In my apartment, on our vast bookshelves there is a book entitled “100 Photos That Changed Canada”. It ranges from a photo in 1847 of an Ojibway chief up to the “Olympic gold unites the nation” by Sidney Crosby in 2010 and many well known photos from Canadian History.
Therefore, I decided to shift the angle from focusing on examining words to photos, which in a lot of ways contains more information than words can describe. And by examining them allows me to see through words and get to my own conclusion.
On of my former colleagues is Indigenous himself, and he confirmed that during their time analyzing photos such as these, there was very little discussion of the voices present or not and the focus tended to be more around the event the photos represented and how they impacted history. With this in mind the question I had was: How many of these photos and their descriptions discuss the absence of Indigenous peoples where their inclusion should have happened or did happen but they were excluded?
In looking through the book I zeroed in on a few photos where it made the most sense to look for impacts of the Indigenous peoples. I would submit that not every single photo in this book needs to be examined through this lens. I think Canadians should enjoy the moments of Sidney Crosby scoring the winning goal in 2010 (Photo 101, p217), the Women’s hockey team after winning gold in the 2002 Olympics (Photo 95, p205) or to grieve the death of Captain Goddard (first woman soldier killed in combat) (Photo 98, p210) without this discussion, so I focused only on the photos where it made sense. I also excluded photos that were of Indigenous specific events, such as the Residential School Apology from Stephen Harper in 2008 (Photo 100, p214), or the photo of the Oka Crisis in 1990 (Photo 88, p190).
Using this criteria many of the photos ended up being excluded but there were a few that came of particular interest. The first one is of “Canada’s Founding Fathers” on September 11, 1864 from the Charlottetown Conference (Photo 3, p9). The write-up to go with the photo does discuss the absence of women in the photo and delves in the history of voting rights for women in Canada but does not discuss the face that all the men in the photo appear to be white. There is a good mix of regional representation and a mix of English-French representation which is supported by the write-up but there is no discussion regarding the lack of representation of Indigenous peoples and how that would go on to shape Canada and its history.
The second photo that caught my attention is “The Last Spike” (Photo 8, p18). In this photo, we see all visibly white males and the last spike being of the Canadian Pacific Railway being driven home on November 7, 1885 by a white male with a large beard in a top-hat and a suit. He is immediately surrounded by other men in suits and top-hates while less central in the photo, we see many men who appear to be more working class white males. As most Canadians would probably be aware, there were a large amount of minorities who played significant roles in the building of the CPR including Chinese Immigrants, Indigenous peoples and women and all of these populations lack representation in the photo. The write-up to go with the photo does discuss how all of these groups are conspicuously absent from the photo and also makes brief mention of how the building of the CPR displaced many First Nations groups but does not go into detail beyond that.
In examining this book, I wanted to see where Indigenous voices were left out. Indeed there are many photos in the book that reference events that specifically examine events about Indigenous peoples of Canada and they should be recognized for that. The recognition and discussion of events that should have included Indigenous peoples, or did include them but their contributions are downplayed, ignored or not documented is still uneven based on the examination of this book. Then it leads to my other question: Did those moments get recorded by photo at all when these big moments happened and how selective we should be in the future when deciding the historical photo that should circulate among generations?
As educators we must continually examine these instances and give voice to the facts of these events and how Indigenous voices were not included or their contributions diminished in order to play up white and usually male voices. These photos are important to Canadian history and education as they are highly recognizable, but we must continue to examine the missing elements of what has not been shown in the photos.
Reference:
Reid, M. (Ed.) (2010) 100 photos that changed Canada. HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.