Diaspora Studies and Canadian Literature
L. Camille van der Marel When traced to its Greek roots, the term “diaspora” means to scatter about, to disperse. Imagine dandelion seeds on the wind: this image is often used to introduce students to the concept of diaspora. Indeed, dandelion seeds are a common symbol for departments, journals (including Canadian Literature), book series, and […]
Key Border Events and Texts
As the Border Studies Scholarship section demonstrates, some scholars see the border as a site of struggle. We can further analyze this struggle in literary border texts that represent key historical events from diverging perspectives. Many events have impacted members of different groups in different ways (for example, government responses to the attacks in the […]
Literary Analysis of Burning Vision
Burning Vision is a play in four movements, taking place on the clock-like stage divided into four quadrants and tracing the journey of uranium through four locations, in four nations, and through the four elements: from the lands belonging to the Sahtu Dene First Nation in Port Radium, Northwest Territories; to the fires in the […]
Exercise: The Moodie-Atwood Dialogue
In 1970, Margaret Atwood published The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a now-famous poetic and artistic response to Moodie’s book. The first edition was accompanied by images by Atwood, and the second edition, published in 1997, includes a different set of images by Charles Pachter. Here are some prompts to help you reflect critically on the […]
Residential Schools
Loss of language Indigenous languages were seen as inferior, along with Indigenous cultures. Indian Residential Schools discouraged schoolchildren from speaking their languages; many children were physically punished for doing so. The objective of the residential schools was to assimilate the children into mainstream Canadian society. Residential schools taught English to assimilate children into Western ways, […]
Collecting Orature
Early scholars believed that Indigenous cultures were vanishing because of the terrible devastation of European diseases, such as smallpox, influenza, and tuberculosis. Because of this, anthropologists were motivated to rapidly record orature. They further believed that Indigenous cultures would vanish under the strong pressures to assimilate, which were spearheaded by missionaries, educators, bureaucrats, and incoming […]
Challenges of Textualizing Orature
To textualize an oral narrative is to write it down, or to put it into a medium like tape or film that permits its exact reproduction. This process may also include translation. Although it permits hearing and seeing the storyteller, even film loses an immense amount of context. All textualization permits others to turn the […]
Introduction to Nationalism
A nation is a group of people who regard themselves as sharing the same culture; a state is a group of people governed by the same laws and political institutions. Groups of people connected through history settled within a geographical region, building customs and forming dialects. Modern nations emerged from the desire of such groups […]
Nationalism, late 1800s–1950s: Canadian Immigration and War
Assimilation In the nineteenth century, Canada created assimilationist legislation for the governance of Aboriginal peoples (see especially the Indian Act of 1876), producing the residential school system among other initiatives that sought to eradicate cultural differences. Further, new immigrants from non-English or French speaking cultures were also expected to assimilate to the ideal of white […]
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