Eating Across Borders: Reading Immigrant Cookbooks

The cookbook has recently been analysed as a source for historical understanding beyond instruction for preparing a particular culinary dish. This essay surveys culturally thematic cookbooks in Canada as documents for understanding Canadian immigration history through the foodways of ethnic groups. In reading cookbooks for their social, cultural, and political meaning, we can learn how ethnicity is performed, imitated, or practised as individuals of the past and present eat across borders. Ethnic cookbooks examined in this study enabled newcomers to learn how to “eat Canadian” while they also taught Canadians how to “eat ethnic.” I argue that the cookbook is a significant source by which ethnic groups maintain a public connection with homeland culture, reinforce ethnic identity, integrate into a new culture, and form new hybrid identities.Le livre de recettes a récemment été analysé comme source pour comprendre l’histoire par-delà les instructions relatives à la préparation de tel ou tel plat culinaire. Dans le présent article, l’auteure étudie des livres de recettes reflétant des particularités culturelles en usage au Canada comme documents pour comprendre l’histoire de l’immigration au pays par le biais des habitudes alimentaires des groupes ethniques. L’examen de livres de recettes sous l’angle de leur signification sociale, culturelle et politique renseigne sur la façon dont se manifeste l’ethnicité ou dont elle est imitée au moment des repas, de part et d’autre des frontières, aujourd’hui comme hier. Les livres de recettes des communautés culturelles examinés dans cette étude permettent aux nouveaux venus d’apprendre comment manger « à la canadienne », mais ils enseignent aussi aux Canadiens comment manger des mets étrangers. Selon l’auteure, le livre de recettes est une source importante par laquelle les groupes ethniques maintiennent un lien public avec la culture de leur pays d’origine, renforcent leur identité culturelle, s’intègrent à une nouvelle culture et façonnent de nouvelles identités hybrides

Midwife-Healers in Canadian Mennonite Immigrant Communities: Women who “made things right”

For Mennonites who immigrated from Pennsylvania to Upper Canada beginning in the early nineteenth century and for those who arrived from the Russian Empire later that century and from the Soviet Union beginning in the 1920s, the community midwife served multiple purposes: not only did she assist at numerous births when hospital deliveries and physicians were rare or inaccessible, but she also provided a wide range of essential health care services that were crucial to individuals and families experiencing the trauma of uprooting and the challenges of rural settlement. Community and family studies profile some of the more prominent midwives in early Mennonite settlement communities, supplementing the information found in the midwifery journal of Mennonite immigrant Sarah Dekker Thielman. While women such as Sarah did hold characteristics that fit the image of the “neighbour” midwife, a concept that has dominated historical portrayals of women who assist at childbirth, their personal lives and chosen career paths exhibited a great deal more diversity. Chez les Mennonites qui ont immigré de la Pennsylvanie au Haut-Canada au début du XIXe siècle et chez ceux qui sont arrivés de l’Empire russe plus tard durant ce siècle et de l’Union soviétique au début des années 1920, la sage-femme du village s’acquittait de rôles multiples : non seulement aidait-elle souvent les femmes à accoucher là où les hôpitaux et les médecins étaient rares ou inaccessibles, mais elle offrait également une foule de services de santé essentiels qui étaient cruciaux pour les personnes et les familles aux prises avec le traumatisme du déracinement et les défis de l’établissement en milieu rural. Des études sur les communautés et les familles dressent le profil de certaines des plus éminentes sages-femmes des premiers établissements de pionniers mennonites, étoffant l’information trouvée dans le journal de sage-femme de l’immigrante mennonite Sarah Dekker Thielman. Si des femmes telles que Thielman correspondaient bel et bien à l’image typique de la sage-femme du « voisinage », un concept qui a dominé la représentation historique des femmes aidant à l'accouchement, leur vie personnelle et leurs choix de carrière logeaient à l'enseigne d’une diversité beaucoup plus grande

Assimilation—On (Not) Turning White: Memory and the Narration of the Postwar History of Japanese Canadians in Southern Alberta

This essay explores understandings of “race” – specifically, what it means to be Japanese – of nisei (“second generation”) individuals who acknowledge their near complete assimilation structurally and normatively into the Canadian mainstream. In historically-contextualized analyses of memory fragments from oral-history interviews conducted between 2011-2017, it focusses on voices and experiences of southern Alberta, an area whose significance to local, national, continental, and trans-Pacific histories of people of Japanese descent is belied by a lack of dedicated scholarly attention. In this light, this essay reveals how the fact of being Japanese in the latter half of the twentieth century was strategically central to nisei lives as individuals and in their communities. In imagining a racial hierarchy whose apex they knew they could never share with the hakujin (whites), the racial heritage they nevertheless inherited and would bequeath could be so potent as to reverse the direction of the colonial gaze with empowering effects in individual engagements then and as remembered now. We see how the narration and validation of one’s life is the navigation of wider historical contexts, the shaping of the post-colonial legacy of Imperial cultures, as Britain and Japan withdrew from their erstwhile colonial projects in Canada