Teaching Colonial Histories in Canada Through Relationship and Responsibility

Chaa’winisaks and Pia Russell

As the teaching of history in Canadian universities seeks to incorporate decolonization, anti-racism, and truth-telling, the work of how to realize these commitments in practice remains emergent. As a Nuu-chah-nulth and a White settler co-teaching team, we delivered a 12-week undergraduate history course at the University of Victoria (UVic) that focused on these commitments. In so doing, we treated relationship and responsibility as essential parts of the work of teaching history at a Canadian university. This post reflects on how relationship and responsibility shaped our pedagogy, describes what we learned in the process, and encourages others to consider how our experience might inform their own teaching. 

HSTR329A: Race, Racism, and Ethnicity in Canada up to 1900 is a third-year history survey course about the lands and peoples that came to be governed as Canada before 1900.[1] The scale of this description can conceal the histories and jurisdictions of the peoples whose lands it gathers under the name of a single nation state. We therefore had to ask what it meant to teach a course framed around Canadian history while remaining answerable to the place where we taught, the lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ homelands in which UVic stands. Naming the homelands at the beginning of a class could only be one part of that work. The harder question was what changed in our selection and interpretation of sources, in our assignments, and in our responses to students, by better knowing the histories specific to lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ lands.

We approached those histories from different perspectives. Before we taught together, we were good friends and colleagues that had worked together for nearly ten years on the British Columbia Historical Textbooks (BCHT) collection currently held in UVic Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA).^[2] But we brought different positions, experiences, and areas of expertise to the classroom.^[3] Chaa’winisaks came as a Nuu-chah-nulth educator whose commitments to family, community, law, and the responsibilities of telling history do not end at the classroom door. Pia came as a White settler historian, librarian, archivist, and curator of the textbook collection, with responsibilities for how the sources in her care are described, made accessible, and shared. 

Our friendship helped us stay in conversation, including when classroom conversations were challenging; such as when a student was unsettled, when a historical source reproduced colonial violence, or when the demands of the course exceeded the time for which we were compensated. But it did not make our positions interchangeable, nor our labour perfectly equal. Where appropriate, students could look to Chaa’winisaks to share Indigenous histories, to respond to racism, and to support Indigenous classmates. Pia had responsibilities to intervene in situations where there was racism rather than watch them unfold or assume that Chaa’winisaks would lead everyone through them. It mattered who was asked to explain racism, who was expected to care for Indigenous students, and whose time was understood to be available and when. We had to make those decisions together, as the course unfolded. 

These distinct responsibilities are important to acknowledge because universities often celebrate collaborative teaching and decolonizing education without explaining how such work is distributed, supported, or compensated. We shared one sessional instructor salary for a course taught by two people. Dividing the twice weekly classroom meetings helped us manage some of the work, but planning together, reviewing student responses, intervening when needed, and maintaining relationships did not divide neatly in half. We should not present a course like ours as an inexpensive model for institutions to adopt. If universities want this kind of co-teaching, they need to pay both instructors for the work required and recognize the responsibilities that extend beyond time at the front of a classroom. While our experience offers no universal template, it accounts for the conditions a university would have to take seriously if it wanted to sincerely support this work.  

One practice that helped us make decisions was daa-daa-puh-duh, a Nuu-chah-nulth way of “taking all things into consideration before making a decision.” Daa-daa-puh-duh was explained to Chaa’winisaks by her late grandfather, Chah-chim-sun-up. As practice, this was more than an exercise in gathering student feedback. It required us to notice that people in the same room could experience a story, a reading, or an exchange very differently. We had to attend to those accounts, discuss what they asked of us, and decide whether to change what we were doing. We also had to explain our decisions when a request could not be met.

In both formal and informal ways, we regularly invited students to reflect when they felt engaged, distanced, affirmed, confused, or surprised. We reviewed their responses between classes and returned to themes with the group without identifying individual students. At times we adjusted the pacing, the way we introduced a source, or the space available for discussion. We asked questions reminiscent of those in Stephen Brookfield’s critical incident questionnaire, often used in higher education, but a questionnaire is only a tool for collecting information.^[4] Daa-daa-puh-duh asked more of us. Our obligation was to consider responses, talk with one another, and act accountably. This did not mean guaranteeing comfort; avoiding the uncomfortable is not an organizing principle for teaching the history of racism and colonialism in Canada. We needed to recognize when students were unsettled by the history they were encountering and when the unfolding of classroom conversation risked causing harm. We were still learning how to make these calls together. Daa-daa-puh-duh gave us a way to keep listening after a class ended and to return with a decision rather than assume that the initial plan was adequate.

Early in the term, students completed an assignment called “These Lands.” They researched the histories of the place where they lived, drawing on sources made available by the peoples connected to that place and from other appropriate historical materials that we identified. The assignment asked for more from them than a polished land acknowledgement. Students had to consider whose histories were available, who had produced a source, what it could tell them, and what they still did not know. For many students, this was a confronting task; there was uncertainty and even embarrassment in not knowing. Students were offered the opportunity to revise and resubmit as often as desired. We were careful not to describe a student’s surprise at finding gaps in their knowledge as the completion of responsibility. Rather, it was a beginning.

