Silent Words

I recently listened to a lecture series by John Rauston Saul and was pretty impressed with his arguments. I made some notes from his lecture and have decided to share here.   John Rauston Saul has critiqued the mainstream Canadian historiography which he argues is amnesiac as it has ignored the major and the crucial part of Canadian history, the history of the First Nations and the role Indigenous philosophy, culture and the norms played in shaping Canada as a unique country in the world. He challenges the grand-narrative that Canada is a new country which was formed after the arrival of European Anglo-French people few years ago. Though I have reservations in some of the claims he makes in this lecture, I agree with most of the arguments he puts forward. First of all, Saul makes a bold statement that Canada is not a “new country” and argues that Canada is first and foremost a M étis Nation, not an Anglo-French ‘new’ country that the mainstream historiography claims...

(Unedited first draft) The European Settlers in Canada not only appropriated the indigenous land, they even tried to break the Indigenous social structure.  Indian Act of 1876 institutionalized the European Settlers’ attempt to destroy the social and cultural fabric through different policies one of which was Indian Residential School (IRS). While most indigenous people suffered due to the Indian Act and the IRS, Indigenous women were the worst victims. By imposing the European male-centric social structure by formalizing the male-female inequalities into law, and by ‘producing’ a generation of indigenous people ‘trained’ in the Indian Residential Schools, the Indian Act completely altered the gender dynamics of the Indigenous community. Though racial, economic and other forms of discrimination were also institutionalized through the Indian Act, gender issue will be the focus of this paper.   Gender balanced social structure was one of the hallmarks of the First Natio...

Lee Maracle (Source:Wikipedia) One of the contemporary prominent Indigenous Canadian (Sto:Loh nation) writers, critics and activists, Lee Maracle was born in North Vancouver, British Columbia on July 2, 1950. An honorary Doctor of Philosophy, she has taught in many universities as a visiting faculty and currently teaches Indigenous Studies at University of Toronto.   A vocal critic of the under representation and the misrepresentation and of the indigenous people, especially indigenous women in the mainstream Canadian literature, she is equally critical of the recent Native Studies program in the Canadian institutions where natives have to study what White settlers did to them, rather than studying about themselves. As a young Indigenous girl growing up in the Northern British Columbia, she witnessed, experienced, and endured the systemic as well as individual racial discrimination and atrocities. These experiences, she says in an interview with Margery Fee in 2004, tr...