Hi everyone and welcome to my blog post! My name is Anna and I am a fourth-year literature student at UBC. I was born in Mainland China and came to Canada with my family at the age of eight, so I guess you could say that I was raised in Canada. At the time when I left China, however, I was old enough that a part of me had already identified with the Chinese culture. Growing up, I’ve always liked to read, but my love for literature didn’t emerge until my high school years. It was then that I came to realize how much impact a book could have on someone, and how much of myself had been built around the stories that had crossed my path since I was young.

This course will give me an opportunity to explore difference mediums of story-telling, from voices that are in the shadows or gradually disappearing from our narratives. Sometimes the most powerful stories are not necessarily told by books, or films. Photographs, for example, can carry the weight of people’s lives within a small frame and in this technological age, stories can travel faster than ever through various sites and forums. All you need is to ignite a spark of interest within the audience, and new world of information can open up at their feet in a matter of seconds.

Despite my love for reading, I often feel that the number of stories I know is minuscule, and my perspectives are horribly limited. Through the use of blogs and comments in this course, I hope to step away from the comforting, familiar corner of stories I’ve collected for myself, and explore ones that are told by different voices, striving to be heard. As a Canadian citizen, I am ashamed to say that I do not know much about the lives and stories of the Indigenous Peoples.

One of the articles in Huffington Post mentioned Trudeau’s speech during the celebration of Canada’s 150, saying, “We recognize that over the past decades, generations, indeed centuries Canada has failed Indigenous Peoples.” However, what does it mean to come to this recognition? What are the actions that can follow once stories have been heard? These are some of the questions that I would like to explore throughout this course with everyone.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Nelson, Jimmy. “Gorgeous Portraits of World’s Vanishing People.” Ted, Ted, Oct. 2014. Web. 11 Jan. 2019. https://www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_nelson_gorgeous_portraits_of_the_world_s_vanishing_people

 

Rabson, Mia. “Respect Indigenous Peoples Who Don’t Want to Celebrate Canada 150: Trudeau.” Huffington Post, 30 June 2017. Web. 11 Jan. 2019. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2017/06/30/respect-indigenous-peoples-who-dont-want-to-celebrate-canada-15_a_23010031/?utm_hp_ref=ca-canada-first-nations