In Chicago, where he settled, William Henry Jackson, British settler, transformed himself into Honoré Jaxon, Métis freedom fighter. He identified so closely with the Métis struggle for justice that he became one of them. He had no trouble convincing others that he was a Native and probably had no trouble convincing himself either.

Several years ago Ian McKay, a Queen’s University history professor, published a book called The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s University Press) in which he argued that the image many of us have of Nova Scotia as a tartan-wearing, bagpipe-squealing mini-Scotland is pretty much a fabrication.

In 1952, Princess Elizabeth and her husband Prince Philip visited Kenya, then a British colony, and stayed for a night at Treetops, a tiny, rustic structure in the branches of a fig tree, where guests could watch the wild animals that came to drink at an adjacent waterhole. During the night, Elizabeth’s father, King George vi, died, so when she clambered down out of the tree in the morning she was the Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (and, of course, Canada).

In the sun-streaked barroom of the Irma Hotel on the main street of Cody, Wyoming, late one afternoon in June, I made a big mistake. “What’s on tap?” I asked.

Not long ago I was having dinner at a small cottage beside a lake in central British Columbia hundreds of kilometres north of Vancouver. Among the guests seated around the table was Elio, a neighbour from down the shore. As we talked he mentioned that he had grown up before the Second World War in the Adriatic port city of Rijeka, where his father had worked in a factory making torpedoes. “Most of the torpedoes used by the Axis during the war were made there,” he informed me.

When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.

Daniel Francis recently spoke to Joseph Planta from THECOMMENTARY.ca about his book, Red Light Neon: A History of Vancouver’s Sex Trade (Subway, 2007). Listen here.

In 1971 I went to work as a reporter at the Ottawa Journal. The newspaper depended for much of its copy on a roster of freelancers who would get their assignments by phone and drop by the office to deliver their articles. One of these contributors was D’Arcy Marsh.

One thing Canadians have learned from our armed incursion into Afghanistan is that we do not have a vocabulary for discussing war or warlike events.