Notes on Winning the Pierre Berton Award

This is a talk I gave to the recipents of the Governor General's History Award earlier two weeks ago. Since then, I've decided to make writing, at most, a very spare-time hobby.

Author’s Note: Since I gave this talk, I’ve decided to concentrate fully on paying work, rather than on writing. Peter Stursberg is right: the cultural, business and political environment has made non-fiction writing in Canada untenable. Maybe that will change. I will play with the projects that I want to write but I will not contract for a new book project or try to get one published until there’s a drastic change in the situation.

I have a small book, a Biblioasis “field note” on the need for media professionalization, that will likely be in book stores in a year. I hope people read it. I will finish all the journalism projects that I have agreed to do.

This will be my last Substack post unless there’s something that I feel I must comment on. Thanks for following me and reading these posts.

I effect, I am concentrating on my legal work and taking my life private.

In the 1990s, in my early 30s, I started writing books because I wanted to tell stories about places that normally didn’t get much attention. I saw how writers on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes told fascinating stories about the big ships on the Lakes. I thought I could do that here.

At the time, the idea of “place” was very important to me, as I had lived most of my life in Ontario but outside the Toronto area. I saw how so many great stories and important issues were either missed completely or were trivialized. This drove a lot of my early journalism, which I deliberately centred outside the major cities. I concentrated on environmental, Indigenous and rural cultural issues, and was lucky enough to be able to get some history into the Globe and Mail and, after 1988, the Toronto Star. Writing books about the hinterland seemed like a natural thing to do, though the economics of publishing were – and still are – foreign to me. And, I suspect, to almost everyone who interacts with that industry.

After negotiating my first contract with a commercial publisher, my wife and I relocated to Ottawa. This gave me access to Library and Archives Canada, which became central to my work. I learned how to find things. It’s a skill that should not be under-estimated. I mined it for books, magazine pieces and newspaper articles. That institution and its provincial and municipal counterparts, is so, so vital to Canada. As are the archives of the HBC, which might end up being that companies most lasting legacy.

Ottawa gave me the opportunity to improve my skills by getting a Master’s and a PhD. The greatest lesson from graduate work was that I didn’t know everything about history, maybe didn’t know much about some important things, but I learned how to research new topics and write at standard where there was some chance of adding to the canon. Later, I gave all my TA money back by going to law school.

Along the way, I did another shipwreck book, some small true crime work, political and military writing. As years go by, I see more clearly that my PhD studies were a game-changer. My thesis, which was published in 2012, was a far better book than anything I’d done before. And during my PhD work, I’d pitched a biography of Pierre Radisson. That idea was in limbo for more than a decade, which might have been a good thing. Sometimes things just happen when you’re ready.

The Radisson book is the first in a trilogy about Indigenous-colonial relations. It’s a character-driven look at an instance where contact was somewhat advantageous for both sides. Radisson doesn’t want land or to change people’s way of life. The Indigenous people want the stuff he sells, technology that did make their lives easier. The fallout from that – the Hudson’s Bay Company and its claim to so much of the continent – is credited to Radisson but was an unintended consequence. And Radisson is one of just a couple of people writing at that time who appreciated the culture of First Nations, saw them as people, and, when he wasn’t in full mercenary mode, loved them. And some Indigenous people, especially his Mohawk parents and sisters, loved him back.

Crosses in the Sky, the biography of Jesuit martyr Jean de Brebeuf, is the opposite of Radisson’s story. The Jesuits’ entire purpose was to remake the Huron-Wendat people into Christian farmers in a Jesuit-run country. There were intended and unintended consequences, all of them catastrophic. Then the story was re-written.

The third book, which I have the research material for, is a study of an expedition where Indigenous people were one of the cogs in a bizarre British imperial project in Victorian times. My concern is that I may not be able to write this book due to the state of the Canadian publishing and cultural environment.

If I have a moment, I want to talk about the fact right now we are in the midst of a revolution. Anybody who chooses to ignore it is simply going to find that out later. This is “elbows up” time in Canada. You would not know it from our policy-setters, who have let our country’s publishing and historic story-telling wither. We will be celebrating at the Canadian Museum of History tomorrow. Not everyone in the building will be happy – 67 people in that organization have been told they are going to lose their jobs because of federal cuts.

At the same time, media continues to peg Canadian history as boring. And we have a big challenge that I know you educators are struggling with: convincing young people, especially young men, to become readers.

Canadian private networks and streamers like Netflix avoid Canadian history. The History Channel airs pseudo-history, despite being licensed and given the monopoly to be THE history channel on the Canadian TV dial. I’m getting this prize knowing Canadian media would never make a TV series like “The National Dream” again. A Canadian historian would be thrilled if their book sold a tenth of the numbers that Canadian authors like Berton and Peter Newman sold. It’s almost impossible to tell Canadians your book exists. And, while book sales are fairly solid in Canada, Canadian authors’ share of the market – 12% in 2024, according to Booknet -- is dismal. And that includes the books of Louise Penney, the hockey porn of Rachel Reid and books by people like me. No other country would allow its national story-telling to fall into such a sorry state.

The Internet is blamed for the problem. That’s wrong. Book sales are still strong doing much better than newspapers and magazines. Independent bookstores are making a comeback after many years of decline. Yet some of the most prominent Canadian popular historians have given up.

This problem has been politicized. Jack Granatstein argued, in Who Killed Canadian History, that “social history” had displaced political and military history. Richard Stursburg claims, in a book about to come out, that our books are too woke. But the numbers I cited above don’t lie. “Non-woke” and political/military history are still published. The quality of these books hasn’t changed. They are more likely to get coverage in commercial media than other books. Yet the trend is still downward.

Can we fix this with more and better podcasts, substacks, YouTube videos, even tiktoks? Maybe public historians should take a long look at the creativity of the educators here and try to rise to that level.

I would love to finish the third book in the “contact” trilogy. I also hope to co-author a book that takes a look at the civilian impact of the Seven Years War. The idea came to me when I saw one line in a British book that said American militia burned 1000 farms in the Quebec City area around the time of the Plains of Abraham. And I’d tell the story of one of my direct ancestors from New Hampshire who was at Fort William Henry and managed to survive the killings.

I would like to be able to do more advocacy. We need to find ways to get the word out about our books. We need to fix the problems with the Copyright Act that, effectively, gave schools the “right” to take our work without paying. And we need to have a funding system that takes the financial risk of producing public history off the shoulders of families like mine.

The situation is unsustainable, it’s wrong and we need to fix this right away so the people who follow Pierre Berton as national storytellers can do the projects they want because the support is there, both culturally and politically.