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Showing posts from May, 2010

"I see you"

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I'm a little late, because I only just saw the movie Avatar recently.  I didn't go to theatres to see it (so I didn't see it in 3-D) because I stayed home with Nicolas.  (We rented a movie for him at home instead). Marc bought the movie in blue ray, so we watched it the other day. I know a few people didn't think it was that great, other than the special effects. The story ressembles the story of first nations and the first Europeans who came to conquer (and take the ressources).  But there's a twist, the natives on this world really are connected to their world in a special way.  I thought the story was well-written, I didn't find it the boring repeat of stories already told that some people thought it was.  The story was able to stand alone, even without all the cool special effects. But let's just say for a moment that the special effects weren't all that great and the story line not all that original. It wouldn't matter as long a

Culture Shock

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I was 18 when I arrived in Québec City, on my own.  Except for a four month stay in Timmins Ontario, I had never lived anywhere in my life (that I could remember) except for Moose Factory. Had I been going to live in India, or China, I might have expected different customs.  But I was just going to Québec City.  Other than the language barrier, how different could that be? Very different, as it would turn out. Moose Factory Island, Northern Ontario, James Bay Lowlands My sister's ex-boyfriend (a man from Gabon) went with her to visit Moose Factory once.  He was surprised to find that even in Canada, you could find the "third world". When I went to Paraguay, many mannerisms and customs (but not all) were so similar to those in Moose Factory, that I did not notice them until the people in the group I was with talked about how strange they were;  The way they would say, "Yeah, yeah, I'll be there." and then never show up;  The way meetings always s

Reconciling Amerindian and Euroamerican (Mis)Understandings of a Shared Past:

Cross-Cultural Conflict Historiography and the 1832 Hannah Bay “Massacre” An article by Cecil Chabot While these sources (Oral tradition from Cree and at least one person in the Orkney Islands descendant of Hudson Bay Company workers, and written accounts from Euroamericans) coincide in more than simply casting doubt over Wilson’s summary phrase, diversity and discord are also present. If they flow in the same direction, their origins appear to be nevertheless of very different colours, and the question remains: ‘can they ever merge?’ Addressing this question will help explain, diminish, and even remove significant obstacles in order to form and communicate a better understanding of what happened, in what context, why, and to what effect, at Hannah Bay in the winter of 1832. Conversely, attempting to answer these four historical questions may shed light on the historiographical problem that extends beyond the context of the Hannah Bay conflict in which it has just been framed. It i