Thread | Brutkey

I don't know how this other kind of framework works in practice. One part of it, I think, is recognizing that if everyone in Canada is "us", our history goes much farther back than Frobisher and Cartier. Our books trace the stream of history across the ocean back to England and France, but it includes what happened here for indigenous people going back to time immemorial, even when no English and French people were in sight. And it streams back to Kashmir and Guangdong and Jamaica and Italy.

Evan Prodromou
@evan@cosocial.ca

About 2 million Canadians trace their ancestry back to Italy; that's about 5% of the population.

Evan Prodromou
@evan@cosocial.ca

Italy's history in the 1800s is one of throwing off foreign occupation and uniting into one nation - the Risorgimento - that culminated in the 1860s. The irony is that a population boom and economic downturn directly related to the unifying wars led to a generation that could not find room in the nation their parents and grandparents had made for them. A flow of emigration to the Americas, including Canada, ensued.