A Failure to Commemorate – a call for submissions

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In 2019, in the wake of conflict and controversy surrounding the commemoration of political figures such as John A. Macdonald, Parks Canada issued a Framework for History and Commemoration to provide direction for the agency and to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMBC). As a key part of that framework, the document identified four strategic priorities that demanded greater representation: history of Indigenous peoples, diversity (ethnocultural communities, women’s history, and 2SLGBTQI+ history), Canada and the world, and environmental history.

Here is the number of each theme that the HSMBC has added to Canada’s register of persons, places, and events of national historic significance since then:

Indigenous peoples: 14
diversity: 33
Canada and the world: 9
environmental history: 1

To which I, as an environmental historian, can only say: ouch. (It is little consolation that it was me who nominated the sole new environmental designation.)

And it is not as if all potential environmental-related commemorations have already been taken. Of the more than 2200 designations the HSMBC has made over its century-long history, just 45 are characterized by the Board as relating to environmental history.1 And more than a third of those are of landscape painters and poets – five members of the Group of Seven are National Historic Persons, for example, and the Group of Seven itself is celebrated as a National Historic Event. A more expansive conception of environmental history, and more representations of it, is certainly possible.

Since the HSMBC is entirely dependent on a public nomination process for proposed designations, we might wonder why environmental history – with one of the most active Canadian history research communities this century – continues to be so underrepresented. Perhaps many of our histories feel too negative or declensionist to be memorialized – do we really want a commemorative plaque for the Sydney tar ponds? Perhaps topics such as climate change or habitat loss seem too amorphous and all-encompassing to be pinned down to a single, “plaqueable” location. Or perhaps environmental history, as a young and vibrant subfield of the 21st century, views commemoration generally and plaquing specifically as vestiges of an outmoded, 20th century manner of understanding and representing historical significance.

But the Historic Sites and Monuments Board designation still matters. It constitutes an official determination by the government of Canada as to what elements of our history have had a nationally significant impact. Those elements are then granted permanent memorialization, both as plaques sprinkled across the nation, and by joining the online national register. Like the Dictionary of Canadian Biography or Historica’s Heritage Minutes, the HSMBC is an important national enterprise that simultaneously celebrates and, by its choices, defines Canadian history.

As is NiCHE, when you think about it. The thousands of posts on this site that relate to Canadian history quietly lay claim to the significance of environmental history and to their own individual slivers of it, be it caragana or Maurice Strong or Oshawa. NiCHE has been very successful in attracting deep research and valuable writing on a wealth of historical events, places, and (to a lesser extent) people that deserve to be better known.

Yet at the same time, NiCHE has largely bypassed the topics with which Canadians outside our field are already familiar – and that they would likely expect to find on our website. For example, there is only one article on the environmental racism of Africville – the site’s second most read article ever, by the way – and it was written by an undergraduate. There is likewise only one article (sort of) on the pretendian nature writer Grey Owl. The NiCHE community should continue to introduce new historical topics to readers, but we should also use our research and interpretive skills to improve understanding of topics Canadians think they already know. (Surely low-hanging fruit is an appropriate topic for environmental history.) We should meet Canadians halfway.

That’s where the HSMBC comes in. The Board has identified environmental history as a strategic priority. But it is in the business of designation, so if few or no nominations on that theme are put forward, it will look elsewhere. Members of the Canadian environmental history community should take this opportunity to read over the criteria and guidelines and consider nominating a person, place, or event.

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With that in mind, I thought it would also be fun putting a call out to the NiCHE community: what environmental history topics merit HSMBC consideration? Besides inviting Comments below, I invite submissions for a Commemorating Canadian Environmental History series of NiCHE posts. Describe your topic and discuss its impacts, environmental and otherwise, and how it meets the HSMBC criteria. Your post may well be – but need not be – a dry run for an actual HSMBC nomination.

Please provide a brief description (max. 200 words) of your proposed submission to me (amaceach@uwo.ca) by 14 September 2026. (One lucky submitter will win a $200 gift card from UBC Press.) Authors will be notified of acceptance by 21 September 2026. Accepted articles will then be expected in full (max. 1200 words) by 2 November 2026, and the series will be published on the NiCHE website throughout November and December 2026. If you have any questions, contact me by email.

Feature Image: HSMBC plinth & plaque, Charlottetown, PEI.
  1. The 45 categorized as having an environmental component are: the 1913-18 Canadian Arctic Expedition, preservation of the Plains bison, first banding of a bird, the Group of Seven, continuous meteorological recordkeeping in Canada, the Boundary Waters Treaty, Canada’s Marine Biological Stations, creation of the Dominion Parks Branch, Ducks Unlimited Canada, and the 1825 Miramichi Fire as National Historic Events; Banff Cave and Basin, Banff Park Museum, Last Mountain Lake Bird Sanctuary, Algonquin Provincial Park, as National Historic Sites; and Archibald Lampman, David Thompson, William Campbell, Horatio Walker, Homer Watson, Maurice Cullen, Clarence A. Gagnon, Francis Sherman, Sir John Franklin, Emily Carr, Pierre-Étienne Fortin, James Morrice, J.B. Harkin, Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, Cornelius Krieghoff, Sir George Back, A.Y. Jackson, Frederick Varley, J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Harvey MacMillan, Archibald Belaney (Grey Owl), Abbé Léon Provancher, A.O. Wheeler, Ernest Thompson Seton, Allan Brooks, Marc-Aurèle Fortin, John Macoun, Roderick Haig-Brown, and Donald Rawson as National Historic Persons. ↩︎

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Alan MacEachern

Professor at Western University
I am the author of Becoming Green Gables & the companion website GreenGablesDiary.ca (2024), The Summer Trade (with Edward MacDonald, 2022), & The Miramichi Fire (2020). I'm also the editor of the print/open-access Canadian History & Environment series at University of Calgary Press. I was Director of NiCHE, 2004-15. Contact me at amaceach@uwo.ca.

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