Hi everyone! I’m Kaitie.

I’m from outside a small town in Central Ontario, in the territory of the Chippewas of Lake Simcoe and Huron. My family came to different parts of Ontario from Scotland and England, four or six or eight generations back. I’m near the end of a two-year program in Library and Information Science at UBC – I was in beautiful Vancouver for about a year and a half, and am now back in Ottawa working.

I did Canadian Studies at OttawaU, including quite a few English courses, but I haven’t taken an English course in four years, and I’m very much looking forward to it! In my program now, which has a great First Nations Curriculum Concentration, I’ve learned a lot by looking at colonization in Canada in terms of education, libraries, and information services. A lot of the time, in reality, that means non-Aboriginal teachers, librarians, archivists, policymakers, etc. designing and delivering resources and programs about and to Aboriginal people. Efforts to decolonize that information world mostly centre around becoming more aware of our colonial reality, and changing the paradigm towards supporting Aboriginal communities’ information initiatives.

ENGL 470A, Canadian Literary Genres: Canadian Studies

For me, the greatest opportunity in this course is to reflect on the question of how we tell stories about ourselves and others, both “story telling in literature and the stories we tell about literature” (Paterson). This is the basic question that a lot of my coursework on decolonization has led to, and I’m really looking forward to the challenge of tackling it in depth. In the context of my information science lens, I’ll be trying to make more explicit the lines between storytelling and the way we manipulate it with things like classification, means of access, and format.

The variety of forms of storytelling in this course is exciting – written stories, music, video. I think I’ll enjoy the variety of material, and the variety of thoughts from everyone else! Along with our weekly blog posting and commenting, we have an individual final paper, and an intriguing group research project. I’m looking forward to a summer of letting things sink in.

See you all soon!

Kaitie

Works Cited

“About Us.” Chippewas of Rama First Nation. Chippewas of Rama First Nation, n.d. Web. 14 May 2015.

“First Nations Curriculum Concentration (FNCC).” iSchool@UBC: School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies. University of British Columbia, n.d. Web. 14 May 2015.

Paterson, Erika. “Course Syllabus.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres May 2015. University of British Columbia, 2015. Web. 14 May 2015.

rocknrollmachine2003. Ottawa River. 2006. Flickr. Digital image. 14 May 2015.