The folks at Many Eyes recently introduced their new comparison cloud tool. Basically, it lets you visualise two fragments of text displaying word frequency for each in the same cloud. It’s an interesting addition to the more familiar word cloud. Using a standard word cloud you get a matrix of words with relative size, weight or colour highlighting frequency in a selected text. This quickly allows you to visually perceive an author or speaker’s emphasis on a particular theme or style of writing or speaking. With Many Eyes hybrid tool, words which occur in both text are abutted. You can now visually compare two texts from the same author for similar empahsis or quickly determine a difference between texts. In the example presented at Many Eyes, they compare the US presidential State of the Union addresses from 2002 and 2003. In this example they note the less frequent mention of Afghanistan and the increase in mention of Saddam. Whether this allows one to conclude a change in policy or not, it does demonstrate the use of the tool for provoking questions for further exploration.

On Saturday, the Ontario government officially announced how much funding each university in Ontario is to receive for maintenance and renewal of facilities. I just happened to see announcements from a few institutions appear simultaneously in my RSS reader and was struck by the rather different ways in which they presented this news.

At McMaster, there was a relatively terse announcement that provided very little detail on how the money would be spent. Western on the other hand had a pretty picture and a complete list of how much was being distributed to each institution. The University of Guelph was more detailed than McMaster and provided very precise details of what the money would be spent on. I was struck by the differences, so I thought I’d see how I might quickly use a text analysis tools to compare the announcements.

I rely on two sources for tools such as these TAPoRWare and ManyEyes. For industrial strength analysis and fast results, I use TAPoRWare tools. By simply choosing the URLs of the announcements from two universities I receive a wealth of information about the announcements. I am particularly interested in extremes in this case. What makes each announcement similar and what apparent differences are there. Taking a look at a chart of common words and their frequency of use is a first attempt at this.

A similar chart was created showing me words that appeared only in one or the another and I was immediately struck by the fact that campus didn’t occur at all in the McMaster announcement, where it was the most frequent word at Guelph. On the other hand, McMaster emphasized engineering and psychology. Yet, neither word occurred in the text of announcements. The reason for this was my use of the the web addresses of the announcements, as opposed to the text of the announcements themselves. The TAPoRWare tool analysed all the text on the page and McMaster’s announcement page contained summaries of a variety of other announcements, thus ‘polluting’ my analysis. Thankfully there is an easy way to fix this. By choosing to upload only the text of the announcements themselves (And thus help the tool know just what is important to me) I can get the results I want to consider.

Voila! Now I can see that Guelph emphasizes the future and campus, whereas McMaster emphasizes renewal. Interesting. I want to consider this further, but I am far more a visual thinker, and while these bar charts are pleasing, and take a wealth of data and distill it to a very nice summary, I want to take it one step further. Word clouds are a way of accomplishing this as I mentioned above.

ManyEyes new tool gives me a way to quickly accomplish this comparative analysis. Unfortunately, I can’t just point ME at the web pages and have it capture the text. I had grabbed the text files above to better focus TAPoRWare, and so it was a matter of copy and pasting the text from each of the university web pages and inserting a short comment line between each fragment. Then you simply upload it to Many Eyes by pasting it into a text box, applying some meta information (a title, source and description) and clicking the upload button. Once uploaded, you can choose from a variety of available visualization tools. Choosing the word cloud tool immediately presents you with a default cloud display. In this case, Many Eyes noted the fragment dividers and automatically selected the comparison cloud type. I could have overridden this option if the fragment dividers were actually part of the text I was analysing.

The texts that I was analysing are somewhat shorter than the examples that the Many Eyes blog featured and one thing that became apparent was that shorter text may demonstrate a far fewer number of comparable words. Nonetheless for the ones that are identified, one might be inspired to consider whether lack of emphasis is reflective of institutional priorities. In the word cloud in this post, I compare the announcements from York and Western.

York seems to be emphasizing campus renewal, where Western seems to focus on funding as a concept.

