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The past is often used by political figures in the present in order to achieve political goals by manipulating a feeling of identity, based upon a shared history, among their followers. The extent to which a political leader may alter narratives of the past to meet his or her own needs is governed by certain constraints and laws of structure, as Appadurai and Sahlins have argued (Appadurai 1981; Sahlins 1985). However, the credibility of a leader is affected by such factors as how well that leader fills the cultural construct of a leader's role and adheres to the community's expectations. At Kahnawake, a Mohawk community near Montreal, I found that the amount of authority granted to individual factional leaders in their interpretation of the Iroquois Confederacy's Great Law of Peace reflected the degree to which each leader behaved as a Confederacy chief or orator should, and also reflected the degree to which the leader obeyed social norms, particularly that of not advocating violence against fellow Mohawks. My findings add to the growing body of anthropological literature on the uses of the past by demonstrating in a specific case study how interpersonal relationships between leaders and a community affect the leaders' credibility and authority over the past.

The everyday life of people on the street has not received the attention it deserves in the history of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Quebec. This dissertation joins a small number of recent studies which redress this omission. It makes a significant contribution to existing examinations of North American cities and Canadian social history through the use of categories which are rarely employed and questions that are seldom posed in investigations of working-class history during the period of industrialization. A holistic treatment of Marxist philosophy provides the theoretical underpinnings for a sensitive engagement with daily street life in an urban milieu. As a site of intense sociability, Notre-Dame Street, the main street of the industrial suburb of Saint-Henri, offers a unique perspective on the intricate use of public space and its relations to social space. This thesis covers the period between the years of town incorporation in 1875 and annexation to the City of Montreal in 1905. / Notre-Dame Street underwent significant transformations in this period. A main street of a small town on the outskirts of Montreal became the principal commercial street of a bustling industrial city. The 1890s was a decade of particularly marked shifts, characterized by significant population growth and dramatic changes in physical form. Class and ethnic tensions intensified as a result. A 1891 labour dispute at Merchants Manufacturing, a textile factory, took to the streets, and the local elite contested George A. Drummond's refusal to pay municipal taxes in 1897. Resistance to monopoly control of utilities was evidenced by the use of petitions and protets or notarized letters. Workers' parties, journalists, and municipal reform leagues increasingly challenged the hegemony of the local elite whose persistent practices of overspending resulted in a substantial debt and annexation. / The study of a local street in an industrializing community demonstrates the prevailing social and political distribution of wealth and power. It reveals significant differences between the various class ideologies which were played out in the management of the public space of the street. An economic liberal ideology was instrumental to the development of the modern Western city through the creation of divisions between public and private spaces. Social usage, the visible presence of the working and marginal classes and women on city streets, suggests a different reality. A reconstruction of daily street life from a diversity of written and visual sources indicates that women, men, and children inhabited and frequented homes, shops, and offices, travelling to and from work, and various places of recreation. The rhythm of everyday street life was punctuated by unusual events of a celebratory, criminal, and tragic nature, which emphasize the connections between spatial structures and subjective experience. / The local management of public space thus involved class antagonisms, characterized by negotiation, transgression, and resistance. This dissertation argues that the politics of this public space benefited the class interests of a grande bourgeoisie of Montreal and a local petite bourgeoisie, to the detriment of the working classes. These conflicting class interests were played out in a variety of different ways. The exclusion and appropriation of social and symbolic spaces were characterized by distinct property ownership and rental patterns. An anglophone grande bourgeoisie of Montreal owned vacant and subdivided lots. A francophone petite bourgeoisie dominated property ownership, and a majority of renters lived in flats on the main street and on adjoining streets. The shaping of the physical infrastructure was distinguished by the growth of monopolies and minimal local intervention. The civic manifestation of the ordered and ritualistic celebration of the parade emphasized a Catholic identity. Attempts to impose an appropriate and genteel code of behaviour on city streets led to the moral regulation and social control of criminal behaviour.

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This work focuses on the efforts of Montreal's Irish Catholics to maintain a cohesive ethnic community throughout the nineteenth century, and on the vital role that the national parish played in this process. The early community directed its attention towards institution building centred around Saint Patrick's church, which had been built for the use of Irish Catholics in the 1840s. Following the dismemberment of the extensive parish of Notre-Dame and the erection of smaller Irish national parishes in the early 1870s, greater emphasis was placed on the creation of a wide variety of parish societies. By discouraging participation in Irish national societies that refused to submit to clerical authority, and by effectively fusing religious and national identification, the clergy ensured the success of parish-based organisation. Broader associations embracing the various Irish-Catholic parish societies were established, and participation in the Saint Patrick's day procession inscribed these affiliations in space. It will be demonstrated that the territorial and social evolution of parishes were intimately connected.

Women made, and continue to make history in Point St. Charles, and in doing so, transform selves, groups and community. / Building on the literature on class and gender in community organising, read through the conceptual lens of "translocational positionality" (Anthias, 2002a), I tell a story of the journeys of a group of ten women activists through four decades of neighbourhood organising. I show that although all the women were first involved in citizens' committees around practical needs such as housing, welfare, urban renewal and education, most of them, stimulated by feminist agitators in their midst, came to new awareness about gender inequalities, to new and deepening analyses, and to individual and collective actions around strategic gender needs. Part and parcel of this spiral of change (Nadeau, 1996) were the tensions that emerged with their families, friends and neighbours, and even with the agitators themselves. Out of these tensions came transformations at the macro level---community, public opinion and government, at the meso level---organisational structures and cultures, and at the micro level---family and selves. / Next I do a metanarrative on the methodology that underlies the project upon which my thesis is based, one that borrows from feminist community organising practice (Gutierrez & Lewis, 1994) to deal with the many ethical dilemmas inherent to feminist life history methodology (Geiger, 1990). In line with the notion of "translocational imaginings in dialogue", the project was conceptualised to pre-figure power-with (Starhawk, 1987) in order to construct narratives of belonging that break with processes of differentiation and stratification. The project is about doing community history with the people who make that history. Because of this, when tensions emerged around power relations, instead of paralysis, individual, interpersonal and collective transformations emerged. / Through this work, I am not only releasing new voices into the collective narrative, but I am also contributing to debates on life history methodology. And, my thesis, and the other historical products that will emerge from this project, will enable organisers and activists to learn from the past, and will, hopefully, entice younger people to get involved in community activism.

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