This project explores the “Laurier Memorial,” a pivotal document written by Chiefs of the Secwépemc, Nlaka’pamux, and Syilx Nations of interior British Columbia, and presented to Prime Minister Laurier in 1910. With the assistance of Scottish-born ethnologist James Teit, the Memorial is written in lucid first-person narrative, charting the history of relations between these Interior Tribes and settler populations, then putting forward a different vision of relations based in traditional law, reciprocity, obligation, mutual sovereignty and shared jurisdiction. As the document continues to circulate a century later, drawing new relations around it, it provides insight into Indigenous-State relations throughout history and how we might make moves towards resolving them. This work looks at the document’s proposal, its continued relevance and circulation, its nuanced impacts on broader political relations, as well as its impacts on my own political, personal, and research relationships.

This thesis investigates the motivations, strategies and experiences of a movement that saw thousands of young and youngish people permanently relocate to the Canadian countryside during the 1970s. It focuses on two contrasting coasts, Denman, Hornby and Lasqueti Islands in the Strait of Georgia, British Columbia, and three small communities near Baddeck, Cape Breton. This is a work of oral history, based on interviews with over ninety people, all of whom had lived in their communities for more than thirty years. It asks what induced so many young people to abandon their expected life course and take on a completely new rural way of life at a time when large numbers were leaving the countryside in search of work in the cities. It then explores how location and the communities already established affected the initial process of settlement. Although almost all back-to-the-landers were critical of the modern urban and industrial project; they discovered that they could not escape modern capitalist society. However, they were determined to control their relationship to the modern economic system with strategies for building with found materials, adopting older ways and technologies for their homes and working off-property as little as possible. Living in a resource based economy, building a homestead, and cutting firewood favoured masculine strength. The thesis addresses the gendered implications of this way of life, particularly for women. At one extreme, they embraced and came to terms with the traditional roles expected of them; at the other they insisted on conquering both the masculine and feminine roles. Through the study of a newsletter for Denman Island and eye-witness accounts for Cape Breton, we get a glimpse of the fierce commitment back-to-the-landers felt for their new communities and of their willingness to defend their collective rights to clean air, water and soil. The study concludes that geography, demography and culture were instrumental in shaping the eventual integration of the immigrant and pre-existing communities. Everywhere this influx of young and enthusiastic migrants enriched their communities and provided a deeply satisfying way of life for those who succeeded in their newly adopted rural landscape.

President John F. Kennedy’s announcement, on Monday 22 October 1962, that there were offensive missiles on the island of Cuba began the public phase of what would be remembered as the Cuban missile crisis. This Cold War crisis had ramifications in many other countries than just the Soviet Union and the United States. Due to the danger involved in this nuclear confrontation, the entire globe was threatened. If either side lost control of negotiations, an atomic war could have broken out which would have decimated the planet. As the direct northern neighbors of the United States and partners in continental defence, Canadians experienced and understood the Cuban missile crisis in the context of larger issues. In many ways, Canadian and American reactions to the crisis were similar. Many citizens stocked up their pantries, read the newspapers, protested, or worried that the politicians would make a mistake and set off a war. However, this dissertation argues that English Canadians experienced the crisis on another level as well. In public debate and print sources, many debated what the crisis meant for Canadian-Cuban relations, Canadian-American relations and Canada’s place in the world. Examining these print and archival sources, this dissertation analyzes the contour of public debate during the crisis, uniting that debate with the actions of politicians. Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker hesitated for two days before making a statement which fully committed Canada to a position which supported the American quarantine of Cuba, and shortly after the crisis, was defeated at the polls. This dissertation argues that understanding the Canadian reaction to and experience of the Cuban missile crisis necessitates an understanding of how different Canadians talked about and understood the actions of their leaders. The shifting terrain of memory also serves to demonstrate the manner in which this history is told and remembered in Canada. This dissertation, therefore, examines the intersections between this Cold War confrontation and Canadian identity in the postwar period. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2011-12-23 09:01:36.5

The contemporary conflation of pedophiles and child sex offenders is a prevalent aspect of reporting in news and social media, as well as in government-sponsored efforts to prevent child sexual victimization. Throughout twentieth century Canada, however, legal experts, psychologists and psychiatrists, and social activists were recognizing the harmfulness of grouping individuals who may have a propensity to commit crime with those who have committed the most heinous of criminal acts. As early as 1938, Canadian legal experts suggested that criminal insanity was a myth, advocating for a divergence between legal punishment and psychiatric healthcare, but after World War 2 had enacted serious efforts targeting criminal sexual psychopathy. Successive Royal Commissions investigating sexual victimization and child abuse revealed that Canadian courts, jails, prisons, and remand services were unable to solely deal with the realities of child sexual victimization. Psychologists and psychiatrists of the American Psychological Association increasingly researched sex and sexuality, classifying pedophilia as a paraphilia using child sexual victimization as a diagnostic indicator and criterion. Gay liberation activists discussed inequalities posed between hetero- and homosexual ages of consent and, more rarely, thought about the total abolition of age of consent. Each of these discourses firmly advocated for a separation between thought and action, recognizing the pedophiles who had not and would not harm children. The historical roots of the conflation of pedophiles and child sex offenders makes an important contribution to understanding contemporary discourses on criminality, victimology, sexology, and sociology, and to the development of efforts which can more successfully reduce child sexual victimization.

THE DAWSON ROUTE: A PHASE OF WESTWARD EXPANSION The basic problem attacked in this thesis is the general lack of readily available knowledge concerning the Dawson Route. While there is much material in manuscript collections and in government publications, little attention has been paid the route in other places. Several scholars have dealt briefly with particular aspects of the route, but no person has treated it in a comprehensive fashion. This thesis sets out to rectify this situation. It has been written in the belief that a short general history of the Dawson Route — dealing with its origins, development, use, and significance — is justified and will be of some interest. Secondary problems have emerged in the course of this inquiry. In coping with these, the writer has attempted to describe the physical nature of the route and the natural obstacles overcome in its construction, and to tell why and how it was built. He has also tried to tell who used it, what it was like to travel the route during the 1870's, and to describe its relationship to other transportation routes. Finally, he has attempted to explain why it declined and to assess its significance. The thesis, in short, is a brief general history of the Dawson Route. The research for this paper has been carried forward at libraries and archives in Ottawa, Toronto, Port Arthur, St. Paul, Winnipeg, and Atikokan. Because physiography looms large in the story of the Dawson Route, a number of field trips into the area it traversed have been undertaken. Again, because the route was a physical thing, considerable effort has been expended in locating and reproducing maps and pictorial material to illustrate its use, its characteristics, and the country through which it passed. The writer has benefitted from involvement in archaeological and historical projects undertaken along the route in recent years. Several conclusions have grown out of this inquiry. In large degree, the Dawson Route was an extension and refinement of a long tradition of water transportation in the area between Lake Superior and the Red River. It was developed in the face of considerable physical obstacles and may be viewed as a triumph over those obstacles. Concern for the economic and political future of the British Northwest inspired its construction. This concern was largely a result of the expansionist temper of Americans, and particularly Minnesotans. Combined with this were transportation developments and physical expansion in Minnesota, as well as the activities of the Canadian Party in Red River, which also worked to encourage the construction of a Canadian transportation route. The Dawson Route served a useful military- political purpose in 1870, but its success as an emigrant route to attract settlers to the Red River area (for which it was primarily designed) was severely limited. It declined because of inherent weaknesses and because of developments in competing transportation facilities, both north and south of the international boundary. The relationship of the Dawson Route to the Canadian Pacific Railway was closer than has been suspected, and the fact that it survived for even a short period after 1873 was largely owing to the railway policy of Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie. In a sense, the route was obsolete from the day it opened for emigrant travel in 1871. Nonetheless, it served a useful purpose and appears to have reflected the willingness of Canadians to marshall the resources of the new nation in the interests of an expansive national purpose. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

Revisiting the Anthony Burns drama in 1854, the last fugitive slave crisis in Boston, I argue that traditional historical interpretations emphasizing an antislavery groundswell in the North mask the confusion, chaos, ethnic and class tensions, and racial division in the Bay city and also treat Virginia's most famous fugitive slave as an object rather than the Revolutionary and advocate for equal rights that he was. I contend that it was far from clear that antislavery beliefs were on the rise in midcentury Boston. I show that antislavery views had to compete with other less noble, sometimes racist, sentiments and with white Bostonians' concerns about law and order. Many white Bostonians sought to conserve the Union as it was; they did not seek to extend the fruits of the Revolution to a fugitive slave or to their black neighbors. The message that many black Bostonians took from the drama was that they could not depend on their white neighbors, including supposedly friendly abolitionists; they had to unite and look out for their own interests. Reexamining the link between Anthony Burns and the coming of the Civil War suggests that the most significant impact of the crisis was on the white South, not the North. Events in Boston seemed to confirm white Southerners' suspicions that antislavery feelings were on the rise in the North, which fueled their anxiety about the future protection of their interests in the Union. The crisis also accentuated differences between Northern and Southern societies, and white Southerners saw their society, with slavery at its center, as distinctly good. The Burns crisis thus encouraged their defense of slavery as a positive good. Finally, I demonstrate that when Anthony Burns moved to Canada West and joined St. Catharines' vibrant black community, he did not relinquish his fight against slavery; he fled America but not the fight against human bondage.

No description available.

This thesis proposes that the nuclear age offered high modernity and technological nationalism a central position in the making of modern Canada. The nuclear age influenced modern Canada’s social, economic, and political history and it did so by telling Canadians they were, essentially, a modern people governed by a modern state. From the 1940s to the end of the 1970s, Canada’s development of the nuclear industry reflected the pursuit of science and technology to create modern forms of energy production. Canadians were urged to see in nuclear power a way of remaining competitive in a changing global order. It offered them new industries at many stages of the nuclear cycle. The post-war era reflected a changing direction in the country’s central ideological direction – one defined since the 1840s by liberalism and a subordinate role in the British Empire. The creation of the Canadian nuclear cycle signified a transition to a new stage in which Canada, now imagined by some to be a nation, actively sought out modern forms of social and economic progress. Nuclear energy systems came to fruition at a moment when Canada was establishing new directions as a sovereign state vying for greater global political and economic influence on the global stage. This thesis argues that this pattern was no mere coincidence: this technological nationalism was the logical outcome of deep-seated tendencies. Yet, many citizens remained skeptical of the nuclear age’s possibilities. Although the federal government had established its nuclear cycle to develop the peaceful uses of atomic energy, its birth in the shadows of the Second World War and the Manhattan Project also provoked a widespread sense of discomfort. The dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 solidified fears of nuclear energy long before the AECL built its first reactor on the shores of Lake Huron. Canadians en masse rejected the country’s participation in the development of nuclear weapons and, as Lester Pearson learned to his cost in 1963, were adamant that Canada should remain a nuclear-weapons-free nation. Successive governments in the 1950s and 1960s faced public backlash regarding Canada’s complicity in the stockpiling of nuclear arms, the production of uranium for American weapons, and its involvement in weapons tests. Born out of the peace movements and ecological movements of the 1960s, anti-nuclear groups emerged in the 1970s to oppose the nuclear industry. These groups shared members, ideas, and momentum, and the chasm between anti-war and environmental activism was progressively bridged as the 1970s proceeded. Both the anti-nuclear and anti-bomb activists were essential to challenging the path and direction of the Canadian nuclear system and its role in creating political and environmental uncertainty. Such fears remained a constant social reminder throughout the post-war era of the mutually assured destruction associated with atomic energy and the Cold War arms race. Indeed, Canada’s peaceful nuclear program did not always seem so peaceable, as activists in both camps argued more and more empathetically. Canada’s nationalistic pursuit of a nuclear modernity also entailed the quest of a narrow form of utopianism – one in which a future-oriented Canada provided greater social and economic freedoms under the aegis of liberal democracy. At the community level, nuclear energy symbolized the changing senses and sensibilities of living through modernity – the perception that the core structures of society were giving way to new social realities and that the relations of time and space were shifting. While nuclear energy symbolized the social and economic benefits of the cultural revolution of the nuclear age, it also aroused the concerns and fears about modernity. The conflicts between the pro- and anti-nuclear movements of the 1970s and 1980s were in many respects an extension of debates over high modernity and techno-nationalism. / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy / This thesis explores the history of Canada’s nuclear age between 1942 and 1979 and examines how both Canadians and the state perceived the development of the country’s nuclear industry. It examines how Canada gained entrance into the nuclear club – joining the ranks of the Manhattan Project – its post-war developments in nuclear power, and the ways in which nuclear energy bolstered a form of nationalism predicated on technological prowess. The need to develop Canada’s nuclear industry reflected the larger social, political, and economic changes occurring in the post-war era. In many ways, the history of Canada’s nuclear age is the history of how societies act and react to modernity – the radical transformation of perceptions of space and time. This thesis examines that process of change and its influence on Canadians’ responses to the modern world around them.