To further refine the analysis, you can also choose word pairs on the display and change the cloud to most frequent pairs of words. Unfortunately in my samples, campus renewal and facilities renewal are the only two repeated pairs, York favouring both.

If we consider the announcement from Guelph versus the one from York, the word future features very large in the Guelph announcement. Does this mean they have vision for the future or that they fear the future? The word York in their own announcement is the single most frequent word, where references to Guelph in theirs is rare. Does this suggest that York University is far more interested in self-promotion? These are the sort of questions that calls for further investigation and underlies the danger of trying to use word clouds on their own. They are all the rage and can be very powerful, but as with any visualization tool, they call for consideration of shortcomings as well as strengths.

By the way, thanks to Western’s comprehensive list of where all the funding went, it begged creating a bar chart of distribution amongst institutions. Click on the chart below to go to ManyEyes to see it.

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Dr. Kathy Garay of the McMaster Library gave a lively and fast-paced talk exploring the nature of majesty to the Medieval and Early Modern Research Group. Her paper,“Manufacturing Majesty: Elizabeth of Hungary, Diana of England and the Construction of Royal Saints, 1207–2007,” reflected on the rather striking similarities between St. Elizabeth of Hungary and Lady Diana Spencer. Particularly:

• Lineage
• Texts
• Marital Love
• In-Laws
• Beauty
• Motherhood
• The Third Person
• Charity
• Agency
• Funeral Rites
• Legacy

 Dr. Garay demonstrated the remarkable consistency in the nature of majesty over an 800 year span. She concluded with one of the most striking similarities between the two women: the engagement beyond ‘royal touch’. Lasting images of both show them not simply amongst the people, but often in a very tactile, hands-on and even subservient position. Dr. Garay is a superb presenter and her infectious enthusiasm for her subject matter was a real treat.

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Naru Shiode from the University at Buffalo gave a spellbinding presentation on spatial-temporal analysis at the Centre for Spatial Analysis (CSpA) on Friday. Shiode is trained as architect and urban planner and finds himself in the Geography department at Buffalo. He has been associated with projects such as Digital Egypt and the Virtual Ryoanji projects exploring ancient historical reconstruction as well as time-based recremorphing. His current project is the 3D Buffalo project which allows a user to interact via a chronoslider that triggers time points for each building within a multi-block area surrounding downtown Buffalo. This project is only in its early stages, but the potential for historical analysis is tremendously promising.

What Shiode and his co-PI are doing is exploring a similar spatial-temporal linkage that I have been doing my individual best to create create on a smaller scale for Guelph. Unlike my attempts to attach a 3D streetscape from Guelph to census, tax and business directories and ultimately to the inhabitants through their physical surroundings, Shiode is very much concerned with wedding CAD and GIS to focus on the aesthetics of the built environment. The result of his work is most impressive. The interface employs a chronologically structured slider which ties to buildings categorized by their period of existence so that as you slide, they are erected in realtime. The 3d mass models have had surfaces mapped from historical and contemporary photographs and are superimposed on aerial photos to provide streetscape.
Of note is that the use of aerial photography to establish buildings and to use as the underlying backdrop for the model itself. Shiode points out the challenge this poses with street reorientation over their period of study.
Shiode asks three prescient questions of his own current work:

1. How do we choose to visualize uncertain data? While he offers some answer to this, I think that it probably depends on the context of the analysis that we are trying to do and the level of inference that we feel comfortable to exercise;
2. How can we continue to make the data and the tools compatible? They’ve done a great job harmonizing GIS and CAD.
3. How do we harness the power of a dynamic 3D model?

