre
December 6, 2009 § 1 Comment
On 6 December 1989, a lone gunman burst into the École Polytechnique de Montréal, part of the Université de Montréal, and opened fire. He targeted women specifically. He was upset that “feminists” had ruined his life. For his delusions, 28 innocent people were shot, before he turned the gun on himself. In the first classroom he broke into, he separated men from women, then shot all 9 women, 6 of whom died. Then he wandered the hallways, the cafeteria, and another classroom, targeting women, shooting another 14 women, and 4 men. All 4 men survived, of the 24 women who were shot, 14 died. All this within 20 minutes.
I was 16, living in suburban Vancouver when this happened. I remember the shock. I couldn’t fathom then, and I still can’t, how someone could open fire in a school, let alone, to kill women for being in school. These 14 women died because they were just that: women getting an education. I have never been able to wrap my head around that concept. It doesn’t make sense to me. It didn’t in 1989 and it doesn’t in 2009. The Montréal Massacre is one of those transformative moments in my life, it is deeply embedded in my view of the world. It was a shocking, terrible event. And despite all of the school shootings since in both Canada and the USA, this is the one that is, to me, a horror story. Every 6 December, I remember watching the chilling news footage in the living room back in BC, I remember trying to understand why this had happened, my mother and I both horrified. And every 6 December, I find myself asking those same questions over and over. I still don’t have an answer.
But what particularly upsets me about 6 December is that the shooter’s name lives on, in infamy, of course, but nearly everyone of my generation, we were all affected wherever we were, know his name. I refuse to utter it, print it, post it, etc. I do not want to remember him. Diane Riopel, who taught at L’École Polytechnique in 1989, and narrowly missed meeting the killer, echoes this sentiment: “We have given him enough publicity. Out of respect for the victims, the killer should be completely anonymous.” I don’t think Hell exists, but when I think of him, I hope it does. I don’t think anyone can name all 14 women who died. I certainly can’t. They’re all agglomerated as “the victims.” The shooter maintains his individuality in death, but the 14 women he martyred lose theirs. All we seem to know is that they were engineering students. But what else about them? What were their dreams? What did they plan to do with their lives when they finished school? What books did they read? Where did they hang out with their friends? All of this, I wonder about every year at the anniversary. And I have no idea what the answers to these questions are.
These are the victims:
- Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student, age 21.
- Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student, age 23.
- Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student, age 23.
- Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student, age 22.
- Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student, age 21.
- Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student, age 29.
- Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department, age 25.
- Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student, age 23.
- Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student, age 22.
- Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student, age 28.
- Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student, age 21.
- Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student, age 23.
- Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student age 20.
- Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student, age 31.
Layers of Diaspora
November 15, 2009 § Leave a comment
Perhaps as a means of avoiding my current research project, which is to turn my dissertation into a monograph, I have been thinking about my next project, the one that will examine diaspora and its multiple layers on the urban landscape. Really, this is a mobile project, can be fit onto any large city with multiple diasporas, but Montréal is where the idea came from, and Montréal appeals to me because of the bifurcated nature of the host cultures here.
Back in the winter of 2006, I taught the History of Montréal, an upper-level course at Concordia. I think this is where this idea comes from for me, I taught that course as an ethnic history of the city. I traced the history of the landscape that is Montréal through the various ethno-religious groups that have called the area home, dating back to the pre-Contact Mohawk populations in the St. Lawrence River Valley, right through to the Vietnamese and various African and Arab diasporas today. As we moved through history, we dealt with the aboriginals, the Contact era, the French colonial culture here, then the onslaught of the British. This set the city up as a multi-layered, bifurcated location, French and English, the aboriginals more or less marginalised on reserves that ring the Île-de-Montréal. French and English were equal but different, though the British were dominant, they being the conquering colonial power.
It was into this milieu that the Irish arrived, becoming the first immigrant group in Montréal. Whilst the other groups, including the aboriginals, arrived at the location, they had done so as colonisers and conquerers, not as immigrants. The Irish set themselves up, established a model of negotiating space for themselves on the emergent urban landscape of Montréal. They found a niche for themselves in the Catholic Church (indeed, it is due to the Irish that there is an Anglo Catholic Church in Montréal today), established various community organisations, etc. Other immigrant groups that followed the Irish to Montréal all copied this model: Jews, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, African Americans (and Canadians), Arabs, Africans, South Asians, Southeast Asians, etc.
So I visualise these waves of immigration on the urban landscape of Montréal as successive layers building the landscape. I think of this as an archaeology of diasporic Montréal, not unlike Pointe-à-Callière, the archaeological museum down in the Vieux-Port (and, I might add, one of only a very few museums that can hold my attention). But it is not as simple as this, as each successive wave of immigration didn’t further bury the French and British (though aboriginal culture in Montréal seems to have gone further subterranean over the past century, though that is due more to Canadian government policy than immigration), as both have managed to establish and maintain their hold on the city’s culture and landscape.
But, as these immigrant groups are Montréalised, Québcised, or Canadianised (depending on your politics), there is a sanding down of their edges, of their distinct voices, as they are made more and more part of the urban landscape of the city. For some groups, this is a simpler process, like the Irish in the 20th century (before they re-discovered their separate ethnic identity in the mid-to-late 1990s), due to skin colour, language, and/or religion. For other groups, it isn’t so simple, for religious reasons (Jews) or skin colour (Jamaicans, Haitians), or language, or a combination of all three (Arabs). Indeed, of all the constituent elements of “Angl0-Montréal” throughout the last half of the 20th century, only the old-stock Anglo-Irish fully subsumed themselves into this identity/community. Other groups, most notably Jews, maintained their separate identity, in many ways due to the fact that they were never fully welcomed into the Anglo-Irish core of Anglo-Montréal. Nevertheless, there is a process of acculturation and Canadianisation going on here.
