Welcome to My Blog!
My name is Ryan Littlechilds and I am happy to welcome you to my blog for English 470: Canadian Studies: Canadian Literary Genres.
This a course about the Canadian story – who tells it and how they tell it. Specifically, we will focus on the differences and similarities between Indigenous and European literary and oratory traditions. Our study moves beyond the story itself, however, by also including meta-literary issues of whose stories “we” as “Canadians” hear and those “we” ignore. This course will address Canadian history and identity, racism, colonialism, canonization, and power.
The process by which we study these complex issues is by interacting through our blogs. Our professor, Dr. Paterson, has provided assignments that we post on our blogs. Students’ are expected to comment and respond on each other’s blogs, creating an interacting web of insights and questions. In short, this course involves two streams of learning. We will learn about important core Canadian issues through the power of stories. We will also learn how to effectively use collaborative online work spaces.
So what are my expectations of this courses? I have taken Dr. Paterson’s ENGL 301 before and it was the best online course I have taken yet because it was highly structure and practical. My advice to fellow students is to be vigilant on keeping up with the assignments. Although they are frequent, they are chunked in a way that if you spend about an hour a day on them, you should be able to keep up and do well. I have not come across an online course yet that chunks the assignments so well. ENGL 301 was also practical. I still continue to use what I learned in that course in my life (here’s an assignment we did). I am optimistic that this course will be the same.
I also expect to expand my knowledge about Canada and use this knowledge in my life and in my future career as a high school English teacher. I am very excited about this!
Nevertheless, I approach this course, as I do with all humanities courses, with a measure of skepticism. This course’s cannon of knowledge has been filtered by our professor and academia in general. There is no pure knowledge in the humanities. If there truly is a leftist bias within the humanities, then this course and all the others we have taken up to this point, has provided a mere shade of the spectrum of colours that make up the reality we think we know.
Thank-you for your post, Ryan.
It is fascinating that you said we will be learning about core Canadian issues “through the power of stories”, because storytelling has such power to either give voice and agency to Indigenous peoples speaking their own truth: or for powerful colonial narratives to problematically take agency away and speak over the voices, lived experiences and identities of real people.
To this end, I must recommend Thomas King’s book, “The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative”. He most brilliantly writes on this topic through a series of short stories. One thing I found interesting is how King writes about the colonial, romanticized and problematic idea of “The Dying Indian”.
King writes that when narratives about his own people are so incredibly powerful and pervasive -these colonial narratives start to become romanticized in favor over real groups of people. He says the romanticized and racially fetishized, colonial construct of “The Indian” is so beloved that it leaves little space for others to even try and understand real, living, breathing, human Native Americans.
The colonial story of “The Indian” is often championed over the real Indigenous people.
Thanks for your teaser into King. I’m looking forward to reading him this term.
It must be hard for people who already face difficulties around their identity to also have to deal with positive (as well as the obvious negative) stereotypes and distorted representations. This a very different kind of problem than purported lack of a Canadian identity we hear about today.