McKay lecture challenges changing perceptions

Thanks to Nipissing’s Dr. James Murton for providing this account of the lecture.On the evening of Thursday, Jan 27 a nearly full house gathered at Nipissing University to hear Queen’s University historian Dr. Ian McKay speak.
McKay, an award-winning and influential historian of Canada, came to North Bay to deliver Nipissing’s annual History Department keynote lecture, which he titled Warrior Nation? The Use and Abuse of History in Harper’s Canada. McKay’s topic was the militarization of Canadian identity under the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. To explore the issue, he told us the story of Captain Bill Stairs. Stairs was born in 1863 in Halifax to an upper middle-class family.  He sought adventure and a life of meaning, and like many in his time and place, he revered the British Empire and the British military.  After attending Royal Military College in Kingston, Stairs eventually got himself appointed to the famous Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, a privately financed venture in Southern Sudan.
McKay invited us to consider how to properly remember Stairs. He is remembered as a pioneering Canadian soldier and hero of Canada by cadets at RMC. But, as McKay went on to detail, his time in Africa was marked by repeated brutalities, including the massacring of whole villages. So what, then, are we to make of the fact that he is the sort of person that the Canadian government now wants us to remember as a hero of Canada? Where we once thought of ourselves as a peacekeeping nation, McKay closed by arguing, we are now encouraged to think of war as central to the Canadian experience. We are now to think of ourselves as a warrior nation.  Is this a change we are comfortable with?
The talk closed with a series of challenging questions from community members, students and Nipissing faculty, as well as much thanks to McKay for delivering such a learned, thought-provoking and provocative talk.