A child playing in a snowbank. A woman cutting a cake. A man digging a car out of a snowdrift.

At first glance, these are common Canadian moments. But look closer and they become celebrations in the daily life of any Canadian family. Whether they are new to the country, first- or fifth-generation Canadians, these are things we all share.

Elizabeth Mudenyo is the special projects manager at the Regent Park Film Festival, which leads free, community-driven programming in Toronto. Reflecting on the representation of people of colour she says: “Whenever we see archival material, it’s usually centred around whiteness, especially in Canada.”

Mudenyo is working to change that. In partnership with Charles Street Video and York University Libraries, she is coordinating Home Made Visible, a project to digitize home movies created by members of visible minority and Indigenous communities.

The scenes from a snowy day and a family party are just a few examples of footage that has been transferred from video and film formats to digital files so far. Although the Regent Park Film Festival is rooted in Canada’s oldest and largest social housing community, Mudenyo sees the national archival project as a natural fit because “we are an organization run by people of colour who create content and platforms for people of colour to share their own stories.”

Home Made Visible responds to both technological and social change. By digitizing home movies, it restores access to personal stories that risk being lost as formats like VHS and 16mm become harder to enjoy at home. By allowing participants to choose which portions of their footage they would like to contribute to the archives at the York University Libraries, it ensures that members of Indigenous and visible minority communities remain in control of how they are represented and remembered.

This process tackles the underrepresentation of people of colour in Canadian archives. For Mudenyo, “being a part of our public archives can actually shape how we view the past, how we view communities and people, and how we shape our future.”

Home Made Visible also opens dialogue about analogue artefacts in a digital world. A second component of the project commissions seven artists across the country to create work that critiques the notion of archives. Nadine Arpin is a Two-Spirited Métis artist based in Sioux Lookout, Ont. As one of the commissioned artists with Home Made Visible, she is working on a documentary-style film that tells the story of a local Zamboni driver who emigrated from Colombia. “Archival and found footage is actually a staple of my work,” explains Arpin. For her, the commission is an opportunity to tackle stereotypes about small-town life: “When you see the same faces every day, inclusiveness is imperative.”

It’s a reality Arpin rarely sees reflected in depictions of northern communities. Finding little archival content at the local public library, she put out an open call to residents of Sioux Lookout and is constructing the commission from shoeboxes full of Super 8 footage provided by a community member.

From shovelling snow in the suburbs to shining the ice in Sioux Lookout, this project aims to shed a light on underrepresented communities and how they both contribute to and challenge national narratives.

Jean-Louis and Marie-Angélique Riel, ca. 1888, by Steele & Wing, albumen print

A freestanding wall decorated with blue motifs frames a glass case. Inside the case sits a brooch inscribed with a person’s name and dates of birth and death. On the other side of the wall, the front of the brooch is exposed: a portrait of a little girl, Alice Walker, the daughter of Canadian artist Horatio Walker who died at the age of nine from diphtheria—a disease that was once a common cause of death among Canadian children.

A Little History, an exhibit in the Canadian Museum of History’s Treasures From Library and Archives Canada (LAC) gallery, presents 36 artifacts that elevate children’s voices and presence in Canadian history. Some voices include daughter of Sir John A. Macdonald, Margaret Mary Theodora Macdonald, Sandford Fleming, and David Suzuki.

“I thought this was an opportunity to highlight this sort of little-known aspect of Canadian history,” says exhibit curator Carolyn Cook. “Children are typically absent from the historical narrative, and I think it’s important to look at what their experiences can shed light on. Because, really, they have their own stories.”

Many artifacts that were found and kept about children were actually produced by adults: government records, art, toys, textiles. The things that children made themselves were not prioritized. These things “kind of provide a more romanticized view of childhood.” Cook sees this exhibition as a step toward improving practices that include children’s history in Canada’s historical narrative, in all its unromantic glory.

The Canadian Museum of History and LAC did manage to find some artifacts that were created by children, such as a composition by a young Glenn Gould and a design submission for a new Canadian flag to Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. Cook believes the artifacts that were made by children “are the gems of the exhibition.”

