Between History and Histories: The Making of Silences and Commemorations

David E. Smith is a professor of political Studies at the University of
Saskatchewan and the author of Building a Province: A History of
Saskatchewan in Documents and The Invisible Crown.

Between History and Histories comprises 12 chapters written by 13
contributors drawn from the disciplines of history and anthropology. One
of the authors is a Canadian academic; the rest are scholars from
Germany, the United States, Israel, Sweden, and India. The subjects they
discuss range across several continents and centuries, and some in fact
deal with practices that predate any calendrical time.

While the provenance of the research is impressive in its diversity,
the theme each paper advances is singular and uniform: history does not
just happen. The form it takes—in Haiti as in Germany, in the 18th
century as today—is the result of choice, consciously made or
otherwise. What is recalled and what is forgotten, what is put in and
what is left out are not matters of chance. These are important
decisions because they determine how a society sees itself and how it
sees others.

Much can be learned from what history does not say, from what the
authors refer to as its “silences.” This book aims to show that
historical silences are the common lot of humankind, and particularly of
the common person, for as one author says, “disempowered people
repress the unspeakable.” But as shown here, high history too can be
mute when the occasion demands.

The opposite of silences is commemoration, which is defined as an
“attempt at closure.” Truth in bronze and stone: “Forget the
Indians, forget the Japanese Canadians, forget the interned Ukrainians.
This is how it was and, therefore, is.”

This is a book of much scholarship that raises important questions. Yet
one of the questions it does not ask is, what happens when the silences
are broken, when new commemorations are required? For if the politics of
identity unsettles how democracies govern themselves, then the history
of identity demands that these same societies re-examine themselves to
discover who they are.