These annual awards are given for meritorious publications or for exceptional contributions by individuals or organizations to regional history. The Canadian Historical Association wishes to announce that it is soliciting nominations for its 2019 Clio Prizes. These annual awards are given for meritorious publications or for exceptional contributions by individuals or organizations to regional history. Studies on any theme and in any period concerning a particular region or a regional interpretation will be considered for the prize. For an Achievement Award consideration, please send your nomination(s) and supporting documentation (documentation is not necessary for books)for candidates who have made outstanding contributions to regional history to the Chair of the appropriate Clio Committee. Books and nominations for an achievement award should be submitted before 31 December 2018 to the appropriate regional representatives. Diaries, textbooks, edited collections of essays, translations of books originally written in French or English, and books of documents are not eligible. Diaries, textbooks, edited collections of essays, translations of books originally written in French or English, and books of documents are not eligible. Books must bear a 2018 copyright imprint or, if not previously submitted, a 2017 imprint. The awards will be given on June 4, 2019 at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Historical Association at the University of British Columbia. ATLANTIC CANADA
QUÉBEC
ONTARIO
THE PRAIRIES
BRITISH COLUMBIA
THE NORTH (YUKON AND NORTHWEST TERRITORIES)
__________________________________ Winners 2018 ATLANTIC Jeffers Lennox, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690-1763. University of Toronto Press, 2017.
Matthew Barlow. Griffintown. Identity and Memory in an Irish Diaspora Neighbourhood. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017.
ONTARIO Susan M. Hill, The Clay We are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River. University of Manitoba Press, 2017.
THE PRAIRIES Erika Dyck and Alex Deighton. Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017.
BRITISH COLUMBIA Lynne Marks. Infidels and the Damn Churches: Irreligion and Religion in Settler British Columbia. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017.
Cole Harris
THE NORTH Joan Sangster. The Iconic North: Cultural Constructs of Aboriginal Life in Postwar Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017.
___________________________________________________________________ 2017 ATLANTIC Ronald Rudin, Kouchibouguac: Removal, Resistance, and Remembrance at a Canadian National Park. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.
QUÉBEC Sean Mills, A Place in the Sun. Haiti, Haitians, and the Remaking of Quebec. Montréal/Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2016.
ONTARIO Nancy Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank, The People and the Bay: A Social and Environmental History of Hamilton Harbour. UBC Press, 2016.
THE PRAIRIES Sarah Carter, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016.
Lifetime Achievement Award
BRITISH COLUMBIA Aaron Chapman, The Last Gang in Town: The Epic Story of the Vancouver Police vs. the Clark Park Gang Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016.
Lifetime Achievement Award For thirty-seven years until his retirement in 2011, Dan Savard curated the Royal British Columbia Museum’s photographic collection – an assemblage of tintypes, stereographs, glass negatives, lantern slides, picture postcards, modern transparencies, amateur snapshots, and professional photographs and film. He infused historical and ethnographic depth into the collection and shared his knowledge generously with scholars, students, and others over the years. He gained a public profile through lively public lectures on hidden facets of the collection. For Savard, photographic materials are rich and exciting sources of insight on the physical and cultural landscape, insight that is often missing in textual sources. He spent his life studying the region’s historiography as a way to better understand the photographs, photographers, and the early photographic technology, along with its transport (in backpacks, saddlebags, and in stagecoach holds). Savard’s book, Images from the Likeness House (2010), explored the relationships between photographers and the Indigenous peoples of Washington State, British Columbia and Alaska between 1860 and 1930 was awarded the Roderick Haig-Brown Book Prize in 2011. THE NORTH The prize was not attributed this year ________________________________________________________________ 2016 ATLANTIC Raymond B. Blake, Lions or Jellyfish: Newfoundland-Ottawa Relations since 1957. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Lions or Jellyfish is a polished investigation of the often-strained relationship between Ottawa and Newfoundland and Labrador. While many elements of this story are well known, Raymond Blake brings a sophisticated analysis and a well-constructed narrative. As Blake shows, Confederation has never been a comfortable fit for the province. Public and impassioned intergovernmental disputes – over federal transfers, management of the fishery, oil and gas revenues, and constitutional renewal – have fanned the fires of Newfoundland nationalism over the last six decades. Blake’s accounts of these confrontations are detailed and compelling, and reflect considerable research in governmental and private papers. Any analysis of intergovernmental relations must discuss the personalities of political leaders but Blake goes beyond mere personalities, as colourful as they often were. He delves into the economics, the contemporary political ideas and culture and the bureaucracy that constrained provincial and federal politicians’ choices. Despite this, Blake allows us to still savour the nasty squabbles between John Diefenbaker and Joey Smallwood, between Brian Peckford and Pierre Trudeau and, most recently, between Danny Williams and Stephen Harper. Lions or Jellyfish makes an important contribution to the history of Canadian federalism, and makes us wonder, why more has not been written about Newfoundland’s sometimes acrimonious, colourful, and contested relationships with Ottawa. QUÉBEC Amélie Bourbeau, Techniciens de l'organisation sociale. La réorganisation de l’assistance catholique privée à Montréal (1930-1974). Montréal/Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015.
