McGill-Queen's Studies in Ethnic History – serie

A mere 150 years ago Scottish Gaelic was the third most widely spoken language in Canada, and Irish was spoken by hundreds of thousands of people in the United States. A new awareness of the large North American Gaelic diaspora, long overlooked by historians, folklorists, and literary scholars, has emerged in recent decades. North American Gaels, representing the first tandem exploration of these related migrant ethnic groups, examines the myriad ways Gaelic-speaking immigrants from marginalized societies have negotiated cultural spaces for themselves in their new homeland. In the macaronic verses of a Newfoundland fisherman, the pointed addresses of an Ontario essayist, the compositions of a Montana miner, and lively exchanges in newspapers from Cape Breton to Boston to New York, these groups proclaim their presence in vibrant traditional modes fluently adapted to suit North American climes. Through careful investigations of this diasporic Gaelic narrative and its context, from the mid-eighteenth century to the twenty-first, the book treats such overarching themes as the sociolinguistics of minority languages, connection with one's former home, and the tension between the desire for modernity and the enduring influence of tradition. Staking a claim for Gaelic studies on this continent, North American Gaels shines new light on the ways Irish and Scottish Gaels have left an enduring mark through speech, story, and song.

The South Asian population in Canada, encompassing diverse national, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, has in recent years become the largest visible minority in the country. As this community grows, it encounters challenges in settlement, integration, and development.Accounting for only 1 per cent of the population in Quebec, the South Asian community has received limited attention in comparison with other minority groups. The Invisible Community uses recent data from a variety of fields to explore who these immigrants are and what they and their families require to become members of an inclusive society. Experts from Canadian and international universities and governmental and community agencies describe how South Asian immigrants experience life in French-speaking Canada. They look at how members of the community integrate into the job market, how they manage socially and emotionally, how their religious values are affected, and how their children adapt to French-speaking and English-speaking schools.The Invisible Community shares lived experiences of different subgroups of the South Asian population in Quebec in order to better understand wider social, political, and educational contexts of immigration in Canada.

Following Antonietta and Loris's first kiss in the shadows of the Italian Alps barely a year after the end of the Second World War, the couple was divided by a distance far greater than could ever have been imagined. With Antonietta's family moving to Montreal, migration entered the couple's intimate worlds, stretching the distance between them from the two hundred kilometres separating Ampezzo and Venice to the ocean between Montreal and Venice. Throughout their transatlantic separation, the young lovers fervidly wrote each other until they were reunited in Canada in 1949.With Your Words in My Hands tells a story about love and migration as written and read, idealized and imagined, through daily correspondence. Sonia Cancian recovers a rare complete epistolary record of an immigrant experience defined by love and sustained in writing, translating the letters with deftness and an ear for the immediacy of emotion and longing they embody. Cancian gives context to these exchanges dating from the beginning of the largest migration movement from Italy to Canada, showing how love, frustration, fear, sadness, and empathy were palpable elements that inflected the quotidian – bureaucratic processes, employment, family life – and defined immigrant experience.For the countless couples whose love is fragmented by separation but woven together with envelopes and stamps, or onscreen in today's instant messaging, these letters remind us how the experience of distance and proximity, absence and presence, can be reconfigured within the world of intimate correspondence.

Over the two decades following the Second World War, the policy that would create "a nation of immigrants," as Canadian multiculturalism is now widely understood, was debated, drafted, and implemented. The established narrative of postwar immigration policy as a tepid mixture of altruism and national self-interest does not fully explain the complex process of policy transformation during that period. In The Least Possible Fuss and Publicity Paul Evans recounts changes to Canada's postwar immigration policy and the events, ideas, and individuals that propelled that change.Through extensive primary research in the archives of federal departments and the parliamentary record, together with contemporary media coverage, the correspondence of politicians and policy-makers, and the statutes that set immigration policy, Evans reconstructs the formation of a modern immigration bureaucracy, the resistance to reform from within, and the influence of racism and international events. He shows that political concerns remained uppermost in the minds of policy-makers, and those concerns – more than economic or social factors – provided the major impetus to change. In stark contrast to today, legislators and politicians strove to keep the evolution of the national immigration strategy out of the public eye: University of Toronto law professor W.G. Friedmann remarked in a 1952 edition of Saturday Night, "In Canada, both the government and the people have so far preferred to let this immigration business develop with the least possible fuss and publicity."This is the story, told largely in their own words, of politicians and policy-makers who resisted change and others who saw the future and seized upon it. The Least Possible Fuss and Publicity is a clear account of how postwar immigration policy transformed, gradually opening the border to groups who sought to make Canada home.

