To begin this evening's discussion, I'd like to make a fairly bald sort of statement: Recording regional history is an act of reclamation and of affirmation. As such it is a vital pursuit.

You may wonder whether that statement really relates to the topic announced for this evening. I suggest that it does, and with your indulgence, I would like to show you that you can indeed get there from here.

First of all, let me elaborate a bit on the title. Whose History Makes the Books? This question provides, I think, the key to this discussion. There are probably many ways of reading this question, but I think two are particularly useful in the context of this talk.

"Whose history" can be asking just exactly who are the subjects? About whom, or what, is this history written? Whose stories and events are preserved in what historians call "the historical literature?" An answer that was substantially correct until about twenty years ago was "members of white male elites (of various nationalities) and those cultures and institutions they particularly admired." That is, those men and their historians tailored a specific view of the past that allowed them to make sense of their present. Their present expectations and understanding of the world, in turn, was reflected in the subject, scope and timbre of their historical researches. Anomalies and exceptions certainly exist but, generally speaking, this was the case. Nowadays the situation is changing.

As an aside I should mention that the change, however, is not as swift as many historians might hope. In a historiography course I took only eighteen months ago, all the historians I was required to read and whose works I was asked to discuss were male.

In the 1960s some of the basic assumptions upon which western society had structured itself began to be replaced. As you know, it was in those years that Blacks in the United States were agitating for recognition of their civil liberties, and the women's movement began to make measureable progress. Scholars and aid workers alike recognized a fundamental truth: that knowledge is power. In the years since, a prime component of efforts to empower all sorts of previously disadvantaged groups has been education. Equally important has been to provide those groups (which range from the dispossessed and oppressed of war-torn and underdeveloped nations and regions--like the North--, indigenous peoples, and the labouring classes, to women, the poor, and the visibly different) with a sense of solidarity, purpose and identity by encouraging them to reclaim their pasts. Literacy leads to the development of a historical consciousness (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 1989: 81). A community requires a history. Knowledge of the past is essential for understanding the present because people have to know where they come from. It is in this way that historical knowledge can engender power. Today historians are attempting to rectify past imbalances in the historical record, are revising accepted historical interpretations and, with new methods and new attitudes borrowed from other social sciences, are furnishing pasts where there were none.

The second important reading of the question "Whose History Makes the Books?" stresses the author rather than the subject as I have just described. The answer would probably be something like "it is the trained historian's interpretation of some event or process that gets published as history." 

Historians are the mediators between the sources of history, whatever they may be, and the public, which generally can ill-afford the time to do it for themselves. The non-historian has been educated to take the historian's word that the account, the history, explains exactly what happened. What may be forgotten is that historians are people, individuals with the same strengths and weaknesses of character we are all gifted with. 

Hopefully the historian has been trained to avoid affecting (or infecting) the material he or she is writing with unacknowledged assumptions and biases. But whether historians wish it or not, there will always be an element of themselves in the work simply because they are human. Thus many historians are occupied revising and reinterpreting what has been written so that the current generation can clearly see its connection with the past and so to understand its present.

Thus there are two kinds of history that makes the books; that of the subject and that of the author. From this point of departure, then, I'd like to look at the situation here at home, and to suggest that writing our own history can lessen the dichotomy of those two kinds of history.

Generally speaking, the North and northerners as subjects of history have been treated rather cavalierly. The stranglehold of the myth of the North has pretty much seen to it that until recently only the really romantic and exciting subjects made the books. The North plays an immense role in the Canadian psyche. Professor Grant of Trent University began an article on the subject by saying that "since the time of Confederation, Canadians have looked upon their north as a reflection of identity and destiny. Other scholars have written on this subject of our national infatuation with the north: it is thus not too surprising that the majority of our coins bear northern images: loon, beaver, caribou, canoe and fur trader." For many Canadians, spending money is probably the closest contact they will have with the wildlife and the northern environment that define this country. 

I probably don't have to enumerate at any great length the stereotypes and the main focus of much of the history of our part of the North. Missionaries, placer miners, the Klondike, mad trappers, traders, Mounties, a few First Nations people for effect, add the Highway and that's Yukon history. It seems to me that we have been made apparently willing victims of a historical hoax perpetrated by authors whose interest was attracted northward by something they seemed to think they couldn't get at home, in Toronto, or Vancouver, or Albuquerque. If our present, here, in the Yukon, is misinformed by a rather romanticized past created for us by several generations of, more or less, armchair historians, as I believe it is, how can we truly understand the present and so be adequately prepared for the future?

