The historiography of Canada’s ethnocultural communities has developed largely over the past 60 years and individual community histories continue to be told in the context of restrictive immigration policy and struggles with racist attitudes on the part of employers and the community at large.
While there is a significant body of Italian-Canadian history developed by academic historians, for example, Franc Sturino, Roberto Perrin, Franca Iacovetta, Gabriele Scardellato and others who came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, a great deal of history has been produced by community historians. By and large, they have used techniques developed by social historians in the 1960s and 1970s who studied the experiences of ordinary people as a counterpoint to public history that had focused on major political figures and events.
Social history has been described as the history of “the people” or “history from below” and includes subfields such as demographic, ethnic, labour, gender, family, urban and rural histories. I began my work in community history as a volunteer but, because of my academic training, scholarly methodology has been central to all of my work, whether done as a volunteer or as a heritage professional.
As part of the team that celebrated the 25th anniversary of Santa Maria Goretti Parish in Edmonton in 1983, I helped develop an oral history project; wrote a historical booklet titled Italians Settle in Edmonton; and created a photographic exhibit documenting the early history of settlement. These materials were all deposited in the Provincial Archives of Alberta.
The Carrying of the Cross on Good Friday at the Santa Maria Goretti Church in Edmonton’s Little Italy, 2004, courtesy of E. R. Cavaliere.
I was not, however, the first to do this in Alberta. Community leader Sabatino Roncucci, a founder of the Dante Alighieri Society (1961) and School in Edmonton initiated an oral history project in 1973, which was continued in 1978. I had those materials that had been deposited in the Provincial Archives of Alberta to draw on and as models. Sabatino Roncucci and Father Augusto Feccia, a Scalabrinian priest who had come from Chicago to Santa Maria Goretti Parish, were my mentors. There were two other significant figures: Italian-American historian Rudy Vecoli, a professor of immigration history at the University of Minnesota, and Jim Parker, University of Alberta archivist. The latter created an oral history workshop to provide us with tools to do local history research and invited Vecoli. I thus became aware of the importance of oral history and community-based research as tools for the study of marginalized peoples.
The other figure who came to bear on my pursuit of ethnocultural history was Howard Palmer, a prominent social historian based at the University of Calgary who, with his wife Tamara Palmer, published Peoples of Alberta: Portraits of Cultural Diversity (1985). He also involved students, including Antonella Fanella, in ethnocultural histories, including the series Peoples of Southern Alberta Oral History Project. Calgary’s Italian Club was inspired to undertake their own oral history series (initiated in 1985) and Rosanne Audia, Kathy Savoia and Fanella were the primary researchers. These materials were deposited in the Glenbow Archives, now part of the University of Calgary. With Sabatino Roncucci, I also created the Italian community profile for the City of Edmonton as the city embraced multiculturalism in the 1980s.
It would be through my professional life as Executive Director of the Alberta Museums Association that I became part of the movement that focused on “museums and communities,” which was an extension of social history into the heritage field. A final tool would be digitization of archival and museum resources that was initiated through the Department of Canadian Heritage as it moved from computers as tools for collections management to digital media as a means of sharing knowledge held in collections.
At this time, I was Executive Director of the Heritage Community Foundation, established in 1999 by the Alberta Museums Association, with the mandate to bring heritage into the mainstream. I was part of the Canadian Heritage Information Network Advisory Committee and involved with the Canadian Museums Association initiative “Museums and the Web,” for which I created the first website to showcase Alberta’s museums, in 2000. The Virtual Museum of Canada was created in 2001 to enable eligible organizations and institutions to create digital content (in 2021 it was replaced by the Digital Museum of Canada).
