This article examines two Canadian universities, both given significant land grants as an initial endowment, and focuses on the histories of these land grants, as well as their land management. The two case studies are the University of New Brunswick, founded in 1785 as part of the Loyalist settling project, and the University of Toronto, which traces its origin to the all-Anglican King’s College, founded in 1827. The authors show that despite the generous granting of Indigenous land (already appropriated by the Crown), with the land grants meant to be monetized through leases or sales, neither university managed to turn the initial endowment into an ongoing revenue stream that would support financial self-sufficiency, the aim of colonial governments that were “cash poor but land rich.” Funding from provincial governments turned out to be essential to the operation of these “endowed” universities. They show that while both universities have periodically tried to turn their land grants into profitable investments, they did not truly realize their perceived potential as real estate investors until the later twentieth century when markets for land, as well as funding pressures, changed. Despite land revenues failing to meet the administrators’ expectations to fully support their institutions, land endowments were and continue to be crucial to these universities. They offered legitimacy to the new institutions in a settler society in which status and value were based on land ownership. Administrators also saw land endowments as stable sources of future income, independent of changing government priorities, and thus regularly returned to the question of how to produce more land revenues.
Indigenous food security in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is differentially governed through programs and technologies that aim to make Indigenous people better biocitizens, through the medium of nutrition, rather than more food secure. The author brings together theorizations of governmentality, biocitizenship, and healthism to articulate what they refer to as nutritional citizenship. The author interrogates how expectations of nutritional citizenship are embedded in notions of food security, which results in the differential and disciplinary governing of Indigenous people in Winnipeg. They contend that the fields of Indigenous studies, citizenship studies, and food studies serve as a critical juncture to undertake analyses that attend to shifting and differential modes of citizenship and to understand how food becomes a barometer of appropriate conduct to be a good citizen. Focusing on interventions in Indigenous food insecurity in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the author demonstrates how education and municipal zoning are operationalized to demarcate expectations of nutritional citizenship and argues that when food security hinges on the requirement to be a good biocitizen, food security becomes conditional by conduct rather than conditional on access.
In 1972, as Toronto’s cultural landscape was being reshaped by postwar immigration and countercultural movements, poet Gwendolyn MacEwen and musician Nikos Tsingos opened the Trojan Horse at 179 Danforth Avenue. This boîte became an unexpected hub where political exiles, artists, and activists forged connections across cultural boundaries. Drawing on oral histories, archival materials, and newspaper accounts, this article traces the Trojan Horse’s remarkable history through three phases: its founding as a space of cultural dialogue, its evolution into both a sanctuary for political refugees and a classroom for intercultural exchange, and its emergence as a creative studio where the Greek neo kyma harmonized with the Chilean nueva canción . The study reveals how the Trojan Horse fostered a form of multiculturalism that emerged not through government-led initiatives or curated cultural spectacles but through shared grassroots creativity and political commitment. This grassroots multiculturalism also reproduced gendered hierarchies and asymmetries of symbolic capital familiar from the broader left, revealing that solidarity built from below carried its own structures of exclusion.
Janet Jones (Gretzky) was vilified in the Canadian press for her perceived, not actual, role in the blockbuster hockey trade that involved her husband, Wayne Gretzky. Unfairly and without proof, Jones was cast as a manipulative American seductress who had duped the righteous, but too-trusting, Canadian hockey star into a bad decision that negatively affected his country. The media granted Jones absolution after a hasty indictment, but the amnesty proved temporary. Twice more Jones found her reputation sullied by the Canadian media as it attempted to validate its initial verdict. This investigation of Canadian media illuminates important facts about its willingness to engage in gender-based chauvinism, particularly in sports sections, and the media’s reluctance to move beyond those narratives even as time passed and truths were revealed. This analysis considers the reactions of local and national media and is guided by recent research into press coverage of wives and girlfriends of high-profile sportsmen.
Social scientists have only recently come to explore in depth the ways in which the work that they do, the knowledge that they produce, and the ways in which they undertake these activities have emerged within and influenced colonialism. This article explores the role of social scientists in one federal government initiative introduced after the Second World War, a formative period for the social sciences in Canada. The Panel on Indian Research, introduced by the Indian Affairs Branch in the late 1940s, served as a vehicle for government officials to learn about social scientific knowledge that might assist in addressing matters that they considered problems. The activities undertaken by and associated with the panel revealed that social scientists were willing to assist the government in its aims to assimilate and integrate Indigenous peoples into Canadian society, but it also exposed some tensions and contradictions in those relationships.
