Notice Board

The Department of History Colloquium presents:

Clearing the Plains and Clearing the Air:  Canadian History in the Age of Reconciliation
Guest Speaker:  Prof. James Daschuk (U of Regina)
Day/Date:  Friday, November 4, 2016
Location:  C-674
Time:  3:00 - 4:30 p.m.

Prof. Daschuk will be speaking about his award-winning book, Clearing the Plains: Disease,
Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, which examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics -- the politics of ethnocide -- played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir. John A. Macdonald’s “National Dream.”  It dismantles the view that Canada has a special claim to humanity in its treatment of indigenous peoples.  Daschuk shows how infectious disease and state-supported starvation combined to create a creeping, relentless catastrophe that persists to the present day.

Prof. James Daschuk is a graduate of the University of Winnipeg and Associate Professor in the Department of Kinesiology and Health Sciences at the University of Regina.  His book Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life won the Governor General’s Award for Scholarly Research in 2014.  The book has sold more than 20,000 copies and was named as one of the  25 most influential books of the past 25 years by the Literary Review of Canada.