Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A survey of Canadian history to 1867. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

The Land and Its Peoples before Canada

This course offers an introductory survey of northern North America from its earliest beginnings to the mid nineteenth century.

Our guiding focus will be the Land—understood here as a worldview that encompasses the relationship many Indigenous Peoples have to the physical, ancestral, and spiritual dimensions of the place they call home. In the time period under consideration here, the Land—in its varied understandings—presents itself as the most appropriate category through which to understand the history of northern North America.

This orientation will bring a valuable perspective to the major themes of this history, including: the diverse ways in which the peoples Indigenous to this land made their home here; the arrival of Europeans and the subsequent relations between them and Indigenous Peoples; the development of New France and other settler colonies; the rise of a trade in fur pelts; imperial struggles to dominate the continent; immigration; social and political reform in nineteenth-century British North America; Indigenous responses to settler colonialism; industrialization; and the competing visions of nationhood on display in the years 1864-70, both settler and Indigenous.

Please note that this is a course in transition. For the moment, the official course title remains “Canada to Confederation.”  Despite this framing, this course does not aim to offer a history of national beginnings. Rather than attempting to study “Canadian” history before Canada existed, we will attend to the developments of the great diversity of communities and cultural and political formations to be found throughout this period, which arguably presented potential alternative futures. The creation of the new nation of Canada in 1867 was neither natural nor inevitable.

Finally, as part of the work of reimagining how the history of the northern half of North America might be understood, we will reflect upon the historical and ongoing formations that have led to the existence of this course.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: