We need it.
I started it.
You finish it.
Maybe we don't really "need" it, but it was fun finishing it to the extent that I have. Some years back I was browsing a nearby dollar store and came upon a stack of these little photo albums with a nice Canadian design on the first insert sleeve. I bought a couple and started the first "brag book" to take with us on our next jaunt to Europe.
That first one consisted mostly of family pictures with some magazine clippings of Canadian animals - and I could so tell them apart! Then I had to look up and add a few notes about famous Canadian inventions. Then I stuck in a few little maps so I could show people where we lived. It grew.
Now, after ten years of adding and discarding bits and family expanding, the basic information pages have grown to 32. There's still more I could put in, but who ya' gonna tell? If you corner some poor wretch on the Champs Elysees who just asked you the time of day and unload the whole thing on him - along with photos of you and the grandchildren - well, you won't need a Larousse to understand the response.
Tell you what. I'll stick in some extra interesting little bits down here somewhere and you can use whatever you want. As a matter of fact, you can use whatever parts of the brag book you want to keep as well. Just get one of those dollar store photo albums and put in whatever you like of the pages I've provided. What's that? You want to know where it is? Right here in the next paragraph.
Go to my site at http://www.derekpeach.com (where this blog entry resides) and click on the "free stuff" link. That will take you to the travelogue and presentation page. After you look at all the powerpoint presentations there (or not), you will find the "Canadian Brag Book" down at the bottom. I put it there rather than on the books page because it consists of a pdf file and you can just download your own copy and print off whichever parts of it you want.
On what, you ask? Boy, you sure want a lot of help with this, don'tcha. There's two ways to do it. The first involves going to a stationery outlet and buying some 4X6 photo print paper. I found packages of 100 sheets for $16 but you can probably find it cheaper if you check around. You don't need photo quality paper however because these are all simply text pages. And that brings me to the second option which I did because I'm cheap, tight-fisted thrifty.
Take some of your regular old 8½ X 11 printer paper, or get some cover stock if you really want to be fancy, and cut it to size. You can get two pieces of 4X6 out of every big piece. Whadda deal! Yes, it takes a bit of time and swearing, but if you're as cheap, tight-fisted, thrifty as I am, you'll appreciate the results. Put that in your machine and hit "print". Then go get a cold drink to sip on while the copies run through.
There are 32 of those 4X6 pages, but I'm sure you won't want all of them. Six pages of famous Canadians is five too many. You can edit the lot down to a manageable number or just ignore 'em. Same goes for the political structure notes. You really want room for typical Canadian scenery and animals and typical family pictures - preferably yours. And because I had more information than even I was willing to burden the book with, here's some more anecdotes picked up from various sources over many years of teaching and eavesdropping on teachers teaching.
Mariners, or their navigators had no illusions about the shape of the earth. The Greeks had done the homework on that bit of geometry many years before. It was round. Captains were pretty sure they could get to India and the spice islands by sailing west across the globe; they just weren't sure how big it was. The same Greek mathematicians had given them the calculations, but someone lost the pages along the way through the dark ages.
Giovanni Caboto or John Cabot as we know him, was an Italian sailing for King Henry VII of England with financial backing of some British-Italian business men of Bristol. He got himself hired to find that trade route to the riches of the East, but ran into this continent instead. He made a few trips between 1498 and 1508 and there's a cairn and monument to him at Bonvista Bay, Newfoundland, but no road map through the continent. Tough luck, Giovanni!
The Indians (and that's what they were called then and many of them still do today) showed Champlain how to make hemlock tea to keep his crew from dying of scurvy through the winter. It was Champlain himself who initiated the Order of Good Cheer whereby groups of crew members took turns entertaining the rest of the guys at various times during those same long winters. As the "Father of New France" he was quite taken with this "Kanata" as his Huron friends called it and travelled widely through what is now southern Ontario mapping the land and learning a couple of Indigenous (there, ya happy?) languages along the way. He would have stayed longer but King Louis ordered him home in 1630. Our loss.
In 1751 Thomas Gray wrote "An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". You probably still remember some lines, such as:
"The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea" or
"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/ and waste its sweetness on the desert air"
On the night in 1759 before General James Wolfe climbed the steep embankment up to the plains of Abraham to surprise his adversary, Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, the commander of the French garrison of Québec, Wolfe is reported to have said that he "would rather have written one line of that poem than take Quebec tomorrow." He may have been reflecting on "The paths of glory lead but to the grave," as both he and Montcalm would lie dead at battle's end and Canada would pass into English control. Later Wm. Pitt would rise in the British parliament to propose giving back the whole thing to France in exchange for some much more pleasant and useful piece of real estate -like Tahiti.
In Acadia, on the seaboard of what is now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the French settlers would refuse to swear an oath of allegiance to the British crown and old George II or one of his military commanders finally decided to boot out the lot of them and sent troop ships to carry them away. The Great Expulsion was a nasty scene in 1750 with buildings burned and livestock slaughtered and the "habitant" Acadians forced onto boats to be transported to Britain's southern colonies. Although some did eventually make it back, many remained in their new lands, and now we can enjoy the "cajun" cuisine of Louisiana and Mississippi and celebrate mardi gras in New Orleans.
