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Hello everyone, welcome to the blog that I will be posting on throughout the semester as we tackle this course together. My name is Kyle Olsen, and I am a fourth-year student at UBC majoring in Human Geography while minoring in English Literature. 

I am very excited to be taking ENGL 372 because I have studied a lot of literature from various countries across the world. However, I have not focused too much on studying literature in the Canadian context. By the end of this course, I hope I will have a better idea of what it truly means to be Canadian based on the different perspectives that we will approach throughout the semester. As a human geography student, I have learned quite a bit already about how colonialism has made Canada the way it is today; however, I have minimally studied these processes through a literary lens. For that reason, I come into this course, hoping that I can learn the perspectives of what it’s like for different groups of people to live in Canada. To be well-educated on a topic like colonialism in Canada, it is important to hear these perspectives of different people to get a true idea of how these processes affected their livelihoods.

In the previous semester, I took an Indigenous Literature course. We mainly focused on Louise Erdrich’s texts, Four Souls and Tracks. These novels were my first experience of learning about colonialism in North America through a literary approach. I found these books fascinating because the novels didn’t only share the perspective of one character’s narration but also through multiple characters. All the characters narrated in these stories came from different backgrounds as some of the characters were a part of the Ojibwe community while other characters were European settlers. I enjoyed this type of narrative throughout the story because it allowed me to experience how Indigenous people faced colonialism’s hardships and how their culture was affected permanently. Throughout this course, I hope to make similar connections with those two previous novels I have read.

This is a photo of my Dog! Her name is Callie and she just turned 2 years old!