Colonialism in Canada

1. Explain the overall purpose of today’s lesson: to give students the correct information, language, and history to talk about Indigenous peoples and colonialism in Canada.
2. Go over the organization of the lesson – two parts, slides and cards. Slides provide history and self-reflection while the cards provide an opportunity to engage and look for patterns.
3. Lecture using the Colonialism in Canada slide presentation, giving students time to write their responses to the included reflection questions. Students may write their reflections in their dialogue journals or on a separate sheet of paper. In order to ensure participation, you may let them know that you will be collecting their answers at the end of the lecture portion of the lesson.
4. Break students into teams. Give each team a stack of event cards (roughly 3 cards per team member), and ask teams to read through the cards and then categorise/organize them in a way that feels meaningful to them.
5. Invite teams to share the patterns/categories they identified. Have students to come up and use the whiteboards or poster boards to write out the patterns/categories they have discovered as well as where their teams’ cards fit within these categories. While this portion of the lesson plan is meant to be interactive, it is key to remind your students that they are dealing with real-world and ongoing oppression. It is important that the activity doesn’t feel like a ‘game’ within the classroom but rather that the cards be treated as the reality and lived experience that they are for many people.
6. Lead a whole-class discussion about categories and patterns. There should be a number of patterns observed such as: oppression/colonial acts and resistance; various systems in which colonialism works, such as healthcare, education, etc.; chronological mapping, etc.

The main goal of this activity is to equip students with knowledge that will help them feel comfortable talking about difficult subject matter. Therefore, the activity should be empowering and provide students with critical hope as they now have the words and history to help them understand the position of Indigenous peoples within Canada. That said, sometimes actually learning and thinking through this history and present-day colonialism can be triggering, upsetting, and revelatory to some students. Go gently and always be prepared with your list of counselling and other mental health services in case students need help working through their strong feelings.

One risk of focusing on the history of colonialism in Canada is that it can make Indigenous peoples seem like merely victims and make non-Indigenous peoples feel guilty for the founding of the country. Indigenous peoples are not passive victims but vibrant and resistant communities who are thriving in the face of colonial oppression. Guilt is not a useful position for anyone to take as it paralyzes. Invite your students to move through that phase and on to the phase of actually taking action to rebalance the country.  Try to draw out reasons for critical hope as the class moves through these patterns – pay attention to moments of resistance, protest, and reclamation of culture.

The class may also include recent immigrants or children of immigrants from countries where they themselves were colonized. It can be a challenging and complicated position to go from being the colonized to being the colonizer-settler, particularly when the original colonizer-settlers look nothing like your family. The role of the more recent immigrant in reconciliation is complicated, but it is worth noting that, as a citizen of Canada, they are benefiting from the history and current conditions of colonialism in the country. And, as a citizen of Canada, they, along with all settler-colonizers have a responsibility to resist any and all ongoing oppression, including that which is perpetrated on Indigenous peoples.

Here is a resource that discusses this complex issue: The intersection and parallels of Aboriginal peoples’ and racialized migrants’ experiences of colonialism and child welfare in Canada by Jennifer Ma

You may also opt to share this CBC radio documentary, in which immigrants to Canada discuss the privilege and value of learning an Indigenous language.

Students who are non-Indigenous may feel defensive when encountering this subject matter. Their reactions can range from “Well, it wasn’t me who did this, so why should I feel badly/pay for it, etc.?” to “This is just the natural cycle of human civilizations – one people comes and replaces or rules another” to arguments about natural selection. As a professor, it can be key to prepare yourself for these questions and think through how you feel about these arguments. These resources may help in reflecting on these reactions:

• A trauma-informed approach to teaching the colonization of the Americas by Suzanne Methot
• An Indigenous pedagogy for decolonization by Karyn Wisselink
• Aboriginal identity and the classroom by Karmen Crey