Last week’s provincial election was called historic even before it happened. But is it? Does it turn the course of events from one direction to another? In the future, will this election stand out as pivotal?
It’s simply too soon to tell. Calling something historic as it happens is an exercise in myopia — only time will tell if this election was more significant than any other in B.C.’s history. And even then, it will depend on whose perspective you accept.
On assignment a few years ago, I pulled into a small remote town and was admiring an old wooden church. Three teenagers, knowing I didn’t live in that town (it was that small), rode up on bicycles, interested in my interest in the old church and the history of their town.
“How old is this church?” I asked.
“It’s pretty old,” said one of the youths. “It’s been here as long as I have, and I’m 16.”
History is relative.
A university history professor was explaining the conference she was organizing, in which she and other participants were examining the role of women in regional history, noting that too much history was told from a male perspective.
“Are you rewriting history?” I asked her, and she readily admitted that was the purpose.
“You can rewrite history,” she said. “History is being rewritten all the time as new evidence comes to light and as people ask new questions about the past.”
This quote pops up from time to time: “After you’ve heard two eyewitness accounts of an auto accident, it makes you wonder about history.”
A Vancouver Island history from only the European perspective, for example, would be woefully inadequate. And unfair.
In February 1869, a vessel called the John Bright struck a reef near Hesquiat on Vancouver Island’s west coast. One account said that of the 22 people on the ship, 12 drowned and 10 were killed by Hesquiahts intent on plundering the wreck. The Hesquiaht version says that all 22 people aboard died, and that two badly battered bodies washed ashore.
The first account prevailed for many years, bolstered by the Eurocentric perspective of the 19th-century Victoria establishment. In later years, the Hesquiaht version gained more credence, and last year, the provincial government officially acknowledged that an injustice occurred in the hanging of two Hesquiaht men convicted of killing the vessel’s passengers.
After all the time that has passed, no amount of historical research can ascertain the exact chain of events, but examining the incident from different perspectives left little doubt that proper standards of investigation and justice were not applied.
We should always be re-examining history, searching for different viewpoints and deeper understanding.
It’s disturbing, though, if that examination becomes tainted by politics. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is reviewing Canadian history, if the point is to expand the view of our nation’s past. But if the aim is to rewrite history to align with a particular philosophy, that would be scary.
Harper’s government has launched a “thorough and comprehensive review of significant aspects in Canadian history.” The effort will be led by Conservative MPs and will investigate how history is taught in schools.
Past governments have shaped our understanding of history. There’s no reason the current one shouldn’t do the same. But the slashing of funding to Library and Archives Canada and the abandonment of the long-form census are reasons to question the objectivity of the Conservatives in rewriting history.
Do we want politicians determining what goes into our history books? No thanks. Leave it to professionals who follow standards of research.
Any discussion of history is good — the more the merrier. But we should always seek to broaden the discussion, not narrow it.
