Program
Colonialism, Racism, and Labour
October 22, 2022 from 2:30pm EDT to 3:45pm EDT
Location: Lincoln Park Room J301
Chair: Carmen Nielson
Peter Campbell, “Forty Canoes of Women: The Lives and Legacy of the Algonquian Women of 17th Century New France”
Indigenous women worked harder than Indigenous men, but does that mean, as 17 th century Europeans claimed, they were “real pack mules?” By focusing on Algonkianspeaking women in hunter-gatherer societies, the presentation will explore three central components of the work lives of women; the snaring and trapping of small animals, the retrieval of big game killed by the men, and the meanings and significance of the canoe. The talk will attempt to shift our focus from the rigour of women’s work to the control women exercised over the products of their own labour, their role in ensuring group survival through respectful treatment of the animals, and the deep connection working women had with water and the canoe.
Gabrielle McLaren,“Memorializing the Settler Worker Along the Rideau Canal”
In 2012, Stephen Harper’s conservative government announced that the Rideau Canal’s National Heritage Site designation would be expanded to commemorate the workers who had died during its construction (1826-1832). In framing this expansion, the labour of the 1,000+ workers who died during construction was labelled as “contributions” and the imperial-capital structures responsible for their deadly working conditions became “challenges.” Empire and capital disappeared from the picture. Drawing on public histories and media coverage of the Rideau Canal, my presentation echoes Fred Burrill’s recent critique to argue that working-class history, if divorced from labour’s settler colonial context, both obscures and misrepresents working-class lives and perpetuates the legitimacy of the settler colonial nationstate.
Speakers / Panelists
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Colonialism, Racism, and Labour
October 22, 2022 from 2:30pm EDT to 3:45pm EDT -
Colonialism, Racism, and Labour
October 22, 2022 from 2:30pm EDT to 3:45pm EDT
Peter Campbell
Peter Campbell
Peter Campbell
Peter Campbell is retired from the history department at Queen’s University. He is in the process of writing a series of three articles on 17 th century New France that focus on Algonquian women, the hidden history of the Algonquins of the Ottawa Valley, and the way in which our concern with 34 “race” disguises the greater importance of the IndigenousEuropean encounter as a clash of belief systems.
Gabrielle McLaren
Gabrielle McLaren
Gabrielle McLaren
Gabrielle McLaren is a second-year MA student at Concordia University’s Department of History and the current General Coordinator for the Graduate History Student Association (GHSA). Their thesis, tentatively titled “‘Not so very fine and healthy, as has been reported’: Settlers, Malaria, and Improvement Along the Rideau Canal (1826-1832),” explores how experiences of disease during 42 the Rideau Canal’s construction affected British settlement and environmental understandings of Upper Canada. An early version of this presentation was published in the Network in Canadian History and Environment’s “Parks Not Profit” series in summer 2021. McLaren holds a BA with distinction, honours in history and minor in world literature, from Simon Fraser University (2020), and wrote an honours thesis that dealt with working-class people’s experiences during Montreal’s 1885 smallpox epidemic.