But, however one thinks of this process of immigration, retrenchment, and acculturation, I do think that the layer metaphor helps to make sense of the city and its myriad diasporic populations, and the ways in which they interact and influence each other on the urban landscape of the city.
the house of the irish
October 5, 2009 § Leave a comment
i submitted a book proposal to mcgill-queens university press the other week. i mailed it out monday, i got an email response on thursday. i was astounded canada post could get something somewhere that fast, even if the proposal travelled no more than 3.5km from pointe-saint-charles to mcgill. anyway, mqup liked what they read. they are interested in publishing the book, once it becomes a book.
so now, i am beginning to ponder how to turn “the house of the irish”, the dissertation, into the house of the irish, the book. i am cutting out the first substantive chapter, on the shamrock lacrosse club. that will become an article or two. and i am extending a chapter on nations and nationalism in griffintown, c. 1900-17 to at least 1922, with the establishment of the irish free state. part of my argument is that once ireland gained something approximating independence, even if the north was left out (or, more properly stated, opted out), the irish of the diaspora more or less lost interest in ireland, at least that was, i think, the situation in montréal. ireland was already an imagined nation by the early 20th century on account of there being hardly any irish-born irish in montréal by this time, immigration having dried up shortly after the famine. but after the free state was established, the irish here turned even more inwards. so that’s the first major revision or expansion.
the other is to correct the methodological issues in the last two chapters of the dissertation, which is too much reliance on the same set of sources. to correct this, i am going to engage in some oral history. but i am back to the same problem i had with the dissertation in a sense here. i am not interested in talking to the professional griffintowners, the don pidgeons and denis delaneys of the world. their thoughts and opinions on the griff are very well known, they are part of the commemorative process amongst the griffintown diaspora. i want to talk to people who didn’t necessarily think that they grew up in shangri-la. the ones who have an alternative view of the griff, or at least a more critical one. one former griffintowner in burman’s film said something like it was a shame to see the griff go, as they had it all. oh really? despite the poverty, unemployment, insecurity of tenure, etc.? of course, this is partly nostalgia, partly a child’s view of life in the 1940s. but i want to talk to people who have a more critical memory.
and that’s the hard part. where do i find these people? they’re not the ones at all the various griff gatherings. i have a few ideas, one of which is to make use of the parish of saint-gabriel, the historically irish church in the pointe (in fact, almost next door to us here). i recognise old griffintowners standing outside of saint-gabriel’s every sunday morning, so i’m hoping i can start there, talk to a few of them, get references to their friends, and so on.
either way, i am excited about this, i’m excited to turn this story of griffintown into a book. i think this is a story that has wider implications, not just for montréal, but for the irish diaspora, and even as an example of the acculturation of an ethnic group in a major metropolitan centre in north america.
as my favourite soccer blogger used to say at the end of each post: onwards!
Nationalism, Globalism & The Economy
February 27, 2009 § Leave a comment
A few weeks ago, French President Nicholas Sarkozy dismissed nationalism in Québec as tribalism, amongst other things, and suggesting that the world has moved on. This set off a frenzy amongst nationalists here, not surprisingly, who have been keenly and actively using the economic downturn to argue that Québec would be better off as an independent country.
Meanwhile, in the United States, President Barack Obama’s first stimulus package contained a “Buy American” clause for major items and industries, like steel. This set the United States’ trading partners, including the EU and Canada into a rage and was Obama’s first mis-step on the international stage, which he and his administration have spent a lot of time backing away from since.
Québec and the United States demonstrate, in many ways, the old way of doing things. During an economic crisis, to withdraw, to become protectionist, and tribal. Meanwhile, in the European Union, at least at a political level, the impetus has been quite the opposite: Europe has branded together to attack the economic downturn, to try to find solutions. Sarko’s rejection of québécois nationalism is something that plays out in his politics, and those of the rest of the Europe.
And whilst the actions of European politicians may be at odds with some aspects of the European population, what I find more interesting are these two competing notions of how to deal with the economy today. During the Depression of the 1930s, nations became protectionist and introverted, led by the United States, the country that, in many ways, had the most to lose with the Stock Market Crash in 1929. The Depression, I should also point out, lasted for most of the 1930s. So maybe protectionism is not the correct model for surviving this recession? Whatever we think of globalism, good or bad or ambivalent, it might be time to recognise its reality, that we do live in a globalised economy, with an emergent global culture, and respond to the recession in that spirit. The world’s response to the “Buy American” clause of the US stimulus package was telling. Canada and the EU told Obama and his administration that protectionism was not acceptable in this day and age (nor is it entirely legal according to the US’ trade pacts with Canada and the EU), and that rather than turn inwards, the world’s governments need to work together in order to solve the problems with the economy.
Of course, that then leads to the question of whether deep structural reforms are necessary, as the European Union seems to suggesting insofar as the banking and securities industries are concerned, or not, as Canada and the United States are suggesting. Will this bring conflict and argument about a New World Economic Order?
Matthew Barlow 