We often forget that children lived through historic events, and that adults aren’t the only people who have been affected by them. A display houses a diary by 12-year-old Eleanora Hallen in which she details her voyage across the Atlantic from England to Upper Canada in 1835. She describes everything from a tussle over steak to seeing an iceberg for the first time.

In another display sits a photograph of a young David Suzuki on the back of a pick-up truck with his two sisters—the photo was taken inside a Japanese internment camp. Accompanying the photo is an interview with David Suzuki, who describes his relationship with nature while in the internment camp and speaks about how dangerous discrimination can be. Cook is right, the gems of the exhibition lie in the heart of the child, not in the hearts of the adults who know what’s best.

Portrait of Charles Lawrence.

I went to church in August. I hadn’t been in 20 years. It was Monday and St. Paul’s Anglican in downtown Halifax was dead quiet. A young woman in burgundy sat at a table near the door. I looped around the pews before asking the question I had come here to ask: “Charles Lawrence is buried under here, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, he’s up front, to your right,” she said.

It’s a less-than-plain resting place. Battleship-grey floorboards, a flimsy hand-painted family crest; pretty modest for a former governor. I stomp my right heel into the wood. Then my left. I add a toe tap. Stomp. Tap. I sway my body, lift my arms, and stomp again, harder this time, trying to pull a groan from the old boards. No luck. I’m an awful dancer.

The woman at the front pays no attention to my arrhythmic jig. Later she tells me she’s seen quite a few people dance on his grave in her three years working here. Her face reveals no opinion. I suppose she knows I’m Acadian. She said the other dancers were, too, aside from a few Cajuns.

Dancing on someone’s grave is a sign of disrespect. It’s a “ha-ha, screw you, I relish in your demise, and outlast you.” It seems silly, but it’s not. Not here. Charles Lawrence was the racist megalomaniac behind the Expulsion of the Acadians, or Le Grand Dérangement—the forced deportation of almost the entire population of Acadie, about 14,000 people.

The ancestors of those deported haven’t forgotten what he did. The rest of Nova Scotia seems to have. We have two Lawrencetowns and many Lawrence Streets throughout the province. There are no statues to tear down—like the confederate monuments coming down across the American South—but there’s a conversation that needs to happen. I don’t want the history of Charles Lawrence erased—that was his bit—but I want him to be remembered for what he really was: a criminal, a racist, and a horrible man responsible for the displacement and death of thousands of innocent people.

Lawrence didn’t invent the idea behind the Expulsion— it had been around for years—but he put it into action. Since the early days of British rule in Nova Scotia, colonial officials were worried about the political leanings of the Acadians, the original French settlers of the land. The thinking went like this: If England and France went to war, which seemed likely, the Acadians would obviously side with the French, and probably bring along their Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) allies. Even old Edward Cornwallis—former governor of the colony, founder of Halifax, and a shameless racist in his own right—wouldn’t entertain the idea. He asked for an oath, and when this was rejected, he did nothing more; this from a man who put a bounty on Mi’kmaq scalps.

Lawrence was less kind. After a backhanded attempt to force Acadian community leaders to submit to the British Crown—or to use Game of Thrones lingo, to bend the knee—he signed the decree setting about a series of events that add up to nothing less than cultural genocide.

It began in 1755. British soldiers forced Acadians out of their homes dotting the shore of the Bay of Fundy and stuffed them into decrepit transports and decaying naval brigs. The ships called along the bustling British ports of the Thirteen Colonies, dropping off small groups of prisoners at each city. Homeless, linguistically and religiously alienated, and torn from their families, most exiles ended up destitute on the streets or dead. More than a quarter of the 7,000 deported in the fall of ’55 never made it back to dry land, succumbing to wretched ship conditions and disease. Those who escaped to surrounding French territories were hunted down and deported three years later, from Ile St-Jean, the island we now call P.E.I. This time the ships sailed for France; death rates at sea were even higher. Two ships packed with hundreds of prisoners never made it at all, sinking with all hands lost in the frigid North Atlantic.

