Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Selected problems in the history of Canadian agriculture and industrial development, migration and settlement, labor, native policy and class structure. Content may vary from offering to offering; see course outline for further information. HIST 428 may be repeated for credit only when a different topic is taught.

COURSE DETAILS:

People, Polar Bears, Pipelines: A History of the Arctic
As global warming accelerates and polar ice melts, the Arctic is fast becoming a hot topic of conversation worldwide. Canada is a circumpolar country with sizable arctic territories, yet most people living in Canada have never been north of sixty. This course introduces students to the recent human and environmental history of the Canadian North, focusing principally on the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, and Nunavut. Inuit, Dene, Métis, and other Indigenous voices and perspectives will be foregrounded, but we’ll listen to and learn from historical non-Indigenous visitors, sojourners, and settlers as well.

We’ll examine key social themes and transformations in this region, including cross-cultural trade, Christianization, and modernization. We’ll learn how people have behaved toward and understood northern environments by studying different cultural traditions of renewable and non-renewable resource use, environmental knowledge, and adaptation to environmental change. We’ll analyze conflicting, even radically divergent accounts of events in Arctic history, told through various media, including comics and films. Finally, we’ll explore the multiple, often contradictory “ideas of North” that Euro-Canadians have constructed over the last few centuries. This will entail some critical reflection on our positionality as residents of southern Canada, and on the colonialism and white supremacy undergirding historical and contemporary representations of Canada as a “northern” nation.

 

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: