Prof. Angela Misri hosts historical podcast Canadian Time Machine
While hosting a new podcast series on milestones in Canadian history, assistant professor Angela Misri made some surprising connections with her guests. She also realized she had a few gaps in her own knowledge.
Misri is hosting Canadian Time Machine, a Government of Canada podcast produced by The Walrus Lab (external link) .
Season one walks listeners through four significant anniversaries that occurred in 2022.
“When you are asked to be a host, you have a lot of options,” she says, “I asked the producer - do you want me to allow myself to instill my own personality in this?” and they told her that is exactly why they hired her to take on this project.
The first episode (external link) explores how people in Canada identified before the Canadian Citizenship Act came into effect in 1947. Misri interviewed Audrey Macklin, lawyer and law professor, who described “what it means to be an immigrant, especially when you’re relating it back to Indigenous communities.”
Misri related to the episode as she immigrated to Canada with her parents when she was six years old from England.
The stories she heard while interviewing people who landed in Canada in 1972 also resonated. In the 50th Anniversary of the Ugandan Asian Resettlement (external link) episode, Misri examines Canada’s crucial role in helping resettle over 7,000 Ugandan asylum seekers after Ugandan president Idi Amin announced that all residents of Asian descent had to leave the country within 90 days.
Misri interviewed historian and anthropologist Zulfikar Hirji, and writer/editor Tasneem Jamal who resettled in Canada after the expulsion order.
“My entire family was driven out of Kashmir in the 80’s, and it was giving me flashbacks of having conversations with my uncles when they arrived in Delhi with nothing. These are the same kinds of conversations here,” she says.
Both of the interviewees described the racial discrimination they faced in Canada, similar to what Misri’s own experiences. As a host, she was surprised to find the similarities between the Ugandan and the Kashmiri resettlements.
“The parallels are incredible,” she says.
In hosting this podcast so far, she has discovered that she has “a hole in [her] understanding of historic references” and hopes to continue learning more about key points in Canadian history.
The podcast series is produced by The Walrus Lab, which creates branded editorial content. Those profits, it says, fund The Walrus, where Misri worked as the digital director until last year.
You can listen to the full episodes of Canadian Time Machine here. (external link)
