Joan Sangster

In the current moment, violence against women is positioned as both a raw memory of the past as well as an evocative spectre of our present. The 25th anniversary of the Montreal massacre has now passed. Aboriginal families continue to press for a federal inquiry into the disappeared women from their communities. Speeches in Quebec recently commemorating the horrific violence of…

Canadians like to think of themselves as a relatively tolerant society that possesses a history free of the worst excesses of racial hatred, in contrast to our neighbours to the south: a Heritage Minute, for example, portrays Canada as a welcome haven for runaway American slaves. While this Heritage Minute may reflect a certain truth, Canadian historians have increasingly posited another set of…