The HBC & Winnipeg General Strike

Listen to a podcast about Matt and Heather's project: 



General Steps:

This project had students ask questions related to significance, continuity and change, cause and consequence, and historical perspective while using primary source evidence to make judgements related the the development of the Hudson Bay Company and the Winnipeg General Strike. (By symbol of the Strike, we referred to the photo of the NWMP charging down Main Street.) In light of the MacLean’s article suggesting issues related to a colonial past and present in Red River, we decided to engage our students in an investigation of these two symbols of Canada.

At the beginning of the year, we took the students on a walking tour of downtown Winnipeg, beginning with the Forks, followed by Upper Fort Garry, the St. Boniface Museum, and finally finishing at Union Station. The students were asked to think about and later describe via their Wordpress sites about how Red River/Winnipeg has changed and remained the same over the past 12 000 years. Specifically, students were asked to think about how Winnipeg transitioned from being a colonial settlement of the HBC to the fastest growing city on the planet in 1911. Following this investigation, we then focused on the HBC and the Winnipeg General Strike to help our learning community understand and lead our community in 2015.

Step 1: HBC: For this project, we began reading Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden as a class as an introduction to how the Hudson Bay Company had influenced the lives of the three prominent characters. Following our reading, the students then began to ask questions about the HBC. Having the entire back issue catalogue of the Beaver/Canada’s History, we spent an afternoon going through issues of the magazine to gain a sense of the relationship between the magazine and the HBC while also to read articles from various perspectives on the Company. From there, students began to create research questions focusing on a variety of topics, including economic factors, the Deed of Surrender, various historical figures, indigenous relations, the role of women, the spread of disease, and the development of Red River.

The following few weeks, while researching our questions through the HBC Archives and secondary sources, we held conversations with historians to help us think like historians and develop our philosophies and methodologies of history. We spoke with John Ralston Saul, Gerald Friesen, Desmond Morton, Charlotte Gray, Allan Levine, and James Daschuk. We also visited the Manitoba Museum’s HBC gallery to gain greater perspective on the Company and identified various symbols of the HBC. Students interacted with the Museum staff and had discussions about artifacts, primary source evidence, and the transition of the HBC and Winnipeg through the fur trade to industrialization.

Step 2: Winnipeg General Strike: For this part of the project, we began by bringing in Danny Schur, the creator of the musical Strike! Danny spent one afternoon with the students discussing the history of the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919. The following week, he brought several singers in to recreate the atmosphere and the experience of the general strike. At the same time, we read both A Streetcar Named Desire and Great Expectations. We began to have discussions as to how notions of race, class, gender, and culture played out in these texts and during the Winnipeg General Strike. A few days later, the infamous MacLean’s article came out, and we began to talk about whether the Winnipeg in 2015 is that much different than the Winnipeg of 1919. Using the historical thinking skills, we were able to deconstruct the strike and compare it with our current experience.

Finally, we decided that we would like to apply our knowledge of the strike to our understanding of the texts we were reading in Language Arts. The students decided that they wanted to create radio plays of either a scene from Great Expectations or A Streetcar Named Desire in the context of Winnipeg in 1919.

Evaluation: Throughout this exploration of these two particular symbols of Canada, the HBC and the Winnipeg General Strike, our designed and intended outcomes were the following:

• Students will gain an understanding of the six historical thinking concepts and be able to apply them in order to develop research questions.
• Students will be able to develop their own philosophy of history based on a the conversations and the study of historians throughout Canada.
• Students will be able to create their own histories by developing a strong research question and a logical thesis coupled with primary source evidence to substantiate their claims.
• Students will be able to use their historical thinking to comment on the self, community, and country in 2015.

Selected Resources: 

Major Paper Assessment Criteria

Big 6 chart for developing research questions