Aboriginal Literatures in Canada: A Teacher’s Resource Guide serves a double purpose: to encourage the teaching of Aboriginal literature in English high school curricula across the country because Aboriginal students deserve to be taught texts they can relate to and, because non-Aboriginal students should be educated about Aboriginal culture, history and contemporary life through the richness of Aboriginal writing with its innovative uses of the English language. The Ontario Curriculum, English states, “literature is a fundamental element of identity and culture.” Aboriginal literatures should be more visible in the curriculum in all its diversity. The use of the common denominator “Indian” for all Aboriginal peoples often overshadows the fact that the Aboriginal peoples of Canada are culturally diverse and that each cultural group produces its own literature. As Okanagan author and director of the First Nations Creative Writing School (the En’owkin Centre in Penticton, B.C.), Jeannette Armstrong, put it in an interview with Renate Eigenbrod on August 6, 2001: “I would stay away from the idea of “Native” literature, there is no such thing. There is Mohawk literature, there is Okanagan literature, but there is no generic Native in Canada.” .

Available online at: http://www.curriculum.org/storage/258/1334159060/Aboriginal_Literatures_in_Canada.pdf. Electronic reproduction.