In May 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Nation announced preliminary results of their search for unmarked burials of children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (IRS), Canada was forced to reckon with a truth that Survivors had always carried: children were taken, and many never came home.

This difficult truth was already established years earlier, in 2015, by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada’s final report, which confirmed more than 3,200 deaths of children as a result of the IRS system, including 51 at Kamloops.

The Kamloops announcement shook many Canadians and revealed that more children likely died at residential schools in Canada than the TRC reported. This was something the commission anticipated would happen with new research, and additional deaths have now been confirmed by First Nations and police as they have undertaken their own subsequent investigations.

Read the full story at The Conversation Canada

“These two positions always go together: the power to rule and control lands, peoples and waters (and) the power to document and control history,” says Adele Perry, University of Manitoba history professor and director of the Centre for Human Rights Research.

“And that’s one of the really powerful things about colonial archives and records, and that’s why the struggles with them exist.”

To read the entire article, please follow the link to The Free Press. 

It’s hard to compare the modern era with the Depression, the autocratic and authoritarian dominance of the 1920s and ’30s or the Second World War because of different generational experiences, Kuffert says.

Post-Second World War, there was a general consensus in the West “about the kinds of extremes to which society should not go again,” that democracy and a respect for human rights and a measured approach to change was to the benefit of everyone’s security and prosperity, Kuffert says.

To read the entire article, please follow the link to The Free Press.

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Most of these organizations “run very close to the wire as far as their funding goes,” so she suspects they’d have to turn to donors for help.

While several museums did not respond to queries from The Canadian Press asking whether they’d want any Bay art or artifacts, many institutions appear to be watching the company’s creditor protection case and two processes already underway to sell of its assets.

To read the entire article, please follow the link to The Canadian Press. 

University of Manitoba history instructor George Buri disagrees with that assertion, stating its effects were quite insignificant.

Shedding light on the behind-the-scenes of that famous movie scene, Buri reveals that the Ben Stein, the actor that played Buellers teacher, was a free market economist and a conservative before he turned comedian. During the movie’s production, he was actually told to give a boring lesson by the director.

Buri finds it interesting that he gave that lecture, because it is a direct reflection of what was being preached during the 1980s in the era of Thatcher and Reagan, a time when Keynesian policies and government intervention was seen as a thing of the past. Buri believed it was a lack of demand that caused the Great Depression, not tariffs.

To read the entire article, please follow the link to Global News Winnipeg.

He talks about the similarities and differences, providing context on how Canada’s relationship with the U.S. has evolved since that pivotal debate between John Turner and Brian Mulroney.

To listen to the full conversation, please follow the link to CBC Manitoba Information Radio.

“It was pulled, really quite quickly after it had been completed,” said Adele Perry, a professor of history at the University of Manitoba and director of the Centre for Human Rights Research.

She said Heritage Minutes at the time tended to focus on ‘cheerful’ components of Canada’s past – and Riel’s video was a stark departure from that.

“It depicted, in very concrete terms, the death of an Indigenous leader under circumstances that were quite clearly could be parked at the door of the Canadian state. And I think at that time, it was seen as not particularly palatable, and so it was pulled.”

To read the full story, please visit CTV Winnipeg. 

Over a decade ago, he set out to write a biography on the former premier. What started as a small part of his thesis work as a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto later became a project Gerald pursued after finishing his forty-year teaching career at the University of Manitoba.

The Distinguished Professor Emeritus of history and retired St John’s College fellow expressed relief as the long-awaited Norquay book arrived and was ready for launch this month. The book has been published by UM Press, located in St John’s College

“The immediate research took about five to seven years, the writing two to three years, and preparing for the topic began decades ago. It is a happy moment to have the book in my hands after such a long time.”

In an interview Dr. Friesen mentioned the book’s connection with the late John Bovey, then the provincial archivist and husband of Patricia Bovey, recent recipient of an honorary doctorate at the College:

“Fifty years ago, having decided that John Norquay would make an ideal subject for a biography, I consulted John Bovey, a family friend who was then the provincial archivist of Manitoba. He urged me not to undertake the project. I swallowed my disappointment, knowing that he knew the archive better than I did. I came to appreciate only later that he was saving me from the disaster of doing a lot of research and publishing a flawed book that failed to employ a crucial resource. Bovey could not tell me, for fear it might ruin a potential transaction, that practically all the letters received in and sent from Norquay’s office in the 1880s rested in a trunk in the home of historian Ellen Cooke. He was negotiating to obtain this collection, between five and seven thousand documents. It eventually reached the shelves of the provincial archives and I relied on them. John Bovey can take some responsibility – and credit — for the delay in delivery and the consequent depth of this biography.”

With the book ready for launch, Gerald will have busy months ahead, with book launches in McNally Robinson, a Lieutenant Governor’s evening at Government House, the Selkirk Heritage Fund Evening of History, and visits to Saskatoon, Calgary, and Banff.

To learn more about the book, visit the UM Press website. 

Selling items for multiple dollars has allowed the stores to increase their product breadth — they’ve become, in a way, a melting pot of places like Shoppers Drug Mart, Canadian Tire and Walmart, says Sean Buchanan, a University of Manitoba professor who studies social issues in business.

He considers dollar stores “a reflection of this broader sort of consumer culture.”

“Basically the nature of consumption these days is, if you don’t pay a lot of money for something, it’s OK it doesn’t last very long,” Buchanan says. “You can throw it out, because you can just replace it.”

Sarah Elvins, a University of Manitoba professor who studies the history of retailing is also featured in this article, please visit Bang for the buck, or down-market dross for more.

With a range of topics being discussed, the presenters included Jayson Gislason, LJ Fulugan, Elliot Kelsey, and Hanako Ternaishi.

Jayson Gislason – “Acknowledging Land: Lord Dufferin, The Numbered Treaties and Indigenous Agency.” 

Jayson is a recent St John’s College scholarship recipient and an SSHRC-supported graduate student in the Joint Master’s Program in History between the Universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg. His thesis examines the intersection between contemporary land acknowledgement practices and the history of the numbered treaties in western Canada. His interests in studying history are driven by a desire to explain the modern world and build a more equitable Canadian society. Jayson wishes to thank Drs. Ryan Eyford, Sean Carleton, and Adele Perry for their direction and encouragement on this project, and Dr. Greg Bak for his encouragement in presenting this work here. 

LJ Fulugan (They/them) – “Critical anthropological heritage curation and collaboration.” 

LJ (they/them) is a fourth-year student, a first-generation Filipino Canadian, and an undergrad honours student in the Department of Anthropology. Their research interests are mostly concerned with identity in social contexts, representation, and the critical decolonization of anthropology. In engaging with these concepts self-reflectively and reflexively, they hope to write for and with the people in their lives. 

Elliot Kelsey – “The Migration Period and its connection to Norse Mythology” 

Elliot is a second-year student studying archaeology who hopes to pursue a master’s degree in this field because of the lack of knowledge we have about the time period between the 3rd and 4th centuries. As Elliot has researched, the Migration Period isn’t necessarily a popular topic with the public, and he wants to change that.

Hanako Teranishi – “Absent Histories in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1958) and In Cold Blood (1965).” 

Hanako is a fourth-year student studying this project as a textual analysis of Truman Capote’s novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and the true crime novel In Cold Blood. These texts include Japanese American “characters” and are coded with Japanese American history, specifically Japanese Internment in America.

On behalf of St John’s College, we are proud to see these students excelling in their respective research areas.