Bringing it all back to the same spot: re-engaging place

My last post in this little project is one where I feel I must bring it all back to the beginning. I referenced Seixas, (2009), and Levesque (2010) and their call for a historical inquiry that involved process, and meaning and connectedness. A historical narrative is, just that, a narrative, but it is made meaningful by its connections - to the past, present, and future - not simply for the writer but also for the reader. There has to be a connectedness of the narrative to those who read it.
It is my hope that this little blog, being in a place of complete publicity, will create connections for those who read it and engage with it as it did for me create connections between what I thought, what I think and what I am open to thinking in the future. The Rideau Canal as a historical place is fueled by the people who interact with it, whether it be the visitors, the officials who maintain it, the citizens who use it or the people who remember it. It is interacted with over and over and it is those interactions those connections of meaning that make it a site worth historical remembering.

How others are creating visual histories

While searching for images that reveal the historicity of the Rideau Canal, I also found several websites that have already started their own visual historical narratives of the canal.
Of particular note is the Workers' Heritage Centre, who are working on an online visual tour of the canal from the point of view of the workers. Although the site is not yet fully functioning, they are "still working on this", the potential for such visual histories from this narrative point of view are quite powerful. It will be interesting to see how my visual narrative, as a current education student and beginner historical researcher and online lover, is conversation with this narrative. More on that when it's finished I guess! (there is also a link to their site in the menu on the right).
The other visual narrative of note was the paintings of Thomas Burrowes (1796-1866) that have been put together by Archives of Ontario in a section they entitle, Eyewitness: Thomas Burrowes on the Rideau Canal. In this visual narrative, they use specifically Burrowes paintings to discuss his contribution to understanding how the Rideau Canal was built.
Archives Ontario also has a number of other sections of visual archives relating to the canal that were exceptionally helpful in starting to create my narrative.
Though it is not as much a visual narrative, as a collection of historical images, the McCord Museum has a vast array of striking photographs and artistic depictions of the Rideau Canal.

Visual history of place: The Rideau Canal from the past

On googlemaps.com, if you type "rideau canal" there is only one photo associated with the place in this fairly historically recent understanding of geographies, it is also situated in the section of the canal that contains the Ottawa locks at the end of the long slack-water system that is the entirety of the 'Rideau Canal' (check out the link from UNESCO for a wonderful overview of what is actually included in the 'Rideau Canal' water system). In an attempt to grapple with how colonization do violence to geographies, I looked for some visual representations of the Rideau Canal to contrast with my own. I have written below two short narratives of place based on what I see in the photo and my understanding of their historical positionings based on Library and Archives Canada, Archives of Ontario and Parks Canada's websites.

Henry Pooley, 1833

 In 1833, the artist, Henry Pooley sits with his watercolours on the hill which we now know as Parliament Hill to depict the landscape in a state of transition. The trees in the foreground reveal this state as one is cut down, one dead but still standing, and the middle one attempting to continue to grow on the barren rockface along the river. Most of the landscape depicts the 'untamed' wilderness of the area, that was largely undeveloped at the time. The view is vast and deep, as if the forest go on forever as the delicately fade into the sky. This depicts the sense of the power of the natural landscape during this time as it is very much involved in the setting of the scene Pooley paints. On the far shore however, the shoreline shows the dirt of where the trees have been cut and the stumps removed, the beginnings of colonizing and controlling the land. There appears a small building in the middle ground of the painting and the edges of the locks of the canal are visible in the bottom corner of the painting. They are not front and centre and consequently not as 'present' for Pooley as the natural vastness. Also, around the locks the earth is bare and raw, with no grass depicting the newness of the development of the locks for this area. This is interesting to note however, as the canal was officially opened in 1832 (Parks Canada, 2012), a year before Pooley's painting. Perhaps for Pooley, the more intersting scene was not the man-made one, but the natural one as his view looks out into the wilderness from edge of the settlement that later becomes Ottawa downtown. The detail is put most into the flora in the foreground as the shading and colours are most vivid in the small plants that grow most near. Bytown is obscrured from view, but Colonel By's house is visible on the hill at the edge of the painting. In later depictions of the canal, this view very much shifts focus.