Great questions that anyone playing in this arena inevitably faces.
Projects such as Rome Reborn1.0 (which I blogged on earlier this year) have focussed on similar aesthetic recreation of the visual. One of the future directions for Rome is to consider the audible end of the equation (I suppose smell might even be there someday). The absence of people in many of these models seems to be the biggest gap. We are studying them through their material artefact, yet don’t represent them as part of the model. The choice to include the human dimension depends on what the model is being constructed to explore or accomplish. Thus the third and most prescient question above.
The challenge in asking this question is that in many cases, it is only through construction that we discover some of the questions that can be asked or patterns that might be discovered. Questions leading to the development of the model often lead to begging the bigger questions to ask of the model. Spatial-temporal modeling simply presents existing data in a different way and allows for the viewer/participant to see patterns that aren’t otherwise apparent. 3D Buffalo looks like it will have tremendous potential for deeper understanding of early twentieth century urban development.

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Geoffrey Reaume from York and University of Toronto gave a fascinating talk in the History of Health and Medicine Lunchtime Seminar Series today. “From Activists to Archivists: Documenting Mad People’s History Since the 1970s,” explored both the formation of psychiatric survivors organizations from the 1970s as well as the collection of artifacts allowing for study of these movements.
His talk reminded us of Allen Markman in NY, Kenneth Donaldson in Portland then more directly of local personalities such as Mel Starkman and Don Weitz. Reaume’s talk provided me with a wonderful exposure to the more human side of the mental health world and also put it into the context of other groups within society that battle with naming conventions. Very poignantly, Reaume also exposed the tremendously contentious area of attempting to remember the past when treatment has often been undertaken to eliminate such remembrances.
Reaume is currently engaged in two ongoing attempts to ensure that those that have been participants (willingly or unwillingly) in Toronto asylums past are not forgotten. The walls of the old Queen Street Asylum have been the site of local development over the past decade. Recently, the Psychiatric Survivors Association of Toronto has been successful in erecting a commemorative plaque that recognizes that the walls were constructed by the forced labour of patients confined to the Asylum. Their role in this construction is significant as is that most of it still stands solidly over 150 years after it was constructed. The wall is highly symbolic and a lasting tribute to patients whose experience of the system is worthy of continued remembrance and study. It is however a symbol of mixed emotions amongst those who have experienced confinement. There are calls to remove the reminder of many of the horrors experienced by clients of the system, even to our current time. Others, Reaume among them, seek to realize lessons lessons learned from past failures and to reflect on society’s attitudes towards those denied the ability to express their own wishes.
A second project is taking place at the site of the former Mimico Asylum (the Lakeshore in Etobicoke), where a graveyard containing the remains of 1511 patients who dies while confined is located. In the last two years, PSAT has made efforts to uncover grave markers and is still attempting to erect some form of commemorative marker for the entire site.
Both of these projects highlighted Reaume’s message of sensitivity to and respect for people in society who have been labeled and identified as lesser members, sometimes suffering injustice in due to societal naiveté or deliberate exclusion.

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When is a tool, not a tool? Apparently when it is a quasi-tool or a proto-tool. A tool provides functionless functionality.
These were a couple of the epigramatics Barry Allen shared during a talk on technology, culture and civilization.¹
I could not possibly do justice to philosophical reflections on the nature of a tool, so I stop there on the philosophical and refer you to my footnote, but as an economist I was particularly drawn into his discussion of the progression from first to second order machines. First order being ‘devices that extend human capacities by exploiting a mechanical advantage’ and second-order featuring ‘an assembly of first-order machines, coupled to produce a multiplying effect.’ This form of organization seemed to dovetail with a similar discussion that Allen raised about our ability to effectively fix prices, but our seeming imability to determine the true cost of a tool. His talk at this point expanded from a focus on individual artifacts to a comment on societal inability to leap the chasm between monetized value and societal impact. Engineers, Allen charged, were driven by efficiency alone in design, where recyclability could in fact be a similarly overriding design decision. My thought was that this itself could be further extended into a form of second order economy, in which we find a means to extend rather than reduce liability for design. This accepts that we are good at fixing the price, but have to find a means to determine real cost and in fact create an incentive at the outset to do so. This is not dissimilar from the overly simple and trendy concept of carbon credits we are starting to practise today. Monetization of the long-term environmental cost is a great start, but we cannot currently come to grips with the fact that progress/innovation whatever we choose to call it leads to our creation of tools with great promise by narrow analysis of immediate effect, but that have far wider consequences that we know or would care to invest in trying to discover. The idea of the unknown in our ‘first-order economy’ is something we label as risk. An economic player is called upon to find their own balance between the level of risk and what they perceive as return. The reality is that if risk is redefined to carry longer term liability for design decisions, this will force more broad exploration of wider impacts of tools at the design stage rather than in when we are trying to develop remediative responses to unintended consequences of the tool design in the future. The immediate challenge to this rethinking is the charge that it will stall innovation. My only response to this, is that we are now forced to innovate in response to unintended consequences and this may in fact demand greater costs environmental, economic or otherwise than if we chose to force earlier design decisions in the creation and application of technology.
In closing, Allen remarked on ethanol/ethane and the fact that this is one of the clearest examples of deliberate human avoidance of true cost. Getting beyond the social costs of redistribution of the harvest from the food chain into a resource for mechanical propulsion, corn is the single-most water intensive crop under cultivation. We are absolutely aware that by using it in a combustive process, the component parts are irrevocably lost to the natural cycle and yet we are clearly destroying our groundwater resources.
Allen challenges that there have never been civilizations in human history that waste tools as we do. Second-order factories are idled and having lost their opportunity are often not recombinant to another second-order machine.