The answer, I believe, lies in Yukoners--northerners really, because this problem is not limited to the Yukon; it's probably worse in the Northwest Territories--taking over control of the process. We must reclaim the past, affirm our peculiar understanding of the present, so we can be prepared for the future. The solution is, it seems to me, for we, who live here, to write our own history and to write it in any way we please.

I hope I've startled you a little bit because I think this whole issue is vitally important. What most Canadians know about the North is extrememly limited. I am a graduate student at Lakehead University and in the 1991-92 school year was a teaching assistant for a survey of Canadian history. For many of my students it was probably the only Canadian history they had taken outside of a Grade Eight social studies component on pioneer life or perhaps a Grade 12 course. In two terms, twenty-six weeks, the North entered the discussion on only four main occasions: the transfer of the North-West Territory to Canada, the Gold Rush, the Boundary Dispute, and Diefenbaker's Northern Vision. Of the over two hundred students in the course, only two did their major term papers on northern topics. And it seems to me that the truly bizarre thing of it was that people in Thunder Bay think they're northerners! It may be that our knowledge of the north's history is as sketchy as theirs but with the gaps in different places.

That being said, I want to address the first part of the title of this lecture and then try to tie the rather disparate ideas I have presented together with some examples from my thesis work.

I chose the two words "history" and "remembrance" rather specifically because I will be using them to mean two separate things. By history I don't just mean the stuff that professional historians write, the academic kind--the kind I'm being trained to do; I am also using it to mean the public past, the collective memory. The way I am using the word in this discussion has political implications. The collective memory is reinforced by displays and commemorations that are sanctioned or controlled by certain dominant social groups. Professor Roger Simon of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education in Toronto has examined this issue and has explored the tensions inherent within it. Certain groups in society, he suggests, have greater legitimacy than others. Those groups, including governments, churches, and so on, have greater control over the display of historical representations than smaller, less powerful interests. This tends to create a common understanding of a shared past that overlooks large portions of that past. In the Yukon, Riverboats, Discovery Days, Rendezvous, the Alaska Highway Anniversary, the can-can, the gold panner on our licence plates, war memorials and territorial flag are a few of its celebrations and symbols. Accepting them as true representations of the way things really were is, essentially, acquiescing to a incomplete vision of the past created by someone for a particular purpose and without our full knowledge and consent. To reclaim our proper past, we must look to remembrance.

"Remembrance" is private. It is an individual's personal memory. It is family knowledge and tradition. It can be more encompassing and include the members of small groups who experienced things together and who remember. It resides informally in people far more than it is formally preserved in books. It is shoeboxes of photographs of people and occasions that matter, personally, rather than historically. It binds us together and forms the true basis of our communities. But it is fleeting. It can be lost in a moment. Once the memory is gone, once the person who knew who those people were in that photograph and what they were doing, there is little hope of recapturing it. In remembrance lies the key to a region's history particularly for the North, where the memories of its residents are an important link to a past that has not yet attracted the attention of many historians.

Remembrance is what we all have--the built-in historian. It is created almost automatically. We are surrounded everyday by history and innundated by historical representations. The most forceful of these is memory. They provide a picture of an earlier age that was manifestly different from the present. Others find these memories particularly interesting if they include recollections of important public events. For all its obvious shortcomings as a form of knowledge of the past, memory surpasses every other in vividness and in the authenticity of firsthand experience--"I was there."

Education, of course, also contributes to our knowledge of the past. It is deliberate, planned and organized and possesses an authenticity that is academic rather than personal. A third way we recieve historical information is the most chaotic and unstructured. It is in the avalanche of information from a huge variety of sources we must sift through practically all the time. These can include works of formal history in books and journals, historical fiction, guidebooks to historical sites, exhibition catalogues and other written sources that claim to convey information about the past. The sources are not at all limited to written material, however. A list I came across while preparing this talk included government rituals, state-sponsored commemorations (holidays and displays), archives (national, local and private, magazines, newspapers, radio, television, cinema, museums and galleries, prints, postcards, posters and t-shirts, story quilts, performance spaces (including theatres and community centres), public art, photo albums, diaries, collections of memorabilia, oral narratives and life histories, and ritualized expressive forms of speech. The author called these the "loci of the social production of collective memory." This list is by no means exhaustive.

I hope I've not given you with the impression that remembrances rarely get published, for that is certainly not the case. Remembrance is readily available in local bookstores and accumulated in libraries. Libraries are particularly important as they are often a community's first major public work after establishing some kind of government apparatus and vital local infrastructure. An illustration of this is Dawson City's library. It was constructed very early in that community's development.

