Event Date: Jun 2 2008 – Jun 4 2008
City: Vancouver, BC
Country: Canada

There are three themes for the 2008 meeting: childhood, youth, and generations; environments, culture, and power; and migrations, place, and identities. The overall theme of the 2008 Congress is “Thinking Beyond Borders – Global Ideas: Global Values.”

Archived Presentations

NiCHE has archived 22 presentations from this event.

Citation: Craig-Dupont, Olivier. “Des «beautés naturelles» au précambrien : l’objectivation scientifique de la nature au parc national de la Mauricie, 1968-1979.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.
Abstract:: This paper address the creation of La Mauricie National park in the province of Quebec, in the 1970’s. It presents how the federal institution Parks Canada used scientific ecology to justify the implementation of a new wilderness park on the otherwise humanized landscapes of la Mauricie region. By extracting cultural dimensions of the Maurician territoriality through scientific abstractions, Parks Canada was thus able to recreate it’s institutional ideal of wild nature on this hybrid territory.

Citation: Thorpe, Jocelyn. “‘Our Virgin Forests’ to Visit and Cut Down: Tourism, Forestry, and the Social Construction of Nature in 20th Century Northern ON.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Baehre, Rainer. ” The Folk Art of Bond Penney: Outwoodsmen and Logging Culture in Western Newfoundland, 1939-46.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Nelson, Heather. ” Coniferous Forests, Canoeing and Campgrounds: Manitoba’s Forest Reserve Policy.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Stevens, Peter. ” The Nature of Cottaging: Summer Homes and the Environment in Postwar Ontario.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Kheraj, Sean. “Animal Citizenry: Early Regulation of Urban Animals, Vancouver, British Columbia.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.
Bio:: Sean Kheraj is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia. He is also the creator of the Nature’s Past podcast and was the 2008-09 NiCHE New Scholars representative.
Abstract:: This paper examines the regulation of urban animals in Vancouver in the nineteenth century. As one of Canada’s youngest western cities, Vancouver rapidly grew into one of the leading Pacific metropolises of North America. In part, that sudden growth was fueled by the bodies and labour of animals. Cows, pigs, chickens, and horses were a crucial component of the city’s population. The early regulation of animals in Vancouver shows that animals played a vital role in city-building and that urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a process of constructing a built habitat that facilitated symbiosis between humans and domestic animals.

Citation: Taylor III, Joseph E. “The Social Contexts of Gendered Play: Climbing as a Case Study.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Clifford, Jim. “The Overuse of the River Lea and the Politics of Water Famine in West Ham, 1898 ” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Bonnell, Jennifer. ” Toronto’s Underworld: The Don River Valley as a ‘Repository for Undesirables’ .” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.
Bio:: Jennifer Bonnell is a doctoral candidate in the History of Education Program at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Her research interests revolve around intersections of place, environment, and human experience in nineteenth and twentieth century Canada. Her dissertation research explores the social and environmental history of the Don River in Toronto, and the range of factors—ecological, cultural and economic—that have shaped the river’s course and condition over time. Aspects of her research on the Don River have appeared in the recent collection, HtO: Water in the Toronto Landscape (Coach House Books, 2008), and in a forthcoming collection on the history of the Toronto waterfront (University of Toronto Press). Jennifer is currently working with researchers at the University of Toronto Map Library on a geographic information systems (GIS) project mapping the history of the Don River Valley.
Abstract:: As Toronto developed through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Don River Valley on its eastern periphery was straightened, diverted, and polluted. Particularly in its lower reaches, the river valley has been relegated to a “waste space”: a dumping ground for coal tailings, salt waste, and other “undesirables”—including people living on the fringes of society. This paper explores the interconnections between a marginal space and the marginalized populations who sought refuge there. The experiences of two groups in particular are explored: Depression-era “hoboes” who established an extensive camp in the Lower Valley in 1930 and 1931, and a series of Roma family groups who sought refuge in the valley in the early twentieth century.

