Griffiths, Naomi E.S.

ENCAENIA, CEREMONY B, 18 MAY 2008
NAOMI GRIFFITHS
to be Doctor of Letters

Naomi Griffiths has enjoyed a career as unlikely as it has been brilliant. In 1956 she left her native England to earn an M.A. degree in history at the University of New Brunswick in far-away Fredericton. She has since established herself as one of her adopted country's most accomplished academic leaders and its foremost historian of early Acadia and its people.

After completing a Ph.D. from the University of London, she joined the faculty at Carleton University in Ottawa, serving from 1979 to 1987 as Dean of the Faculty of Arts there, the first woman to hold that important position. Fluently bilingual, possessed of an incisive and brilliant mind, comfortable and confident among power-brokers, hers soon became an influential voice. She has played key roles in Canada's academic granting councils, the Deportment of National Defense Committee on Arts and Social Sciences, the Ontario Press Council, and the Ontario Council of Deans of Arts and Sciences. In 1990 she was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1999 was promoted to Officer of the Society.

Having experienced first hand the challenges that confront women scholars, Dr. Griffiths has devoted her academic and administrative skills to women's issues. She was one of the founders of the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women; her thoughtful book of 1976, Penelope 's Web, is treasured as a pioneering text of women's history in Canada; and her commissioned history of the National Council of Women in Canada, published in 1993, has received scholarly applause. For a generation of academic women she has been a role-model, wise counselor, and hero.

Naomi Griffiths treasures her ties to Ottawa and to Carleton, but her heart belongs to the Maritimes and especially to the history and culture of its Acadian peoples. Before her, their history was typically dismissed as a trivial sideshow in the greater imperial struggles of France and England; sentimentalized as a tale of innocence betrayed; or exploited as an ideological tool for contemporary political purposes. But in the scholarly publications of Dr. Griffiths, the early Acadians come alive, not just as deported victims, but as a people successfully forging and tenaciously preserving a unique culture. As no other historian, Dr. Griffiths conceptualizes the Acadians in the larger 17th and 18th century world. She draws out their similarity to other “border peoples,'' who, living in the shadow of powerful neighbors, have nevertheless found their very marginality an instrument for the preservation of their linguistic, cultural, and religious -- although not necessarily political -- autonomy. Today the world faces anew the task of defining a just and practicable relationship between cultural and ethnic minorities and the national and supra-national political entities that claim hegemony over them. To this task the experience of the Acadian peoples and the writings of Naomi Griffith have a unique contribution to make.

But is it really so unlikely that this Anglophone, British immigrant, should have become the preeminent authority in the complex and politically delicate field of early Acadian history? Perhaps, on the contrary, it was her Welsh heritage that has made her so sensitive to the plight of border peoples. Certainly it is her deep respect for family and tradition; her intuitive and nurturing character; her sense of fun, determination, and independence that have helped her understand and love the Acadian people, and allowed so many of them to love her. Naomi Griffith's life, like her scholarship, reminds us that most of us are immigrants, and that our prized and sometimes-painful national experiment in multiculturalism had its beginning on Maritime and Acadian soil.

From: Honoris Causa, UA Case 70