In book form remembrance is history written by those who remember. As such it is generically different from the formal, academic work of professional historians. Reclaimed remembrance is primarily categorized as autobiography or life history, or it may be presented as picture books with a brief account of the author's experiences doing whatever, local guides, collections of anecdotes and the like. Professional historians tend to undervalue this kind of material because it is so obviously the work of an individual who is not a historian that its usefulness as a source is limited. Even works by amateur historians is devalued simply for not being written by a professional.

Phillipe Ariès is an excellent example of the latter, though not a Canadian one. Monsieur Ariès had leaped through perhaps 2/3rds or 3/4rs of the hoops required by the French academy to be deemed a historian. He decided not to complete his final degree and went into business as a banana importer, which earned him enough that he could dabble in writing history on the side. He published a 350-odd page book called, in its English translation, Centuries of Childhood. In it he traced the evolution of the concept of childhood from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. It was adopted as required reading in many university courses. The translation was hailed by reviewers as a "pioneering venture," and "the best history that is being written today." In France it was reviled, not for being lousy history, mind you, but for being the work of a banana importer. I should probably qualify this story by saying that I heard it from a professor whose sense of humour made it difficult to tell whether he was being entirely truthful. Nevertheless, it's useful as an illustration of how good history can be undervalued simply because of its author.

Remembrance, I believe, is the basis, the sine qua non, if you will, of a region's history. It is where we must begin to create a comprehensive, but more personal history of the Yukon, of the North. The process is not that difficult; it begins with simply remembering, hearing or reading about something that engages interest. "I didn't know that," thinks the historian; "what does this mean?" The next steps are researching, thinking and writing. The last step is beyond the control of the author, however: people must be interested enough in the account to read it must make the decision to fit it into their own, individual, understanding of the regional past.

My own experience can serve as an illustration. I first heard of the University of Canada North in November, 1990. Yukon College was willing to apply, on my behalf, for a modest amount of funding under the federal government's Northern Scientific Training Program. I was interested in undertaking a project but had no idea what it would be. A colleague suggested that I research the University of Canada North. He told me what he knew about it and when the funding was granted, I started reading. Initially, I thought I would try to find out why it had failed; I assumed it had failed because I hadn't heard about it despite two years in the Northern Studies program at the college. I began at the Yukon Archives. There were two boxes of files containing memos, notes from meetings, minutes, agendas, telexes, newspaper clippings and letters. I made scads of notes, took down names, surprised that I had heard of some of them, and began to get a sense of what a small group of people had been trying to do.

In my thesis I hope to show that the UCN was an important indicator of the growing maturity of northern society. By trying to establish a university here, with campuses in Yellowknife, Inuvik, Fort Smith and Whitehorse, the founders were signalling to northerners and to the rest of Canada that they were willing to take a good close look at the kind of society that was developing here. They believed that northerners wanted to study the North because they lived here. They wanted the UCN to be a clearing house for all northern research and to initiate its own research projects to look into the things that northerners wanted studied. This is what I think the UCN means.

Its corporate life begins with its creation by federal letters patent in early 1971. The brain-child of Richard Rohmer, a prominent Toronto lawyer, and thirty residents of the two territories, the UCN appeared to offer northerners the opportunity to exercise greater control over northern research and post-secondary educational programming. The possibility of this greater control stemmed from the fact that the UCN was not established, as were many other northern insitutions, by government, but by a group of committed northern residents. From its inception, however, the endeavour was plagued by a number of serious problems that ranged from diverging opinions about what kind of institution the new university should be to financial and administrative difficulties. In addition, political and social conditions appear to have operated to mitigate against the success of the university.

The founders organized the university into two parallel divisions because they recognized there were crucial differences in the situation in the two territories. The most obvious were the composition of the population, the size of the territories, the maturity of the respective governments and the effectiveness of the existing educational system. The administrative headquarters were to be located in Inuvik, but the two divisions were to work more or less independently to establish campuses in their respective territories. The division of the UCN along those lines was a sound decision. Their separate histories illustrate the effects conditions in the territories had on the UCN project. In the first sixteen months, the NWT Division came to realize the impossible nature of its goals in the face of enormous difficulties, not the least of which was rather ineffective primary and secondary education. The Division had entirely faded away by the beginning of 1974. The Yukon Division, while it lasted much longer, was unable to secure the funding it needed to plan and implement a "Yukon Higher Education Program" to direct the establishment of the Whitehorse campus of the UCN. It examined various other possibilities for offering post-secondary level courses, with little result. Its major successes were running a public land claims information forum in November, 1977 and the creation of a separate research division that coordinated the efforts of several notable academics, among them, Julie Cruikshank. In 1979, YTG published the results of a study of options for post-secondary education that recommended the creation of a community college as the way to meet the public's needs. YTG adopted the recommendations and the UCN initiative was rendered more or less obsolete.

