Abstract
Small Stories of War: Children, Youth, Conflict in Canada and Beyond, edited by Barbara Lorenzkowski, Kristine Alexander, and Andrew Burtch, is the product of a symposium held in November 2016 at The Canadian War Museum that brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, survivors, and activists. The contributors explored the ways that the experiences of war and conflict differ for young people and adults. Within the culminating text, the authors present analyses of the mechanics of memory, emotions, and knowledge in ways that demonstrate the different perspectives that children maintain. These perspectives are the products of different socio-political, emotional, and educational forces children face in addition to the reality of violence. Educators, parents, activists against nuclear war, and militia fighters imagined children as the ideal sources for a new socio-political future. In the responses to the pressure of futurity, children sometimes broke from the script, creating new memories and languages that differed from the expectations placed upon them by adults. As the contributors emphasize, children created new forms of knowledge as well as made political claims. The volume does not simply look to the past to examine history, but also to the future, presenting alternative forms of memorialization and justice.
The authors present a valuable source for scholars and students seeking to expand their methodological toolbox. The edited volume contains four different parts, fifteen chapters, and five analytical strands: experience, ways of knowing, temporalities, children as political actors, and communities of memory. Though the editors have curated a global discussion, there is a particular focus on Canada. The contributors place Canada in a global perspective displaying networks of war mobilization and refuge. This does provide, as the editors discuss in their introduction, a kaleidoscope into Canadian history.
Part One of the collection explores children's direct experiences of war with three contributions focused on the First and Second World Wars and during the Cold War. The authors emphasize that though children were the targets for scientific discourse, parental care, and forms of educational experiments, children could subvert adult-imposed expectations. This is eloquently shown in Carolyn Kay's chapter “Children's Images of War from the German Home Front, 1914–1918” which focuses on children's drawings created in German classrooms. Utilizing an impressive collection of drawings located in Germany and Austria, Kay highlights how children were targeted by pedagogues and teachers in the hopes of promoting not only patriotism, but continued support for the war. Educators encouraged children to draw various aspects of the warfront including battlefields, air raids, and caring for the wounded. Kay highlights two important methodological approaches to analyzing children's drawings. First, these sources demonstrate the ways war culture entered the classroom and how children were instructed to perform and enact pro-war feelings and emotions. And second, by closely reading the ways children participated in these exercises—examining the sizes, colors, and shapes utilized in the drawings—historians can uncover individual views of the war. The thread presented by Carolyn Kay is continued in Barbara Lorenzkowski's chapter, “Sensing War: Childhood Memories of the Wartime Atlantic: 1939-45.” The author discusses the ways cities were experienced through smell, sound, and touch more than just the written and spoken landscape. These sensory experiences importantly differed for adults and children. As the author maintains, children “inhabited a sensory world that was markedly different” (p. 65). For adults who saw potential danger and disruption, particularly with the lodging of soldiers and ammunitions, children saw excitement and opportunities for adventure. Andrew Burtch furthers this discussion on experience and knowledge creation in “‘What am I to do to Save my Children?’ Canadian Children in Civil Defence Planning.” Burtch's study is multi-directional, examining the state's approach to the threat of nuclear war, the response of ordinary citizens, and then the reactions of individual children and youth. Burtch presents a vibrant discussion on the cultural construction of the symbolic child that was mobilized in the hopes of making political claims and the reality that older children were also active participants.
