Creating Colonial Pasts: History, Memory, and Commemoration in Southern Ontario, 1860–1980 by Cecilia Morgan (review)

Issues of how the past is remembered, how it is celebrated, and how these both influence the present have received increased attention among historians in recent decades. Cecilia Morgan is one of those who has been in the forefront of the movement. In this book, really a collection of four essays, she presents four lesser-known figures who have commented on how the past should be remembered, and deals with how one town, Niagara-on-the-Lake, wrestled with the problem of how to present itself in order to attract tourists. In so doing, the author emphasizes two of her particular interests, the place of women and of Indigenous people in history and in creating accounts of the past.

Her first essay, concerning Janet Carnochan, the best known of her subjects, is perhaps her least successful. Several of the essays suffer from an overabundance of detail, which tends to obscure the point of the discussion, but this essay also suffers from structural defects. Carnochan was instrumental in reviving the Niagara Historical Society and served on its executive for many years, directed the collection of historical artifacts leading to the building of Memorial Hall in 1907, and published a History of Niagara in 1914. We are given some idea of the types of topics that the History covered, with emphasis on Carnochan’s unusual-for-its-time comments on the place of women and Indigenous peoples in the narrative. This in itself is valuable. However, while the author sees Carnochan operating in both a local and an imperial context, she does not explain why the museum collection reflects more than these contexts, and the author cannot resist providing a very long list of artifacts collected for the museum, without any apparent reason to do so. She mentions that the collection was dispersed, but says nothing about why or when. At one point an individual is described in a quote from another person. A few pages later, the same individual is introduced again by Morgan as if the reader knows nothing about that person. All of this obfuscates, and distracts from the theme of the work.

The second and third, shorter, essays deal with even less well-known individuals. The first of these, dealing with how members of the Grand River Reserve perceived their history and thus their relationship to the Canadian nation and to Euro-Canadian culture, is arguably the most successful in meeting the author’s objective. It looks at members’ activities in local and provincial historical societies, and the ideas of individuals, especially Elliot Moses and Milton Martin. While there were some differences, essentially all argued for a distinct history and culture while acknowledging a two-way interplay with Euro-Canadian culture, and interaction with the Canadian state. Not surprisingly, there was a universal condemnation of the Indian Act and its treatment of Aboriginals as inferior, subject peoples.

The third essay deals with the life and writings of Celia B. File, who seems to have spent much of her life teaching. She is included in this book because she wrote an M.A. thesis in the early 1930s on Mary Brant, sister of Joseph and “wife” to Sir John Johnson, and wrote a short record in 1960 of her life teaching on the Tyendinaga Reserve in the early 1920s. For three years in the late 1960s she contributed material about the reserve to the local newspaper, though we learn little of what she contributed. Morgan looks at how Mary was portrayed, and at how Celia remembered life on the reserve and her part in it. The author also provides details on File’s life, about which only a limited amount is known. The extent of this latter material seems unnecessary, particularly since it involves numerous suppositions.

The final and longest essay deals with attempts by residents of Niagara-on-the-Lake, since the early 1800s...