Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An examination of fact and ideology in history and historic events involving contact between Indigenous and European peoples. The course will also address questions of research methodologies in studying Indigenous/European relations, such as the evaluation of oral history and written ethnohistoric sources. An additional focus will be on gender as it influences perspectives. Students with credit for FNST 201W may not take this course for further credit. Writing/Breadth-Social Sci.

COURSE DETAILS:

The aim of this course and the carefully selected topics and materials, is to draw on Indigenous perspectives to examine and unpack explicit and implicit messages about Indigenous Peoples and histories.  From libraries and archives, to museums, education and school textbooks, and various media, we will engage in thoughtful and critical understandings of how such colonial institutions have supported (and often continue to support) the political and social agenda of the day in creating approved histories. We will apply the critiques made by Indigenous scholars and researchers to the production of Indigenous histories.

This is a W course and you will be offered many opportunities to respond in writing and to receive feedback. Along with building your writing skills, you will engage in reflections and peer-discussions prompted by the weekly topic.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

• Identify and understand important processes and periods in the history of Canadian Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples during the last 1,000 years, including the fur trade, missionization, treaty making, government policies of the last 200 years, European settlement, and Indigenous peoples' dispossession of their lands and cultures.
• Critically understand the concept of historiography and how historians present and analyze information about events and processes of the past, in particular as it is relevant for understanding the writing of Indigenous peoples' history.
• Assess how historical writing, while presented as objective and scientific, has also been driven by political motivations and culturally and socially based assumptions on the part of the historian and the people they represent.
• Understand how Indigenous peoples have been portrayed in European historical writing during the last few centuries and how these portrayals, in turn, reflect social, economic, and political processes in European society.
• Have an understanding of the importance of oral history research in describing and analyzing histories of Indigenous peoples.
• Appreciate the culture-specific ways in which Indigenous elders talk(ed) about their pasts and tell their histories
• and stories.
• Understand and critically assess current concerns of Indigenous peoples in Canada about having their own representations of their pasts validated by the Canadian political and legal system.
• Proceed to further self-directed readings and/or advanced topics and courses about Indigenous history from an informed and critical basis

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

All assigned readings and materials will be available on Canvas, either as pdf documentats or by a link to the resource.

REQUIRED READING:

RECOMMENDED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: