Canadians and the NCPH

20 January 2015 – Matthew Barlow

Canadian parliament building. Photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

The field of public history has a long history of its own in Canada.  The first programme was founded at the University of Waterloo in Ontario in 1983 (though it has since been disbanded), and the University of Western Ontario followed suit in 1986.  By the time Concordia University in Montreal, where I completed my PhD, established a programme in 2004, public history was a burgeoning field in Canada.  The National Council on Public History (NCPH) has long recognised the importance of public history in Canada, holding the annual meeting there four times, beginning with Waterloo in 1983, twice in Ottawa, 2001 and 2013, and Victoria, British Columbia, in 2004.

I went to my first NCPH conference this year in Monterey, California.  I generally don’t enjoy conferences and feel slightly disingenuous networking in the competitive atmosphere of such events. But, this was a truly wonderful experience from start to finish.  Attendees were warm and welcoming, and rather than a sense of competition, there was a sense of collaboration, which reflects, perhaps, what drew me to public history in the first place.  But, as I sat in on several panels devoted to international public history, looking at countries as disparate as Germany, France, and China, I couldn’t help but wonder where the Canadians were.

Last year, at the conference in Ottawa, CanCon [1] (or ‘Canadian content,’ as it’s called in Canada) was all over the programme: posters, papers, and roundtables on a variety of Canadian subjects. But this past year in Monterey, there was one single, lonely paper on Montreal for CanCon.  There were a handful of folks from the national museums in Ottawa.  And I also met a handful of Canadian academics, but all of them, like me, were American-based.

In looking back at a sampling of earlier conferences, I see the pattern repeated.  When the conference was held in Ottawa or Victoria, CanCon appeared on the programme. In those years the conference was held in Canada, the CanCon hovered around 40%.  Canadians presently are also represented on the various committees and the Board of Governors of the NCPH.

Something else struck me as I perused these old programmes, the same thing Nick Sacco pointed out in this space a few weeks ago: the growth of international public history.  It was slow coming, but it can only be a good thing.  The conferences in Ottawa and Monterey, especially, saw scholars and practitioners coming from overseas to present their work and findings to the NCPH.  But, as I’ve noted, we Canadians have been doing public history almost as long as the Americans.  So why are we so unlikely to attend the NCPH conference when it’s not held on our own soil?

I have been puzzling over this question since Monterey, spoken to friends and colleagues, and thought back to my PhD studies at Concordia.  And then it occurred to me: the NCPH conference was never really presented to me as a viable option to share my work, despite the fact I worked with public historians, did public history, and was part of the group that established the public history programme at Concordia (by virtue of the fact I had experience in the field, even though I was a student).  Instead, I was encouraged by the Canadian historical profession to go and present my work to the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) annual meeting.  The Public Historian, like all American journals, was never considered an option for publication.  There are several different processes at work here:

• The field of Canadian history really isn’t all that big, and while I can’t claim that all Canadian historians know each other, it is still a relatively insular field, and this insularity leads us back to the CHA first and foremost.
• The CHA itself, the organisation, has been hesitant to include public history in the annual programme, unless the panels are about Parks Canada.  Moreover, while the CHA does have a public history committee, that committee continues to struggle, both in terms of membership as well as in its relationship with the CHA itself.
• The Canadians who are active in the NCPH and its leadership, much like the Canadians at the conference this year, are professionals.  They work in museums and historically focused government departments.  Academic historians are missing in action, so to speak.
• Related to the last point, there is the matter of cost.  Air travel is expensive, relative to the United States.  Thus, when the conference is in Canada, it is easier for public historians from the surrounding region to attend, such as at Ottawa.  Travel to the United States, on the other hand, is expensive.  Indeed, I was prevented from traveling to the 2008 conference in Louisville, KY, from Montreal due to prohibitive travel expenses, which are then compounded, depending on the relative health of the Canadian dollar in relation to the American.
• There are still only four recognised academic programmes in Canada, which also limits the number of academics who see themselves as public historians.
• The NCPH is somewhat of an anomaly in being a major historical professional organisation that is American-based and is attempting to reach historians and practitioners across the Canadian border.  We tend to have our own organisations in Canada.
• We also have our own journals, so Canadian historians tend not to publish in journals published in the UK or the US.

I’m not entirely sure what the solution is to ensure more CanCon at future NCPH meetings.  Maybe the solution is for a Canadian CPH?  One thing the NCPH does well is lobbying, but it lobbies in the United States, not Canada.  The CHA is left to speak for the interests of all historians in Canada .  This is both a good and a bad thing.  It’s good in the sense of numbers and the unified front of historians.  But it’s not necessarily a good thing in terms of special interests for subfields of history, like public history.

There is a wealth of issues confronting historians in Canada at the moment, many of them driven by Canada’s current Conservative government, which is focused on a singular narrative of the Canadian historical experience, Canada’s martial history.  Many of these issues of representation call out for the experience of public historians, such as when the federal government insists that the War of 1812 was a war for the very soul of Canada, a nation that wasn’t founded for another 55 years.  For the next four years, or at least until the federal election in 2015, Canadians will be subjected to a reinterpretation of Canada’s involvement in the First World War.  And so on.  Canadian public historians need a voice to confront, or at least document and comment upon, the reinvention of our nation’s history by the government.  But, maybe Canadian public historians also need an organisation to do so.

~ John Matthew Barlow is Lecturer at University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

[1] The term ‘CanCon’ comes from laws in Canada that were designed in the 1960s to ensure that Canadian artists, especially musicians, had a chance to have their voices heard and weren’t swamped out of the airwaves by American and British artists.  So Canadian radio stations are mandated to play at least 40% Canadian content.