Indigenous Canada @ University of Alberta
Hey there!
The University of Alberta is offering a 100% FREE, 12 week, online course called “Indigenous Canada” and Dan Levy (Schitt’s Creek) is going to be hosting discussions with the course facilitators on social media every Sunday starting this Sunday at 3pm EST, for the course duration.
I don’t super care about Dan Levy but I do super care about Canada’s Indigenous folks, so after some humming and hawing because I suck at school, I signed up.
The course covers a broad range of topics related to Canada’s Indigenous people, including colonialism in general, residential schools & the 60’s Scoop, treaties, Indigenous women, art & pop culture, and current social movements. It’ll also probably explain why and how Justin Trudeau hates Native kids!
There are 12 modules to the course and each module is made up of a video, something to read, and a multiple choice quiz. Each module takes 1.5-2 hours to complete and you’re expected to do one each week. If you miss a due date though, that’s okay because you can reset it and learn at your own pace. Or, you could do what I’m doing and try to do 2-3 modules each day to stay ahead of the weekly due dates.
As I said, the course is 100% free to complete, but if you wanted to, you could pay $66 for a certificate of completion, or significantly more (I assume) for University credit. It’s even open to other countries! So far 95,000 people have signed up!
I figure, we’re all at home anyway, and everyone’s bored, so why not do something to enrich your mind with no cost and no risk? With important stuff every Canadian should know, no less! And hey, if you like Dan Levy, go find him on Instagram (@instadanjlevy) and take the course at the same time he does! I’m sure he’ll be having many many discussions in the weeks to come!
Oh! And! You can do the whole course on your phone or tablet! You don’t even need a computer!
Indigenous Lives Matter. So let’s learn about them together! 🙂
Don’t have 2 peaceful hours to spare per week? What about an audiobook on the same subject matter? You could listen to it on your way to and from work instead of the crappy radio!
Might I suggest Alicia Elliott’s “A Mind Spread Out On The Ground“? It’s a series of essays she wrote about Indigenous issues that are personal to her as an Indigenous woman. It’s part memoir and part editorial maybe? There’s an AMAZING chapter in there about white people photographing Native people that I learned a lot from as a white artist who used to have aspirations of drawing an Inuit woman hunting with her daughters, inspired by the reality TV show “Life Below Zero”. The author also grew up with a mentally ill, white mother, which I could relate to. A lot of it had me shedding white woman’s tears because it was so dense with story and emotion, a lot of it sadness and depression. To say I enjoyed it feels wrong, to say I enjoyed someone else’s pain or struggle feels wrong. Maybe it’s best to say that I appreciated and empathized with the pain and struggle because it was so well written. She has a lot to say and says it well.
Another book written by an Indigenous author that I enjoyed recently, was “Jonny Appleseed” by Joshua Whitehead, which is a novel about life on an off the rez for the gay main character, but I didn’t realize that until halfway through. I thought I was reading a memoir. So it’s fiction, but you wouldn’t know it from a memoir, which is to say that the author does such a good job of making his characters real, that I actually did believe they were real. Also, the kind of poverty described in the book reminded me of how I grew up so there was a bit of weird nostalgia there. I loved the main character’s relationship with his boyfriend. It was so loving and caring and just beautiful. Made me appreciate my own relationship more because there were similarities.
After that, I read “Islands Of Decolonial Love” and “The Accident Of Being Lost” by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, which are essays and reflections on different aspects of the author’s, an Indigenous woman’s, life. I didn’t really connect with these two works as much as the two I previously mentioned, but I still enjoyed the prose and found them both interesting just from a “person whose life is different from mine but we live in the same country” perspective. In “The Accident Of Being Lost” there was an essay where the author was at a writer’s retreat during a flood that I particularly liked.
Before all of those books though, because I love horror, I read “Moon Of The Crusted Snow” by Waubgeshig Rice, which is about the apocalypse from an Indigenous point of view. It. Is Excellent. (but a bit of a slow burn). Related: if you like horror, you need to see the zombie film “Blood Quantum”. Trust me. It’s available to purchase or rent on YouTube!
