Hello everyone.
My name is Deepak Nijjer and I am a fourth year student in the Sociology department with a strong passion for improving my every day learning and engaging with my professors/peers. Admittedly, this is my first online course that I have ever taken and I can’t begin to express how excited I am in learning about Canadian literary genres in this interactive online fashion.
In briefly describing what I hope to learn in this ENGL 470 course, I am interested in the opportunity to learn about the scholarly work done on Canadian literature as it pertains to the story telling of the European colonization of Canada and the impact it has on the Indigenous populations in regards to the preservation of their traditions. The concept of story telling is something that I am very interested in because we have to opportunity to engage in scholarly work to expand our knowledge on hearing the stories of those who we do not always hear. Being a sociology major, I have been fortunate enough to enrol in classes that analyze racism, class issues, gender issues, structural deficiencies causing cyclical implications for those oppressed in Canadian society.
The issue of racism in Canadian societies is a topic that hits close to home for me, as my parents are immigrants from India who came to Canada in the late 1970’s with little to no money/resources. The issue of racism is prevalent today in many different forms in contemporary Canadian society and is a cause for concern provided the on-going widespread acceptance of immigrants throughout the country and multiculturalism is one of the core elements in the formation of the Canadian identity.
I look forward to a great semester in ENGL 470 and getting to know you all as the semester progresses. Thank you for taking the time out to read my first blog entry for the course.
Image: Thompson, Peter J. Oh Canada Your Home On Native Land. 2013. Alberta.
Gilmore, Scott. “Canada’s Race Problem? It’s Even Worse than America’s.”Macleans. 22 Jan. 2015. Web. 18 Jan. 2016.
Woroniak, Monique, and David Camfield. “First Nations Rights: Confronting Colonialism in Canada.” Global Research. Socialist Project, 31 Jan. 2013. Web. 18 May 2016.
Hi Deepak,
I agree with you that the relationship between European colonization and the ability for indigenous peoples to preserve their traditions is an interesting topic, that is heavily connected with story telling. I think this relationship ties in closely with another good point you brought up, that often there are stories that the majority of people don’t get to hear. In this way, it seems that stories can be seen as both the downfall of these indigenous traditions or the mechanism of their preservation, depending on which stories we listen to.
Thanks for the insightful post.
Cam
Hi Cam,
Thank you for your insightful comment, I am a strong believer in the power of story telling which was first inspired to me from the book “In Plain Sight” by Leslie Robertson (a must read for sure). I am looking forward in to relating the new ideologies regarding the power and effect of un-heard stories in connections with my previous experiences. I agree that the issue of the preservation of indigenous traditions is embedded in the fact that the dominant settler colonial ideology has yielded to a general sense of ‘abolishment’ in hearing the stories of the First Nations peoples in order to gain an understanding of who they really are and their backgrounds that they come from.
This deeply ties into Chamberlains argument in the final chapter of his book, where he places importance on the ability for people to create a sense of unity through a mutual understanding of differences in a society.
Thank you Cam for reading my first blog, I look forward to working with you in the future.
Kind regards,
Deepak Nijjer
“I agree with you that the relationship between European colonization and the ability for indigenous peoples to preserve their traditions is an interesting topic, that is heavily connected with story telling.”
Can you see what is wrong with this sentence?
Look: European / indigenous
Who do European’s get a capital letter – but not Indigenous?