But some families escaped the fate of the ships. That’s where I come in.

I don’t speak French. The few church events I attended as a kid were Anglican ceremonies. I didn’t even know my last name was Acadian until someone told me two summers ago while I was working as a tour guide in Cheticamp, N.S.—the largest Acadian community in the province. Acadian culture was erased, at least in my family. But I’ve traced my ancestors back to some of the first settlers that arrived in Port Royal in the middle of the 17th century. No one in my family knew of the connection until a few months ago. I’ve been told French was spoken in the house four generations back, but memories are getting foggy. We’ve nearly forgotten. Many of the unlucky souls who landed in the hostile ports of America had their culture physically stolen. For my family, among those who escaped the deportations, the erasure happened much more slowly, but it happened nonetheless.

Mr. Lawrence, I danced on your grave because you deserve it. I drive by towns named after you whenever I go surfing on the eastern shore or apple-picking in the Annapolis valley, and they anger me. Nova Scotia’s need to memorialize you angers me. We talk about removing statues and changing street names a lot in this province, and I want your name added to the list. May you not rest in peace.

Todd McLellan’s Things Come Apart series features disassembled technology, both old and new, to explore our relationships with their disposable nature. As technology improves and we replace our gadgets at a rapid pace, what comes of the components that make it work? McLellan shoots each disassembled machine by dropping it from a platform, creating a stunning view of technology, inside out.

The next time you look at social media, I want you pay attention to a subtle detail on each post: the timestamp. If you’re on Twitter, for example, when was each post published? When I was writing this paragraph, I glanced down at my Twitter feed, and here’s what I saw: A tweet about a Chinese internet CEO acting nuts (53 seconds ago), a snapshot of a friend’s cat asleep in an inbox tray (one minute ago), a hot take on Hillary Clinton’s book (two minutes ago). And on and on, backwards into time, minute by minute.

This is what’s known as “reverse chronological” design, and it’s the organizing principle for nearly every social media giant. Log into Instagram, Facebook, a discussion board on Reddit, and just about any blog, and boom—it’s all reverse chron. They’re constantly refreshing the feed, pushing the newest, latest updates to you. History recedes in a flash. What happened last minute is immediately pushed away, as is last hour, and the last day. It makes it awfully hard to examine the past, even the quite recent past. If I wanted to see what my feed looked like, say, last week? I’d be sitting there scrolling backward until my forefinger fell off. Twitter doesn’t want me doing that.

These days, we’re warned about the myriad of ways that social media corrodes our culture. We worry about how it creates “filter bubbles” and fosters a rotting swamp of abusive trolls. We’re told it’s sapping our penchant for face-to-face human contact: “We have sacrificed conversation for mere connection,” as MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes. And hey, how about those gormless millennials? Their selfie snapping and relentless hustling for likes has become “a conduit for individual narcissism,” if you believe psychologist Jean Twenge, co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic.

Me, I’m not so sure. I’ve been writing about technology and its effects for two decades, and my sense is that many of these fears are overblown. Toxic trolldom is real, certainly; but fears that technology will turn us into numb, self-obsessed morons are as old as the hills. They’re likely driven more by intergenerational friction, the habitual scorn of the olds for the youngs.

If you asked me what the true danger about social media is, I’d say it’s much more subtle. It’s the problem of time—and becoming stuck in the present. It’s the relentless pressure of reverse chron.

And, weirdly enough, it’s a danger that pioneering Canadian communications theorist Harold Innis warned us about—over 60 years ago.

***

When we talk about Canadians famous for analyzing new media, we often think of Marshall McLuhan first. With his koan “the medium is the message,” McLuhan synthesized his basic idea: Our tools, from electric light to television to phones, change not just how we communicate, but what we communicate about.

But if you asked McLuhan, he would tell you that Innis got there first. In the 1920s and ’30s, Innis cut his teeth as an economist studying how Canada’s abundant resources—furs, wood, fish—shaped the country’s economy. Later on, he became one of Canada’s first red-hot cultural nationalists, inveighing against the way American art and military power warped Canada’s own industries.

