Learning Canadian History

Learning Canadian history is an interesting experience, for example, the first day of class, my History professor asked us “what is history?”. Now I don’t know about you but what I put was probably the most text book definition of history you possibly could have put, I put “History is the study of past event in human history” or something like that. looking back on it my teacher was probably looking for a more philosophical answer  than that. After a couple minutes of letting us think she then said (at least this is what I remember her saying) “at the end of this class, I will ask you the same question, and it will probably be a different answer”. Now look at me, three and a half months later answering the same question with a different answer. thats what a good History class does to you, you walk into the class with some idea of what went down in Canadian history, the settlers came were generally terrible to the Indigenous people and then four or five hundred years later things got better. that is the basics, or at least those were my basics, then through long lectures and countless hours study and writing essays that view of the basics changed. After awhile I learned that there are no basics, yes the Colonists were crappy to the Indigenous people, but the Indigenous people were also pretty crappy to the colonists, I learned that when King Louis of France sent over about a thousand women from France to marry the mostly male population of the colony, for many of them it was a better lot in life that what they would have had back ion France. In early Canada they could choose who they would marry, they could become heads of the family if there were no of age male children to take over when the husband died, and many of early Canada most successful merchants and traders were women. So when you ask me “what is History?” I don’t think that I can answer that question so easily now.