Update 12: A Title, At Last!
- John Vanek
- Jan 29
- 9 min read
Since the grant to write the book in 2026 was not funded, I am busy on multiple fronts right now: research, a cool side project, conference planning, and more. Most importantly, I think I finally found a title!
Come See Me!
The Little Canada Historical Society’s annual open house is this Saturday, January 31, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Enjoy tourtière and a musical performance featuring a historic Gervais-family violin (around 11:30). I’ll be there the whole time to answer questions about Little Canada history and the book project.
If you can't make in person, I was recently interviewed about the book project by NineNorth Media. In addition to my talking-head historian stuff, the interview features Little Canada Assistant City Administrator Laura Linehan—who happens to be a classically trained Suzuki violinist—playing a French piece on the restored violin.
A Title, At Last!
I think I have finally landed on a title I like. The scope of the book is so vast—it covers multiple migrations over a full century and develops numerous key themes—that I have struggled to find a title that encompasses it all. The title must, in a few words, capture its monumental scale, intense drama, deeply personal framing, and central thesis. I think I have one now.
The Long Road to Little Canada:
One Family’s Odyssey Through Empires, Borderlands, and Belonging
An Epic Story of Debt, Displacement, and Determination, 1789-1885
The main title works both literally and metaphorically. It signals a lengthy journey and a prolonged struggle, while prompting readers to ask: What is “Little Canada,” and how does it relate to big Canada?
The subtitle reinforces the scope—this is truly an odyssey, marked by repeated migrations and an endless series of unexpected challenges—but viewed through the lens of a single family. It also establishes several key themes. The Gervaises’ lives offer insights into the British Empire, the American Empire, and their contested borderlands. Finally, the subtitle hints at the protagonists’ lifelong struggle to balance self-fashioned identity with belonging.
Many nonfiction books also include a tag, often in smaller type on the cover, that further situates the book in terms of subject and style. Here, the tag communicates the more personal themes of the story. If the subtitle defines the macro-historical concerns—nation-states, frontiers, and identity—the tag defines the personal stakes: financial misfortune, powerlessness, and perseverance. (The alliteration doesn’t hurt, either.) It also tells readers exactly which century the narrative covers.
The title is obviously not final. Editors and publishers will have their say. But I am happier with The Long Road to Little Canada than with anything else I’ve come up with so far.
Another Artifact Discovery!
Many of you will recall last year’s wonderful surprise, when a Gervais descendant out west donated two historic family violins, a cuckoo clock, and several Hudson Bay–style blankets to the Little Canada Historical Society. Well, I have recently made another artifact discovery—one that ties into a famous moment not just in the family’s history, but in the history of Minnesota. This artifact embodies the political conflict that ultimately gave rise to the Twin Cities, and because of my research, I believe I can directly link it to its source!
For now, you will have to accept this teaser. I am waiting until I can obtain a photograph of the artifact before revealing what it is and why it matters. I found it hiding in the most expected of places—the Minnesota Historical Society—thanks to a hundred-year-old newspaper article. It is in collections that are not published online, which is why I never found it before.
I should be able to obtain a photograph, and perhaps even see it in person, sometime in February. For now, the only clue I will give is this map excerpt.
A Side Project: French-Canadian Heritage in Industrial Minneapolis
I mentioned in my last update that I might need to pick up some side work this year as we continue to seek funding for the next phase of the book project. The first side project emerged suddenly during a planning trip for an upcoming conference here in the Twin Cities (see “Save the Date!” below). Until funding is secured, this too will remain a teaser.
It turns out that Minneapolis’s most iconic Yankee landmark has surprisingly rich French-Canadian history. I am approaching this project from two angles. First, the nonprofit that runs the landmark has applied for a small grant to fund a new exhibit. If funded, I will return to my roots in exhibit interpretation by developing and writing the panels.
Second, I am drafting a corresponding article to submit to Minnesota History Magazine. One critique we received during the November grant review was that I am not a published author. While my interpretation and exhibit writing have won national- and state-level awards, it is true that I have never published in an academic journal. This article would therefore serve two purposes: promoting the exhibit and establishing me as a published historical voice in Minnesota. Peer review takes months, and the topic must align with the journal’s editorial calendar, so look for publication in the second half of 2026.
Save the Date!
The 2026 French Heritage Corridor Conference will be happening right here in the Twin Cities, May 29–30! (That’s the weekend after Memorial Day.)
Friday, May 29, will feature conference sessions and workshops on the theme of “Digging to Discover: Our Common Roots and Our Potential to Flourish in the FHC.” On Saturday, May 30, visitors will be invited on a tour of French heritage sites around the Twin Cities. The tour will feature the myth of St. Paul founder “Pig’s Eye” Parrant, an international kerfuffle over Roquefort cheese, iconic landmarks designed by famous French architects, and much, much more. It may even include the opportunity to paddle replica fur-trade canoes!
We are busy finalizing the conference agenda and tour schedule, but count on me being one of several hosts and tour guides.
Funding Update
After months of delay, next week LCHS leadership and I will finally be meeting with folks from the Minnesota Historical Society Grants Office to discuss what happened at the HRAC grant review meeting in November, how MNHS handled LCHS’s formal protest in December, and how the project can proceed in the next grant round. I had hoped to have an update for you in time for my January post, but it kept getting delayed by illness and vacations. In the meantime, I am considering several alternative funding sources.
