By: Adam Babiak
Martingrove Collegiate
Toronto, Ontario
I have a confession to make. Standing solemnly before the altar of Canadian History, hand upon heart, I look over the granite-and-limestone edifice of our "politics, diplomacy, and warfare", and I feel a lump of shame rising in my throat. In the eyes of Jack Granatstein and Michael Ignatieff, I have committed apostasy: I am a historical 'relativist'. Moreover, I track my heresy into the temple: it is my conviction that historical relativism of the kind held in contempt by commentators Granatstein and Ignatieff is
precisely the perspective that sees history 'matter' well into a globalized future.
I am a member of Granatstein's "tuned-out generation", a teen "that can use a computer and surf the Net, but that knows almost nothing about anything of importance". A product of history-as-'victimology', I have run the academic gauntlet of Canada's categorized sins. Enrolled in mandatory Grade 7 Canadian History, I wrote dull papers decrying the hanging of Riel and lambasting aboriginal assimilation. I copied, from the blackboard,
alphabetized lists of the ways in which Canadian women were mistreated, pre-and-post suffrage. In class debates, I argued against conscription during the World Wars and in favour of multiculturalism over melting-pot conglomeration (and in a school with proud speakers of Urdu, Farsi, Italian, Ukrainian, Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Romanian, Polish, Korean, Vietnamese, Sanskrit, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Serbian, Swahili and
Arabic, it was a slam dunk).
I covered all of the politically correct bases. Mine was the history of
Ignatieff's 'young social historians of the 60s and 70s', the result of a move towards the inclusion of broader range of social experience than had previously been presented in the context of Canadian History. The institutional bedrock so prized by Granatstein had been chipped away; we wrote 'perspective papers', doing our best to mentally recreate the lifestyles and challenges of those we were studying. Ignatieff's jab at Canadian history on the basis of "What history? Whose history?" is addressed in my personal educational experience. The history I learnt was the "story of our arguments" which Ignatieff so prizes; there was not a single event of
significance, starting with the discovery of Canada and leading up to the adoption of the War Measures Act, that wasn't analyzed and evaluated from at least two divergent positions.
Perhaps, however, the intellectual plurality softened my brain. I am
one of those contemptible individuals who, in Ignatieff's words,
"believes[s] history is just the stories we happen to tell about it."
History cannot be said to be about facts: it's the study and comparison of story-telling and argument. Unlike any of the other social scientific academic disciplines, a premise posited by a historian can never be proved or disproved: it simply exists on its merits as an argument, with the historian giving accounts of events as they happened and stringing it together into a logically convincing and emotionally compelling tale of how events actually happened. One could never categorically prove Borden's intentions during Great War, as we'll never have a chance to ask him!
The institutional core of Canadian history, the politics, diplomacy and warfare that is held up by Jack Granatstein as the basis for historical experience, is becoming more of a fiction as the years drag on. Witnesses to events pass away; records are destroyed, memories fade, and what remains is very much a tool for 'social engineering', to use Granatstein's phrase. As time goes on and the reality of historically relevant situations - read: a climax in the plot - becomes ambiguous, the events are implicitly and explicitly shaped by historians to support the stories of the past that they now tell. It is McLuhan's proverbial 'message in the medium': the significance of an 'historical' event rests on its smooth subordination into our storytelling.
It is from this truth that one sees the origin of the flaws in Michael
Ignatieff's UBC history curricula: where were the natives, the immigrants, the "photographs in their family albums or the tales told by their grandmothers and grandfathers"? They literally did not fit into the historical vision of a generation of academics who were telling stories of central Ontario and southern Quebec. No one can deny the actual, material significance that Canadians on the West Coast made to the development of the country, but the stories we had come up with to explain the development of the country just didn't have the scope to include the diversity of experience that made us who we are.
Jack Granatstein proposes to 'force-feed' new immigrants his Canadian 'history'. This is cultural hegemony, the strong-arming of an immigrant's individual ideologies and experience for an imposed Canadian heritage. It is as false as it is insidious, and it has no place in Canadian education. Ignatieff hits the nail on the head when he outlines the real drive behind this 'force-feeding': the urge to create 'common cultural capital', a 'set of common understandings' that binds us together by helping us to relate to one another and creating basic standards for conduct. Ignatieff states that there is nothing unique about Canadian cultural capital, that its values are readily reproducible in other 'western liberal democracies' and that it stems less from history and more from the "prosaic… people simply doing
their jobs."
I believe that common cultural capital -does- have a historical basis, but not in terms of the bone-dry development of Canada from "colony-to-nation" espoused by Granatstein. The origin of our "neighbourliness, civic courage, willingness to serve in political office, [and] community pride" is in our acceptance and inclusion of a wide spectrum of stories with which to shape our history. Canada is unique in the world for our incredible ethnic, cultural, and intellectual diversity. Any definition of Canadian 'identity' in all the essays and commentary on the Great Canadian Questions is that merely it escapes categorization. There is no quintessential Canadian; there are only individuals, each as different as the last.
So relativism, the evaluation and validation of all stories and experience, regardless of origin, becomes critical to a new vision of Canadian history. Canada can change. We no longer have one dominant ethnic group, one cultural vision of history under which all others must fit. Our challenge becomes, instead, to rebuild historical education that sees the individual experience coaxed out and evaluated besides contemporary Canadian society. I again reference Marshall McLuhan: if we want to build 'common cultural capital', the glue upon which society adheres, then we must send a message in the medium to new immigrants. Our history must tell them that their stories are valid too, that Canada does in fact have room for them, their language, their traditions, and their humanity.
If the institutional history suffers, so be it. There is nothing truly unique about the quest for confederation, the development of
parliamentary democracy and the penning of the Charter. As Ignatieff points out, their antecedents are easily observed in a survey of other western liberal democracies. It is instead in the fabrication and transmission of our history that the fibre of Canada is found. Does history matter? Only if we let it.
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