Late in his career, though, Innis suddenly pivoted, becoming mesmerized by how media changed the timbre of our cognition. In The Bias of Communication, published in 1951, he went as far back as early Mesopotamians to analyze how their medium, clay tablets, affected the power of elites. Clay, Innis noted, was durable—it’ll last for aeons—but heavy and hard to move. As a result, any religious edicts written down in cuneiform would hang around for a long time, but wouldn’t reach very far, geographically. You can’t easily lug a thousand pounds of religious texts for a hundred miles. So power endured over a long time period, but each empire had a small radius.

The shift to paper, beginning with papyrus in Roman culture, inverted this proposition. Now, Innis noted, written-down rules and edicts and religious tracts were lightweight, so they could be carried for thousands of miles by horse. This is part of why the Roman Empire spread all the way up to Britain, and why—in the 15th century, when Gutenberg created the printing press—Martin Luther’s rebellious theses spread across Europe in a matter of months. Paper accelerated the spread of ideas. It was great for memes.

But paper also, Innis pointed out, made ideas transient. That’s because, compared to clay tablets, paper isn’t very durable. It fades, it gets ripped; the Library of Alexandria burns. Perhaps worse, from Innis’s point of view, is paper encouraged disposability. Once newspaper printing presses started cranking in 17th century—pushed into overdrive by steam power in the 19th—society was flooded with the weird new form of “daily news,” something you discarded immediately after reading.

Many regard early newspapers as cradles of modern democracy and human rights, and there’s obvious truth to that. But Innis worried that newspapers had a structural bias: They focused culture relentlessly on the present. To make money, newspapers had to train us to come back every day—to become convinced that if we stopped keeping up, stopped checking the papers, we’d miss something important, or mesmerizing, or, more likely, deliciously lascivious. (That’s partly why newspapers quickly discovered the allure of covering long-running trials: “It is doubtful whether anything really unifies the country like its murders,” as Innis quotes one 19th-century wit.)

Modern media was changing our relationship to time. It gave us “an obsession with the immediate… a criticism of the moment at the moment,” Innis argued, quoting Henry James. News media’s message, in the McLuhan-esque sense, was to stop paying attention to the past; hell, to stop paying attention to last week, or even yesterday. It was a format that “inevitably shrinks time down to the present, to a one-day world of the immediate and the transitory.” It made us creatures of “present-mindedness.”

A culture that is stuck in the present is one that can’t solve big problems. If you want to plan for the future, if you want to handle big social and political challenges, you have to decouple yourself from day-to-day crises, to look back at history, to learn from it, to see trendlines. You have to be usefully detached from the moment.

What Innis feared—as his biographer Alexander John Watson puts it—is that “our culture was becoming so saturated with new instantaneous media that there was no longer a hinterland to which refugee intellectuals could retreat to develop a new paradigm that would allow us to tackle the new problems we are facing.”

***

Which brings us back to today’s social media and its omnipresent reverse-chron design.

What in god’s name would Innis have thought of Twitter? He died in 1952, so on a sheerly technological level, smartphones and the internet would have seemed like distant, unfamiliar sci-fi. But if you showed him the way social media is organized? He’d probably wince in recognition. Reverse chron is present-mindedness jacked into hypermetabolic overload. Hey, someone said something 15 seconds ago! Now someone’s saying something else! Drop what you’re doing and check it out!

If you ask me, Innis nailed it. Present-mindedness is our biggest danger. Forget all the handwringing about our social habits; I doubt technology is turning us into much bigger narcissists than we already were. And politically, tech has had many wonderful effects—particularly when long-ignored voices have learned how to connect and persuade online. Black Lives Matter and the “We are the 99 percent” economic message of Occupy Wall Street, for instance, both blossomed via social media.

But reverse chron? That’s well and truly a mental trap. Social-media firms know this: They’re experts at hijacking our attention, sucking us into the day-to-day drama of whatever’s blowing up online right now. They use reverse chron because it’s so addictive.