Current Events
Lastly, it is impossible to ignore what is happening in the United States right now—particularly here in Minnesota. I could not in good conscience write an update without addressing the elephant in the room.
If you’re wondering, we are NOT okay. Recent immigration operations in Minnesota have affected many of us profoundly. Sadly, this includes my own elementary-aged children. In December, they watched classmates on their school bus frantically texting parents and begging the driver to let them off anywhere but home, only for those children to be hauled away by masked men in unmarked vans upon disembarking. My kids came home wondering if it could happen to them. (The school district has since updated its bus policy.) They attend a public Spanish immersion school where many teachers are from Spanish-speaking countries. These teachers are here legally on work visas, yet they still fear being disappeared or deported if federal agents stop them for having the “wrong” skin color and dismiss their valid papers as fraudulent.
As a historian who loves the United States dearly, I have been shocked by how many of my fellow citizens do not share what I long believed were core values held by the vast majority of Americans for the past 250 years. The Bill of Rights is meant to protect all Americans—libertarians and socialists; religious zealots and atheists; native-born and immigrant alike. Adherence to the Constitution is not optional. Due process is not optional. Most Americans used to believe this.
From my perspective as a historian, when ICE breaks into homes without a judicial warrant, detains U.S. citizens and denies them access to counsel, or assaults people filming from a public sidewalk with pepper spray (or worse), these are far more serious violations of the law than overstaying a visa. The former are attacks on core legal principles upon which the nation was founded. The latter is a civil offense that could—and should—be addressed humanely through legislative reform. They are not the same.
Violating constitutional principles is a far graver sin than simply being an immigrant. It strikes at the very pillars of what our nation claims to stand for.
My perspective is shaped by my extensive knowledge of U.S. history. Look no further than people at the center of this book project.
The Gervaises were immigrants. They were poor and illiterate and came to the United States under desperate circumstances. Contemporaries called them refugees. They practiced a religion some in the Anglo-Protestant majority considered not just heretical but dangerous for its supposed ill-effects on society. French Canadians were also seen as too close—too comfortable—with Indigenous peoples. As St. Paul’s first schoolteacher, a puffed-up Yankee from Vermont, put it, the region’s early residents were nothing but “low French and half-breeds” who knew nothing of the world and deserved none of its benefits. Another early Minnesota writer, a Philadelphia-born Presbyterian minister and prominent historian, hoped the railroads would bring enough people of “pure and undefiled religion” to sweep away Roman Catholics and other “heathens.”
The Gervaises were victims of this racial and religious bigotry—and parallels to rhetoric heard today are not hard to see.
In hindsight, of course, we realize that people like Benjamin and Genevieve Gervais were not a threat. Sure, they preserved certain aspects of their native culture, such as language and religion, but they embraced American political culture. Benjamin was proud to become a citizen. He voted, sat on juries, and ran for public office. The whole village of Little Canada celebrated the Fourth of July and the freedoms it represented. From the vantage point of 2026, the paranoia of early Yankee settlers looks absurd. So, too, will today’s paranoia—that every Hispanic or East African immigrant is a violent criminal—look absurd in 50 or 100 years.
Indeed, while some Anglo settlers feared people like the Gervaises, real injustices were being carried out by their own leaders. In 1840, Major Joseph Plympton, a corrupt Massachusetts-born military commander at Fort Snelling, ordered soldiers to raze the Gervaises’ home as part of a scheme to enrich himself by controlling land claims at St. Anthony Falls. When settlers complained that Plympton had exceeded his official orders and illegally placed their properties under martial law, Congress declined to reprimand him or compensate the victims.
The year before, the same officer had illegally—and unconstitutionally—used the army to release a man lawfully arrested by civil authorities. Once again, unchecked military power intruded unlawfully into civil society.
Decades earlier in Montreal, an Anglo-Canadian landlord had illegally seized hundreds of pounds’ worth of possessions from Genevieve’s widowed mother, leaving her destitute with little hope of redress in Anglo-dominated courts.
It's not that these things happened in the past, it’s that they were wrong in the past, and we are supposed to be better than that now. History exists to teach us so we do not repeat our worst mistakes.
These examples are not abstract historical episodes, nor can they be written off as “ancient history.” While many statutory laws have changed, the same constitutional principles that governed military officers in 1839 still govern ICE and Border Patrol agents today.
Like the Gervaises and their neighbors in St. Paul and Little Canada, most immigrants today are not a threat. They are hard-working people who came to the U.S. seeking economic opportunities, safety, and freedom. To some, the Gervaises practiced a “dangerous” minority faith and associated with the “wrong” people. Even if that made their neighbors uncomfortable, it was not unconstitutional—then or now. Freedom of religion, freedom of association, and freedom of opportunity are precisely what America claims to protect.
A nation governed by the rule of law survives only if everyone agrees that the law is supreme. Right now, the president and his agents are openly flouting judicial rulings, so much that just this week Minnesota’s top judge threatened to hold the administration in contempt. This is not good—it’s not good for any American of any political stripe. And it is never justifiable. Even if one believes immigration an issue of national security, it is not worth throwing out the Constitution to address it. Doing so will only weaken our great nation.
We must all, always, work to preserve our civil liberties no matter the threats we face. Our safety is only as valuable as the liberties it secures.
I am not only excited about the book, and new discoveries, I so very much appreciate how well you wrote about the current events from a personal and historian's viewpoint.