In This Issue:

Upcoming Events:

• 5th Annual Canadian Family Thanksgiving
• Book talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945
• Graduate student discussion with Prof. Andrea Geiger

Canadian News

• How Quebec preserved “the King’s French”

UPCOMING EVENTS

5th Annual Canadian Family Thanksgiving

Saturday, October 8 | 5:00 pm

Clark Kerr Campus, UC Berkeley | Buy tickets here

Canadian Studies is pleased to partner with the Digital Moose Lounge for our fifth annual Canadian Thanksgiving dinner! Join us for a special meal celebrating the Bay Area’s Canadian community, as you mingle with your fellow SF Bay Canadians while enjoying entertainment and a delicious turkey dinner.

Tickets may be purchased through the Digital Moose Lounge.

We’re also looking for volunteers to help staff the event. A limited number of reduced-price tickets are available to volunteers; please contact us for more information.

Book Talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945

Wednesday, October 19 | 12:30 pm | 223 Moses | RSVP here

Andrea Geiger will discuss her new book, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Making a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the U.S.-Canada border, the book highlights the role that the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship on both sides of the international border from 1867, when the United States acquired Russia’s interests in Alaska, through the end of World War II. Imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways as they traversed these borderlands. Adventurers, prospectors, laborers, and settlers from Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Asia made and remade themselves as they crossed from one jurisdiction to another.

Within this broader framework, Geiger pays particular attention to the ways in which Japanese migrants and the Indigenous people who had made this borderlands region their home for millennia negotiated the web of intersecting boundaries that emerged over time, charting the ways in which they infused these reconfigured national, provincial, and territorial spaces with new meanings. To see the North Pacific borderlands only as a remote outpost that marked the westernmost edges of the U.S. or British empire, is to miss not only the central place it occupied in the lives of the Indigenous peoples whose home it continues to be, but the extent to which it functioned, in the eyes of Japanese entrepreneurs, as an economic hinterland for an expanding Japanese empire, as well as the role it played in shaping wartime policy with regard to citizens and subjects of Japanese ancestry in both Canada and the United States.

Andrea Geiger is professor emerita of history at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include transpacific and borderlands history, race, migration, and legal history. She received a J.D. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington, and is the author of the award-winning Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, and the Department of History.

UC Berkeley students with a research interest in Professor Geiger’s work are welcome to attend a small group discussion with the speaker following her public presentation. For more information, please email canada@berkeley.edu.

CANADIAN NEWS

How Quebec Preserved “The King’s French”

Metropolitan French speakers (and even some Canadians) have long dismissed Québécois French as rustic and unsophisticated. However, as Montreal-based journalist Elizabeth Warkentin points out in BBC Travel, it turns out Louis Quatorze may have sounded a lot more like your average gaspésien than a contemporary Parisian. Quebec’s unique historical development has helped preserve an aristocratic dialect of a past century now vanished from continental France.

The story starts with the early French colonization of Canada in the 1600s. At the time, few French subjects actually spoke French; instead, they spoke many now-vanishing regional languages, such as Breton or Occitan. When settlers reached New France, the French authorities therefore had to teach them a standardized French to facilitate communication. This French was based on the royal pronunciation of the time, and Quebec thus became known for its aristocratic dialect “as pure as that of the Parisians”, according to a French visitor in the mid-1700s.

Things changed when the British wrested control of the colony from the French in 1759. The Québécois were cut off from developments in France, where the French Revolution was fomenting major changes. To consolidate a new republican identity, the revolutionaries pushed for a single language spoken throughout the country, which they based on the bourgeois Parisian dialect. Modernizers eliminated many features of the “old” French spoken during the Ancien Régime, particularly “aristocratic” affectations. The government then enforced this standard throughout France, with the aim of creating a uniform “French” language.

Quebec, however, remained isolated from these reforms, and conserved the older language. When Alexis de Toqueville visited Lower Canada in 1830, he wrote: “The French nation has been preserved there… one can observe the customs and the language spoken during Louis XIV’s reign.” As a result, he noted, “It seems more like Old France lives on in Canada, and that it is our country [France] which is the new one.”

But how do scholars know that Quebec’s French hasn’t also changed over the same time? Historian Claude Poirier looks for misspellings in old documents to give us a clue to pronunciation. For example, the word “perdre” misspelled as “pardre” in a 17th-century document, shows us that the pronunciation back then was quite similar to how some contemporary Quebecois still pronounce it. And many terms now considered archaic in France are still widely used in Canada, such as “piastre” for dollar (originally referring to a 17th-century coin), or “barrer” to close a door (meaning, literally, to bar it).

