Identifying key practices for 2025 and beyond, what should be emphasized?
For all of my professional career at Parks Canada I have been working on public history projects for public lands owned by the Government of Canada. This has included public history work at national parks and national historic sites, as well as historical research for new or existing federal designations and plaques in Canada’s National Program of Historical Commemoration. Following the publication of Imperiled Promise (2011), a landmark study on the state of history in the US National Parks Service, with many issues identified paralleling problems at Parks Canada, I began seriously thinking about best practices for public history in the Canadian context. Following the publication of the recommendations of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools, I worked with colleagues to write a document laying out guidance for stronger public history at Parks Canada. The intent was to make the case for empirically based history that was more attentive to audience interests, including controversy, and aimed to improve historical literacy among Canadians. This was approved by our Minister and published in 2019 as The Framework for History and Commemoration: National Historic Sites System Plan. You can find this document online. In it, the core principles of integrity, relevance and inclusiveness are defined as grounding our work as historians. Ten key practices are explained, such as “craft a big story” and “address controversy.” The six concepts of historical thinking used in secondary school curricula across North America are promoted as fundamental to building historical literacy (for example, “Evidence” and “Historical Significance”) and four thematic areas are identified as priorities for research and commemoration within the history of Canada chosen for their relevance to Canadian interests and the mandate of Parks Canada. The document received a positive reception and has been taken up and used in other jurisdictions in Canada, particularly in relation to dealing with controversial historical legacies of colonial leaders.
Shortly after this document was approved, Covid set in, and more than two years passed before historians returned to regular history projects. The past few years have given me a chance to reflect on how this new framework is working, how history on public lands is evolving, and what we need to emphasize in the years to come. Like many guidance documents used by non-historians with other expertise, people have taken what they want, and left what they wish to ignore. One idea, that has been singled out in our media-oriented public communications, is that it is important to represent multiple perspectives in history, to tell a story with different viewpoints and experiences in mind. This has become the mantra associated with our document, with the related assumption that all earlier history projects were inherently limited, taking only one “official” perspective. This is not the case at all: there is a huge body of existing historical research and interpretation at Parks Canada that forefronts Indigenous perspectives, women’s history and/or the experiences of immigrant and settler communities. Nonetheless, this seemingly new emphasis on multiple perspectives and inclusivity has been at the forefront of public history conversations, sometimes at the cost of telling a strong story, or building a history project from the material reality of the historic place. Emphasizing various perspectives is only one of the ten key practices outlined in the Framework; on its own, it does not contribute to the historical literacy of our audiences or necessarily broaden or deepen what we know about the past.
The Framework for History and Commemoration had its fifth birthday and remains essential to all history projects at Parks Canada. It has been externally criticized as a “woke” diversity and inclusion initiative, and as the primary author, I disagree with this characterization. The document is a call to expand what we know and about Canada’s history through research. It states: “Integrity means that history projects will be ethically undertaken and based on carefully planned research.” It identifies four thematic areas where we need to do more research to better explain Canada to visitors to our heritage places, and to the colonial legacy of the country, as well as its achievements. Yes, diversity is identified as a theme, but it is viewed through the wide-angle lens of Canada`s complexity and includes class, language, religion, and age, as aspects of diverse historical experiences. From the ways this document has been interpreted, however, it has made me think that more of a “back to basics” approach is needed, and instead of historical research being an essential principle, I am now in favour of it being the first essential best practice. There is always a tension in public history between the public or audience and the history component, and depending on the product, one can tilt more in one direction or another. In the case of projects done in my work setting, audiences matter, but the historical research must be strong, trusted, and stand the test of time, in settings where audiences are constantly changing. History in public institutions needs to be trustworthy and credible, even if governments change. So my number one best practice is “Historical Research First.” Important secondary components of a research strategy would be oral histories and community-based histories.
My second best practice would insist upon an Indigenous history component in public history projects about public lands in North America. In the Framework, Indigenous history is a priority theme and a couple of our key practices address how we work and relationship building, but even these are not strong enough to change the channel so that mainstream Canadians receive more history about the thousands of years of First Nations, Métis and Inuit Peoples on this continent. Still too many popular histories of communities in North America begin with European settlement stories, leaving out key phases of early history and depriving audiences of the opportunity to think about the fact that public lands are now and have always been Indigenous places, in spite of the past three hundred years. To be able to communicate specific histories of various Indigenous communities in Canada’s national parks, for example, would require a dedication to new research, and it would present opportunities to document the histories of these communities, some of whom were displaced from parks and who are now regaining rights to these territories. Documenting and sharing Indigenous histories on what are now public lands in North America represents a great opportunity for highlighting histories that are rooted in the land. Indigenous place names, for example, are an excellent way to showcase how public lands have been sites of human occupation and stewardship for centuries.
Finally, as a third best practice, I advocate for reconsidering well-studied places to identify new research gaps, different sources for enquiry, or maybe take a risk and investigate topics that are less “safe.” We can discuss what those topics might be.