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1. Quasi-tools as I understand are objects used by beings without conscious or intelligent awareness that the object provides any particular function. Innate use of a pebble by a wasp to block the entrance to a birth chamber for example. In contrast, a proto-tool, is consciously chosen for use, but has not be fashioned to perform that function, lacking deliberate design to enable that function. A ‘tool’ per se shares two descriptive aspects: that its function is manifold and not limited by purpose, instead extended by technique to form cultural technology. Secondly, the tool is an artifact that lacks definition without having a place within an economy — that is, it has been previously linked to others in an economy of socially complimentary action (design, manufacture, sale, license, etc.) when we engage with it.

The Wilson Centre in Canadian History officially launched an awesome new learning tool destined for the classrooms of local schools last night. The People and the the Bay is an historical environmental documentary created by Nancy Bouchier, Ken Cruikshank and the wizards from Pixel Dust Studios This stunning production brings a vivacity, zest, and probing depth to explore the unique relationship between the Hamilton harbour and the lives of people in the area and the city itself. The occasion was celebrated at the Canada Marine Discovery Centre, a uniquely appropriate site for presenting this production. The centre sits on the harbour and is an interpretative museum dedicated to Canada’s rich aquatic heritage.

Nancy Bouchier, one of the co-authors/presenters of the programme suggests that when most of us think of Hamilton we picture, ” a successful but grimy, industrial city.” The backdrop to this is steel mills, steamers, traffic and smokestacks. But, as Ken Cruikshank, our other guide asserts, it’s much more than this and Hamilton is a city rediscovering its rich heritage by reconnecting to the harbour. Over the next 45 minutes Ken and Nancy bring to life the richness of past connection to Burlington Bay and leave us with a hopeful appreciation for the continued revitalization of the body of water that has been so central to the growth of the area. The natural beauty of the harbour area is highlighted — an aspect of the Hamilton harbour area that is far too easy to miss. You have to walk the trails, sail in the harbour and maybe produce a documentary production, to truly find this beauty. When you immerse yourself in the area you can find it, but it does take effort. It may be easier to do this today, as the DVD conveys, but it is still all too often hidden behind a veil of smog, or camouflaged by industry that scares one away from wanting to get too close. Our commentators do get close to the nature of the harbour. They walk the trails, wander the parks and cemeteries, and in Bouchier’s case canoe the bay to bring a new appreciation to viewers.

Pixel Dust Studios and director Zach Melnick have woven their magic to deliver this amazing historical-environmental documentary. I wax gushingly, but honestly admit that this programme is crafted with a special touch. The cinematography is superbly shot, composed and rendered with original music. They combine historical re-enactments, with stock and historical footage to create an engaging and pertinent production that is testament to their ability not only as filmmakers, but as craftspeople who work with historical material with tremendous sensitivity. The DVD is presented in both SD and HD formats as well, giving the viewer an added visual treat.