Image: Bust of Louis XIV by Bernini, at the Place Royale in Quebec City. Source: Gilbert Bochenek, Wikimedia Commons.

In This Issue:

Upcoming Events:

• Wednesday: “Do Appeals to Human Rights or Canadian Values Change Canadian Public Opinion? Race, Legal Status and the Framing of Positive and Negative Rights”
• 5th Annual Canadian Family Thanksgiving
• Book talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945

Research Opportunities

• Call for applications: Immigration Research Initiative Doctoral Visiting Fellowship

External Events

• Expert Roundtable on Wildfire and Forest Resilience

UPCOMING EVENTS

Do Appeals to Human Rights or Canadian Values Change Canadian Public Opinion? Race, Legal Status and the Framing of Positive and Negative Rights

Wednesday, September 21 | 12:30 pm

Room change: 201 Moses Hall | RSVP here

Who should be granted state protection? Advocates often deploy appeals to human rights or shared national values when advocating on behalf of immigrant noncitizens. But do these approaches actually work? Few studies have empirically tested strategies for persuading dominant majorities to extend social benefits and civil rights to vulnerable minority outgroups. This lecture will draw on newly-published survey data from Canada, a democratic country often portrayed as highly tolerant, diverse, and inclusive, to reveal the limits of rights-based appeals, and the degree to which categorical inequality informs public views of who is “deserving” of these benefits.

Irene Bloemraad is a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley and director of the Canadian Studies Program. She studies how immigrants become incorporated into political communities and the consequences of their presence on politics and understandings of membership. Bloemraad holds the Class of 1951 Chair in Sociology and the Thomas Garden Barnes Chair in Canadian Studies, and is the founding Director of the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI). Beyond campus, she serves as the co-director of the Boundaries, Membership and Belonging program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

This event will be held in person and streamed live online. Please RSVP above if you plan to attend. If you require an accommodation for effective communication or information about campus mobility access features in order to participate in this event, please contact us at canada@berkeley.edu at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI).

5th Annual Canadian Family Thanksgiving

Saturday, October 8 | 5:00 pm

Clark Kerr Campus, UC Berkeley | Buy tickets here

Canadian Studies is pleased to partner with the Digital Moose Lounge for our fifth annual Canadian Thanksgiving dinner! Join us for a special meal celebrating the Bay Area’s Canadian community, as you mingle with your fellow SF Bay Canadians while enjoying entertainment and a delicious turkey dinner.

Tickets may be purchased through the Digital Moose Lounge.

We’re also looking for volunteers to help staff the event. A limited number of reduced-price tickets are available to volunteers; please contact us for more information.

Book Talk: Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945

Wednesday, October 19 | 12:30 pm | 223 Moses | RSVP here

Andrea Geiger will discuss her new book, Converging Empires: Citizens and Subjects in the North Pacific Borderlands, 1867–1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Making a vital contribution to our understanding of North American borderlands history through its examination of the northernmost stretches of the U.S.-Canada border, the book highlights the role that the North Pacific borderlands played in the construction of race and citizenship on both sides of the international border from 1867, when the United States acquired Russia’s interests in Alaska, through the end of World War II. Imperial, national, provincial, territorial, reserve, and municipal borders worked together to create a dynamic legal landscape that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people negotiated in myriad ways as they traversed these borderlands. Adventurers, prospectors, laborers, and settlers from Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Asia made and remade themselves as they crossed from one jurisdiction to another.

Within this broader framework, Geiger pays particular attention to the ways in which Japanese migrants and the Indigenous people who had made this borderlands region their home for millennia negotiated the web of intersecting boundaries that emerged over time, charting the ways in which they infused these reconfigured national, provincial, and territorial spaces with new meanings. To see the North Pacific borderlands only as a remote outpost that marked the westernmost edges of the U.S. or British empire, is to miss not only the central place it occupied in the lives of the Indigenous peoples whose home it continues to be, but the extent to which it functioned, in the eyes of Japanese entrepreneurs, as an economic hinterland for an expanding Japanese empire, as well as the role it played in shaping wartime policy with regard to citizens and subjects of Japanese ancestry in both Canada and the United States.

Andrea Geiger is professor emerita of history at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include transpacific and borderlands history, race, migration, and legal history. She received a J.D. and Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington, and is the author of the award-winning Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Caste, and Borders, 1885–1928.

This event is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI), the Center for Race and Gender, and the Department of History.

RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES

Application deadline: November 1, 2022

The Immigration Research Initiative (IRI) located in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University (Montreal) announces its Doctoral Visiting Fellowship competition. IRI is seeking applications for three 3-month doctoral fellowships for the winter of 2023 in the field of immigration.

