“For decades, our coverage was racist. To rise above our past, we must acknowledge it.”

Reading that recent news-making admission on National Geographic’s website gave everyone at Canadian Geographic pause. The magazine that’s dedicated to making Canada better known to Canadians and the world hasn’t been publishing for as long as National Geographic, but it has been around since 1930. That’s 88 years of telling Canadian stories from coast to coast to coast, and beyond. Some of those stories were award winners. Some took you to places you might otherwise never have seen. Some introduced you to people you might otherwise never have met. Some were educational. Some were entertaining. Could some of them also have contained racist language or attitudes?

The answer to the latter question is yes. Indeed, in recent years, Canadian Geographic hasn’t shied away from acknowledging and discussing this in its occasional forays into its own archives (see examples here and here).

But, given the findings of our peers at National Geographic, the idea of conducting a more comprehensive review of every issue of Canadian Geographic ever published is worthy, and one that the magazine will pursue.

For the purposes of this story, in fact, a cursory search through the very first issue of what was then called the Canadian Geographical Journal yielded sentiments that would never pass muster with any editor of this magazine today. For instance, in a story titled “Canada’s Viceroy in the West Indies,” which is about then-Governor General Viscount Willingdon’s visit to the “sun-room of the empire,” the caption for an image of Lady Willingdon with a young local black girl is “A dusky maiden honoured but shy.” Later in the same issue, the caption for a picture of men described as “a group of fakirs” in India or Tibet refers to them as “lusty beggars” before asserting that the “morality of many of them is of the lowest type.”