Thomas Burrowes, 1845

The next view in our visual history of place is now more than 10 years later. In 1845, Thomas Burrowes also used watercolour to depict a similar scene of the final locks into the Ottawa river. He positions himself on the other side of the locks from Pooley's position above and much closer to the water. There is far more of human presence in this painting, not just with the person in the foreground, but with the pieces of colonialism and settlement that are more present than before. The Lockmaster's house is absent from view in this painting, but the locks are front and centre in the painting. They are painted with precision, as the lines of the stone walls are crisp and neat, the doors of the locks themselves detailed and precise. The earth around the locks is no longer bare but is green with grass. The landscape around the locks is much more manicured and 'civilized' with a fence and a roadway.
waterway is alive with activity. There is a steamboat, as well as several other smaller vessels on the river. There are also logs being floated downriver for some building. The far shore is now populated. There are several buildings on the far bank and much more deforestation than in ten years prior and in Pooley's conception. Burrowes was far more interested in the activity of the canal and the waterway, everything is in action, the person in the foreground, the boats on the water, it is a depiction of a place that is no longer serene in the natural sense, but alive with humanness.
Now thinking back to my own understandings of the canal and my narrative of the past, the canal for me is far more closely linked to Burrowes' vision of humanness and activity. It is even more linked to this then Burrowes' conception of the canal, because I have found that it is the interaction with the landscape, or cityscape, that makes a historical narrative of place meaningful.

References
Burrowes, T. (1845). North entrance of the Rideau Canal from the Ottawa river. [watercolour]. Thomas Burrowes fonds. Item reference code C 1-0-0-0- 14, Archives of Ontario, Ottawa, ON.

Parks Canada. (2012). The history of the Rideau canal. Rideau canal national historic site. Retrieved from http://www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/on/rideau/natcul/natcul2.aspx

Pooley, H. (1833). Rideau canal, Ottawa. [watercolour]. Library and Archives Canada (Acc. No. 1990-505-1), Retrieved from http://collectionscanada.gc.ca/pam_archives/index.php?fuseaction=genitem.displayItem&lang=eng&rec_nbr=2837169&rec_nbr_list=496636,496634,2266600,2266596,2836160,2897080,3317484,3326184,3326194,2837169

Analysis of the map as historical place

I wish for a second, before I delve into my research on the Rideau Canal and the relationship of geography and history, to relate a final observation that was crucial to my thinking of my pictures of the map on my Ipad.
To recall:

When I reviewed my photographs that evening, I was a little disappointed and frustrated that there was a glare of the buildings behind on the map. Then I realized it was terribly poetic to have the buildings of the university, and the trees that were purposely planted superimposed onto the map in such a manner. It was a visual metaphor of everything I had been thinking - My understanding of historical place was linked to the legacy of geography and the repeated 'superimposing' of colonies, peoples, roads, and yes canals in the natural landscape. We see all of the layers in one single image - the earth, the greenery, then the roads, the little 'points of interest', the paths marked in yellow (suspiciously like a highlighter of what's important to see), and finally the place in which we come to see such a map - the wider site in which it stands, the buildings, the trees, the sun, the people, the city, and my own figure in the present.
What then, does the map 'say' in the discursive sense about the historical positioning of the Rideau Canal?