It’s up to us to heed Innis’s warning, and fight back. On one level it’s a personal battle, seizing back control of our own attention: We have to learn to enjoy what’s powerful and delightful about online tools, but to resist their casino-like seductions into the here and now. Some of society’s biggest problems, such as global warming, require careful long-term planning; we can’t tackle them if we’re being dragged in 20 directions every hour by shiny objects and oven-fresh hot takes.

We could use better tools, too. Since their very design affects how we use them, how about forms of social media that don’t focus so narrowly on what’s happening right this instant?

Facebook and Twitter have recently tried to gently tinker with such experiments, occasionally highlighting posts from a few hours or days ago. But I’d love to see more designs that are even more radical yet.

How about this: When I post about a subject, have the social network show me powerful, useful related posts and threads from weeks, months, or even years gone by. Or remind me of thoughts or ideas I myself posted on the subject from years past; connect me with the history and trajectory of my own cognition. Or let’s be even more radical: Why not crawl through Google Books’ public domain archive and find me related work published on the subject in the 1900s? Imagine a social network with content that spans centuries!

This sounds a bit nuts, I realize, and utopian; I’ve no idea how you’d convince social-media barons to rejig their wildly profitable mechanics of reverse chron. But I suspect many people already have an appetite for posts, news, and material that drags them out of the present. Behold, for example, the weird success of @HistoryInPics, an account with more than four million followers that does nothing but tweet pictures of historical photos. (Even better, it was started by two teenagers; they’re now young twentysomethings.)

There’s no simple answer here. But it’s worth thinking about this subtle trap that social media has created. History is long, and worth learning from. It’s time we grappled with the problem of time itself.

Photo by Michael Cooper. Photo courtesy of VideoCabaret.

Walking into a small room, I am greeted by an usher as songs about Louis Riel and Canadian identity foreshadow the upcoming play. I take my seat across from the centre of what I assume is the stage. Scarlet curtains frame a black window made to look almost as if you are peering into a TV screen. Above the stage, Comedy and Tragedy Masks take the shape of maple leaves, accentuating the name of the theatre company responsible for the next two hours of hilarity and history: VideoCabaret.

The play I am about to see is the first of a summer-long, two-part series called Confederation & Riel and Scandal & Rebellion, which is about the struggle of forming the Dominion of Canada. These plays do much more than entertain, though–they teach. They are a clear feat to anyone who fought to stay awake during their grade school history classes: Canadian history has become interesting. They manage this through a type of speed, wit, and hand-eye coordination that left me flabbergasted at how much I didn’t know before walking into this room.

The theatre company, founded in 1976, utilizes video cameras, hot-wired televisions, and the power of rock ’n’ roll to engage its audience in plays concerning mass media politics. Since then, VideoCabaret has toured the world, won a total of 23 awards, and produced over 15 plays. The Confederation series, being shown at Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre, is part of a 21-part play cycle written by VideoCabaret co-founder Michael Hollingsworth that dramatizes and satirizes four centuries of Canadian history in all of its problematic glory.

The plays aren’t what you would think of when hearing the word “theatre.” They are presented in black-box style, where the entire theatre is darkened save for a sliver of light that reveals the actors and subtle projections on hidden screens that form a setting. Hollingsworth’s goal is to create scenes that are under one minute. With speedy character introductions and successional quips that leave no time for afterthought, it’s inconceivable that only eight actors cross the stage, each having more than five roles.

As the play progresses, there is no time to mentally review what you know from elementary school. The play presents a story of Confederation through archetypes that made the characters and plot identifiable, leaving no room for second-guessing the difference between the Fenians and the Orangemen.

In today’s fast-paced age of content creation, the average Canadian’s attention span is eight seconds. VideoCabaret’s theatrical splicing of the lesser-known facts of history has created an indispensable teaching tool that stands its ground in a time where celebrity featured commercials and clickbait titles vie for our attention. VideoCabaret’s Confederation doesn’t ask for your attention, it grabs it, and doesn’t let go until you’ve learned a thing or two about the True North.