ONTARIO Craig Heron, Lunch Bucket Lives: Remaking the Worker's City. Between the Lines, 2015.
THE PRAIRIES Michel Hogue, Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People. University of Regina Press, 2015.
His marriage to Pauline Gladstone initiated his relationships with Treaty 7 First Nations. His close rapport with still-surviving elders provided him with exceptional entry into their oral traditions, which formed the basis of significant new insights into and biographies of First Nations people from their own voice. These works include *Crowfoot*, *Tom Three Persons*, *Big Bear*, and most recently *The Great Blackfoot Treaties*. Joining oral history with rigorous archival research, his widely read books have reshaped how we think about Alberta’s past. He has received many honors, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Calgary and the Order of Canada. When he retired in 1991, the Glenbow made him chief curator emeritus and named the reading room of the Library and Archives after him. He is most proud of being inducted as an honorary chief of the Blood Nation and to receive the name Potaina, his wife’s grandfather’s name. Hugh Dempsey’s continuing commitment to preserving, researching, and writing history make him a deserving recipient of this Lifetime Achievement Award. THE NORTH Emilie Cameron, Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic. UBC Press, 2015.
BRITISH COLUMBIA Lisa Pasolli, Working Mothers and the Child Care Dilemma: A History of British Columbia’s Social Policy. UBC Press, 2015.
Some of these concepts are deceptively simple. Working mothers demonstrated a strong work ethic and were celebrated in wartime, but were criticized for continuing their paid employment while raising children during peacetime. The provision of child care in times of high labour demand, then, becomes essentially a labour policy; its withdrawal during times of relative labour surplus constitutes a decision to privilege male breadwinner labour, while requiring women to commit to child-rearing and housekeeping as full-time unpaid occupations. With these gendered assumptions concerning women’s proper place in force, the working mother who demanded child care was constructed by her critics as “a problem.” If working mothers were understood to be pursuing careers to alleviate financial need (rather than to pursuing a vocation, or fulfilling a desire to work outside of the home), then the policy solution was to provide mothers’ allowances. Mothers’ allowances (and related social programs) were designed to subsidize women to such an extent they stayed out of the paid workforce, and could focus entirely on caring for their own children. Lifetime Achievement Award
Tracing the routes taken nearly 200 years earlier by James Cook, Fisher left his native New Zealand to study at the University of British Columbia. In time, this research was captured in his landmark study and first monograph, Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890, which appeared in 1977, three years after he joined the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Contact and Conflict repositioned the west coast encounter as one in which Aboriginal agency offset the old imperial narrative of European exploration. Arguing that commerce in the Pacific Northwest was marked by Aboriginal strategies and priorities, separate agendas, and identifiable personalities who carefully shaped the terms of trade, Fisher identified the phenomenon of “mutual benefit” as a defining force in the study of the region’s past. Contact and Conflict remains one of the core texts on First Nations and British Columbian history. Fisher’s perspectives, arguments, and evidence have been challenged repeatedly yet the book has aged well. And whatever debate it continues to provoke demonstrates that it remains one of – perhaps the – single-most influential monographs ever written on the subject. That it first appeared in 1977, two years before the inaugural Clio Awards, means that it escaped the recognition from the CHA that it deserved. Fisher’s subsequent monographs, contributions to BC Studies, and collaborative projects have furthered our understanding of British Columbia’s history. With Hugh Johnston, he co-edited Captain James Cook and His Times in 1979 and From Maps to Metaphors: The Pacific World of George Vancouver in 1993. He also worked with Jack Bumsted, editing An Account of a Voyage to the North West Coast of America in 1785 and 1786 in 1982 and with Ken