Prepare yourselves.
The Canadian History of the Environment Summer Symposium (CHESS 2025) is happening in Hamilton, Ontario this year, and we have great plans for immersing participants in the lived history of environmental contamination and remediation that’s unfolded in the “Steel City.” We’re so excited, in fact, that we feel it necessary to share Tim Hus’s classic song, “Hamilton Steel.” While we will abstain from playing that song ever again, it gives you a good introduction to the local culture, rooted in industry, sacrifice, and community pride.
CHESS will explore how this sense of place, crisis, and promise took root in Hamilton, drawing connections to similar communities and histories along the way. We will be welcoming participants to Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University from Friday, May 30th, to Sunday, June 1st. This looks like it will be the largest CHESS in quite some time, and we’re excited to bring people together to exchange ideas, collaborate, and strengthen our networks.
Professor Nancy Langston will be giving her keynote address on the Friday evening to set the tone for an exciting weekend to come. In her talk, Professor Langston will emphasize the transnational links integral to Canada’s resource industry and the resultant impact on environments and communities along these chains of connection. Aside from her groundbreaking and field-shaping academic work, Professor Langston is also an accomplished visual artist, and can help us reimagine our research in creative, inspiring ways.
We will then be spending the Saturday in the field, exploring the history of contamination and remediation along Hamilton’s harbour. This harbour was once noted as a site of natural beauty by Elizabeth Simcoe, who painted it in 1796. This settler colonial scene experienced incredible change in the 19th and 20th centuries, as Hamilton established itself as a key industrial and port city, and this is exactly what our day in the field will investigate.
We will begin at Bayfront Park, a success story in Hamilton’s history of balancing industry and community. This site was once severely contaminated by the industrial waste from the nearby steel processing factories, with much of it acting as a landfill that contained both domestic and industrial waste by the 1960s. Between 1985 and 1993, the City of Hamilton and the Ministry of the Environment spent $9 million remediating this contamination, which included removing 20,000 tonnes of contaminated soil. At this location, we will be encouraging participants to get creative with ways to research and represent the history we’ll be exploring, and we’re excited to see what everyone comes up with!
From this site of relative success (swimming at the beaches of Bayfront remains prohibited, although local children continue to do so), we will make our way along the harbour, stopping at various points of contamination and remediation. This includes getting as close to the local steel industry as possible, visiting a site remediated for the local brewing industry, and an exploration of urban beekeeping along contaminated waterways with special guest, Dr. Jennifer Bonnell.
That evening, we will be enjoying the hospitality of local arts supporters and craft brewers, Collective Arts, and encouraging participants to brave the stage to perform short stand-up comedy sets rooted in their research. The NiCHE New Scholars Group will be supporting this initiative, and if you’d like to take part, please get in touch!
On the Sunday, we will be mainly based on McMaster’s campus, which has its own history of contamination and remediation. This includes the relocation of Ancaster Creek in the 1960s to make way for a parking lot, as well as its very own nuclear reactor. We will be having a mining history workshop that morning, connected to the Mining Danger SSHRC Insight project, connecting Canada’s extractivist history to our broader themes of contamination, remediation, and transnational networks. The workshop will be followed by a celebration of the career of Professor Ken Cruikshank, a leading Canadian historian of environmental contamination and remediation. Professor Cruikshank is a leading scholar of Hamilton’s environmental history, including the 2016 monograph, The People and the Bay: A Social and Environmental History of Hamilton Harbour, co-authored with Professor Nancy Bouchier. This is essential reading for anyone interested in delving deeper into the histories we’ll be engaging with at CHESS 2025, and the celebration will be a fun, engaging way to close this amazing event.
There is so much more to say, but we don’t want to give everything away. We’re so excited to welcome participants and to facilitate the collegial atmosphere CHESS has become renowned for. Prepare yourselves!
