Quote:
Originally Posted by carmenshoes
Things like these should be talked about A LOT more, this is what they should be teaching in schools.
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I agree, but I think it should go a lot further and include history of the land even before European contact. Everyone in Canada should know what traditional territories they reside on and what customs, languages, and land uses were present before fur trade.
Other countries do this. In Europe for example, many countries were settled in more or less their current form after the Roman Empire fell in the period from between 400-1400 (with some border changes and jostling around of course), and the history curriculums go back thousands of years before that.
I get that much of the history was lost, but there is still a lot we know. It still irks me when I hear people refer to Indigenous Peoples as "hunter gatherer" societies as a way to downplay their importance (really just a euphemism for "savages"). The fact of the matter is, they had complex societies and specialization on par with the rest of the world. They had artists, poets, artisans, craftsmen, farmers, tailors, carpenters, teachers, healers, spiritual leader, traders, ambassadors, and the list goes on. But anyone who has taken Canadian history in school wouldn't know much about that.
I would venture a guess that at least half of Canadians do not have direct descendant connections to early colonial days, but we still have to learn about those Europeans. I don't see why that period has become a line where the curriculum has to stop.