Now, this is not always the case. If you read Henryk Sienkiewicz's trilogy, Potop: (The Flood), then you'll absorb a lot of history and fall in love with and era and a nation. Potop is historical fiction but it is extremely accurate in its descriptions of: motivation, politics, war tactics/battles, collective psychology, individual psychology and geography. This makes the three stories some of the best ever written. They are absolutely not boring. If you want to read Potop in English get the Kuniczak translation - same advice applies to Quo Vadis.
Likewise, the BBC makes some very good historical dramas and pays careful attention to dress, surroundings and societal norms. It is telling that the Canadian novel Jalna by Mazo de la Roche was given life on TV by the BBC and a hit in Europe whereas here one would be hard pressed to find the series in any library.
When you begin to hike the Bruce Trail from the south, going north, you begin at Queenston Heights. You do not have to go and see the Brock Monument. The trail does does not pass by it. However, if you're trying to get the most out of your surroundings then it is worth a look.
The Brock Monument is big. It is actually one of the biggest monuments in Canada. It marks the site of the Battle of Queenston heights and also the site of Isaac Brock's grave. The size of it says its a pretty big deal and yet the only in depth reference to Brock I ever got out of all those years of history was in grade 8.
I had an amazing teacher in Grade 8. His name was Mr. Rayner. He had a wonderful collection of very broad ties which other kids laughed at. He also had a plot in the Dundas cemetery reserved and took us there on a field trip. I remember thinking this was kind of creepy but also a good example of thinking ahead. Mr. Rayner was great at teaching science and history. He knew his stuff. He gave it life.
The two things about Brock that stuck in my head were that he was a tricky man (in that he gained the bloodless surrender of Detroit from G. Hull) and that he was a fair man (in that he gained the loyalty and trust of Tecumseh). I had the sense that he was an interesting man but it was grade 8 and in the early '80's even Mr. Rayner had to go quickly over the War of 1812 since, after all, it was a war with our great friends to the south and, therefore, kind of embarrassing to talk about.
This is part of the problem with history. We read it from the perspective of the present. It takes a lot of imagination to go back even 50 years into a different culture and mindset. We forget our former selves. We concentrate on the now. We do not think ahead, nor do we think behind. Not many of us have grave sites reserved.
Naturally, once we had begun our epic journey, I looked Brock up. I figured that the kids were hiking through battlefields and this was cool, especially if you KNEW you were hiking through battlefields. So I had them learn along with me.
As I said, I had a favourable impression of Brock and what I read confirmed this impression. It strengthened it actually because I noticed that Brock had a keen genius for thinking ahead and also for human psychology. He had no love of Canada. He was a career soldier and a perfectionist. He got sent to the backwater that was Canada and it probably ranked because he would much rather have been bashing Bonaparte on the Continent. Still, he did his job.
The War of 1812 did not begin out of the blue. People saw it coming from a long way off. They were pretty pessimistic about the outcome too and they had reason to be. The Americans outnumbered the British and Britain was more or less committed elsewhere whereas the U.S didn't give a damn whether or not Boney ruled Europe. Everyone knew this. Everyone also knew that the defenses of Upper and Lower Canada were a mess. Brock toured them and concluded that of all the forts only Quebec, maybe, could hold against invasion. He was right too.
This is one of those places where history gets very interesting because here is a case where one man and his decisions shaped the next 200 years of a nation, right up to my day and age. Brock could have shrugged and joined in the general apathy but no, he was a perfectionist. He was a visionary and, I am guessing, he hated losing. Brock spent two years or so haranguing his superiors and the men under him and putting some heart into them. He wrote that the people around him were demoralized but that, "I, however, speak loud and look big." It worked and it's a fine motto.
Forts strengthened, Brock threw convention aside and went out to negotiate a firm treaty with the Shawnee chief, Tecumseh. He struck hard and fast when the war began. The natives wanted to see victories and the British troops in the Canadas needed to see victories. I think that Brock and Tecumseh were very well matched. In a different time they might well have become good friends.They could never have done so in 1812, even if they had both survived the war but it looks as though they shared mutual respect. Brock was almost certainly ahead of his time. Had he survived the Battle of Queenston heights I like to think Tecumseh's outcome would have been different.
To teach the War of 1812 in grade 8 and not to really take a hard look at Brock is to do a disservice to the students. A nation needs heroes. Okay, so Brock was not Canadian and had no desire to be Canadian, had, in fact, been approved for transfer back to Britain when the American invasion began, but so what? He was here then and his actions made our now. Without Brock we'd not have had Sir John A. We'd not have had the British North America Act. We'd not have "won" the war.The man was snufffed in October 1812 and the work he did prior to that helped the win in 1914. Pretty darn amazing really
Brock was loyal to his government. He was a good pre-Canadian. Plus, in his temperament were certain key traits that one would like to see in one's citizenry. If you're teaching history then you have to teach about heroes. Bad luck for you if your heroes pe-date your constitution.
Sienkiewicz had no such problem. He had it easy. On the other hand, when he wrote Potop his nation no longer existed. If he could write about heroes of a nation that had ceased to exist then surely we can write about hereos of a nation that was going to exist. It's two sides of the same coin, really. Get past the warp and the woof, look at the entire fabric. .
While we're at it, take a look at Tecumseh.
Someone felt strongly enough about Brock that the monument was erected and trended and re-built and buffed and polished and turned in to a National Historical Site. So, yeah, pretty good but what about Tecumseh?
If you poke around the massive granite base of the Brock Monument you will come across a bunch of sticks tied together with twine. Hanging from the sticks is a bundle of feathers, the odd bit of ribbon and bead and a laminated piece of paper stating that this is a monument to Tecumseh that was erected by the First Nations.
There is a whopping metaphor there and also a very graphic example of how the telling of history is shaped by the victors and by their times. Even now, in 2011, we have not given Tecumseh equal billing. Even the number of streets names after Tecumseh is fewer than those named after Brock. Sure, Brock sought the alliance but Tecumseh honoured it, even after Brock was dead. Tecumseh died almost a year after Brock in October 1813 at the Battle of Moraviantown, left to fight it afetr the British line broke and ran. The British "won" the war, the Shawnee categorically lost it.
The General gets granite, the Chief gets a bundle of sticks and we think the mindset of 1812 is too alien for us to imagine.
That's a pity because our history informs our present. If a nation can be said to have a soul then much of that soul is made up of history. The older the nation the richer the soul. Give a nation enough soul and then finally it might begin to engage our imaginations, take Egypt and Greece, for instance.
I don't think one can engender a feeling of national pride without a good love of national history anymore than one can engender a love of the Earth without going out onto the Earth. When the CBC released "Canada, a People's History" I was quite excited. I made popcorn. I got comfortable. Sadly, I fell asleep long before the first episode was over. Equally sadly, it is difficult to obtain in libraries and prohibitively expensive to buy.
Fortunately, the facts are out there. Sometimes you can come across and old school textbook that actually looks at the history of Canada as a whole. This is nice because while Mr. Rayner was an excellent history teacher he did stick to curriculum and in Ontario you learn Ontario's history. In Quebec you learn Quebec;s history and so on for each of our 5 regions in this country. This is about as effective as learning the biology of the human body by only studying the liver. So, we're stringing together some history as we hike. We string more together as we travel coast to coast though Canada. We collect history like beads of wampum. We get the broad picture. We get that history unfolds according to cultural norms and also according to geography. At the end of the process I hope that we'll have grasp of Canadian history that is vibrant and entire.
Just because we were taught history badly does not mean that we have to continue to teach it badly. Maybe, if we stick at it, we'll glimpse the national soul. Maybe we'll walk tall and think big.
http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?BioId=36410
http://www.warof1812.ca/tecumseh.htm
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