Coates on Out of the Background: Readings on Canadian History, which has gone through two editions. Fisher was also a driving force between the unique department-wide collaboration on Pacific Province: A History of British Columbia, contributing an important update on his earlier work on contact and trade. His second major monograph, a biography of British Columbia’s “Little New Deal” Premier, Duff Pattullo of British Columbia, won honourable mention in the 1992 Clio Prize and still stands as exemplary historical biography and a major contribution to the literature on political history in British Columbia. Fisher moved to Prince George in 1993 to build a History Department at the University of Northern British Columbia. As the founding Department Chair he played a pivotal role in assembling a team of scholars with strengths in northern and British Columbian studies. He remained active in teaching and researching the province’s history throughout this period, even after his promotion to the position of Dean. In 2002 he was recruited to the position of Dean of Arts at the University of Regina and three years later he became Vice-President Academic and Provost at Calgary’s Mount Royal College, shepherding it into university-status in 2009. Fisher’s continued support of Indigenous scholarship and students was manifest in his role in the building of the Iniskim Centre, for which he was honoured by Blackfoot elders and further recognized with a Niitsitapi name, Stum eek see yaan, prior to his retirement in 2013. Fisher has taught thousands of undergraduates and supervised dozens of graduate students over the years. He has been a forceful advocate, as well, for the role of the public scholar and the need for academic historians to communicate their discoveries beyond the ivory towers. Fisher continues to pursue research, set a high standard as a writer, and engage publicly and collaboratively with the history of British Columbia, a path we celebrate with this 2016 Clio Award. _______________________________________________________________________ 2015 ATLANTIC Gregory M.W. Kennedy, Something of a Peasant Paradise? Comparing Rural Societies in Acadie and the Loudunais, 1604-1755 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014).
Previous historical assessments of the Acadians before the Deportation often speculated on the relative autonomy/oppression or wealth/poverty of the Acadians. Kennedy offers a perceptive comparison grounded in extensive research in French archives. He selects the canton of Loudun in the Poitou-Charentes region of France as his comparator for Acadie; this is an eminently reasonable selection, since a significant number of 17th-century Acadian colonists came from this region and it was a borderland in France’s 16th-century wars of religion. Though the Acadian archival inventory is rather skeletal, Kennedy has reconstructed quantitative and qualitative descriptions of the colony’s environment, economy, culture, familial patterns and community political structures as they relate to a contemporary French peasant community. He concludes that life in Acadie was probably less idyllic and more familiar to French peasants and seigneurs than many scholars have assumed. This is not to say that Kennedy sees no difference between the Acadians and the Loudunais. Some recent scholarship on the formation of an Acadian identity has emphasized the Deportation as the formative experience, but Kennedy argues that the colonists forged a distinct, kin-based society in the unique environmental and political circumstances. In this, they were similar to the Canadiens, the Loudunais and other communities who were ‘subjects’ of France, but not yet ‘French’ in a nationalist sense. This will enable us to teach Acadian history as a holistic rather than a segmented reality. By reconnecting Acadie to the French Atlantic World and emphasizing tangible comparisons, Kennedy has opened the door to more comprehensive inquiries into the themes of change and continuity as formative forces. His conclusions will be widely discussed and inevitably challenged, but Gregory Kennedy has produced a valuable new perspective that will guide the conversation to follow. QUÉBEC Steven High, Oral History at the Crossroads. Sharing Life Stories of Survival and Displacement, Vancouver et Toronto, UBC Press, 2014.
ONTARIO Jennifer Bonnell, Reclaiming the Don: An Environmental History of Toronto’s Don River Valley Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014.