It will be valuable to follow the classroom adoption and use of this DVD. As these are distributed to local history teachers for use in their classrooms, the true benefits and impact of the product will be recognized. It has been authored with this use in mind. The duration of the programme is geared towards being able to show within a single class period. It is nicely segmented into short chapters and these can be used to support specific events and study foci. Additionally, and I appreciate this one, one of the navigation options is spatial. The particular chapters have been mapped to their locations around the harbour. All we are missing is a separate chronological timeline view. The wealth of options hopefully will allow varied uses for the product and for convenient enhancement of existing curricula. Will the addition lead to the discussion that the producers clearly hope to engender? I hope and believe it will, and look forward to discovering how it does work. One thing is of little doubt, this product raises the bar for tools to aid in teaching Canadian history in the classroom. I fervently hope that this is only the first of such productions that can bring a compelling and media-competitive edge to teachers who have to battle the pervasiveness of block buster historical epics that lead students to conclude that Canadian history is boring.

Last year I had the privilege to assist Dr. Viv Nelles, the LR Wilson Chair, and person responsible for initiating this project, when he presented the Introduction to Canadian History course. He re-imagined the presentation of what is a staple course for history departments in Canada and created a fresh and dynamic offering for his students. His innovative approach combined pertinent themes with an appreciation for the broader context of the interaction between man and nature. Judging from my interaction with the students, engaged them in a course many expect to be a yawn fest. This went so far as one student confiding to me that she had actually suffered from nightmares following his eerie telling of tales of the loup-garou and its role in Québecois society. You know you are reaching students when… This new teaching tool for high school history teachers smacks of this dedication to innovation and revitalization of the teaching of our history.

I was planning to blog after attending the DVD launch last night. I ruminated over words and messages and continued to do so as I drove to the office this morning. And that’s when it hit me. As I drove along the 403 I passed many of the points highlighted in the production. We can all too easily miss the context of our everyday life. Tasks and places are rooted in our shared existence with others and with the past. The historical context deepens out understanding, our appreciation and hopefully our sensitivity to place. We can be sensitive to their care, sympathy, stewardship and struggles with problems that we face today and continue in their efforts. Through productions like ‘The People and the Bay,’ we are made aware that these processes that are longer than our lifetimes and often memories, but that awareness leads to new appreciation not just of superficial beauty, but can inspire the the strength and dedication to build on the efforts of our ancestors.

Note: The most beautiful sequence for me is the 6 spans crossing the Dejardins canal captured in the image above, and presented at the beginning of chapter 9. The slow progression through the ancient waterway and the perfect lighting conditions really resonated with me.

Update: The Hamilton Spectator has great coverage of the launch.

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The History of Health and Medicine Seminar series continued today with a rather provocative paper by Dr. Ann Herring and Stacey Lockerbie. “The Coming Plague: Global panic, local repercussions and avian influenza,” contends that globalization and spread of information has preceded the potential epidemic with outcomes that alarm potentially unduly and have enormous local economic and social impact.
Herring is well known for her work on the history of infectious disease and very specifically on its impact on native populations. Lockerbie work involves the transition of aquaculture in central Vietnam from local to a global commodity. Their work coincides as a result of Lockerbie’s first-hand experience in Vietnam with the impact of poultry culls and the movement towards larger state-controlled factory operations as the government (over)reacted to the bird flu. This paper centres on the process of anchoring, where the understanding of a new disease is linked and configured to past epidemics. In this case, from 2001, the Avian flu (a disease first identified in the late nineteenth century) has been anchored to the Spanish Influenza of 1918. The result of which has been global panic and extreme attempts to erradicate the potential impact of the diseease with little or no undersatanding of its true vectors or study of the impact of the remedies enacted.
The first part of the talk dealt with a factual exploration of the known imapct of the H5N1 virus looking at the spatial diemnsions of the current outbreak. As Herring identifies, only 271 cases worldwide have been identified in human and of these only 160 have resulted in death. She questions what has made this anchor to the 1918 influenza so pervasive. There have been epidemics in the 1950s, 1960s and again the 1970s that more closely reflect the nature of the current disease, but these seem to have been simply overlooked. Questions raised after the talk suggested that disease may represents another way that borders cannot be secured…and thus in a security conscious world, this is a magnified threat — one particularly witty respondent suggested the picture of a terrorist armed with a chicken-bomb.