MAY 1969
“There’s no place for the State in the bedrooms of the Nation.” Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s Bill C-150 is passed, amending the Criminal Code to decriminalize homosexual acts between consenting adults (but only in private, mind you).

AUGUST 1, 1971
Toronto holds its first Pride celebration with a picnic on the Toronto Islands. The picnic, planned in conjunction with the second anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, is described as a “happy event” though some beach-goers were “grossed out” when the Toronto Gay Alliance banner was unfurled on the ferry ride over.

AUGUST 28, 1971
“Two-four-six-eight! Gay is just as good as straight!” Over 100 people converge on Parliament Hill in support of “We Demand,” a 13- page manifesto calling for changes to laws and public policies regarding the LGBTQ community.

AUGUST-OCTOBER 1973
Pride Week becomes a national celebration with a political theme: The inclusion of sexual orientation in the human rights code. Festivities are held in Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Saskatoon, and Winnipeg.

MAY-JUNE 1976
Multiple raids on Montreal bathhouses and gay clubs are blamed on a city “cleanup” commissioned by then-mayor Jean Drapeau in anticipation of the Summer Olympics. A demonstration organized by L’Association pour les droits gai(e)s du Québec (formerly Comité homosexuel anti-répression / Gay Coalition Against Repression) attracts more than 2,000 participants.

FEBRUARY 1981
Known as the “Canadian Stonewall,” 300 men are arrested following police raids on four Toronto bathhouses. The next day, nearly 3,000 people march on the 52 Division precinct and Queen’s Park; cars are smashed and fires are lit in response to the raids. Soon after, Lesbian and Gay Pride Day is established in Toronto.

MAY 1981
Edmonton police raid the Pisces Bathhouse; 56 men are arrested. Protests are subsequently organized. That same month, the Bi-National Lesbian Conference in Vancouver becomes the catalyst of Canada’s first Lesbian Pride March when 200 women attending the conference take to the downtown streets.

OCTOBER 1981
Toronto hosts its first Lesbian Pride March, paving the way for what is now known as the Dyke March.

AUGUST 1987
Winnipeg holds its first-ever Pride march with some of the 250 attendees wearing bags over their heads “out of fear of rallying in public.”

JULY 1988
Halifax holds its first Pride. Described as more of a demonstration than a celebration, the event is used to protest the non-existence of legal protection for LGBTQ people against discrimination and violence. Seventy-five people participate. (Today, the event attracts 150,000.)

JULY 1991
The City of Toronto officially endorses Pride, 20 years after the first Pride picnic.

JULY 1995
Toronto Mayor Barbara Hall becomes the first sitting mayor of a major Canadian city to march in a Pride parade.

SEPTEMBER 2000
In Toronto, a Pussy Palace Collective party is raided by police. Women are strip-searched and names are recorded. After much backlash and a lawsuit, training programs are enforced for the Toronto police that focus on interacting with the LGBTQ community.

DECEMBER 2002
A bathhouse in Calgary is raided and 17 are charged for keeping a common bawdy house.

JUNE 2005
Toronto’s Bill Blair becomes the first chief of police in the city’s history to participate in the Pride parade—the same year gay marriage is legalized in Canada.

JUNE 2009
The first-ever Trans March takes place in Toronto after years of pushback from both the public and Pride organizers. Without floats or elaborate decorations, the event is described as “putting the ‘act’ back in ‘activism.’”

JUNE-JULY 2014
Toronto hosts World Pride, while new Pride festivals are launched for the first time in Sault Ste. Marie and Timmins, Ont.

JULY 2015
Six Nations of the Grand River hosts what’s believed to be Canada’s first on-reserve Pride event, drawing about 150 participants.

JULY 2016
Black Lives Matter holds a sit-in during Toronto’s Pride parade to protest the whitewashing and commercialization of the festivities. BLM presents a list of nine demands, including the removal of police floats during the march.

Photo courtesy of CBC.