As a former senior editor of The Canadian Encyclopedia, I immediately grasped the importance of the World Wide Web for the creation and dissemination of information and, with the support of my board, created the Alberta Online Encyclopedia. The next website would focus on Indigenous history – The Making of Treaty 8 in Canada’s Northwest – a joint project involving the Spirit of the Peace Museum Network and Treaty 8. This received VMC funding. I next created, with the support of the National Congress of Italian-Canadians – Edmonton District, the Celebrating Alberta’s Italian Community, which also had an oral history component. This was the first multimedia website (2002) in Canada to deal with an ethnocultural community. I also created an overarching site titled Albertans: Who Do They Think They Are, which includes profiles of about 75 communities.
Subsequently, we created a series of Francophone websites (all bilingual), and Estonian and Black pioneer heritage sites in partnership with these communities. Indigenous history was a particular focus because of the lack of authoritative material for educational and community engagement purposes. I worked with the Treaty 6, 7 and 8 organizations and the Métis Nation of Alberta to create thematic websites, including five Indigenous teacher and student resources described as “edukits.”
When I connected with the Italian Canadian Archives Project (ICAP) through Antonella Fanella and Maria Cioni, I found a group of peers as passionate about Italian-Canadian history as I was. The organization, which was established as a not-for-profit in 2013 and received charitable status in 2016, is playing a leadership role at a time when the post-war generation of immigrants (other than child immigrants) has died out, and the gathering of primary resources has become urgent. It was the brainchild of academics and community leaders in Toronto who wanted to establish a network of individuals and organizations working on Italian-Canadian history, and receives support from the Mariano A. Elia Chair in Italian-Canadian Studies at York University. The chair is currently held by Abril Liberatori. Their biennial conference and Zoom meetings and talks have brought isolated researchers together, even during the COVID pandemic. I first presented at the conference in Calgary in 2018 on my research for From Sojourners to Citizens: Alberta’s Italian History published by Guernica Editions in 2021.
Little Italy arch on Edmonton’s 95th Street, close to Giovanni Caboto Park, June 2016, courtesy of Adriana A. Davies.
It would be through their encouragement that I would seek to get the National Congress of Italian-Canadians – Edmonton District involved, and this enabled me to raise the subject of what to do with the Celebrating Alberta’s Italian Community website, which had lain dormant since June 30, 2009, when the Alberta Online Encyclopedia had been gifted to the University of Alberta, and the Heritage Community Foundation ceased operations.
The University had taken the fully-searchable website, with its embedded searchable databases of articles and audiovisual content, including oral history excerpts, and used Archive-It software that disabled most of these functions. I convinced the board to not only create a History Committee, but also to look at giving new life to the website. President Paul Cavaliere and the board approved this and we obtained the rights from the university. With a modest honorarium for Clifford Barnett, my last webmaster at the Heritage Community Foundation, we created the website ncicedmonton.org. I wrote new pages represented in the storyboard and drew on Edmonton-specific content from the Celebrating Alberta’s Italian Community website, including short thematic histories, landmarks associated with the community, biographies, family photo albums, virtual tours, etc. The website currently has about 400 pages. The short transcripts of oral histories can be accessed, but not the original excerpts (which is a time-consuming and expensive process, and will have to wait until funds can be found). There is also the larger issue of making accessible the other Albertan content.
The website has been extremely well-received, and I envision that it is the next generation of genealogists, interested in their family roots, who will make use of it. In the 10 years that the Heritage Community Foundation existed (1999-2009), I received numerous letters and emails from individuals who were tracing family members’ immigration journeys, and this has inspired me to continue this important work of making primary sources accessible online.
There are many other resources that need to find new life on the web, and existing funding programs such as the Digital Museum of Canada need to be accessed fully. However, perhaps we also need a new era of community philanthropy focused on making these primary sources of history-making accessible for future generations.
Adriana A. Davies, Order of Canada, Cavaliere d’Italia and Queen’s Diamond and Platinum Jubilee Medals recipient, has worked as a writer, editor, curator, fine and decorative arts specialist, and cultural executive director. She holds a PhD in Literature and was science editor of The Canadian Encyclopedia. Her memoir, My Theatre of Memory: A Life in Words, was published by Guernica in 2023.
