Bill Waiser on how history is written and re-written
Bill Waiser is a western Canadian historian. He has published more than a dozen books\u2013 many of them prize-winning. A World We Have Lost: Saskatchewan Before 1905, for example, won the 2016 Governor General\u2019s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.\xa0
Bill has been appointed to the Order of Canada, awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit, elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, named a distinguished university professor, and granted a D.Litt. He was the 2018 recipient of the Royal Society of Canada J.B. Tyrrell medal, presented for \u201coutstanding work\u201d in Canadian history, as well as the 2018 Governor General\u2019s History Award for Popular Media: The Pierre Berton Award.
We talk about his most recent book In Search of Almighty Voice,
Resistance and Reconciliation (Fifth House, 2020), about the life of Almighty Voice - a member of the One Arrow Willow Cree who died violently at the hands of Canada's North-West Mounted Police in 1897 - and how his violent death spawned a succession of conflicting stories \u2014 in newspapers, magazines, pulp fiction, plays and film; about how history is written and re-written, and why an 'accurate' depiction of the life and death of Almighty Voice matters.\xa0\xa0
Clarification: According to Statscan indigenous people make up 4.9% of Canada's population, 16.3% of Saskatchewan's population.\xa0