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As Canadians, we remember the stories told to us in high-school history class as condensed images of the past--the glorious Mountie, the fearsome Native, the Last Spike. National Dreams is an incisive study of the most persistent icons and stories in Canadian history, and how they inform our sense of national identity: the fundamental beliefs that we Canadians hold about ourselves. National Dreams is the story of our stories; the myths and truths of our collective past that we first learned in school, and which we carry throughout our adult lives as tangible evidence of what separates us from other nationalities. Francis examines various aspects of this national mythology, in which history is as much storytelling as fact. Textbooks were an important resource for Francis. "For me, these books are interesting not because they explain what actually happened to us, but because they explain what we think happened to us." For example, Francis documents how the legend of the CPR as a country-sustaining, national affirming monolity was created by the company itself--a group of capitalists celebrating the privately-owned railway, albeit one which was generously supported with public land and cash--and reiterated by most historians ever since. Similarly, we learn how the Mounties were transformed from historical police force to mythic heroes by a vast army of autobiographers, historians, novelists, and Hollywood filmmakers, with little attention paid to the true role of the force in such incidents as the Bolshevik rebellion, in which a secret conspiracy by the Government against its people was conducted through the RNWMP. Also revealed in National Dreams are the stories surrounding the formation and celebration of Canadian heroes such as Louis Riel and Billy Bishop.
Michael Adams, president of Environics polling, argues that Canada and the United States are diverging: Americans are growing more socially conservative and deferential toward authority figures, whereas Canadians are becoming more tolerant, open to risk, and questioning of governing institutions.
By investigating mutually dependent categories of identity in literature that depicts northern peoples and places, Hulan provides a descriptive account of representative genres in which the north figures as a central theme - including autobiography, adventure narrative, ethnography, fiction, poetry, and travel writing. She considers each of these diverse genres in terms of the way it explains the cultural identity of a nation formed from the settlement of immigrant peoples on the lands of dispossessed, indigenous peoples. Reading against the background of contemporary ethnographic, literary, and cultural theory, Hulan maintains that the collective Canadian identity idealized in many works representing the north does not occur naturally but is artificially constructed in terms of characteristics inflected by historically contingent ideas of gender and race, such as self-sufficiency, independence, and endurance, and that these characteristics are evoked to justify the nationhood of the Canadian state.
The first book to examine the role of Canada’s newspapers in perpetuating the myth of Native inferiority. Seeing Red is a groundbreaking study of how Canadian English-language newspapers have portrayed Aboriginal peoples from 1869 to the present day. It assesses a wide range of publications on topics that include the sale of Rupert’s Land, the signing of Treaty 3, the North-West Rebellion and Louis Riel, the death of Pauline Johnson, the outing of Grey Owl, the discussions surrounding Bill C-31, the “Bended Elbow” standoff at Kenora, Ontario, and the Oka Crisis. The authors uncover overwhelming evidence that the colonial imaginary not only thrives, but dominates depictions of Aboriginal peoples in mainstream newspapers. The colonial constructs ingrained in the news media perpetuate an imagined Native inferiority that contributes significantly to the marginalization of Indigenous people in Canada. That such imagery persists to this day suggests strongly that our country lives in denial, failing to live up to its cultural mosaic boosterism.
The university is often regarded as a bastion of liberal democracy where equity and diversity are promoted and racism doesn’t exist. In reality, the university still excludes many people and is a site of racialization that is subtle, complex, and sophisticated. While some studies do point to the persistence of systemic barriers to equity in higher education, in-depth analyses of racism, racialization, and Indigeneity in the academy are more notable for excluding racialized and Indigenous professors. This book is the first comprehensive, data-based study of racialized and Indigenous faculty members’ experiences in Canadian universities. Challenging the myth of equity in higher education, it brings together leading scholars who scrutinize what universities have done and question the effectiveness of their equity programs. They draw on a rich body of survey data, interviews, and analysis of universities’ stated policies to examine the experiences of racialized faculty members across Canada who – despite diversity initiatives in their respective institutions – have yet to see meaningful changes in everyday working conditions. They also make important recommendations as to how universities can address racialization and fulfill the promise of equity in higher education.
An examination of the role of windigo narratives among the Algonquian peoples of North American and how those narratives were influenced through colonialism.
The story of the Vikings in North America as both fact and fiction, from the westward expansion of the Norse across the North Atlantic in the tenth and eleventh centuries to the myths and fabrications about their presence there that have developed in recent centuries. Tracking the saga of the Norse across the North Atlantic to America, Norse America sets the record straight about the idea that the Vikings 'discovered' America. The journey described is a continuum, with evidence-based history and archaeology at one end, and fake history and outright fraud at the other. In between there lies a huge expanse of uncertainty: sagas that may contain shards of truth, characters that may be partly historical, real archaeology that may be interpreted through the fictions of saga, and fragmentary evidence open to responsible and irresponsible interpretation. Norse America is a book that tells two stories. The first is the westward expansion of the Norse across the North Atlantic in the tenth and eleventh centuries, ending (but not culminating) in a fleeting and ill-documented presence on the shores of the North American mainland. The second is the appropriation and enhancement of the westward narrative by Canadians and Americans who want America to have had white North European origins, who therefore want the Vikings to have 'discovered' America, and who in the advancement of that thesis have been willing to twist and manufacture evidence in support of claims grounded in an ideology of racial superiority.