About

Thank you for joining Team Decolonizing Ourselves in our journey to understanding how we might activate intervention strategies to combat present and future obstacles in Canadian Literature.

A Literary Map of Canada, as crafted in 1936 by William Arthur and Stanley Turner. For a more detailed and interactive version of this map, click here. This is one, very outdated, very restricted vision of Canadian Literature and its interactions with geography; we hope to expand, diversify, and modernize this approach. 

Who We Are

Cassie is a native Canadian, who lived her childhood years overseas in Qatar and Vietnam. Even with being away from Canada for a significant period of time, her parents still managed to keep Canada alive as a sort of distant home. Over the last nine years of being back in BC, she found a passion in physical geography. Through this course, she has discovered how the impact of geography can reach further than just the mountains, rivers, oceans, and other landscapes. Geography can affect perceptions and establish boundaries (physically and societally), boundaries which may create future problems if we do not change the way we think about geography and its impacts.

Suzanne is a Canadian of Ukrainian and English settler ancestry who has lived most of her life in Winnipeg and Vancouver. With a long-term goal of teaching literature, she believes that building an understanding of the connections between place, identity, community, and knowledge sharing is essential to becoming an effective and responsible educator. Her working goal for this research project is to find and examine manifestations of individuals’ relationships with geography in the works of a variety of contemporary artists, authors, and activists. Through this research and by learning from her group-mates, she hopes to open her mind to new ways of conceptualizing land, and new methods for breaking down boarders and barriers that hinder decolonization and reconciliation. 

Charlotte is in her graduating year of a BA Double Major with Psychology and English Literature. She’s lived in Canada her entire life, with relatives extending coast-to-coast, and has spent lots of that time reading, traveling, and learning more about where we live. She’s used this course to expand her understanding of what it means to be Canadian, and what defines Canadian literature. Her portion of our research will be on how we can use Canadian Literature’s emphasis on land and place to engage with issues facing our modern world, like climate change, particularly through embracing writing and narrative traditions that identify a strong sense of connection to the land in which we locate ourselves and our histories. This includes Canada, but also leaves room to explore diasporic writings and globalization, and to highlight Indigenous writing and the ways in which it engages with the land as both a sacred place and as a place upon which many injustices have been committed against Indigenous people. Navigating these complex, often conflicting experiences with the land can better reflect our relationship with place, with Canada, and with the future of both Canada and its literature.

Cianne is a Canadian of mixed European settler heritage who spent her youth in both BC and Alberta. After graduating high school, she ran away to Ireland and began a love affair with Europe that continues to this day. Two different moves to Europe (2010 and 2014) radically changed her relationship with her birth country and made her question what it meant to be Canadian. These questions were the start of her personal decolonizing process. Since moving to Vancouver in 2016, she has spent the last two and a half years learning about the Coast Salish peoples and other Indigenous Peoples in Canada, while further exploring the Canadian identity. Cianne will focus her portion of research on ways in which geographic limitations can be overcome by leveraging new media techniques in Canadian literature.

For an example of how one Canadian author is redefining her understanding of Canadian geographic heritage and her understanding of history, listen to Candace Savage explain how her latest work rewrites the colonial narrative she had learned in order to highlight Indigenous issues within a specific geographic region.

Works Cited

Arthur, William & Turner, Stanley. “A Literary Map of Canada.” Library and Archives Canada, Toronto: MacMillan Co. of Canada, 1936. Map. 52x87cm. http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/literary-tour/027020-3001-e.html. Accessed 22 Mar 2019.

CBC. “Weston Writers’ Trust 2012: Candace Savage on A Geography of Blood.” YouTube, commentary by Candace Savage, 11 Nov 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CC4UekC2Us. Accessed 22 Mar 2019.

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