English 308 is designed to help students achieve the following objectives.
- To critically read a wide range of Native Canadian works, so that personal responses to the material such as “like” and “dislike” are supported by relatively objective analysis of the material under consideration, and the embedded social and critical values that lead to such responses.
- To balance the dominant European-Canadian voice in literature with writings by aboriginal peoples.
- To consider works by writers for whom English may be the first language but for whom English is not the mother tongue.
- To examine some historic and current events through the eyes of non-dominant, sometimes minority, writers and storytellers.
- To reconsider the traditional European-Canadian image of the Native person as cultural icon, saint or savage, victim or victimizer.
- To examine oral literature, and to see its relationship with the written word.
- To define important genres in Native literature in relation to appropriate examples.
- To establish the connections between the dramatic tradition in the pre-contact era and modern Native theatre.