When I was a child, I used to confuse the title of Us Weekly magazine—a glossy about celebrities—as U.S. magazine, the entirety of America summed up in a glossy about celebrities. Twenty years later, the same can be done with Canada: The Story of Us. First-person plural pronouns are a messy affair, and it turns out that the CBC, rather than developing its own approach, borrowed a format from production company Nutopia that had previously been used to create America: The Story of Us. It shows.

Originally, I decided to watch The Story of Us because, as a white Canadian settler, it’s particularly important to be aware of national myth-making so that I can recognize my own role and understand how my country sees itself. (Or, at least, how the CBC sees us when it’s asked to make a glossy docuseries to celebrate Canada’s 150th birthday).

But the series is both a failure in the way it navigates and frames history as well as the way it presents that history. Though each CGI-enhanced, this-is a-CRUCIAL-moment-in-the-fabric-of-Canada episode aims for action-movie-level tension, I couldn’t make it through more than four. Each one felt like the longest 44 minutes of my life. I say this having had broken bones, suffered severe food poisoning, and made many awful life decisions.

The series suffers from both momentary and major problems. Momentary: The War of 1812 is referred to, for example, as Canada’s “War of Independence.” No. Canada did not confederate until 1867, and, last time I checked, we are still a constitutional monarchy! The U.S. invaded, and groups of British colonists banded together with First Nations and fought to repel them. A war repelling an invading force is not a war of independence. It’s just a war. (One in which the British burned down the White House, which sadly does not receive play in this dull-as-dust episode.)

Major: Each episode features a blend of dramatic reenactment and commentary from experts and, no offence to handyman Mike Holmes or MMA fighter Georges St-Pierre, irrelevant celebrities. It’s hard to say, but the experts seem to have been fed lines from a script—lines that often echo the narration instead of adding anything interesting. For its part, the narration isn’t much better: Too little time is devoted to historical complexity, and too much time is devoted to underscoring, in case the viewers had not noticed it themselves, the deep and lasting importance of the moment at hand. The most egregiously ridiculous celebrity talking heads include Jim Balsillie and former Dragons’ Den panellist Michele Romanow who provide an “entrepreneurial” context for everything from the making of the Canada stove to the digging of the Welland Canal. Lesson one: Canada’s reason for existence was almost wholly mercantile. Lesson two: Our current government’s obsession with innovation is cut from the same cloth, and we’re just as unaware about it now as we were then.

In an effort to draw audiences in with star power and CGI, each episode feels incredibly slow and bogged down by extraneous contextualization. Had the structural defects of the Welland Canal been handled in narration, the series could have made more space to stop and question the overhunting of beavers or some tales from the seedy, racially complex and often violent history of the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The CBC had 10 hours, before commercials, to tell whatever stories it felt was important to our history. Those 10 hours could have come together with maps, visuals, and recreations to outline a cohesive timeline of Canada from well before settlers until now—something like the David Suzuki-narrated Geologic Journey, which tells the story of the geologic history of present-day Canada. Or they could have been used to challenge the dominant narratives of history we’ve learned in school, focussing on lesser-known figures, complicating our understanding of people like Sir John A. Macdonald, and challenging the difficult racist chapters of our past—like the Chinese head tax, the proposed ban on Black immigrants, or the Sixties Scoop. Or, as Metro columnist Vicky Mochama pointed out on her podcast with Ishmael Daro, Safe Space, all that time could have turned into many new Heritage Minutes.

Almost anything would have been better than shoehorning Canadian history into Nutopia’s format. Canada continues to celebrate the military and mercantile highlights of our past while overlooking much of our complex history—history that is more interesting and more important than much of what’s included in The Story of Us. When it comes to learning about our history, it’s time to change the frame—to focus less on celebrity and more on policy and everyday people; to move away from celebration, and toward education and understanding.

The Water Beetles

At times graphic and disturbing, The Water Beetles by Michael Kaan tells the heroic and poetic story of a young boy living in Hong Kong during the Second World War. Based loosely on the diaries and stories of Kaan’s father, the narrative follows 12-year-old Chung-Man as his prestigious family is reduced to shambles. Along with his siblings, Chung-Man is forced to leave his home, travelling on foot to find safety. The book seamlessly flips between present day and the war, with the narrator shedding insight on how the war affected him after all those years. Along the way, the young boy faces the horrific realities of war. However, Kaan is able to balance the bloodshed with beautiful imagery and detail.

