Tuesday’s class really created an interesting discourse about Canadian history, and the role of life narratives in this National Literary Canon. It arose questions about who was doing the writing, who was being written about, and how accurately this reflected the various facets of an important historical event. As we learned, in the specific historical events revolving around the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the people who were doing the writing consisted of members of the dominant white male hegemony that was strongly in place at the time. They wrote about others of that elite class, as seen by poems of the time period like ‘Towards The Last Spike,‘ an epic poem that chronicles the building of the CPR that focuses in on the nailing in of the last spike and minimally addresses the workers who built the vast majority of the rest of the railway, Chinese Immigrants in particular. The intertextuality and allusions on page 130-131 in the Diamond Grill was very effective at counteracting this violent, misconstrued history and turning it on its head by taking the language and documentation and distorting it to show a truth that was and is much ignored. This section is a part of a discourse about censorship and perception of a nation, and how one can revise the teaching of history so it encompasses the previously invalidated experiences of minorities (who are often exploited then forgotten in the building of a nation.) This topic is still prevalent today, in cases like this where Colorado is considering revising the history textbooks to downplay the civil disobedience that catalyzed civil rights movements. How can we incorporate more Auto/Biographies in education to create a more truthful account of historical events? And whose stories are valid, and to what degree? How do we teach History objectively?
Works Cited
Associated Press. “Hundreds of Colorado students protest history curriculum changes that would promote patriotism.”Fox News. FOX News Network, 24 Sept. 2014. Web. 24 Sept. 2014. <http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/09/24/hundreds-colorado-students-protest-proposed-history-curriculum-changes/>.
Pratt, E.J.. “Towards the Last Spike (Annotated).” Towards the Last Spike (Annotated). N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Sept. 2014. <http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/pratt/poems/texts/188/fr188annotated.html>.