Hi everyone! My name is Jacob Kosh, and I’m a fourth year English Literature student at UBC. This course we are taking together, English 372: Canadian Studies taught by Dr. Erika Paterson, aims to strengthen our affinity for stories from the people who have inhabited Canada by providing a range of perspectives from this land’s history. This course will increase our awareness of the power of storytelling and how important it can be, from reading stories written by Indigenous people to writing our own blogs about these stories.
As an uninvited guest and white settler, I am hoping this course will not only expose me to more perspectives from people living on this land from before and since colonization, but also improve my understanding of the complicated relationship between myself and this land that fundamentally does not belong to me. In this course I am looking forward to learning more about Indigenous history pre- versus post-colonization, as I have not taken a Canadian History course with that as the focus, and have only a general understanding of this aspect of history. I am hoping to better understand the progress of relations between Indigenous people of Canada from contact to today.
As for contemporary stories, I am interested in the ongoing battle between Justin Trudeau’s government and the Wet’suwet’en Nation here in so-called British Columbia. As this course is focusing on stories, instead of recounting this story myself I thought it would be appropriate to use this blog post as a platform to pass along a short film about this conflict told by the people who are fighting it and understand it best. If you watched the film and would like to read more about this topic, you can find everything you need to know here. Coincidentally, tomorrow (January 7, 2020) marks the one year anniversary of the RCMP raid of the checkpoint erected to halt further invasion, and there are several solidarity events and fundraisers starting tomorrow in memoriam and support. I use this example of the Wet’suwet’en conflict as a reminder that whatever accounts of colonization we will cover in this class, even in 2020 colonizing is continuing to take place right under the noses of many Canadians.
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Works Cited
“INVASION.” YouTube, uploaded by UnistotenCamp, 1 November 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3R5Uy5O_Ds.
Unist’ot’en: Heal the People, Heal the Land. Unisto’ot’en Camp, 2017, http://unistoten.camp/. Accessed 6 January 2020.
Hi Jacob! It’s great to meet you! Great job on the first post! I just have some points you might want to use to continue your ideas. When you mention that you want to learn more about aboriginal history and that you haven’t taken a history course that covers the subject matter we are in this course, are you speaking of the actual conflicts between aboriginals or do you wish to learn more about their cultural views and ideas in relation to their history? As this is a literature course it does not cover the exact frames that a history one would. In that case what are you hoping to learn from the medium we are engaging with and how do you think it’s a benefit? Is it more limiting then learning from a purely historical standpoint? Or do you feel that the stories told that we must engage with must be purely factual and in the realm of non-fiction? As literature is often used to express cultures, world views and ideas through more abstract often fictional stories.
Hi Nargiza! Nice to meet you, too. And thank you for the input! I am most interested in the cultural history told through stories. For example, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? is full of rich historical accounts of Indigenous people in Canada through the centuries. An example I was particularly interested in was the story Chamberlin told of bringing his grandfather’s quirt back to Alberta to be assessed by Indigenous experts on what exactly the carvings and paintings on it meant (178). Instead of rehashing a chronological account of Indigenous history post-colonization, getting to read these stories is an interesting way to learn about the people who have inhabited the land for millennia, and how they and the generations of settlers after colonization have interacted and co-existed (or how they have not). For me, this is a more engaging way to learn about the history of Canada; I can do all the research I want on my own time to cover events of the past, but being offered a curated reading list on these topics through a variety of lenses is a treat. I do not believe factual accounts are particularly more helpful nor more interesting, so in that regard I am excited about how Canadian history is presented in this course.