Argentina's populist movement, led by Juan Perón, welcomed people from a broad range of cultural backgrounds to join its ranks. Unlike most populist movements in Europe and North America, Peronism had an inclusive nature, rejecting racism and xenophobia.In Peronism as a Big Tent Raanan Rein and Ariel Noyjovich examine Peronism's attempts at garnering the support of Argentines of Middle Eastern origins – be they Jewish, Maronite, Orthodox Catholic, Druze, or Muslim – in both Buenos Aires and the interior provinces. By following the process that started with Perón's administration in the mid-1940s and culminated with the 1989 election of President Carlos Menem, of Syrian parentage, Rein and Noyjovich paint a nuanced picture of Argentina's journey from failed attempts to build a mosque in Buenos Aires in 1950 to the inauguration of the King Fahd Islamic Cultural Center in the nation's capital in the year 2000.Peronism as a Big Tent reflects on Perón's own evolution from perceiving Argentina as a Catholic country with little room for those outside the faith to embracing a vision of a society that was multicultural and that welcomed and celebrated religious plurality. The legacy of this spirit of inclusiveness can still be felt today.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European settlers from diverse backgrounds transformed Ontario. By 1881, German speakers made up almost ten per cent of the province’s population and the German language was spoken in businesses, public schools, churches, and homes. German speakers in Ontario – children, parents, teachers, and religious groups – used their everyday practices and community institutions to claim a space for bilingualism and religious diversity within Canadian society. In The Boundaries of Ethnicity Benjamin Bryce considers what it meant to be German in Ontario between 1880 and 1930. He explores how the children of immigrants acquired and negotiated the German language and how religious communities relied on language to reinforce social networks. For the Germans who make up the core of this study, the distinction between insiders and outsiders was often unclear. Boundaries were crossed as often as they were respected. German ethnicity in this period was fluid, and increasingly interventionist government policies and the dynamics of generational change also shaped the boundaries of ethnicity.German speakers, together with immigrants from other countries and Canadians of different ethnic backgrounds, created a framework that defined relationships between the state, the public sphere, ethnic spaces, family, and religion in Canada that would persist through the twentieth century. The Boundaries of Ethnicity uncovers some of the origins of Canadian multiculturalism and government attempts to manage this diversity.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European settlers from diverse backgrounds transformed Ontario. By 1881, German speakers made up almost ten per cent of the province’s population and the German language was spoken in businesses, public schools, churches, and homes. German speakers in Ontario – children, parents, teachers, and religious groups – used their everyday practices and community institutions to claim a space for bilingualism and religious diversity within Canadian society. In The Boundaries of Ethnicity Benjamin Bryce considers what it meant to be German in Ontario between 1880 and 1930. He explores how the children of immigrants acquired and negotiated the German language and how religious communities relied on language to reinforce social networks. For the Germans who make up the core of this study, the distinction between insiders and outsiders was often unclear. Boundaries were crossed as often as they were respected. German ethnicity in this period was fluid, and increasingly interventionist government policies and the dynamics of generational change also shaped the boundaries of ethnicity.German speakers, together with immigrants from other countries and Canadians of different ethnic backgrounds, created a framework that defined relationships between the state, the public sphere, ethnic spaces, family, and religion in Canada that would persist through the twentieth century. The Boundaries of Ethnicity uncovers some of the origins of Canadian multiculturalism and government attempts to manage this diversity.

The October 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent Civil War triggered a mass exodus from Russia. Thousands boarded ships heading for California. Before We Disappear into Oblivion chronicles the struggles of members of the Russian diaspora in San Francisco and northern California as they built communities and negotiated their acculturation into American society.Nina Bogdan challenges the stereotype of the White Russian émigré as an aristocrat in exile, revealing the diversity within California's Russian communities in terms of social backgrounds, political affiliations, and geographic origins. Bogdan details the historic Russian presence in northern California, particularly Fort Ross, and examines how émigrés incorporated this presence into their strategies and tactics used to establish a foundation for community while developing their Russian American identity. Consulting Russian-language sources generated by the diaspora alongside American public discourse and thousands of government documents, Bogdan traces the divergent paths Russian émigrés took to become, or not become, middle-class white Americans, a century prior to the latest mass exodus of Russians from their homeland in 2022.Set against a backdrop of national and global events – the Great Depression, World War II, McCarthyism, and the Cold War – Before We Disappear into Oblivion explores the factors that shaped the Americanization of one ethnic group in an environment where cultural affiliation became submerged in favour of a constructed racial identity.