Citation: Stunden-Bower, Shannon. “Flood Prevention along Manitoba’s Assiniboine River.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Peyton, Jonathan. “Imbricated Geographies of Conservation and Consumption in the Stikine Plateau.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Anastakis, Dimitry. ” An Early Surrender in the “War on Pollution”: Canadian Responses to the Automotive Emissions Problem, 1970-80.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.
Bio:: Dimitry Anastakis teaches postwar Canadian history at Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario. His books include The Sixties: Passion Politics and Style (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008) (ed.), Car Nation: An Illustrated History of Canada’s Transformation Behind the Wheel (Lorimer, 2008) and Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960-1971 (University of Toronto Press, 2005), for which he won the 2008 J.J. Talman award from the Ontario Historical Society “honouring the best book on Ontario’s social, economic, political or cultural history published in the past three years.”
Abstract:: Though Canada’s auto sector operated within a continentally-integrated industry, Canada developed its own automobile emission standards in the 1970s that were significantly less stringent than regulations imposed by the U.S. on their own automobiles. This was justified by economic concerns, national differences, and fuel consumption concerns. In the first great postwar test of both continental integration and environmental regulation, there was no regulatory “race to the bottom” or loss of sovereignty, which critics of free trade agreements have claimed will occur as continentalization and harmonization takes hold. Instead, Canadians exercised their national right to allow their automobiles to spew three, five and even seven times the amount of pollutants that U.S. cars did.

Citation: Perez Cebada, Juan D. “Canadian Pollution Mining Conflicts in International Perspective.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Deligne, Chloe & Michele Dagenais. “Regards croisés en histoire environnementale : la pollution industrielle en Angleterre, en Belgique, au Canada et en France.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Sefton MacDowell, Laurel. “Conquest of Nature, Environmental Destruction and the Failed St. Lawrence Seaway.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.
Bio:: Laurel MacDowell is a professor of history at the University of Toronto, teaches North American environmental history at the undergraduate and graduate level and has written an environmental history of Canada.
Abstract:: In 1954, the St. Lawrence Seaway opened and was one of the first large modern dam projects in Canada. It fundamentally changed the St. Lawrence River/Great Lakes system ecologically. While economically not as successful as anticipated, at the same time the Seaway became a conduit for disruptive alien species that are expensive to eliminate.

Citation: Routledge, Karen. “A Harsh Environment: Inuit in New England, 1850-1885.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.
Bio:: Karen Routledge is a PhD student in History at Rutgers University. She studies encounters between Inuit and Americans in each other’s homelands in the nineteenth century.
Abstract:: This presentation considers Inuit from South Baffin Island who travelled to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. It focuses on the experiences of one couple, Taqulittuq and Ipiirvik. I argue that the definition of a harsh environment is relative: to Inuit, life in the United States could be as strange, as lonely, as confusing, and as dangerous as American encounters with the arctic world.

Citation: Van Huizen, Philip. ” From a ‘Whopper’ to a ‘Green and Clean’ Development: Modernity, Environmentalism, and the Canadian-American Libby Dam Project.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.
Bio:: PhD Student, UBC History Department. My PhD dissertation will investigate Canadian-American water relations, specifically the 1970s High Ross Dam controversy on the Skagit River in British Columbia and Washington State.
Abstract:: This paper examines how a fundamental shift in ideas about development, from high modernism in the first part of the twentieth century to environmental modernism in the latter half, affected the promotion and construction of the Libby Dam Project in Montana and British Columbia from 1948 to the late 1970s. I argue that the larger North American environmental movement gave pre-existing conservation groups and government agencies in Montana and British Columbia greater influence over politicians and legislation, although to varying degrees in each region. In response, Libby Project planners implemented mitigation measures, “blended” the dam and reservoir into the Kootenay landscape, and appropriated First Nation’s symbols and artefacts to make the project seem “native” to the Canadian-American Kootenay Basin. Thus, planners were a central part of the shift from high modernism to environmental modernism, rather than opposed to it.

Citation: Breen, David. “Nuclear Utopia, Atlantic Richfield’s Proposed Atomic Detonation in the Alberta Oil Sands: a cautionary tale.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Martin, Brad. “Repossessing the Wilderness: Aboriginal Peoples and Protected Areas in the Yukon Territory.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.

Citation: Evans, Peter. “The Newfoundland Rangers and the Labrador Inuit, 1935 – 1950.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.
Bio:: Peter Evans, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.

Citation: Sawchuk, Christina. “Amateur Explorers and the ‘Opening’ of the Canadian North” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.
Bio:: Christina Sawchuk, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge.

Citation: Sorlin, Sverker. “Lapland Laboratories: Science, Conservation and the Sami in the Scandinavian North.” Canadian Historical Association. 2 June 2008.