This illustrator is drawing #365Canadians you might not find in history textbooks

You're probably familiar with Rick Hansen, Buffy Sainte-Marie and David Cronenberg, but do you know Chan Hon Goh, Del Lord and Lori Fung? Author, cartoonist and illustrator Evan Munday is drawing portraits of Canadians you might not find in textbooks — think less John A. MacDonald and more Alexander Milton Ross (who? See below!) in his Twitter project #365Canadians.

We chatted with Toronto-based Munday about the daily illustrations, the importance of how we remember people and the compelling contradictions of Canadian identity.

So, #365Canadians, how did this get started?

My partner last year decided she wanted to draw more and so she did daily sketches in 2016. But she did not share those drawings — I barely saw them myself. And as someone who has done illustrations in the past and used to do a lot of comic work, I'd kind of fallen out of drawing so I stole [her] idea for 2017!

The main difference being that I post them daily. Partially because I'm a show off, but also because I kind of need the public element to keep me doing it. I'm really interested in history in general, and I feel like Canadian history doesn't get the same kind of fun pop culture [telling] that other country's histories do. So I really wanted to make it portraits of different figures in Canadian history, both ones who are still alive and ones who no longer are, and both people who were fairly well known as well as people who most wouldn't have heard about.

Which is smart because 365 is actually a lot of people.

Ya, exactly! I don't know if there are 365 Canadians from history that people would just be able to name off the top of their head. Part of the process for me is learning [about] people that I'd never heard of before. I include very brief descriptions of who they are, maybe what their job was, maybe what they did that was particularly notable. They're all full body shots, all about the same size, all in the same style — at the end I want to make one crowd shot, like a Canadian history Where's Waldo.

Have you really made one every day so far?

I have really made one every day! Since January 1st. I draw them at night when I'm done everything else and the one that I'm posting [each day] is from the day before.

It looks like there's an effort to showcase fewer white men than we might usually see on lists of Canadian historical figures. Are you making a concerted effort to include diversify?

Canada is so many different people of so many different backgrounds, so many different races, different genders, and it was kind of a conscious effort, especially as I am a white male doing this historical project, to include a wide swath of different Canadians.

So how are you choosing who to draw?

That's the difficult part. I want to make sure when I'm drawing someone, it's a person who has done something of some distinction. I have an internal rule where I want to feel like the person I'm representing, at least to me very subjectively, has done more good than bad for Canadians as a whole. I want to include people that I feel are maybe not as well known but have done a lot of interesting, good things.

Yesterday I had Tiger Jeet Singh who's a Canadian wrestler. He worked in Japan but he lived most of his life in Milton [Ont.]. And he's also a huge philanthropist. And I think he's the first professional wrestler to have a school named after him. So if you're in Milton, you can go to a school named after a professional wrestler.

Tell me about Azzedine Soufiane.

That one I struggled whether I should do it or not. Azzedine was a grocer and part of the community in Quebec City, and one of the Muslims that was killed earlier this year [in the Quebec City mosque attack]. I wanted to do that as a tribute. I wasn't sure whether to do that or not, but at the same time I felt like it'd be nice if he were remembered in some way other than just a victim of a horrible hate crime.

Though your project isn't explicitly tied to Canada 150, has drawing these people given you any reflection on what it means to be Canadian?

Part of my secret [is] I became a citizen later in life. I'm actually a dual citizen — I was born in the United States and moved here when I was in high school. So I grew up with a lot of the historic folklore of the United States and I think most people agree that as overblown and sometimes fictitious as it is, Americans have done a really good job of selling themselves on their own history. And the importance of it. I feel like Canadians haven't done as great a job and like there's a tendency to think it's not as interesting.

One of my favourites is Alexander Milton Ross. He was an ornithologist who was secretly a conductor for the underground railroad. Under the guise of studying birds he would go to these plantations in the South and because he was a wealthy white man, they would let him roam free and look at birds. And while he was free pretending to look at birds, he was actually arranging with slaves and helping them escape the plantation.

There's so many different people represented in Canada that it's hard to say what Canada is. When I'm selecting people to draw, I'm trying to pick out the best that Canada has to offer. But at the same time, there's people who represent the conflict that has created the Canada that there is today.

Another one of my favourites that I drew, and it was a story I didn't really know when I drew him, is a soldier whose name was Masumi Mitsui. Masumi Mitsui was one of the most decorated soldiers in WWI. He was a Canadian originally from Japan, and he served in and was decorated as a hero of WWI. But then in WWII, he and his wife were interned. And he spent the rest of his life trying to get an apology for Japanese-Canadians from the government and he actually died the year before that apology was granted.

Canada is this really amazing place where you can have both those things be true — you can have someone who's willing to die for Canada but at the same time have so many fierce problems with Canada because of various different conflicts. Canada has a history of individuals and groups doing amazing things even sometimes in spite of authorities. I feel like that's sort of what I've been picking up as I go through it.

The people that interest me the most are people who have something to say and have stood against the forces of complacency.

For a daily dose of #365Canadians in your Twitter feed, follow @idontlikemunday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.