A few years later, with things deteriorating between European powers as they so often did (and still do) the War of 1812 happened here as a bit of Old World conflict being staged in a New World setting. Napolean would get his Waterloo in a few years, but in the meantime, powers in the recently-formed United States of America decided it was a good opportunity to send an expedition north to conquer this British colony of Upper Canada. There were skirmishes at various points along the border, but the significant one was the defeat of the American invading force at Niagara. General Isaac Brock was our champion who rallied the regiment and routed the enemy and got himself a monument at Queenston Heights where he was killed. Leading your army in a charge at people who are trying to shoot you was as hazardous a business then as it is now.
Before the US Civil War, the Underground Railroad brought a lot of settlers into our Maritimes and we benefitted from their knowledge and toughness of spirit. Making the trip on foot from the slave states to the Canadian border took a lot of grit. Think Handmaid's Tale with really nasty consequences for failure. They got a bit of a raw deal here even if we like to congratulate ourselves on how liberal we (or our ancestors) were. Africville in Nova Scotia, however, was deprived of amenities and its citizens relocated in the 1960s to make room for urban development - that after a city dump was located close by to encourage folk to move. A formal apology was given in 2010.
Now, check a ten-dollar bill to see a picture of Viola Desmond, our own version of Rosa Parks. Viola was supposed to sit in the "coloureds" section of a theatre in Halifax, but in 1946 she decided enough was enough and stayed put. In 2018 she became the first woman and the first non-royal and non-politician to appear on a Canadian banknote.
John A MacDonald was our first prime minister and if he was a bit of a boozer, he was probably no more so than many other politicians then and now. One anecdote had him sitting on a platform at a political debate, and while his adversary harrangued the crowd old Sir John rose, tottered to the back of the platform, vomitted loudly and came back to the front of the stage to tell the assembled electorate, "Now that you know my opinion of my opponent's policies, permit me to present my own."
John A. kept us from becoming the 51st state long before the present Taco Crazy became president of those United States. He had a railway built across this new country and anchored it in British Columbia as evidence that this land was not up for grabs by any whiskey traders or Civil War vets looking for homesteads west. He also established the North-West Mounted Police in 1873 to patrol the great plains and their legends are, well, legendary. Read some.
But, yes, the Residential School system was instituted by his government following the model of the United States. He has to wear it, and the intergenerational trauma it caused can't be whitewashed, no matter how much the apologists and history rewriters of the Frontier Society and others (even in the BC conservative party) may try.
Louis Riel has a lot of print space dedicated to his work as politician, failed military leader and strategist, but this history summary needs to be summarily ended. Let's just note that his plan to create a Métis nation at the Red River settlement in present-day Manitoba folllowing the 1869 transfer of Rupert's Land to the new Dominion of Canada by the Hudson's Bay Company was clever. Establish a government and call for a negotiated entry as a province. Sounds good. MacDonald's boys in Ottawa weren't up for it though and they sent a volunteer force to put down this "rebellion". Things didn't go any better in 1885 when Riel came back from a forced retirement in the States to try the same thing in the Saskatchewan settlement of Batoche (Battleford to you) and the new railroad brought an army out to stop him. Louis was hanged though he's since been rehabilitated and is now considered a great if somewhat naïve father of late confederation.
And that brings me to the conclusion of this long-winded jaunt through my recollections of Canadian history. You can have your L'Ance aux Meadows and your Laura Secord chocolates another time. My final thoughts are annoyance at the folk today who want the folk of long ago to have been as enlightened as they think they should have been.
A bunch of drunken clods toppled a statue of James Cook from its pedestal here on Victoria's inner harbour walk and tossed it into the water. The city council removed a statue of John A MacDonald from in front of City Hall. In Toronto, Ryerson Institute was renamed the City University of Toronto or some such obvious thing.
All of these were acts taken to redress perceived attitudes of individuals - explorers, politicians, civic leaders - that were not as politically correct as they could have been. But they really couldn't have been. The people were products of their time, enlightened in some ways, for which they were honoured, but unconscious of others. Giovanni had a slave. MacDonald drank too much. Riel was timid. So what?
This is what, and it was spoken by an Indigenous leader and I can't remember who, but it's too important to ignore just because of my bad memory. He said we should keep the statues and names of buildings and infrastucture and all - just write a more complete dedication on the little brass plaque. So they weren't all saints; neither are we and that is the legacy I'd want remembered for myself. And so would you.
We gave it our best shot and sometimes we couldn't always see the big picture because we had our eye on the ball and our nose to the grindstone and our shoulder to the wheel and that's a helluva posture in which to accomplish anything. And I joke about things too much, I know, but those jokers who threw the statue of a great explorer into the water had no sense of humour and no respect for the man's accomplishments, and that's really a national disgrace.
You could make book on it. Here's your start.