People have arrived on Turtle Island from the Asian continent since the 1500’s with people from modern-day Philippines. When considering what we now refer to as “Canada”, the first Asians to arrive came during the late 1700s, with multiple waves arriving through the last several centuries. Evidently, people of Asian descent have been, and continue to be, complicit in the ongoing settler colonialism of Indigenous lands – lands that have belonged to, and been tended to by, Indigenous people who have been here since time immemorial. How do people of Asian descent living on this land continue to benefit from their/our complicity? And how does this intersect with various forms of colourism and anti-Blackness within Asian communities?
People of Asian descent have lived on this land for centuries, since pre-Confederation. Yet, throughout this history, these communities have endured continuous racism and discrimination and treated as some “other”, while finding their/our own ways to survive and thrive. In what ways has this experience impacted these communities in terms of health? In what ways have these communities maintained their cultures and their health?
There is no way to “master” this course in the traditional sense – that isn’t the purpose of this course, and I am certainly not a “master” of this course either. This is a course about learning, sharing, and discovering.
I do hope, though, that when the course ends, students successfully meeting the course requirements will be able to:
- Appreciate the diversity, but also the unity, of experiences between various Asian communities in Canada
- Understand the intersection of various social issues in impacting the health of Asian communities in Canada
- Engage with the primary materials across different academic fields
- See themselves as agents of change – to identify health-related social issues facing Asian communities in Canada, and to propose potential solutions to those social issues
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