In the summer of 1847, over four hundred ships arrived in the Gulf of St Lawrence, carrying Irish men, women, and children who were fleeing the starvation and misery of the Great Potato Famine. Tens of thousands of famine refugees rebuilt their lives in different parts of Canada, in places urban and rural, Anglophone and Francophone. Though still a young province within the British Empire, Canada would be marked permanently and in significant ways by this mass migration.Canada and the Great Irish Famine examines how people confronted, experienced, and remembered the famine migration. Essays consider the transatlantic voyage; the collection of donations and organization of aid; the challenges encountered by the cities of Quebec, Saint John, Montreal, Toronto, Kingston, and Hamilton and their public debates over the impact of so many new arrivals; the accompanying problems of disease, destitution, mental illness, death, and burial; the stories of orphaned children; and expressions of famine memory. The worst demographic catastrophe in nineteenth-century Europe inspired generations of political writings, artistic and literary endeavours, and commemorative practices, and it was woven into narratives of Irish nationalism and the founding of Canada.Canada and the Great Irish Famine provides a new perspective on the social outcomes of Ireland's famine migration as well as on the resilience and adaptability of the receiving communities and the migrants themselves.

Departing from conventional community-based histories, this innovative work examines how immigrant identities are transformed into transnational ones. Focusing on families from the Campania region of Italy who settled in Toronto, Ontario, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, after 1945, Transnational Italians and the Culture of Everyday Life demonstrates why ethnic identity is best understood as a transnational construct – shaped by migrants’ mobility and the global dispersal of extended families and kin networks.Drawing from more than two dozen oral histories, Abril Liberatori places migrants’ narratives at the centre of her book. Alongside a range of archival materials – including song lyrics, recipes, and advertisements – these stories show how transnationalism is articulated through everyday cultural practices around food, music, gender, and language. Imported goods from Campania mixed with local foods and traditional cooking methods; Neapolitan song culture, canzone napoletana, indisputably fostered a common group identity across borders; and a private network of bonds between Campani women eased the hardship of migration. Sites of everyday life became rich arenas of cultural entanglements that brought together families and strangers from across Europe, the Americas, and beyond.Transnational Italians and the Culture of Everyday Life will engage not only historians but also those interested in local community histories and the connection to Italian diasporas across the globe.

In the early 1890s, nearly three thousand emigrants from towns and cities across Britain and Ireland were lured to Brazil by promises of free passage, work, and land. Instead, after arriving in South America they endured extreme hardship, wandering thousands of miles in search of employment and aid as disease, poverty, and displacement claimed hundreds of lives. Most of those who survived eventually returned home. From Britain to Brazil traces these emigrants’ journeys, examining the forces that drove them to leave home and the migration agents and commercial networks that profited from their hopes. John Zucchi highlights the reality of displacement in intimate, descriptive, and dramatic detail. He shows how racialized ideas of tropical climates shaped both British perceptions and the emigrants’ own sense of biological and cultural vulnerability, further undermining their adaptation to South America. He argues that most local movements of population in the period were connected to global capitalism: the tariff-related collapse of the textile industry in northern England became connected to the labour shortage on Brazilian coffee plantations – the two linked by a migration industry that trafficked in people for profit. Yet the central story remains one of failure: nearly a fifth of emigrants died, while many others were left destitute, drifting through Brazil in hopes of finding a way back home.Moving beyond the conventional focus on stories of successful settlement, From Britain to Brazil explores a failed late Victorian migration to reveal the human costs of global labour schemes and the forces that sustained them.

Created in honour of the sesquicentennial of the birth of Kristian Barons, the original compiler, classifier, and publisher of close to 182,000 Latvian folk song texts, Linguistics and Poetics of Latvian Folksongs provides an overview of recent research on the dainas and will be of interest to students of comparative literature and semioticians, as well as to specialists in oral literature.

The indigenous population, Coates stresses, has not been passive in the face of expansion by whites. He argues that Native people have played a major role in shaping the history of the region and determining the relationship with the immigrant population. They recognized the conflict between the material and technological advantages of an imposed economic order and the desire to maintain a harvesting existence. While they readily accepted technological innovations, they resisted the imposition of an industrial, urban environment. Contemporary land claims show their long-standing attachment to the land and demonstrate a continued, assertive response to non-Native intervention.

Using a wide array of published and unpublished sources, McLean examines in detail nine group emigrations that left western Inverness between 1785 and 1802 for Glengarry County in Upper Canada (now Ontario). She describes how, once in North America, they built a new Highland community in an attempt to ensure each family's access to the land. By revealing the pattern of Highland emigration to Glengarry County - families and friends leaving and/or settling together - McLean confirms Bernard Bailyn's notion of a "provincial emigrant stream," and offers a convincing explanation for the development of one of Canada's "limited identities."

