Getting to Know Your Neighbours: Critically Thinking Through an 19th Cenutry Irish Family in Ontario

Summary

In exploring ethnicities in North America, groups are often contrasted against a homogenized patterning that can often be read as the white Euro-Canadian colonizer. While this framing is effective for demonstrating while specific groups may differ from the predominant pattern, it also risks creating a ‘straw-dog’ argument that artificially creates a homogenized pattern where non exist. This paper shows that the white Euro-Canadian colonizer can be explored to demonstrate nuanced ethnic difference. By demonstrating how the Odlums, an elite 19th-century protestant Irish family from Ontario, manipulated and maintained aspects of their Irish background to be simultaneously part of, and apart from, the homogenized dominant Euro-Canadian trope.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Seeing Ethnicity?: Parsing Hybridity, Creolization and Ethnogenesis in The Archaeological Record

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 541