Greetings! 

My name, as the title of this blog suggests, is Breanna E. Simpson. I’m not telling you what the E. stands for, you’ll just have to guess in the comments! Welcome to my first ever blog.

I am a fourth year Arts student at UBC’s Vancouver Campus, majoring in English Literature and Classical Studies. My main area of interest is ancient languages and literature, primarily koine greek and greek verse.

This is my first online course through UBC, although I completed high school entirely through distance education courses, administered by the VLN(Vancouver Learning Network). It was a digital and WWW run education format which operated several years behind its time in terms of technological and educational standards, and left a residue of excellent online research techniques in my consciousness, but little else besides. One area which was singularly lacking in the curriculum was any formal or in-depth study of First Nations history, cultural, or stories. My focus in university has been on Middle and Old English studies and texts, and my knowledge of First Nations issues is still rather lacking in some areas. I am hopeful that EN 470A will assist me in correcting this deficit, and so far, it has risen to the challenge.

An online course designed to cultivate and stimulate a critical understanding of Canadian literary canon; what our stories are, where they come from, and how we perceive them, “Oh Canada! “Our Home and Native Land”” seeks to challenge our assumptions about what makes up”our”stories, as we think we know them. It does this by presenting a variety of primary and secondary sources which examine issues of storytelling, colonialism, and racism, from both Indigenous and European perspectives. The course offers a cutting edge approach to utilizing social media to facilitate student learning and participation, turning the sometimes alienating and anonymous world of the WWW into a chance to connect with other students and contribute opinions and content on an entirely different level to the traditional classroom environment. This course joins a growing wave of change in the way learning is presented and experienced, feeding off of the phenomenon of distance education which increased exponentially with the advent of the WWW(Bruce, 1999). While some argue that such a “revolution” has not had the growth or impact that one might have expected(see Doyle, 2010), which one could argue is demonstrated by my own rather lackluster experiences with distance education, this medium of education’s potential for providing innovative and interactive learning environments is perhaps unlimited, in my opinion. (Feel free to discuss this issue further in the comments, or argue for a different point of view. I’ve only done some superficial research on this topic so far, and would be interested to hear others perspectives on the value/potential of online education). Thus far, this course shows every sign of far exceeding Doyle’s(and my own) rather poor opinion of the potential of distance education to become a force of learning capable of rivaling more traditional, classroom based systems.

While I’ve touched briefly on my hopes and expectations for this course above, I feel compelled to return to my earlier reflection on my lack of knowledge about Indigenous perspectives and stories, and what this deficit in our primary and secondary educational institutions might mean for the persisting attitudes of racism and silence surrounding the history of Europeans and Canadians’ treatment of Indigenous peoples. I have so far completed the first fifty or so pages of J. Edward Chamberlin’s excellent “If this is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?”, and am finding it both an engaging read, and a rather eye-opening one. For the first chapter and a half, I was struck by the contradictory reaction the book sparked in my consciousness, tapping into familiar language and universal social issues which I have encountered before(I have written several papers on colonialism and “The Other”, most of them for English classes), but in an entirely new context. I was startled to realize that while I recognized the framework of the issues being discussed and presented, the context was completely new. Every time I’ve studied topics of colonialism and the dangers of falling into a “settler’s” viewpoint, and  the prevalent “Us” vs. “Them” attitude, the subject of the discussion has always been far removed, discussing Slavery or the colonial practices in Africa or South America. It’s never been this personal. That both made me uncomfortable, and made me sit up and think, for a lot longer than a moment.

Why is this the first time I’ve ever really directly studied this topic in any formal setting? This is partly due to the teachers and/or courses I had in high school, as my brother, who was several years ahead of me in school, studied Indigenous issues rather heavily. Even so, I was a child who loved history, and devoured every history book, fiction and non-fiction, that I could find for children and young adults in the library. I read books about all aspects of history, from Ancient Egypt to the Slave Trade to the Romanovs. But none about this. Why? It wasn’t by choice as far as I can remember; there simply were no books about Indigenous issues, peoples, or their stories or perspectives readily available to a young person. It wasn’t a part of my education, and that bothers me immensely, partly because I’ve never really thought about this deficit in my own knowledge of my country before.

There was one issue mentioned by Chamberlin which struck a cord, albeit a rather distant one. It was when he discussed the “worthless horses” of the Navajo in Chapter 2, “Doodlers”(35-46). This issue, with Collier’s classification of the “worthless” horses into sheep units and the livestock reduction program, was something that I could at last claim some prior knowledge of. It’s a rather tenuous connection, but the issue was featured as a side plot in a series of novels I read many years ago, by Terri Farley, an author and activist who works to preserve the descendents of those “worthless horses”, some of whom still roam free on American soil. By finding this one tenuously familiar connection to the narrative, the book transformed for me from an informative and eye-opening read to a method of awakening a desire deep in my own consciousness to know, to question, to understand . Intellectually, the idea of questioning the stories one thought one knew is an easy concept  to understand. Emotionally, it’s a rather daunting idea. Once it’s awakened however, it can be a terrifyingly exhilarating and educational ride, as I’m currently discovering. If this course continues as it’s begun, I have a feeling I might never look at “our” stories, or “our” country, the same way again.

References:

Bruce, Bertram. “Education Online: Learning Anywhere, Any Time.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. 42.8(1999): 662-665. Web. May 14, 2014.

Doyle, William R. “Playing the Numbers: Online Education, the Revolution that Wasn’t.” Change. 41.3(2009): 56-58. Web. May 14, 2015.

Farley, Terri. Phantom News. The Phantom Stallion, 2003. Web. May 14, 2014.

Vancouver Learning Network. VLN, BC’s Largest Online School, 1999. Web. May 14, 2014.