So, if the threat has been magnified, what of the response to it? In this case, Lockerbie’s experience in Vietnam suggest that it has been simply enormous, especially at the local level. In a place where the consumption and availability of chicken forms part of cultural practise, the mass culling of flocks and the move to take the chicken out of backyards and concentrate in factory surroundings destroys community bonds and cultural links. The authors point to the Vietnamese state desire to be seen as taking appropriate response to the threat has led to the elimination of live bird markets and driven the adoption of supermarkets. Culturally this has a huge impact as markets had centred a local system of trust and commitment amongst vendors and buyers. More ironically, by trying to gain biosecurity, and shift poultry production to safe and clean spaces, science is in fact driving production into the very sort of places in western nations that strains mutate and erupt.

Thus those in the regions affected by H5N1 suffer doubly, both from the disease itself as well as global condemnation for cultural practices that may not in fact be at the root of the threat.

Clearly, the potential of the Avian Flu Epidemic is different because it is being configured in a more global fashion than things have been in the past. The reality is that we don’t know a lot about it. Certain hypotheses that have been raised and are really not based on study or understanding. So, what has made this happen and who gives credence to this fear mongering? Herring asserts that the scary part it is its actually ‘authoritative science’, and this has moved into fact and become unquestioned dogma, despite any real evidence.

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To a standing room only audience, Dr. Stephen Heathorn kicked off the Fall Thursday Seminar series in the Department of History with a talk entitled ‘Long Before Oliver Stone…Conspiracy Theory and the ’Kitchener Films’ 1921–26.’ Heathorn’s talk centred on the backstory to a half-decade struggle to bring the movie ‘How Kitchener Was Betrayed’ to British screens during the early 20s. He used this episode to demonstrate how official policy perpetuated the Kitchener myth and avoided questions of professional competence. This paper comes from a larger exploration of how memory and reputation of martial leaders is manipulated over the space of the 20thC.
In 1916, Kitchener drowned on a mission to Russia when the ship he was aboard struck a mine off the Orkneys. Public grief was intense over the loss of the man who symbolized the fighting spirit of the nation and led many to question the culpability of military and politicians in the tragedy. Although the mines that lay in the path of the Hampshire were known to some in the admiralty, in the fog of the aftermath of Jutland, this intelligence probably failed to reach Scapa Flow in time to divert the mission. The failure of the government to publicly reveal the results of the investigation into the sinking gave birth to several conspiracy theories. In 1921, this led to the film ‘How Kitchener Was Betrayed,’ which spun a tale involving a traitorous british officer, a beautiful german spy and Rasputin. The film was immediately banned by official bodies seeking to maintain Kitchener’s iconic status as symbolic of ultimate sacrifice for the nation. When the film could not be shown, the original owners sold it to Frank Powers, a journalist of some repute. He re-edited the film now calling it ‘the Tragedy of the Hampshire’ and once again attempted to gain official acceptance. Despite removal of the plot involving the German spy and the British officer, a license for the film could not be obtained. In a last desperate attempt to get some return on his investment in the film, Powers claimed to have discovered the body of Kitchener in Norway in 1926. Staging an elaborate tour of Norway with a casket in tow, he returned via Scotland to London. When pathologists pried open polished casket they discovered only a thick layer of tar inside.
Using papers declassified in 2001, Heathorn demonstrates that there was a concerted effort on the part of authorities to prevent the showing of this film (considered most persuasive media of the time) in a manner which might raise questions of professional competence on the part of the government and the military. He asserts that ironically, it was this lack of transparency and unwillingness to publicly challenge Powers that fed the sense of conspiracy. Officials saw the dramatic portrayal of Kitchener’s demise as a clear challenge to the legitimacy of the state. Despite a difficult wartime relationship, both the Home and War offices agreed that Kitchener’s reputation could not be tarnished. He was the symbol of all that made the fighting just and worth the cost.