Between 1920 and 1933, no issue in Canadian-American relations proved more contentious or more intractable than prohibition. While American enforcement authorities and diplomats repeatedly sought the assistance of the Dominion government to stop the flow of liquor across the border, not until 1933 did Canada acquiesce to American requests. In the meantime, Canadian brewers, distillers, rumrunners, and bootleggers were more than happy to assuage the parched throats of their American neighbors.;By examining the geographic, historical, political, economic, social, and cultural fabric of the bilateral relationship in the Pacific Northwest borderlands, this study takes a regional approach to explain the intractability of the prohibition problem. It seeks to explore the complex interaction and relationship between common Canadian and American citizens, such as the bootleggers, tourists and temperance workers, as well as local government officials who contribute to the more common, day-to-day Canadian-American relationship. It also seeks to explain why British Columbians generally advocated cooperation with the United States in advance of more eastern Canadians.;The answer is found in the unique relationship shared by Canadians and Americans in this region who, by geographic necessity, often had more in common with their counterparts north or south of the border than they did with their respective sovereignties to the east. Indeed, the central paradox of prohibition in the Pacific Northwest is that the very heritage that had enabled a smuggling economy prior to prohibition also advocated Canadian and American cooperation in the later enforcement against the illicit liquor traffic. After a particularly sensational hijacking and slaying of a Canadian rumrunning crew in 1924, and then again after royal commission investigating the Canadian Department of Customs and Excise discovered evidence of widespread corruption at the highest levels of the Dominion government, British Columbians began to recognize that, whatever the profits, enabling rumrunning no longer served Canada's best interests.

The purpose of this thesis is to critically examine the factors contributing to the rise and subsequent decline of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Upper Canada. Although the time period of this study spans from 1830 until 1850, the principal years of activity were from 1832 until 1840. An effort is made to discuss any major location wherein the Church made substantial progress.The major contribution of the thesis lies in the effort to stage the Mormon drama against a Canadian background of changing social factors. During the times of greatest economic stagnation, political upheaval and Methodist divisions, Mormonism made its greatest strides. In contract, once the economy had improved, the political rebellion quelled, and religious divisions healed, the Mormon influence waned. Furthermore, the Church emphasized so strongly the doctrine of gathering to America that not enough stalwart converts remained behind to form a permanent nucleus of activity.