By Del Muise, professor emeritus of history at Carleton University

Canadians and their Pasts, a Community-University Research Alliance project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, surveyed 3,419 Canadians on their engagement with and attitudes toward the past. Conducted as a telephone survey during 2007-08, its more than 70 questions per interview provide the most nuanced understanding of Canadians’ engagement with the past to date.

As with earlier such surveys in Europe, America, and Australia, Canadians place family history at the centre of their historical consciousness. While the level of education achievement was a key indicator of engagement, other factors such as age, sex, and locational factors were also important. Its key findings are discussed in a recently released book: Canadians and their Pasts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013).

Among other things, the survey puts paid to commonly held notions that Canadians are uninformed about or uninterested in the past. In fact, considerable interest and activity regarding the broad field of history was reported; Canadians visit museums and historic sites and watch history related movies and television as well as reading history related books and magazines. So much more of Canada’s history is available in so many media that access to the past has flourished in the past few decades.

The survey also accentuates the engagement Canadians have with historical contexts of contemporary issues. Debating history, and not just commemorative military-related practices, pervades public discourse. The vast terrain of evolving communities of practice, such as genealogy and family history and community-based discussion groups on social media such as Facebook, not to mention such popular vehicles as Canada’s History magazine, reflect the dynamism of historical communities in Canada.

The Findings

When we began this project, we understood that Canadians, like their counterparts in Britain, America, and Australia, would rate their family past as their highest priority. We found plenty of evidence of people’s interest in autobiography and family history. It might be expressed as a visit to a cemetery, still using an ancestor’s recipes, or a relative’s genealogical research. We learned that 83 percent of the 3119 people who responded to the national survey had looked at old photographs in the past year, 74 percent were saving something meaningful (heirlooms) to pass on, 57 percent visited a place connected to the family’s past, 56 percent prepared a past-based scrapbook, and just over 20 percent worked on family tree.

These are personal activities, for the most part — aspects of what can be called “autobiographical or communal memory.” But we also found through our extended interviews (which averaged over twenty minutes each) an extraordinary Canadian tapestry, as people spoke of the specific relationships and communities about which they felt keenly. In their explanations of how the past figured in their daily lives, the idea of selfish individualism and the absence of any appreciation of community pasts was not sustained. Rather, interest in family history often provided a point of entry and a means of access rather than a dead end. Many respondents were able both to establish the facts of “history” and to distinguish such public contexts from stories about a personal or autobiographical and family “past.” Of particular significance was the frequent association of family pasts with migration and arrival in Canada.

Respondents to the survey shared with us their interests and abilities, though only about a quarter of them approached the problem of resolving conflicting historical accounts with sophisticated research approaches. As well, significant differences emerged in the kinds of sources most trusted: respondents with less schooling tended to trust family stories more, and museums less, than those who had spent more years in school and university. The presence of artifacts, the availability of multiple sources, and the opportunity to analyze primary sources meant more to the longer-schooled, less to the lesser-schooled. But, in general, museums and historic sites were considered to be far more reliable sources of historical information than teachers or family stories, or the web, which garnered the lowest scores for trustworthiness.

The results of the survey also offer a different, illuminating, and perhaps even a more precise estimate of “how important” an outlook or opinion is, that is, how strongly it is held, or how much it affects one group as opposed to others; second, it reveals unsuspected attitudes or differences in outlook or currents in popular thought. But third, and paradoxically, the results seemed lifeless because they were presented mostly in the form of numbers. We loved the quotations we were able to draw from people’s responses but they were said to be merely illustrative, not representative.