Historical site investigation: The Rideau Canal with history in mind

As part of the assignment in which this blog is my offering, we were asked to visit our historical 'site' with some questions in mind relating to the history and experience of history in mind. Specifically, my partner Colleen and I were asked to visit the map of the canal that appears at the end of the walkway from the University of Ottawa campus, walking under the Transitway, Nicholas Street and Colonel By Drive to the portion of the canal with a map for visitors. (Check the link in "My location" at the bottom of the post to see exactly where we went.)
When we got there, it felt almost anticlimactic: The map seemed so 'ordinary' so factual and detached from the expereiences we were asked to think about - like what it was like to be there as the canal was being built. Everything was so perfectly manicured around us, even the people who walked, ran and biked on the smooth sidewalks seemed so pleasant and perfectly placed. The sun was setting when we looked around so the water in the canal shimmered with the sun and the trees across the canal on the other shore were aglow with the fading light. It felt almost impossible to conceive of the canal in the organized chaos of its fabrication for this moment of sereneness in the city.

First picture of the map I took.

We decided it would be wise to take a photo of the map for later reference so I used my IPad to take a photo. The map itself was a drawing of the streets and walkways, with the winding waterway of the canal in the centre, and the satellite image of the 'geography' underneath. There were several 'points of interest' scattered on the map in little flag-like signs in relation to the canal and Ottawa in general. I realized quickly, through a variety of means, that the map was not for 'citizens' but tourists. The points of interest were largely those that would interest people wanting to explore Ottawa and its surrounding areas - those places of significance (more on this later). Also, we had several different people, as Colleen and I studied the map intently, ask us if we were looking for something, or needed help. The map was there for people unfamiliar with the sense of place in this area. It created this strange feeling of foreignness that we both had to dispel through admissions of our interrogation of the map was part of school projects.
Consequently the sense of place made by the map itself creates unfamiliarity and a positioning of space as organized largely for the person who is unfamiliar and unattached to the space they are in through this unfamiliarity. I asked myself what was 'historical' about this map? What 'stories' was it telling me; how was I making meaning with this space and this text?
My antiracist education background kicked in and I was immediately reminded of the commonsense understanding of colonialism within the map and the place. As I had felt before I started to dismantle and understand my own historical narrative of the Rideau Canal, I realized its very normalcy to me covers over the legacy of colonial initiatives and racisms it engendered and continues to engender (Stanley, 2009; Rarack, 2002). The name 'Rideau' is French for curtain, which references the shape of the falls, named  by the French colonizers themselves, to the river after the same name (also named in colonial expansion). Do we remember this part of the historical 'story' when we talk about the 'Rideau Canal'? (Looking at my own narrative in the previous post, the answer is: from one perspective at least, not really). It is the colonizing of geography that I came to concentrate on. The map itself, and the pictures I took of it, speak volumes about the colonizing enterprise in relation to geography in this region we call Ottawa and the Rideau Canal.
The map was 'innocently' showing how 'Ottawa' and the Rideau Canal was when the map was created, it does show the violence that was needed for this serene autumn day to look so polished. I am reminded of Montgomery's (2005) work, which I had read before, about the insidiousness of discourses of racism, that readers, viewers and consumers of the discourses do not recognize. I looked at the map again, the roads and names (which were almost all colonial in reference in their origins) were literally written over the greenery and the satellite image of the region. The water was controlled and coloured a single colour of blue (even though when you look at it, the water is more greenish in colour) The larger words "Gatineau" and "Ottawa" were written to demarcate the spaces of belonging of each space. All of the land is a patchwork of ownership and naming. It all allows for that sense of comfort I felt in the order of the space around the canal itself that lay beyond the map itself.
I left the map with a strange sense of wonder at my own thoughts. I have often endeavoured to try and flesh out a way of engaging this normalcy of colonial history in Canada from an antiracist perspective. So much of our everyday surroundings are infused with the violence of colonialism that we take it as normal, as eternal as unquestioned, and it takes a lot of work to uncover the colonial histories of those that are excluded from the story and to find and expose their 'side of things'. (I am thinking here of Stanley's (2009) article about the street signs in Vancouver, BC and the effort he goes through to meticulously flesh out the historical racailized exclusions that the street names so casually exhibit). I found then, that history as stories of place are infused, by definition, I suppose, with stories of geography as well. To understand the history of place, I must understand the geography of place, how history has interacted with that geography. This is apparently a delicate balance, one that historians and geographers walk all the time (Harris, 2012). Being neither a historian or a geographer, it is an interesting endeavor indeed for me to engage this type of historical thinking.