Part Two of the collection explores the ways war and conflict affected the family and community with a particular view towards relationships between children and parents. The contributors emphasize the ways gendered care, emotional labor, and community building were reimagined, disrupted, and performed during times of war. Kristine Alexander and Ashley Henrickson's “Children, Soldiers, and Correspondences in Canada's First World War” examines how letters sent between parents and children sought to make up for the absence of a family member during wartime. Letters, the authors highlight, are material objects that demonstrate the experiences of “waiting.” Not only are historians encouraged to read the letter for its contents, but also to analyze how it was physically handled. In the collection of letters examined, the authors show the ways fathers sought to keep up with the daily life of the family (out of fear of being forgotten by their children) and the ways mothers and children sought to make up for their absence by taking on additional roles (emotionally and financially). Chapter Five continues this discussion on parenting and gender roles in Isabel Campbell's “Deconstructing a Canadian Military Family: The Taylor Mother and Son Remember the Cold War.” Campbell utilizes oral testimonies to explore how a mother and son managed the demands of military family life that including dealing with constant relocation and a largely absent father figure. Though the Canadian military promoted the figure of the strong masculine father, it was largely mothers who conducted the bulk of the parenting in their absence. In Chapter Six Tarah Brookfield focuses on space and community formation in “From Wartime Refuge to Peaceful Hippie Haven: Generations of Youth on Grindstone Island.” Brookfield charts the history of an island that had served as a space of refuge for youth from the Second World War through to the Cold War. The author's discussion illuminates how a space could be utilized and mobilized to imagine new forms of political activism that actively included the family unit.
Part Three explores the ways children shared difficult experiences with violence and war. The three chapters in this section utilize largely oral testimonies along with drawings from young children to explore feelings of isolation, despair, and, at times, coping mechanisms. Deborah Harrison and Patrizia Albanese open the section with their chapter “Adolescents during Canada's Afghanistan Mission.” The sociologists examine young people attending a school with a large military community to explore the ways these people were affected by the Afghanistan mission at home, school, and with their friends. They show the ways young people felt isolated from their peers who did not have family serving in Afghanistan. Many also recorded the ways they struggled mentally with the added responsibility of having to emotionally support their remaining parent. The authors emphasize the need to listen to the voices of these young people who felt left behind by their communities. Myriam Denov examines the oral testimonies of children born of wartime rape in Northern Uganda to highlight the intergenerational effects of the civil war. The chapter examines the voices and perspectives of sixty children born in the Lord's Resistance Army captivity. Once the civil war ended, they continued to be affected by their origins and the treatment of their families, communities, and larger society. Mary Tomsic's chapter “Politics and Emotion in Drawings by Children in Australian Immigration Detention” highlights the ways children utilized their drawings as a form of protest in her examination of the drawings compiled by children detained in offshore detention facilities on the Manus Islands and Nauru. Though these images have been used by many children's rights groups, Tomsic returns to the drawings to emphasize children's protest against their own treatment. These are not actors without a voice, rather they are making direct political claims. Together, the section emphasizes children's agency in telling their own stories for the sake of creating a new political reality.
The last section of the collection provides the reader with close readings of various forms of children's stories of war. Kristine Alexander and Ashley Henrickson, Claire Halstead, and Barbara Lorenzkowski return to letters and oral testimony to explore children's experiences of war. Andrew Burtch investigates how children utilized the medium of drawing to respond to Mine Awareness Education in Former Yugoslavia. Mary Tomsic further explores intergenerational storytelling with her analysis of four books published with Kids Own Publishing. Elizabeth Miller provides the reader with a discussion on the project “Mapping Memories,” a media project dedicated to learning with youth with refugee experience.
Notwithstanding the global reach of many chapters, Canada was the focus of the volume. The editors remind the reader that many Canadian children were not directly affected by major violent conflicts across the globe. One however wonders about the concept “tyranny of distance” (p. 5) utilized by the editors of the volume in the introduction. This approach does run the risk of minimizing the real violence within the Canadian settler-colonial project as well as the violence faced by non-white Canadians. The editors dedicate some space in the introduction to discuss the history of violence and displacement within Canada. They highlight that Canadian history is not only marked out by various forms of exclusion, but also that the category of child is bracketed by class and race. The editors encourage the reader to keep in mind Laura Ishiguro's concept of “settler futurity” which focuses on white children (p. 17). For example, while white British children were evacuated to Canada for refuge, state officials took Indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools, in an act of cultural genocide. Additionally, Japanese-Canadian children were also interned by the state at the same time. While this is an important note from the editors in the introduction, it does not make up for the lack of discussion on Indigenous children's voices from across Canada in the rest of the volume.
The volume provides an impressive account of children's stories of war and conflict. With fifteen chapters, the reader dives deep into specific sources to excavate voices, examples of agency, and experiences that also provide a view into structures of power, violence, and migration. Indeed, the volume is a masterclass on how to approach sources.