I attended an emergency meeting, last Friday. Some of this country’s greatest history thinkers and writers came from all over Canada to attend. Part of the assembly took place at Rideau Hall, the Governor General’s residence; the rest took place at the Carleton University in Ottawa. Presiding over the gathering was indeed the Queen’s representative, Michaelle Jean. She addressed the several hundred delegates present.
“I worry about how little importance our society places on history and how we fail to recognize the past,” she said.
In her keynote address, the Governor General made particular reference to the quickly depleting reservoir of veterans – the men and women who have served Canada and the cause of peace in the Great War, the Second World War, the Korean War and all of the armed forces missions abroad in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and Asia. In part, the meeting came together to pay tribute to six men and women – recipients of awards for excellence in teaching Canadian history and the recipient of the Pierre Berton Award for history writing. But threaded through the Governor General’s praise for the celebrated teaches was her dire warning about a young generation unaware of its wartime and peacetime history.
“To create good critical thinkers (among Canadian students),” she said, “requires a need to consider the decisions and actions of our ancestors.”
I couldn’t have said it better. To have suddenly left a job, home and loved ones to serve in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the Great War or to have volunteered to defeat fascism in the Second World War or to have served the first defence of the UN peace charter in the Korea War, required a self-sacrifice most of us will never have to face. Yet, thousands did it with no assurance they would survive. Perhaps sadder than the great losses of those three wars – 60,000 war dead between 1914 and 1918, 40,000 from 1939 to 1945 and more than 500 between 1950 and 1953 – is our ignorance of the gift of their sacrifice.
The heart of the emergency meeting – the First National Forum on Canadian History – brought together scholars, broadcasters, some interested corporate leaders, history teachers and history students. A relatively new group organized the gathering – Canada’s National History Society. Said the society’s president, Deborah Morrison, we need “to explore ways to enhance how we learn and remember Canada’s past.”
Among the presenters, Penny Clark, a professor from UBC, warned that “we know where we’ve been, but do we know where we go from here?” She emphasized the need to teach the teachers how to deliver Canadian history and that history shouldn’t be determined as it often is: “You’ll make a terrific basketball coach. Oh, and would you teach a little history to complete your timetable?” Jocelyn Létourneau said collective memory and myths in history exist already (particularly in Quebec); it’s more a matter of harnessing them. Ruth Sandwell, from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, pointed out that history needs to be “shown” not just “told.” She proposed the creation of a model curriculum to be prepared and introduced into all Canadian schools by 2017, Canada’s 150th birthday.
I thought long and hard about the messages from the meeting. It seemed a steep learning curve for educators, politicians and young people. I worried that not enough of us care about Canadian history, least of all the legacy of Canadian veterans. We support their need for a sanctuary (the Legion hall). We pay respects for their loss and survival with plaques, cenotaphs and lately street names. We honour them with two minutes of silence once a year on Nov. 11. But what the Governor General and those at the history meeting we really saying is that perhaps it’s time to mark their contribution to Canada with more than monuments and reverence.
Memory only lasts as long as those of around to speak about it. History books are important. History lessons offer a foundation. Remembrance, I think, shouldn’t be static. It should include activity, instruction, discussion and engagement. Unless we make the time, make the effort and make a point of telling and retelling the stories of our past, we’re doomed to forget greatness, to ignore heroism in our midst and, as they say, to repeat the mistakes of history, including the causes and effects of war.
One of the Governor General’s final recommendations about actively preserving history seemed like the impossible dream, but I sensed she really meant it:
“Willingness to bring the past into the present can only improve the fate of humanity.”