Newcomers' Perspectives

Canadians and Their Pasts’ chapter on immigrants and migrants offers some quite interesting distinctions. We were able to draw comparisons between immigrants who had been in Canada for ten years or less, immigrants of more than ten years’ residence, first generation Canadians, and Canadians whose families had been in the country for two or more generations. As is well known, Canada has experienced in recent decades a significant westward drift of population. British Columbia and Alberta have much higher proportions of arrivals from the rest of Canada. Atlantic Canada and Quebec have the lowest. We looked at “Movers” and “Stayers”: Movers had been born in one province and were now living in another; Stayers were living in the province where they were born. More Movers than Stayers saw the past of Canada as being “very important.” A much higher proportion of Stayers in the provinces east of the Ottawa River, compared to Stayers in Ontario and the western provinces, ranked the history of their province as a “very important” past. Therefore, we suggest that Canada may be perceived as a country divided in two at the Ottawa River. Residents of the provinces with a “long history,” all situated east of the Ottawa, view provincial and national history somewhat differently from those in Ontario and the West.

Cultural Differences

When we embarked on this project, our goal was to place the Canadian survey in an international context. Most directly, the survey enabled us to compare the presence of the past in Canada to the United States and Australia, where comparable research had been undertaken. The similarity of findings is not surprising. These three countries have high levels of economic development and literacy; all have allocated impressive resources to museums, historic sites, and public history; and all have broad historical trajectories as settler countries with Aboriginal populations and continuing immigration. We would not expect similar findings in societies with recent traumatic experiences, such as Bosnia and Somalia, or where the foundations of the present are being revised continuously, as in Palestine, Russia, and South Africa. People with greater levels of awareness of the contested past may express lower levels of trust in formal sources of information such as museums, historic sites, and textbooks. In the survey findings of both the United States and Canada, Aboriginal groups had lower levels of trust in official sources of information about the past and higher levels of trust in family stories or personal accounts.

We can think of many other reasons why the presence of the past may be expressed differently in different cultures and societies. For example, some of the highest participation rates in the United States, Australia, and Canada were related to family reunions, writing diaries and cookbooks, and looking at old photographs. In countries with lower levels of income and literacy, where the extended family lives in one place all the time, and where history is commonly conveyed through oral communication, visual arts, performance, and other mnemonic devices, such activities may not be the most common ways of engaging with the past. Interest in the past may also be defined and expressed differently. In countries with fresh evidence of losses from recent wars, or with large refugee populations, the term “interest,” itself, would seem inappropriate as a way of capturing people’s involvement with the past. Here, the presence of the past often has an immediate and visceral impact on everyday life, creating acute uncertainties about the future.

Conclusions

What can we conclude? Our survey illuminates a number of important themes that have been prominent in media commentary in recent years. Have people lost contact with the past as a result of today’s extraordinary changes in communication? We say, emphatically, no. Do they express any interest in Canada’s history? Yes, quite clearly they do. Are ethnic and religious loyalties evident in the pattern of their responses? Yes, without question, but regional and linguistic differences were not as significant as we had anticipated. Do immigrants differ in some way from the Canadian-born in their relationship to the past? Not nearly as much as has been suggested in public debates in other countries. Do interprovincial migrants have a distinctive view of Canada’s past? Yes, like immigrants, they express greater interest in Canada’s past than many of their fellow citizens. Do Canadians differ from Americans and Australians? In some matters, yes, but the bigger story is the presence of an internationally shared perspective.

Ultimately, we can conclude that history plays a significant role for many people in providing meaning in their fast-changing world. For some it may be a substitute for religion that in an earlier time offered context and comfort, but our survey suggests that many respondents used history to supplement their spiritual beliefs about the place of human beings in the universe.

At the heart of this outlook is awareness of the past: people live with history in the present; the past lives within us all. From this assertion, unremarkable in its wording, but significant in its implications, a myriad of consequences arises for all those – citizens, teachers, curators, policymakers, volunteer associations, private institutions, historians – involved in the production, communication, and contemplation of history. The Canadians and Their Pasts study speaks confidently to those who dedicate themselves to finding ways of informing and entertaining, of combining rigour and fun, in their daily work on historical messages.

The Canadians and their Pasts team included seven co-investigators representing six universities across the country, who are also the co-authors of the book Canadians and their Pasts. As well, a dedicated web page outlines all aspects of the project and includes various scholarly publications by project team members as well as conference papers, etc. A copy of the interview protocol is available there as well.