• ​Unit Title

    ​Twelve Ways to Deny a Genocide

    Lesson Titles

    ​Background for Teachers

    ​This unit called “Twelve Ways to Deny a Genocide” helps students understand how and why people and countries have argued that certain genocides never really happened. The unit fits well with focused conversations about particular genocides as well as very general conversations about careful reading, critical thinking, and civic responsibility.

    The first lesson, called “Understanding Genocide Denial,” teaches students about denial by looking at various twentieth- and twenty-first-century examples. The second lesson, called “Research Project,” asks students to research a particular genocide and to identity the strategies that have been used to deny it.
  • A 26-minute documentary about how the Georgetown Boys were brought to Canada in the 1920s as part of a humanitarian undertaking. It uses archival materials and interviews with the Boys (now men) to tell their story and was recorded at the Armenian Boys’ Farm Home in Georgetown and the Armenian Community Centre in Toronto. Created by Dorothy Manoukian in 1987.

  • Pages from Armenian-Canadian History is the Corning Centre’s first book-length publication. It brings together all known issues of Ararat Monthly and Արարատ ամսաթերթ, two newsletters published by the Georgetown Boys and their teacher Aris Alexanian in the 1920s.

    The Georgetown Boys were a group of 110 genocide orphans brought to Canada starting in 1923. Led by Alexanian, they created the Ararats to practice their English and Armenian, to share their artwork and short stories, to spread news about life on their orphanage-farm, and to keep connected with Armenians around the world. The publication of Pages from Armenian-Canadian History was made possible by our work, over ten years, to gather the dispersed remnants of these newsletters from families, libraries, and archives in Canada, Armenia, Austria, France, and the United States. Originally mailed to 2,000 people in more than thirty countries, the Ararats are once more available to readers all around the world!

    To buy the book in hard copy, search “Pages from Armenian-Canadian History” on your country’s Amazon site:

    Click here to read it online

    Click here to download it

  • This academic article by our director of research Daniel Ohanian is about the migration of the Georgetown Boys and Girls—children and women who had survived the Armenian Genocide—to Canada. Its full title is “Sympathy and Exclusion: The Migration of Child and Women Survivors of the Armenian Genocide from the Eastern Mediterranean to Canada, 1923–1930.”

    This is the summary:

    In 1918, some 500,000 Ottoman Armenians found themselves displaced from their homes or living in Muslim households in the Eastern Mediterranean and the South Caucasus. For most, life did not return to normal after WWI. Rather, new wars, war scares, political maneuverings, economic policies, famines, and epidemics during 1918–1930 resulted in a long-term refugee crisis that was responded to by a large number of Armenian and non-Armenian organizations. This article looks at one such response: the humanitarian relocation to Canada of 110 boys and 39 girls and women—all genocide refugees and most of them orphans. It traces how this relocation campaign was realized despite Canadian immigration authorities’ long-standing efforts to keep Asians, the impoverished, and the stateless from entering the country. Breaking with the often simplistic and celebratory tone of the literature on humanitarian aid to Ottoman Armenians, this article discusses how the Canadian fundraising campaigns of 1880–1922 were a liability for this subsequent relocation project, and it pays special attention to the people and ideas that opposed it.

    Click here

  • Exhibition: ”The Forty Days of Musa Dagh: Testament of the Resistance at the Heart of the Armenian Genocide”

    Following three months of struggle and resistance against the Ottoman army, 4,500 Armenians from the villages of Musa Dagh (Turkey) were saved by the French.

    July 1, 2017, marks Canada’s 150th birthday and the 94th anniversary of the arrival of the first 46 Armenian genocide orphans at Georgetown, Ontario. A group of 50 were collected from the London, UK-based Armenian Refugees (Lord Mayor’s) Fund Orphanage in Corfu, Greece, and traveled via Marseilles to Cherbourg, France. Four were held back for several weeks, with the rest continuing on to Quebec City. Taking a train through Quebec and Ontario, they finally arrived at Georgetown on what was then called Dominion Day. The project was a milestone in the history of a country that has prided itself for its humanitarian record.