Teaching Canadian History
in the United States:
Problems and Possibilities

Scott W. See

Like weather maps in American newspapers, with their bland white spaces where a country of thirty-million people should be, the history of the United States typically ends abruptly at the northern border. For many Americans, Canada invokes images of endless expanses of snow, fearsome hockey players, decent and affordable beer, scarlet-coated Mounties, and perhaps memories of a camping trip to a magnificent lake in British Columbia. These playful stereotypes provide an important segue to the serious business of teaching the history of Canada to an audience of American college students. Poorly understood and pock-marked by superficial impressions, Canada presents some rather daunting pedagogical challenges to professors south of the forty-ninth parallel. These will be distilled into two basic points in this brief essay. American students need to be convinced that carving three credit hours out of their college careers to study Canadian history is worth the binder, and they should see beyond the obvious--and useful--comparative value of Canada's past to gain an acceptance of the country's history on its own terms.

Having been asked to address the "problems and possibilities" of this exercise, I am tempted to trot out anecdotes accumulated through sixteen years of teaching Canadian history at the Universities of Maine and Vermont. Working in two Eastern border states has no doubt given me a certain perspective that might not be shared by colleagues who ply their trade in Virginia or Idaho. Nonetheless, my activities with the Association of Canadian Studies in the United States has brought me into frequent contact with the surprisingly large number of historians who regularly teach some aspect of Canadian history at their institutions.

The first important dimension in coming to grips with teaching Canadian history in the United States is that in virtually every case an important ôhookö is needed to bring a student into the course. The problem is almost the exact opposite of the one faced by Bruce Daniels, who points out that his Canadian students are perpetually inundated with American culture and ideas. In many cases, the students themselves provide the motivation that brings them to the threshold of Canadian history. Memories of a trip to historic Quebec City or the spectacular Banff National Park, family connections to Canada both distant and close, familiarity with television and radio programs from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and bits of information on Canada's interrelated history with the United States from a high school course: all can and do kindle an interest in exploring Canada's past among America's college population. Each semester I ask students to articulate the factors that brought them to pre- or post-Confederation Canadian history. After jettisoning the common "this was the only class available in the time slot"--a perfectly legitimate reason to take a course, in my opinion--I have gathered responses that run the gamut from insightful to frivolous. "I was curious about why Canadians didn't join in the Revolutionary War," an example of the former, shares space with "I want to know why they drive like hell in Quebec," an obvious illustration of the latter. Over the years my classes in Maine and Vermont have been populated by Franco Americans and students with English- and Scots-Canadian roots. Colleges and universities in the northern tier of states, as well as in Louisiana thanks to its Acadian heritage, are filled with students who have genealogical ties to Canada.

In the cases where students do not generate their own motivation for taking a Canadian history course it falls to the professor, and often the school, to provide the "hook." Teachers involved in Canadian Studies in the United States have long fancied themselves of the missionary ilk. My sense is that successful Canadianists probably have to put a little extra into the effort to capture and hold the interest of American students. Here I am not suggesting pandering to the students, nor am I encouraging the dilution of subject matter to heighten its appeal. Instead, I think that enthusiasm and creativity are especially important qualities for the professor of Canadian history to possess, or at least to acquire. After a great deal of experimentation I have fashioned a series of discussion groups (six to eight) that are dispersed throughout the semester. Each session targets a theme in Canadian history that is lively and important enough to have engendered a critical mass of contradictory historical interpretations. The role of Louis Riel in the Red River and North-West uprisings is one example. Another popular topic is Canadian anti-Americanism in the 1960s. Students receive a list of targeted readings in advance of the sessions, and each is responsible for an essay on a question that addresses the material at hand. To be sure not all of these discussion sessions have been smashing successes over the years, but on the whole they have been instrumental in keeping the students' interests at an acceptable level. Institutions can also assist in providing the "hook" by steering students to Canadian history courses through international or multicultural curriculum requirements. Before American readers guffaw at the last point, consider the fact that Toronto was recently deemed one of the most multicultural cities in the world. Universities with comprehensive Canadian Studies programs are clearly at an advantage in this context. Still, even the smallest college can encourage students to take Canadian history courses by embracing them in the curriculum as a broadening experience.

The second essential challenge of teaching Canadian history in the United States is a bit trickier. Canada's comparative value looms large. If the professor is not careful, it will subordinate other subject matter and become the only importantámessage in the course. Several dynamics contribute to the comparability issue that makes teaching Canadian history especially problematic, perhaps more so than one finds in courses on the Middle East or Italy. For one, American students often bring an inherent sense of superiority--not arrogance--to classes in Canadian history. Typically they believe that if the United States is the sole remaining superpower, then Canada should be viewed favorably but nonetheless as a secondary player in a North American partnership.

Canadian history is often quite familiar to Americans, even if they bring the proverbial blank slate to the exercise. Colonial conflicts, women's issues, immigration patterns, Native peoples, Western development, labor struggles, the Great Depression: the list of themes that appear so strikingly familiar to American students is almost endless. This is both a blessing and a curse for the professor. The comparisons are both pedagogically sound and useful for maintaining interest levels. On the other hand, a danger lies in suggesting that Canadian history is a pale reflection of American history, or even worse, that it is only meaningful as a comparative tool. There is no easy way to avoid this pitfall. Constant attention to the distinctiveness of Canadian history, taking the country's past on its own terms, helps to counterbalance the comparative impulse. Thus many topics, such as the treatment of Native peoples in the late nineteenth-century West, can be addressed by asking questions that get at what is familiar about the Canadian case as well as what is unique. This point is inevitably reinforced when Canadian-produced texts and materials are used in the course. It is a wonderful moment, for example, when American students are introduced to a Canadian interpretation of the Revolutionary War. The message of distinctiveness can be transmitted short of waving the Maple Leaf in class or reciting the wildly popular Molson's advertisement known as "Joe's Rant." One need not be a nationalist or ideologue to get the point across about the intriguing characteristics of the Canadian saga.

The joys of teaching Canadian history, to even the most skeptical of American students who demand to know what--if anything--is worthwhile about studying their northern neighbor's past, clearly trump the niggling problems. Indeed the perennial challenge of coming to grips with a nation, one that is at once both familiar in its North American orientation and so different in the ways in which its citizens have fashioned their lives, is an excellent way for history professors in the United States to revisit and test some of their most cherished notions and interpretations.

Scott W. See is the Libra Professor of History at the University of Maine.