References
Harris, C. (2012). A life in history: A life between history and geography. The Canadian Historical Review, 93(3), 436-462. doi: 10.3138/chr.9332

Montgomery, K. (2005). Imagining the anti-racist state: Representations of racism in Canadian history textbooks. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 26(4), 427-442.

Razack, S. H. (2002). Race, space and the law: Unmapping a white settler society. Toronto: Between the lines.

Stanley, T. J. (2009). The banality of colonialism: Encountering artifacts of genocide and white supremacy in Vancouver today. In S. R. Steinberg (Ed.)., Diversity and multiculturalism: A reader (pp. 143-159). New York: Peter Lang

My present, to understand my meaning of the past, for the future

My task now is to work towards understanding my present and sense of place. In an effort to organize my thinking, I asked myself this pointed questions about how I know about the past of place: How does one experience historic places? What does it mean when a site is ‘historical’? How does knowledge of the ‘history’ of a site change its meaning?

For this specific project, I was asked to look at the Rideau Canal in Ontario. Before I started any of my research, and even re-visited the site with the 'historical' element of it in mind, I start with a short narrative of how I presently understand the Rideau Canal as a 'place':

I have lived in Ottawa, Canada’s capital for over two years now. I originally moved into an apartment off of Sussex drive, where I walked passed and over the last segments of the Rideau Canal almost daily. It became a part of my habitus, something that within my own sense of space, but this was very much in a frame of the present, with little attention to the consciousness of the past. I walked my dog on Major’s hill at least twice a day, letting him run freely amongst the ruins of Colonel John By’s house. 

Walkway on Major's Hill Park

It was always windy up there, but the view was breath-taking, the open expanse of the Ottawa river and the controlled geography of the canal itself with the grand architecture of the Chateau Laurier on one side, and the East bloc of Parliament on the other. I interacted with the canal as if it was eternal. It was not something I thought about: why it was built, who built it (the labourers, the foremen, the engineers, and Colonel By of course), how it was built, what it has meant to the ‘founding of Canada’ as a nation state as it appears today. Or even what historically had to happen to make this space 'the canal' as I experience it now. I was simply part of the cityscape where I lived. 
In the winter I would wait, like all Ottawans, for the ice on the canal to be solid enough for the customary skate on the canal - it was not an engineering feat, it was "the world's largest skating rink" (National capital commission). It was where I had my first beavertail, where you could watch all the kids learning to skate, and all of the couples holding hands and gliding for kilometers to Dow's Lake. 

Rideau Canal: Winter and Summer

In the summer, and warmer seasons, it was a nice walk along the waterway, seeing all of the boats, and the main walkway to Parliament for Canada Day fireworks.  

Even within my own description, when I start to see how my own present conception of place relates to pasts, I can see how the Rideau Canal is integral to understanding the Capital as a place, Ottawa as a place, and an environment of national belonging. 

My description is also infused with the concept of tradition, which is in itself something that is very much linked to a legacy of the past. The tradition of skating in the winter, boats and long strolls in the summer, Canada Day celebrations, which are founded in a concept of the past, and preservation and continuation of the past into the present. It also very much speaks to Anderson's (2006) conceptions of nationalism and imagined communities. It reveals how place can act as physical manifestation of community. People from Ottawa, from Canada, come together at the canal, in all seasons.

References
Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections of the origin and spread of nationalism. Revided ed. London: Verso. Retrieved from http://www.nationalismproject.org/what.htm

National Capital Commission. Rideau canal skateway. Retrieved from http://www.canadascapital.gc.ca/places-to-visit/rideau-canal-skateway

finding the project

I was initially having some difficulty with how I would go about a small project involving my interactions with a historical site. I did a lot of research into different avenues to explore, different angles or arguments of historical narrative I could pursue, but I was not satisfied with any of them. I felt as though they had already been done, or that I did not have the resources to dive deep enough into the historical narratives of my subject to speak, or write confidently about it. 