Like the Don River itself, Bonnell’s study ebbs and flows through several centuries of Ontario’s history. After discussing Indigenous communities’ uses of the river as an important resource before European contact, Bonnell traces the way “the Don” was reconceived by early Europeans such as John Graves and Catharine Simcoe, who framed it by the pastoral English ideal as a source of transportation and vitality, through its use as an outlet for sewage and industrial waste as the city around it expanded, and then to the many attempts to revitalize, reconstruct, and revision -- in essence reclaim -- the Don River, its valley, and estuary. It is a work of complexity and nuance, combining social, political, economic, and environmental history, using the Don River as a lens through which to tell the history of the region and its people. THE PRAIRIES PearlAnn Reichwein, Climber’s Paradise: Making Canada’s Mountain Parks, 1906-1974. University of Alberta Press, 2014.
BRITISH COLOMBIA Dominique Clément, Equality Deferred: Sex Discrimination and British Columbia’s Human Rights State, 1953-84. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014.
Equality Deferred places individual women’s experiences and legal battles within the context of the human rights state. Clément demonstrates when and how human rights legislation was used to tackle gender inequality during a very active period of policy change and legal “innovations.”(15) However, the failure of the human rights state to address “systemic discrimination” is also acknowledged (13). That this era of dynamic policy innovation did not lead to an evenly applied progression to equal rights for all women is a key conclusion. Clément also details how British Columbia’s application of human rights law differed from other provinces: specific contexts are significant. A case study approach illuminates local interpretations and applications of human rights legislation. The importance of Kathleen Ruff’s appointment as the first Director of the Human Rights Branch, and the contributions of the team of investigators she hired, exemplifies the importance of local and individual stories. Clément also indicates that BC’s labour force, provincial immigration rates, and the precedents set in sexual harassment and gay rights illustrate important regional differences in application of human rights law. He argues that British Columbia provides an ideal case study for the nation, because it was “the epicentre of a conflict on the nature and legitimacy of the human rights state.” (21) Clément has written a historical monograph with sound research and an engaged sense of enquiry. Through excellent stories of individual women’s challenges to the law and by providing the context of the human rights state in a key period, he presents an image of some good intentions and some less than charitable notions, well mixed with politics and policy formation. Here we see, too, historical knowledge offered up as a call for action in the present. This is a compelling demonstration of what engaged historical scholarship can be. LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
In Written as I Remember It: Teachings (??ms ta?aw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder, Paige Raibmon and Harmony Johnson have deftly captured Paul’s knowledge and stories in written form, but she unreservedly remains the author. It is her voice that speaks on every page. Her determination to present her teachings and history within her own narrative framework makes her contributions extremely valuable and, in that regard, this book is much more than a biography. She wanted her teachings to be available to a wider audience. She was insistent about how her story would be told and preserved; she spent years speaking with scholars, journalists and relatives, hours in front of microphones, and many more hours reading and re-reading edited versions of her words. She consented to the process in order to preserve more than a memoir. As Raibmon noted, “Elsie is a serious storyteller….She takes the power of words seriously, and so tells stories in order to impart helpful, potentially healing, knowledge”. (4) The recent publication of Written as I Remember It: Teachings (??ms ta?aw) from the Life of a Sliammon Elder is a culmination of a lifetime in service to the Sliammon history, language and culture and her valuable contributions to BC’s living history. THE NORTH Ted Binnema, Enlightened Zeal: The Hudson's Bay Company and Scientific Networks, 1670-1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014.
_____________________________________________________________________ 2014 ATLANTIC Renée N. Lafferty,The Guardianship of Best Interests. Institutional Care for the Children of the Poor in Halifax, 1850-1960.
The public and private institutions that have played a role of guardian of the poor children of Halifax were guided by what they believed to be the "best interests of the child." On the other hand, their concept of what their “best interests” was remained vague. Renée N. Lafferty demonstrates in her excellent book, The Guardianship of Best Interests that this concept is very indicative of the changing perceptions towards children, social services and the professions working with children. Lafferty’s study examines the creation and management of institutions for poor children from the mid-19th century until their closure a century later. These institutions are then abandoned in favor of a system of foster families promoted by the Children’s Aid Society. Through a dynamic and interesting analysis, the author explores the interaction between these institutions and their environment throughout the period studied. The author notes that the institutions did not care about "saving" children from the worst conditions of poverty. The children had first to be made into "useful and responsible" citizens and thereby meet society’s expectations. To achieve these objectives, the children were separated according to age, gender, religion and race. Even though faced with chronic under-funding, these institutions nonetheless stated to be a lways looking for the best professional methods of child care. Lafferty’s article makes a significant contribution to Canadian historiography as it sheds new light on the evolution of social services for children. Previous studies argue that we have gone from an ineffective and often harmful network of institutions run by amateurs to a professional system for host families well supervised by specialists in social work. Lafferty questions this argument and demonstrates that the authorities in Halifax and Nova Scotia had long since developed an approach that combined foster families and care in institutions. In addition, these authorities supported services as well as public and private funding. QUÉBEC Mario Mimeault, L’exode québécois 1852-1925. Correspondance d’une famille dispersée en Amérique. Septentrion, 2013.