Identifying himself as both an Indian and a Canadian but first and foremost a Sikh, Tara Singh has shuttled back and forth between Canada and India for most of his life, finding personal harmony while incorporating two very different countries and cultures into his life. Tara Singh was raised within an amritdhari, or baptised, Sikh tradition in a small village in Punjab, India; his values and identity are firmly rooted in Punjabi Sikh culture. As a child and adolescent he suffered mercilessly from his father's verbal and physical cruelty, but the support that he drew from his village environment and his religion gave him strength. He married, according to traditional practices, the woman that his family had arranged for him to wed. Sponsored by his sister, Tara Singh emigrated to Canada in the early 1950s and settled in British Columbia. He came alone, without his wife and children, as most Punjabis did. His greatest initial shock in Canada was his experience with racism, and its impact on his relatives who tried to persuade him to shave his beard and abandon his turban - two sacred symbols of the Sikh. Refusing to betray his beliefs, he resisted the relentless pressure of his family just as he later fought against the exploitation of immigrants in the saw mills where he worked. Tara Singh became active in fighting for immigrant rights and protecting the Sikh faith in Canada. The Four Quarters of the Night is more than one man's life story: his single voice reveals much about the collective experience of immigrants. Tara Singh's narrative presents an evocative picture of a newcomer's experiences in a land of foreign customs, culture, and religious beliefs. Hugh Johnston, to whom Tara Singh told his story, has created a unique and invaluable document in immigration and ethnic history.

Using a prosopographical approach that combines descriptive exposition, quantitative tabulation, and structural analysis, Randy Widdis determines the geographical and social origins of migrants, the distance and direction of migration corridors, and geographical destinations in both the United States and Canada. The study provides a new view of the invisible Anglo-Canadian, one of the largest and least understood immigrant groups in the United States. Widdis's results show that there were many differences between Anglo-Canadians, and that their experience in the United States was much more complex than is usually assumed. With Scarcely a Ripple not only contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of intra-regional, inter-regional, and return Anglo-Canadian migration but also interprets this movement in terms of the paradox of an emerging Canadian identity and a developing integration with the United States. It offers a historical geographical perspective on a subject that, in this era of free trade and globalization, is more relevant than ever.

Noivo examines how the intersection of migration and family projects affect kin ties, analyses the multiple burdens generated by migration, class, gender, generation, and minority status, and discusses the interplay between family and economic life. Although forced to cope with marital and intergenerational tensions and conflicts, these families demonstrate impressive coping mechanisms, ingenious economic strategies, and psychopolitics aimed at family survival and individual and collective welfare. Giving voice to an "invisible" cultural minority, Inside Ethnic Families exposes the pains and pleasures, struggles and achievements displayed by these immigrant, working-class families.

Few published collections of Gaelic song place the songs or their singers and communities in context. Brìgh an Òrain - A Story in Every Song corrects this, showing how the inherited art of a fourth-generation Canadian Gael fits within biographical, social, and historical contexts. It is the first major study of its kind to be undertaken for a Scottish Gaelic singer. The forty-eight songs and nine folktales in the collection are transcribed from field recordings and presented as the singer performed them, with an English translation provided. All the songs are accompanied by musical transcriptions. The book also includes a brief autobiography in Lauchie MacLellan's entertaining narrative style. John Shaw has added extensive notes and references, as well as photos and maps. In an era of growing appreciation of Celtic cultures, Brìgh an Òrain - A Story in Every Song makes an important Gaelic tradition available to the general reader. The materials also serve as a unique, adaptable resource for those with more specialized research or teaching interests in ethnology/folklore, Canadian studies, Gaelic language, ethnomusicology, Celtic studies, anthropology, and social history.

Ward draws upon a rich record of events and opinion in the provincial press, manuscript collections, and successive federal enquiries and royal commissions on Asian immigration. He locates the origins of west coast racism in the frustrated vision of a white British Columbia and an unshakeable belief in the unassimilability of the Asian immigrant. Canadian attitudes were dominated by a series of interlocking, hostile stereotypes derived from western perceptions of Asia and modified by the encounter between whites and Asians on the north Pacific coast. Public pressure on local, provincial, and federal governments led to discriminatory policies in the field of immigration and employment, and culminated in the forced relocation of west coast Japanese residents during World War II.

Focusing on these and other thematic issues, Bohdan Kordan assesses the policy and practice of civilian internment in Canada during the Great War and provides a clear yet critical statement about the complex and troubling nature of this experience. Period photographs and first person accounts augment the text, helping to communicate not only the layered and textured character of the experience but the human drama of the story as well. A comprehensive roster identifying those interned in the frontier camps of the Rocky Mountains is also included.