Funded by the Secrétariat du Québec aux relations canadiennes, IRI’s objective is to build bridges between immigration research in Quebec and elsewhere in the world. Its Doctoral Visiting Fellowship program is designed to support doctoral students who are conducting or who wish to conduct a research project comparing Quebec to the rest of Canada or to other regions of the world. More specifically, IRI is looking for applicants who wish to develop a project on: 1) immigrant integration and/or attitudes towards immigration or 2) comparative immigration policies. Both qualitative and quantitative methodologies are welcome. The successful candidate will work in collaboration with Antoine Bilodeau and/or Mireille Paquet.

The award is worth $4000 to cover travel and living expenses while at Concordia University. The selected candidates must be present at Concordia University for a period of 3 months and must begin their stay before March 1st, 2023. Selected candidates will also be integrated into the activities of the Research Team on Immigration in Contemporary Quebec.

To submit your application, interested candidates should send:

• A letter describing the candidate’s research expertise
• A one-page description of the proposed research project, highlighting the place of the Quebec case in the project and its relationship to IRI’s objectives, and indicating the stage of development of the project
• A curriculum vitae
• Two letters of reference

For more information or to submit your application, email Antoine Bilodeau. Offers are contingent upon compliance with public health standards related to COVID-19 and receipt of appropriate visas, if required.

EXTERNAL EVENTS

Expert Roundtable on Wildfire and Forest Resilience

Wednesday, September 21 | 10:30 am PT

Online | RSVP here

Exacerbated by climate change, the increasing frequency and scale of wildfires have devastated communities and ecosystems around the world, while releasing vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. California and Canada are among the regions that have experienced record-breaking wildfires in recent years. Five of California’s six largest wildfires in modern history burned in 2020 alone. And over the past decade, suppression costs and economic disruptions have risen.

In the face of these accelerating challenges, calls for climate-smart management of natural lands have grown louder among policymakers, experts, and stakeholders. Government and civil society programs have begun investing in forest resilience and nature-based solutions to deliver on mitigation and adaptation goals, working with Indigenous partners whose knowledge and experience are vital. Recognizing the need to bring together interdisciplinary, international coalitions to advance wildfire prevention, mitigation, and response, Prime Minister Trudeau and Governor Newsom committed their respective governments to hosting a roundtable on wildfire and forest resilience within their broader Climate Action and Nature Protection Partnership which they announced in June.

This event will feature The Honorable George Heyman, Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy for British Columbia, and Randy Moore, Chief of the US Forest Service. It will be moderated by California Secretary for Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot. This event is part of Climate Week NYC and is sponsored by the Government of Canada.

In This Issue:

Program News

• Check out our new Canadian Studies course list!
• Farewell to research fellow Nicholas Fraser

Canadian News

• Alberta doctor takes charges as first Indigenous president of the Canadian Medical Association

Research Opportunities

• Call for papers: International Journal of Canadian Studies

External Events

• Nine Canadian films at the Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival

A Message from Our Director

Dear friends,

It is my pleasure to welcome you all to another semester at Berkeley. Whether you’re a longtime friend, a faculty member, or a new or returning student, we’re so grateful to have you as part of our community. Your engagement helps us advance our mission to share knowledge of Canada with the Berkeley community and beyond – whether that’s by attending our events, submitting your research proposals, or even just subscribing to this newsletter. We are proud of the way our little community keeps growing, and we couldn’t do it without your involvement. So share us with your friends, and we hope to see you around Berkeley soon!

Warmly,

As part of our efforts to increase education on Canada, Canadian Studies has created a new course list for Berkeley students. As an interdisciplinary program, we strongly encourage students to take classes across a variety of disciplines. Our new list highlights classes from across campus that focus on Canada and its culture, either alone or in a comparative context. The following courses are being offered this semester:

• “Comparative Equality Law”: This course examines how the law protects equality rights in different jurisdictions. Canadian laws will be discussed in a global, comparative context.
• “Language and Identity”: This course examines the role of language in the construction of social identities, and how language is tied to various forms of symbolic power at the national and international levels. This course will use Canada as a case study.
• “Monsters and Modernity”: This class delves into fears and anxieties behind modern literary “monsters”, and what they say about society. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale will be a highlighted text.
• “Native Americans in North America to 1900”: This course will provide an ethnohistorical analysis of America’s original inhabitants and their interactions with Europeans and Euro-Americans, emphasizing an Indian perspective.