Now but a meme, this was originally seen as fact

So long ago it was proven that women are evil because, duh, uteruses have horns.

This week, I am reading An Introduction to Women’s Studies Gender In A Transnational World by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan for Dr. Kristine Klement’s Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies class at York University. We are focusing on how science may just be as culturally affected as the rest of us, especially when it comes to gender: “Many people think that biology answers [what counts as difference] once and for all,” reads the first essay, “Social and Historical Constructions of Gender.” “But science (including biology) has a history.”

These influences affect different aspects of gender and sexuality. As Dr. Klement points out, “Binary thinking affects science.” Because we are so dead set on sticking with this male/female gender dichotomy we are able to use science to justify prejudice against trans* people, or decide what gender role a child will be expected to live up to—something many people and organizations, including the Intersex Society of North America would like to see stop. “Intersexuality is primarily a problem of stigma and trauma, not gender,” reads the society’s website, for example. “Parents’ distress must not be treated by surgery on the child.”

I’m not saying all science is terrible—it’s a pretty broad profession and, of course, used toward wonderful advancements. But scientists are still people coming from an oppressive culture, with their own ideas and—even though some may be subconscious—their own prejudices. And there’s quite the history of how it has been used to justify the dehumanization of women, especially working class women. Take, for instance, the  early 1900s case of Margaret Sanger.

Sanger, is considered the mother of the birth control movement. Earlier this summer, The Washington Times published an article about Sanger’s pushing of the eugenics movement. Sanger wanted birth control to be used for “respectable” married women, not working class women—despite her own working class background. “Her views and those of her peers in the movement contributed to compulsory sterilization laws in 30 U.S. states,” writes Arina Grossu in The Washington Times. “That resulted in more than 60,000 sterilizations of vulnerable people, including people she considered ‘feeble-minded,’ ‘idiots’ and ‘morons.’”

Almost a hundred years before Sanger was Paul Broca, known for measuring skulls, or, crainometry. Broca also thought we were a bunch of idiots, and wanted science to  prove this. He determined women’s heads were smaller than men’s, and thus women were more stupid. Stephen Law writes about it in “Women’s Brains,” quoting who he referred to as “a black sheep in Broca’s fold,” L. Manouvrier: “Women displayed their talents and their diplomas. The also invoked philosophical authorities. But they were opposed by numbers … The theologians had asked if women had a soul. Several centuries later, some scientists were ready to refuse them a human intelligence.”

Also, on the list of “bad” things women’s bodies do: shedding unnecessary garbage during menstruation while men are being awesome producing all sorts of sperm (“The Egg and the Sperm” by Emily Martin.) “In analyzing male/female differences these scientists peer through the prism of everyday culture, using the colours so separated to highlight their questions, design their experiments, and interpret their results,” writes Anne Fausto-Sterling in ‘The Biological Connect.’ “More often than not their hidden agendas, non-conscious and thus unarticulated, bear strong resemblances to broader social agendas.”

Interestingly enough, at my last science lab, part of my assignment was to help a fictional lady, Jezebel (named after the Bible’s bad girl), figure out the father of her baby.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna is in her first year of the gender and women’s studies program at York University. She also maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

For a long time, many Canadians never wanted to talk about rape. Some still don’t. When the nation finally started talking about it, people believed rape was only executed by strange, unknown men to an unsuspecting women. Some still do. Now we’ve moved on to knowing rape can happen to men, to trans women, to trans men, and to women who know their attacker. But maybe hearing the cases and “knowing” is not the same as understanding.

Thirty years ago, This Magazine discussed the ever controversial meaning of rape. Much has changed, but sometimes I have to squint to spot the difference. From our August 1984 issue by Anne Innis Dagg, “Rape’s Progress”: