Memory and Heritage

TEAM OVERVIEW:

This team will investigate the process of commemoration and its influence on popular memory. Memory plays a significant part in the construction of personal and community identity. Within a community, memory is visibly sustained by the public commemoration of people and events through heritage sites. Such sites provide a place and time for remembering; they evoke people’s sense of belonging; and they provide emotional prompts for action. However, not everyone accepts the prescribed versions of the past. Public history can be revised, rewritten, and even forgotten.

We will trace the public history of Niagara by examining three case studies: Niagara’s Freedom Trail (part of the Underground Railroad), the Niagara Falls Indian Village, and the memorialization of the War of 1812. We believe these cases will reveal how Niagara’s public history marks its popular memory ­ a memory shaped and reshaped by debates over the purpose of commemorations, generational changes in values, and local and national interests.

TEAM MEMBERS:

Marian Bredin, Department of Communications, Popular Culture and Film

Following an undergraduate degree in Native Studies and Canadian Studies at Trent University, and a MA in Mass Communication at the University of Leicester, Marian Bredin completed a PhD in the Graduate Program in Communications at McGill University in 1995. Her dissertation examined the theoretical, practical and political implications of Aboriginal broadcasting in Canada. Graduate studies led to a two year SSHRC post-doctoral fellowship at Concordia University to pursue a critique of cultural appropriation and its impact on communications and cultural policy. After teaching part-time in Trent’s Native Studies program and in Communications at the University of Ottawa, she was appointed to the Communications Studies program at Brock in 1997. She is currently Chair of the Department of Communications, Popular Culture and Film. Marian continues to teach courses on media and minorities, and communications policy, as well as supervising students in the MA in Popular Culture. Her main research interests are Aboriginal media, minority representation in media, Canadian communications and cultural policy, cultural politics of heritage and popular culture in the Niagara region.

Russell Johnston

Johnston teaches courses on the operation and politics of the mass media in Canada. Among these are courses on sports in the media and the history of advertising. His research follows similar lines by exploring the development of modern advertising and its impact on news and entertainment in Canadian newspapers, magazines, and radio stations. With the Niagara popular culture project, he extends this research by thinking about heritage sites as means of communication with their own tensions regarding accuracy, news worthiness, entertainment value, and commercial appeal. He came to Brock in 1999 after graduate studies at Queen’s University and time spent teaching at Nipissing University and York University.

Michael Ripmeester

Michael Ripmeester was born in Vancouver, British Columbia. During his nine years at Brock his research has focused mainly on First Nation / Euro-Canadian relationships in the nineteenth century. He is currently extending this work into the twentieth century in a project exploring the relationships between identity and landscape in a First Nation community.
He has also worked on a project involving the cultural naturalization of the lawn as the most appropriate landscape form for private green space. He has served as the Chair of the Native Canadian Study Group of the Canadian Association of Geographers and on the Council of the Champlain Society.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

The team research on popular memory and heritage by Marian Bredin, Russell Johnston and Michael Ripmeester is part of the larger Popular Culture Niagara project (SSHRC file #02-343). We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for this research, of which this website is a part. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Bridget Cahill, Anne Howe and Rob Macmorine in the Department of Communications, Popular Culture and Film for their technical and administrative assistance in various aspects of the research. Lynne Prunskus and Edie Williams in the Special Collections of the James Gibson Library at Brock have given generously of their time and expertise. Our graduate student research assistant, Sarah Bradley, has also made an important contribution to our work. Wilma Morrison and Don Thomas of Niagara Falls helped inspire some of the initial research questions for this project and we are grateful for their time and interest in this project.