This week, Susan Roy’s These Mysterious People brings another discipline’s relationship to Indigenous peoples and colonialism into view: archaeology.  Roy worked for many years doing legal research for xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam)  before doing her PhD.  This book started as her dissertation.  Roy now teaches history at the University of Waterloo.  Her work continues to be in collaboration with Indigenous communities, at the moment particularly with the shíshálh (Sechelt).

Hello everyone,

Paige and I wanted to post these as a way to get our conversation rolling on Tuesday, and to signal the kinds of questions we’ll be asking you to post yourselves as we progress through the term. Thanks!

Coll

From the Smith, O’Brien, Lomawaima, and other readings, begin to construct a history of history. In what ways is our discipline coterminous with, complicit in, and constitutive of colonialism as it manifests at local, national, and global levels?

Taking into consideration the very trenchant critique of trauma-based studies launched by Tuck and Yang, how do we balance a need for surfacing the history of colonialism and bearing witness (perhaps problematic phrasings in and of themselves) with a sensitivity to the concerns raised here? What is a way forward?

Our colleague Daniel Justice uses terms like humility and empathy as important features of ethical and smart scholarship. What role do you feel (pun intended, perhaps) these more affective components of our lives should play in our intellectual work?

We will use this site to share our discussion questions with each other on a weekly basis.  We will meet on Tuesdays from 11:30 – 2pm in Buchanan Tower 1207 on the unceded, ancestral territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people.

In preparation for our first class meeting on 9 January please read the assigned material for week 1 listed on the “course schedule page” of this blog.

Assignment details and other course information will appear on this blog shortly.

Here is a PDF that lists of the books we have ordered through the UBC bookstore.  The only change from this list is that we are not reading Witgen’s Infinity of Nations.  You will see there are quite a number of books that we have ordered for this course.  For the required books, we are reading all or nearly all of the book in question.  For the recommended books, we are reading shorter selections, but recommend that you purchase the book for your own future reference if possible.  Alternatively, we have also provided PDFs of selected chapters of these recommended books on the course schedule page.  We will make an extra copy (or, when possible, two) of nearly every book available to share in order to ease the monetary burden.

Looking forward to seeing all of you in January.

–Paige & Coll