Madeleine Boyer

This was a group project. Group members: Tracy Zahradnik, Madeleine Boyer, & Courtenay Telford. 

Our project originally focused on the preservation of language and culture for literacy
and relevancy purposes for First Nations Peoples of Ontario, since these aspects are lacking for
our target community. This proposal would have involved the creation of an online storyboard
driven by the community incorporating culturally relevant content. Newly generated material
from the storyboard could be tied into the pre-existent On Demand Book Service (ODBS). As
roadblocks developed, our project continued to evolve in an effort to overcome these and other
barriers we encountered. Consistently, the notion of ‘outsider’ and imposition was brought up.
We realized that community engagement, contacts and partnerships were required to overcome
such roadblocks. We identified potential partners to aid us in the facilitation of our project,
including the Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO) and teachers or principals within these
communities.
Our project eventually evolved into one focusing on recruitment, training, and retention
of these community members into librarianship due to their better position of working with
communities and meeting community specific needs. We looked at various Indigenous
communities around the world and best practices in recruitment and retention of these groups
into post-secondary education, as well as did an extensive literary research about the barriers and
needs of Aboriginal People in Canada. In our research, we focused heavily on literacy and the
barriers associated with it and how it affected the community.

This study is a comprehensive literature review examining labor songs within trade unions, the labor movement, and in strike contexts. This research answers the following questions: whether the performance and composing of labor songs is dead within the twenty-first century and whether labor songs are a topic worthy of study in academia. The study also contemplates how to permanently reinvigorate academic interest in this topic. This review reveals that there is an impoverished amount of published literature about labor songs and a need for more documentation that is active, preservation, and research. Most published literature covers a period spanning the 1900s to the 1950s and is primarily American and British centric. The overarching goal of this research is to advocate the importance of labor song documentation and preservation for future research purposes and for preserving working class culture, history, and identity as they provide an alternative historical viewpoint and other invaluable information.

This is an upcoming presentation occurring at the Humanities Congress in Ottawa this June 2015.

Labor songs, the songs of the labor movement, have generally been an understudied genre. Clustered under broader genre classifications such as protest songs or work songs, these songs have otherwise received very little attention by academics, especially within Canada. Despite a mini-resurgence of interest worldwide over the past few decades many of these songs remain hidden or even lost, extinguishing voices of the past, sometimes forever. Augmented documentation and preservation efforts need to be taken as these educative documents preserve culture, identity, ideology, and history and give us firsthand looks into the movement, the era, and the community. Based on my York University master’s research and looking at Mark Gregory’s digital archival initiative Unionsong.com, this paper will discuss the new directions I plan to take my research and how web 2.0 will aid in preserving the songs of the Canadian labor movement.