Before starting the course History 1120, I thought I knew a lot about Canadian history. I knew about the Indigenous people and how the British and French took over their lands and forced the Indigenous children to go to residential schools. I had limited knowledge on the gold rush, and I thought I knew how Canada came to be. But after this course, I realized, I knew barely anything about Canadian History.
Canadian History is so much more than just the fight for land between the Indigenous and “white” people, or the fight for land between the French and British. Canada was the start of a new world that the British, ultimately, took lead to start.
In the weekly readings I learned about so much I didn’t know, I learned about the les filles du roi and the role they played in populating New France and building up the community. Canada did in fact have slavery, yet it is not well known to many Canadians and when slavery is brought up it is mostly linked to the United States. I learned more about the gold rush, and how it was hard to find gold, when so many people thought it would be easy to find and how dangerous it was to be involved in it for men and women, and learning about charivaris was the most interesting part because people were humiliated for marrying a person of different race or having a large age difference between the couple, when in the era we live in now, it is more common. I also found it interesting how the charivaris were relentless to getting what they wanted at whatever cost.
The course work for the semester included reading logs, document analysis, a research paper outline, and the research paper. I will be discussing my research paper later on so for now I will discuss my reading logs.
My reading logs were about the weekly readings we did for seminars. Each reading log was a new subject I didn’t know much about, but I was interested to learn further work for each weekly reading. The first reading log was about the Buffalo Jump, which is how the Indigenous people in parts of Canada mass hunted for the long winters. The last reading was about Pistol’s at Six O’clock and In search of the phantom misnamed honour, which was about duelling in Canada. There wireline readings in total and each reading made me more interested in Canadian history.