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Hello, and welcome to activity two, understanding loss, for week two of
aboriginal world views and education. So for this next activity, it works best
if you have a piece of paper and a pen or pencil.
And you write each of the names I'm going to ask you to write on its own line.
You can use a word processor. I think that it works a little bit more
effectively if you're using pen and paper. So find a piece of pen and paper and think
of 10 people who taugth you something valuable.
It can be family, it can be community, any kind of teacher about any sort of
knowledge. But what you want to do is ensure that
each name Gets its own line and if you want to write down what it is that they
taught you that was valuable, you can do that as well.
Just make sure that each name gets its own line.
So take a moment, pause the video and jot down those 10 names, one name per line.
Now that you have your 10 names, 1 per line.
The next step is to take your pen, and just cross off 1 of those names.
Pick any name. It, it doesn't matter where they are on
the list. Just cross that one out.
And, Now that you've done that, cross out another, and another, and one more, and
one more. Cross out one more name.
Cross out one more name. Cross out another name.
And I'll look at your list and cross out one more.
So, what you have done now. Is, demonstrated the impact on aboriginal
communities in North America, of the population and the knowledge.
Imagine all of those, names and the knowledge they carried is lost to you.
And that. Gets at the impact that aboriginal
communities across North America have faced over the last four or five
centuries. So what has been lost, it's not just the
population but it's the lands, the knowledge that those people carried, that,
that was connected to those lands. It's the cultures and the identities that
were eroded as more people and knowledge and connection to land was lost.
And it's also the loss of language that encodes that knowledge and connection to
lands, territories and relationships with each other and all of the cosmos.
So in some of the cases this, this loss was an unintended outcome of an encounter.
For instance, the epidemic disease and its initial toll in the first generation of
encounter. Has been suggested to be as high as 50%
and this, this comes from the most recent studies of mitochondrial DNA.
And they can see that as much as 50% of the population was lost in this very early
contact period. In subsequent cases, there was definitely
an impact from warfare both with the newcomers and internal warfare as
communities and peoples were displaced and fought over new lands and territories.
And there is also starvation and loss of, from this process of displacement.
There's also assimilation and inter marriage played a role and certainly in
the last century and a half the assimilatory laws and policies such as
residential and boarding schools continue to erode the lives, the knowledge, the
identities of aboriginal communities. Population figures at first contact, of
course are the subject of much debate. What can't be discounted though is that
the population was reduced dramatically. Whatever your starting point is, based on
how you determine it through carrying capacity of the land or through
archaeological record. Everyone agrees that the population was
reduced quite dramatically. In some locations, it is believed to be as
high as 90%, and we have some examples from Massachusetts Bay and also the
Illinois example. In case of the Beothuk in Newfoundland,
the identity of the collective people is no more, so essentially this was an
extinction of the Beothuk nation. But many of the last Beothuk individuals
did absorb themselves into the Montaigne and other cultures, but certainly their,
their existence as a distinct people is no more.
So return to your list. Look again at the, at the impact of loss,
and think of how the loss of those people and the knowledge that they carried and
conveyed would effect you in your own life, and how it would affect your family
and your community, and reflect on how you would live with the sense of loss.
And try to keep your reflection under 200 words, and post it in the forum.
Of course if you go over 200, no one is going to police that, but there's,
there's, there's definitely going to be a lot of, of activity there so, in trying to
understand the impact of loss on an indigenous world view.
This is an activity to help to make it personal.
So I look forward to seeing what you post in the forums, and the, the dialogue that
will start there. Thanks very much for taking part in this
activity.
Jean-Paul RestouleAssociate Professor