Through his original research, Mario Mimeault offers a new perspective on the Quebec exodus which will help us reflect upon the migration process. His main source of information, consisting of more than a thousand letters exchanged between 1852 and 1925, traces the migration experience of a French Canadian family of high social status dispersed throughout America. Carefully structured, the study examines several aspects of these exchanges and what they revea: the uses of letters, individual dreams and migrants adjusting to new realities, the family and the reconstruction of identity and sense of belonging in a family in transit. In particular, the author highlights the development, over generations, of a culture of migration within the family.
ONTARIO William Jenkins, Between Raid and Rebellion: the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867-1916. Montreal and Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013.
Using an innovative methodological approach which combines social historical methodology with historical geography, this book examines the lives and allegiances of Irish immigrants in Toronto and Buffalo in the period between the Fenian Raids and the 1916 Easter Uprising. Jenkins takes up the challenge of rendering the compelling allegiances of those communities intelligible through his examination of the transformations that took place over the politically-charged period of the narrative. The book is organized into two sections, both of which are grounded in a broad array of sources. In the first Jenkins examines the historical geography of the Irish immigrant experience in both Toronto and its American neighbor Buffalo, two rapidly growing cities that were both major destinations for Irish immigrants. In the second he provides an insightful analysis of the transformations and the ‘prevailing threads’ which run from the immigrants to their descendants. It is a work of remarkable complexity and it is firmly-rooted in the historical scholarship of both the Irish diaspora and Canadian and American politics. At one level, its insightful interpretations and its comparative structure add greatly to our understanding of a commonality of experience. More importantly, however, the subtlety and thoroughness of the argument and the skill of the author as a writer provide a richly nuanced study which accounts for national and transnational influences and for the power of geography as a vital historical determinant. THE PRAIRIES James W. Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. University of Regina Press, 2013.
James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains offers a sweeping overview of the health of North America’s indigenous plains societies from pre-contact times through to the end of the nineteenth century. It combines original research with a synthesis of much recent work. Daschuk’s capacity to draw from archaeology, as well as the fields of ethnohistory, historical climatology, biology, veterinarian science and human epidemiology develops a significant new understanding of the pre-history and territorial history of plains aboriginal people and their precipitous demographic losses in the period of colonization. The “clearing of the plains” according to Daschuk, can be traced to the earliest periods of the fur trade, particularly as trade routes, disease pathways and episodic, regional game depletion became more widespread after 1821. In doing so, he sustains the observation that colonial commercial empires linked by market economies transformed as much world ecologies as they did economies. In this case, the realities of people of the Northern Great Plains were changed before colonization began, when the biotic and market impacts of the fur trade significantly altered aboriginal presence, forced bands to reconstitute themselves in new territories, or face subsistence crises aggrieved by climate events and ecological changes. A key contribution of the book links such earlier changes to the territorial period. In a masterful re-examination of the 19th century, Dashuk shows how, as bison disappeared from the plains, the numbered treaties, and later, the construction of the CPR and the events surrounding the 1885 resistance constituted far darker episodes in Canadian history than many appreciate. Dashuk demonstrates that famine, so associated with the treaty and early reserve era, cannot be linked to merely the absence of food in the post-bison period. Plains people bore the shock of the bison crisis to strategize as best as they could through treaties and new agricultural pursuits. However, their worst health crises occurred as famine enveloped reserve life Contact Us1912-130 Albert Street Ottawa, ON, K1P 5G4 Fax: (613) 565-5445 © 2018, Canadian Historical Association. All Rights Reserved. |