Based on interviews with Leamington greenhouse growers and migrant Mexican workers, Tanya Basok offers a timely analysis of why the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program is needed. She argues that while Mexican workers do not necessarily constitute cheap labour for Canadian growers, they are vital for the survival of some agricultural sectors because they are always available for work, even on holidays and weekends, or when exhausted, sick, or injured. Basok exposes the mechanisms that make Mexican seasonal workers unfree and shows that the workers' virtual inability to refuse the employer's demand for their labour is related not only to economic need but to the rigid control exercised by the Mexican Ministry of Labour and Social Planning and Canadian growers over workers' participation in the Canadian guest worker program, as well as the paternalistic relationship between the Mexican harvesters and their Canadian employers.

Exiles and Islanders describes Irish settlement in Prince Edward Island from 1763 to 1880. By tracing the history of these early settlers, Brendan O'Grady demolishes the myth that the Island's Irish settlers were largely refugees from the Great Potato Famine. Using a wide variety of sources, including folklore, newspaper reports, personal interviews, letters, shipping records, and historical data, O'Grady goes beyond mere statistics. We learn about settlers' hometowns in Ireland, why they left, when and how they came to Prince Edward Island, where they settled, and how they adapted to living in PEI. Over ten thousand Irish settled in PEI in the nineteenth century; by 1850 they comprised about a quarter of the Island's population. They were mainly pre-Famine immigrants and mostly Catholic. They came from all thirty-two counties of Ireland and settled in all sixty-seven townships of PEI. They took up farming, fishing, and rural occupations; raised large families; and retained their Irishness for several generations. Exiles and Islanders includes family names and places of origin that will be of particular interest to the Island's Irish descendants. An intriguing cultural history, the book provides new insight into the early settlers of Prince Edward Island.

An eclectic selection of historical essays demonstrates the early influence of the Scots in shaping Canada

Examines the history of the Dene, one of the aboriginal peoples of Canada's western subarctic, from ancient times to the present

The collected writings of a leading authority on Canada's ethnic and linguistic diversity.

A wide-reaching, interdisciplinary examination of the links between New England and the Maritimes.

A study of "leaving home" and the experiences of British and Irish migrants as they made their way to Upper Canada.

According to conventional historical wisdom, Irish nationalism in Canada was a marginal phenomenon - overshadowed by the more powerful movement in the United States and eclipsed in Canada by the Orange Order. The nine contributors in this book argue otherwise - and in doing so make a major and original contribution to our understanding of the Irish experience in Canada and the place of Irish-Canadian nationalism within an international context. Focusing on the period 1820 to 1920, they examine political, religious, and cultural expressions of Irish-Canadian nationalism as it responded to Irish events and Canadian politics. They also look at tensions within the movement between those who argued that Ireland should share the same freedom that Canada enjoyed within the British Empire and revolutionary republicans who wanted to liberate both Ireland and Canada from the yoke of British imperialism. Irish Nationalism in Canada sheds light on questions such as transference of old world political traditions into North America, the dynamics of ethno-religious conflict, and state responses to a revolutionary minority within an ethno-religious group. Contributors include Donald Harman Akenson (Queen's University, Kingston), Sean Farrell (Northern Illinois University), Mark G. McGowan (St Michael's College, University of Toronto), Frederick J. McEvoy (Independent Scholar), Michael Peterman (Trent University), Garth Stevenson (Brock University), Peter M. Toner (University of New Brunswick), Rosalyn Trigger (University of Aberdeen), and David A. Wilson (University of Toronto).

The work is the result of over thirty years of oral fieldwork among the last Gaels in Cape Breton, for whom piping fit unself-consciously into community life, as well as an exhaustive synthesis of Scottish archival and secondary sources. Reflecting the invaluable memories of now-deceased new world Gaelic lore-bearers, John Gibson shows that traditional community piping in both the old and new world Gàihealtachlan was, and for a long time remained, the same, exposing the distortions introduced by the tendency to interpret the written record from the perspective of modern, post-eighteenth-century bagpiping. Following up the argument in his previous book, Traditional Gaelic Bagpiping, 1745-1945, Gibson traces the shift from tradition to modernism in the old world through detailed genealogies, focusing on how the social function of the Scottish piper changed and step-dance piping progressively disappeared. Old and New World Highland Bagpiping will stir controversy and debate in the piping world while providing reminders of the value of oral history and the importance of describing cultural phenomena with great care and detail.