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The History of Health and Medicine Seminar series welcomed Luz Maria Hernández-Sáenz today, who presented the lively story of Dona Maria Tiburcia Reynantes. Her paper “Between Medicine and Magic: the Story of an 18th century Mexican healer,” explored the rather fascinating case of a travelling healer in eighteenth century Mexico who combined magic and medicine with religiously ordained healing practice. In the case of Tiburcia, Dr. Hernández-Sáenz, utilized Inquisition records to explore the tale of a women who claimed to be able to cure illness, reunite the divorced and to even resuscitate the dead. Dr. Hernández-Sáenz completed her PhD at the University of Arizona at Tucson and is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario. She specializes in the social history of eighteenth and nineteenth Mexico.

The case of Tiburcia explores the merging of indigenous native with European medicine. According to Hernández-Sáenz, this was the story of women who walked a fine line between healer and witch and successfully avoided being branded by the inquisition until her behaviour challenged the authority of local priests. The inquisition in Mexico followed the same line as the Spanish with the added self-ordained responsibility for policing the moral tone of the country. Tiburcia, the healer wandered from town to town garbed in white wearing a large cross. She had her herbs and healing talismans blessed by the church and even made the sign of the cross over vital organs as part of her healing process. Her attention to vital organs however, belied a folk belief stemming from Aztec times in the balance between the brain, the heart and the liver. Moreover her reliance on folk remedies using native herb species was far from the European practice of the time.

When prayer and conventional medicine failed to cure illnesses, healers were the recourse and they practised their trade often with the tacit approval of the church. In this Tiburcia was no different. She seems to have set herself apart however in her fondness for alcohol and to invoking Satan when drunk in challenge to the local clergy. As Her..says, “she pushed limits too far and too often,” thus earning the censure of the inquisition and imprisonment that eventually led to her death.

Her story demonstrates an example of the merging of colloquial and scientific medicine, and reinforces that the indigenous practises have proved adaptable and maleable and continue to the present day.

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I attended a SRO lecture by Alan Taylor last week. He delivered a wonderful narrative on the life of Joseph Brant couched in the currently contentious discussion over native land rights in the Grand River basin. Taylor is the author of a variety of books, the most pertinent being The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution. Following a concise, if rather softly spoken, brief on the various parties playing in the story, he moved to the meat of the matter. The key element that Taylor seemed to want the audience to appreciate was that the Six Nations themselves were by no means homogeneous. Additionally, the area into which they moved was by no means dominated by one party or another and was a populated by a collection of diverse groups already: pre-existing natives such as the Mississauga, recent settlers from either the US or from the British Isles and significantly, a small, but vocal cadre of British military forces. The result is an intermixed culturally diverse people in this area.
Turning to Joseph Brant, Taylor suggested that he was a skilled strategician, who probably had the interests of his immediate band, if not the entire Six nations confederacy at heart as he attempted to find a place where they could practice their native customs as a nation and exist in peer relationship with British North America. To accomplish this he engaged in an evolving series of tactics that included superb use of the media, threats, and outright collusion with American interests to maintain a precarious balance of power. In the end he failed, partly through his inability to garner consensus amongst the six nations, to attain outright ability to buy, sell and lease the land that was granted to his confederacy and ultimately through the contingencies of events taking place outside of his immediate sphere of influence. Brant’s scheme to lease land within the Grand River reserve to American land speculators floundered when he overplayed his hand militarily and betrayed a deep racism within the colonial state that was unwilling to see settlers subject to native landlords. The talk was superbly attended and, along with Lou Pauly’s the previous week kicks off the Wilson series for this year.

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