Farewell to Research Fellow Nicholas Fraser

The Canadian Studies Program wishes farewell to our 2021-22 John A. Sproul Research Fellow, Dr. Nicholas A. R. Fraser, whose one-year term ended last week. Dr. Fraser is a scholar of comparative politics, with a focus on immigration and multiculturalism. During his time at Berkeley, he conducted independent research on the impact of possible religious biases in Canadian courts. He also assisted program director Bloemraad with a long-term immigration project, and arranging speakers for our May conference. Dr. Fraser leaves Berkeley for Harvard University, where he will join the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations as a Policy Innovations Fellow. We wish him well in his new position!

Alberta Doctor Takes Charges as First Indigenous President of the Canadian Medical Association

An Alberta-based physician made history this week as the first Indigenous president of Canada’s most prominent medical organization. On Monday, Dr. Alika Lafontaine, a 40-year-old anaesthesiologist from Grande Prairie, assumed the presidency of the Canadian Medical Association (CMA). Founded in 1867, the organization is the country’s largest professional association for physicians, and advocates for medical issues. Dr. Lafontaine is also the youngest-ever president in the organization’s 155-year history.

Dr. Lafontaine was born in Treaty 4 territory in southern Saskatchewan. As reported by the CBC, as a child he struggled in school due to learning challenges, poor hearing, and a stutter. His teachers dismissed him, and predicted he would be “lucky” to graduate high school. These experiences were a “huge motivator” for Lafontaine, who says he was afraid to speak out in his early years.

Lafontaine’s parents were strongly supportive of his education, and believed that his teachers were overlooking his true potential. After Lafontaine was diagnosed with a learning disability in grade school, his parents decided to homeschool him. Contrary to his teachers’ predictions, Lafontaine went on to an extraordinary academic career: he graduated high school at age 14, received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Saskatchewan at 24, and completed his residency by 28.

Dr. Lafontaine says that he hopes his personal background allows him to bring a new perspective to his role. He wants to advocate for people like himself, who felt unable to speak out. And he is making it a priority to bring communities to the table that have previously been excluded from medical discourse, or face unequal health outcomes.

A particular focus of Dr. Lafontaine’s past work has been advocating for improved healthcare in Indigenous communities. He believes that it is important for Indigenous people to see people like them in the medical field, and to normalize Indigenous people in leadership. Dr. Lafontaine previously helmed the development of a national campaign to reduce disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous patients on behalf of the Indigenous Health Alliance, and successfully secured $68 million in federal funding for the project. In 2019, he received the CMA’s Sir Charles Tupper Award for Political Advocacy for his efforts.

Dr. Lafontaine also advocates for healthcare workers, who he says are suffering from high rates of burnout due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Restoring a sense of normalcy and a healthy work-life balance are among his top priorities following years of crisis conditions at many medical centers. And as a doctor in a rural region, he also has firsthand experience with how a shortage of medical workers in many parts of Canada is exacerbating these problems, leading to hospital closures and scarcity of care. He is exploring strategies to ameliorate these problems, which he says have left medical networks in some rural areas on the brink of collapse.

RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES

Call for Papers: International Journal of Canadian Studies

Submission deadline: October 1, 2022

The International Journal of Canadian Studies is seeking interdisciplinary original submissions for its #61 special issue to be published in May 2023. This special issue welcomes articles discussing the topic: “Is Canada a model?”

The International Journal of Canadian Studies is a long-running interdisciplinary journal dedicated to examining Canada from the fields of the arts, literature, geography, history, native studies, social and political sciences. The bilingual journal is published by the University of Toronto Press.

Submissions could explore the place of Canada in the world as a possible “role model” or simply a model of society, in the past or present times. Does Canada have a power of emulation regarding other nations, regarding which topics? Is Canada a leader in some specific social or political areas? In the field of the arts and literatures, are there any Canadian literary canons?

Submissions (6000 to 8000 words plus two summaries in English and French) are welcome from a range of disciplines and perspectives in Canadian Studies, including, but not restricted to political studies, international relations literatures and the arts, history, native studies, sociology, anthropology. Submissions can be uploaded through this portal until October 1, 2022. To prepare and submit your submission, follow the “Guideline for authors”. All articles will undergo double-blind peer review. For inquiries, contact the editor (francoise.le-jeune@univ-nantes.fr).

Nine Canadian Films at the Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival

August 16-29 | San Jose, CA | Purchase tickets here

Canada will be well represented at this year’s Cinequest Film Festival, taking place in select theaters in San Jose. Canadian submissions include Carmen, Labour Day, Montréal Girls, Ashgrove, Wolves, The Family, Tehranto, We’re All in This Together, and Back Home Again.

Image: Natascha McElhone and Steven Love in Carmen (2022).