Learning with The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book in a Cultural Studies Course

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to my research assistant, Simon Orpana, for his intellectual generosity and for his astute suggestions and comments; while our course redesign process was collaborative, this essay is an attempt to reflect on my responsibilities as the instructor of record and primary lecturer for the course. I am also very grateful for the work of the five thoughtful, dedicated teaching assistants assigned to the course during the 2013–14 and 2014–15 academic years, and for the commitment to critical, creative knowledge-sharing on the part of students in 2M06, especially Carrie McMullin (Mohawk Canadian).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For example, consider the challenge to the myth of Canadian beneficence that is posed by panels illustrating the similarity and simultaneity of US and Canadian governments’ enactment of genocidal policies—the extermination of the buffalo and the use of enforced hunger to make land grabs—on the Plains in the 1870s and 1880s (Hill, 500 35–36).

2. Hill narrates the conflict as follows: “During the summer of 1990, a 77-day armed standoff occurred in the Mohawk Territories of Kahnawake and Kanehstake/Oka, near Montreal.” The planned expansion of a golf course by the town of Oka over a burial ground was stopped, and Hill suggests that “Oka served to revitalize the warrior spirit of Indigenous peoples and our will to resist. … Altho’ the government and media portrayed the warriors and criminals as terrorists, many saw them as heroes defending their people” (500 Years 71–74). Monture traces how “this tumultuous time” affected the seventeen communities of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, with a specific focus on how Six Nations of the Grand River supported, negotiated, and debated the situation (179–80), and the ongoing relevance of this recent history to the struggle over land at Kanonhstaton/Caledonia.

3. As Adam Gaudry (Métis) underscores, postsecondary institutions in Canada “need administrative infrastructure, we need expanded Indigenous programming, and we need more Indigenous faculty. Without a firm commitment and careful implementation—backed up with the requisite funding—we risk further entrenching the kind of colonial relationship we're now supposedly committed to transforming.”