I went back to some of the theoretical readings about history as a discipline and how it has evolved (Osbourne, 2003) and some of the current thinking about history and how educators should think about it as a teaching subject (Levesque, 2010; Seixas, n.d.), as well as some of cautions and pitfalls of historical narratives and teaching (Cutrara, 2009). The notes I had written about these articles reminded me of the process of historical narrative and history. Dodd's, (2009) article about historicity and the historical process of making memorable history, of making official history and ways of remembering and commemorating the past, reminded me that history is again not just the ‘facts’ of the past, but the meaning we (as individuals, as citizens of Canada, as people of the world) make of the past.  It is through narrative; narrative in a textbook, on a plaque, or in a roundtable conference (as in the case of  Sexias, 2009), more specifically a narrative of meaning making of the past. Levesque's (2010) words about the way historians must think of history come back to me in this instance:

"Instead of naively asking 'What is the best story to know?' historians face the complexity of the past with such fundamental questions as 'How do we know about the past?'" (Levesque, 2010, p. 43)

In light of this, I have decided to make my own narrative of the process of my own historical meaning making; how I know, and come to know about the past of this historical place. I wish to flesh out and lay bare how I have gone through the process of creating a historical consciousness of place. Not only this, as the influence of the Internet in teaching and knowledge production are important to my larger research goals, I have chosen to create my narrative in the form of an interactive blog to investigate the potential of meaning making online in regards to historical places, people and events. Through a self-reflexive narrative of my own process of meaning making in a subject area that I am not at all familiar, I can grasp at some of the methods and procedures of historical meaning making online as well as some of the potential strengths, cautions and weaknesses this mode of knowledge production can have for others. This blog becomes a way of using my present, to engage the past for the goal of creating a framework for using the Internet as more than a bank of knowledge, but an interactive web of knowledges for others’ historical meanings in the future.

"What sort of past do we carry around and for what uses in the present and for what vision for the future?" (Seixas, 2009.)

map of the internet

To do so, I asked myself some general opening questions: What sorts of knowledge and narratives are ‘out there’ on the Internet on historical places? How do I get at them? What do they show? What is potentially missing? How do these elements effect my understanding of that history? How does knowledge of the ‘history’ of a site change its meaning, my understanding of it? 
"Instead of naively asking 'What is the best story to know?' historians face the complexity of the past with such fundamental questions as 'How do we know about the past?'" (Levesque, 2010)

References:
Cutrara, S. (2009). To placate or provoke? A critical review of the disciplines approach to History
curriculum. Journal of the Canadian Association of Curriculum Studies, 7(2), 86-109. Retrieved from: https://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/jcacs/article/view/22717

Dodd, D. (2009). Canadian historic sites and plaques: Heroines, trailblazers, the famous five. CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship, 6(2), 29-66. Retrieved from: http://crmjournal.cr.nps.gov/04_article_sub.cfm?issue=Volume%206%20Number%202%20Summer%202009&page=1&seq=1

Levesque, S. (2010). On historical literacy: Learning to think like historians. Canadian Issues, 42-46. 

Osbourne, K. (2003). Teaching history in schools: A Canadian debate. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 35(5), 585-626. doi: 10.1080/0022027032000063544

Seixas, P. (Presenter/Author) (2009). Introduction to historical thinking. In Association for Canadian Studies Conference, Panel Presentation/Communication: “What is the Shape and Place of Historical Thinking in High Schools?” [video file]. Available from http://thenhier.ca/en/content/panel-presentationcommunication-%E2%80%9Cwhat-shape-and-place-historical-thinking-high-schools%E2%80%9D-0