TheBulletin.ca Journal of Downtown Toronto
The 2016 Heritage Toronto Awards are rapidly approaching on Monday, October 17! Our annual gala evening at the Isabel Bader Theatre celebrates the absolute best of Toronto’s heritage community. As in years past, this year’s Awards will include the Kilbourn Lecture and the Special Achievement Award.
Dr. Steven High
The Kilbourn Lecture – now in its 20th year! – will be delivered by Dr. Steven High, a Professor of History at Concordia University and a founding member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. Dr. High is an interdisciplinary oral and public historian who has published extensively on post-industrial transformation of North American cities. In Dr. High’s words:
Heritage can not just be seen. It can be heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. Heritage can be beautiful, but it also can be ugly or even toxic. Every place is an archive. So is every person.
This year’s Kilbourn Lecture invites us to consider industrial heritage from the vantage point of those who worked in mines, mills and factories or lived nearby. Oral history offers a multi-sensory way into this rich intangible history, now being lost with deindustrialization and gentrification. This year’s lecture also considers the ways that new forms of media are changing the way we think and do oral and public history. Digital media and the arts have made the intangible much more tangible in recent years. The result is that people are increasingly seeking a heritage that is interactive, participatory and living. As Laurier Turgeon has suggested, we are now living in “a new era of heritage.”
Carolyn King
The Special Achievement Award provides special recognition to those individuals who have made exceptional contributions to the preservation and celebration of Toronto’s heritage. Heritage Toronto is pleased to name Carolyn King as the recipient of the 2016 Special Achievement Award for her decades of work in the field of First Nations community development and promoting a better understanding of First Nations people in Canada.
Ms. King was the first woman ever elected as Chief of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation and a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in recognition of her support for First Nations history and advancement of Aboriginal peoples.
Tickets for the Heritage Toronto Awards are moving much more quickly than in years prior, and we expect a sold-out show. Tickets start at $20, so don’t delay – get your tickets today!