This, then, is a synopsis of what I have researched and thought about the University of Canada North so far. While doing this work, I have been told that my work is welcome. Most of the people I've been in touch with concerning their involvement with UCN have said that they are delighted that someone is getting this down on paper. What was, two summers ago, two boxes of papers in the Yukon Archives marked COR 0321 and COR 0322, two boxes of files in London, Ontario, one expanded file in Peterborough, Ontario, and the scattered memories of several dozen individuals, is in the process of becoming history. But whether my account becomes a part of the popular memory is less sure. As a historian, it is my job to tell the story, to assemble the information and suggest an interpretation. For it to have a life of its own, so to speak, reclaimed remembrance has to have some resonance with the present. 

I can think of an example of recent regional history where the resonance between the past event and the present population is faint. I am thinking of the sinking of the Princess Sophia. At the time it was one of the worst maritime disasters in the region. The loss of life was considerable. Time, certainly, has not lessened the disasterous nature of the event, but those people, for whom the Sophia's loss was a remembrance, have, for the most part faded away. Even though the story has been reclaimed recently by Drs. Coates and Morrison, there appears not to be enough community remembrance remaining to encourage us here, in the Yukon, today, to adopt the event into our popular memory of the Yukon's history.

The difficulty of creating a new northern history, in time and energy alone, is compounded by transiency. Most scholars and demographers recognize that a fluid population is a feature of northern society. In 1981 only 9% of non-Natives had lived in the same house for more than ten years. In contrast 34% had lived in their houses for less than a year. As people come and go, the fabric of remembrance is torn. What could have been part of the collective memory a decade ago may very well have vanished today simply because there are so few left here to remember it. Maybe UCN had its place in the consciousness of Whitehorse residents in the 1970s as the Sophia did in the 'teens. Perhaps the Sophia wasn't made history soon enough.

I think, though, that the effort to reclaim the Yukon's past is a worthy one, for who else other than ourselves is qualified to show us what is important in our past. Who but ourselves can know what is important for our present? Why should we continue to allow others to influence our vision of our future?

I think that northerners have often been made the subject of a history by historians not of their choosing. That history has given us a confused notion of our past and that, I have suggested here, is debilitating. We must each know our own history and we must each discover it for ourselves. Knowlege is power. Historical knowledge may well be the most important kind, for without it we cannot know how the present is different from the past. "Knowledge of the past," said Roger I. Simon, "is important because it can make a difference in the present." Simon urges us to attempt to "construct and engage [historical] representations that rub taken-for-granted history against the grain so as to re-vitalize and re-articulate what one sees as desireable and necessary for an open, just and life-sustaining future."

As I stated at the outset of this presentation, recording for ourselves, the history of the North, preserving the remembrances of residents, unearthing it from the shoeboxes of photographs, and rescuing it from the attics of southern Canada, is an act of reclamation. It affirms that we are not merely adjuncts of the Canadian preoccuption with a mythic sort of North. It also affirms that we believe in ourselves and in our future.

I may have been a bit disorganized in showing you how I reached these conclusions, so I'd like to summarize my thoughts on this topic. I think that history is the account of the past of a community, of a people, or of a nation. These are some of the subjects of history. History is also the interpretation of those accounts, which comes from the mind of the author, the historian. Often the subject and the author are separated by more than merely miles; they are separated by differences in perception, experiences and values. A historian raised in Montreal is likely to perceive and understand things differently than a person raised in Mayo, for example. Given that kind of separation, is it any wonder that northern history often focusses on examining the big event, like the Gold Rush or the construction of the Alaska Highway, or even events that may not be considered so important here.

Knowledge of the past may be casual--what I have chosen to call remembrance. It may be acquired through experience or hearsay, but it is an individual's own understanding of what the past was like and what it means to them in the present. History, as I have used the term, is both the formal academic presentation of the past and the collective memory of the community. Its interpretation is often presented to us by agents or interests who seek to maintain their positions or influence in society. 

I believe, and I hope I have been clear about this, that there is a way to fuse these four elements together--regional history. If we want to know where we are going, we must know where we have been. We can only do that by combining history with remembrance and becoming at once both the subject and the author of our history.

That is why I say regional history is a political activity. It is empowering. This is why I believe that it is a vital pursuit.
 

Thank you.