After the ‘These Lands’ assignment, students were required to complete other tasks including a ‘Library Research Skills’ exercise, and mid-term and end-of-course exams with short answer responses. During the last month of the course, students worked with the BCHT collection held in SCUA. Pia brought students into a Special Collections classroom to work directly with the textbooks.^[5] Students were invited to consider how settler colonialism and related hegemonic narratives were sustained through children’s reading engagement. We asked students to examine what the books said and how they came to claim authority. Prompting questions included: 

• Whose point of view organized the narrative? 
• Who appeared as a subject or a problem?  
• Who was absent?  
• What could students learn from historical textbooks about the schooling of young settlers, and what could they not learn about the peoples being described? 
• What other accounts would be needed before a student made a claim about those histories? 

These questions joined Pia’s bibliographic work with the collection and Chaa’winisaks’s insistence that the people spoken about in the textbooks could not be reduced to the textbooks’ representations of them. Awareness of not reifying stereotypes or omissions was an important goal of the assignment. Student work was overwhelmingly strong. They demonstrated both robust historical research skills and keen understanding of their responsibilities, as emerging historians, to Indigenous communities and to the work of decolonization.  

Daa-daa-puh-duh’s law of “taking all things into consideration before making a decision” informed not just individual assignments but our approach to the course’s wider content. Often, histories of Canada are taught as distant events within a neatly sequenced national chronology, with less focus on relation to the lands where a class is taught. Such approaches can lean towards teleology and even re-colonizing harms. We sought to remain mindful of this risk across the course. Covering over four centuries of history in lands that encompass nearly ten million square kilometers is a considerable task. The temporal and geographical scope of the course was vast. Conceptual topics such as gender, religion, class, or sexuality were highlighted based on region, and often met intersectionally. Topics such as migration, enslavement, racialization, resistance, and dispossession in different regions were introduced to students through primary sources and object-based learning whenever possible. We returned to questions of whose authority defined an event and what changed when the account began with the peoples living in a place. The point was not to attach a local example to every national topic. Instead, it was to ask how a national account had been made and what it left out.

In these efforts, our course was also guided by laws shared with UVic by lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and community members. Given in lək̓ʷəŋən, SENĆOŦEN, and English, these laws ask us to: remember our ancestors and birthright; work together; bring in your good heart and mind; and be prepared for the work to come.[6] Neither Chaa’winisaks, who taught as a Nuu-chah-nulth person in lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ homelands, nor Pia, who taught as a White settler, spoke for the peoples who shared these laws, but we referred to them in each class meeting in ways that encouraged personal and timely reflection. If we were to co-teach this course again, we would further emphasize these laws as classroom principles.

As the course progressed, we saw students ask more careful questions about historical sources and reflect upon their own position as learners and emerging historians. Their assignments and contributions gave us evidence of developing understanding, though we cannot claim to know what every student carried beyond the course. In writing about the course, we have also asked careful questions of ourselves, not least: when a Nuu-chah-nulth approach shapes how a course is governed, how do we write about that without reducing it to a technique that another instructor can lift from the page? We can describe the questions we asked and the actions we took, but we cannot detach those actions from Chaa’winisaks’s relationships and responsibilities and then call the result a transferable classroom tool.

Our experience did not produce a simple recipe but, again, a sense of the importance of relationship and responsibility. Positionalities and local contexts are essential. Co-instructors need to identify whose knowledge is shaping the course and who holds authority to share it. They need time to plan and to respond when the course changes, not just after the course concludes at the end of term. They need to examine what their sources authorize students to say, and they need to pay attention to how race, employment, and institutional status distribute the work between course instructors. Institutions that celebrate this work must support co-instructional work materially. 

We offer this account as two instructors still thinking together about what began to take shape through our work. Friendship brought us into the course. It did not relieve either of us of responsibility for the histories we told, the decisions we made, or the people who were asked to carry the consequences. Yet, by centering relationship and responsibility, we had a foundation upon which to co-teach with care and imagine what was possible.  

Chaa’winisaks is Nuu-chah-nulth and is a continuing sessional in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria.

Pia Russell is a White settler of Danish heritage and a librarian in Special Collections at the University of Victoria.

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^[1] Regularly offered in the Department of History, HSTR329A is a 1.5 credit course that is required or recommended for students completing majors and minors in history or Indigenous Studies; students from other faculties and programs often take this as an elective.  Many registrants of HSTR329A go on to take HSTR329B which focuses on the twentieth-century history of race, racism, and ethnicity in Canada.  The fall 2024enrollment included 17 undergraduate students from a range of disciplines including history, political science, Indigenous studies, sociology, and literature. We thank the Department of History at UVic for their strong support when we suggested this course be co-taught.  

^[2] UVic’s British Columbia Historical Textbooks collection is housed in Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA): https://www.uvic.ca/library/research-learning/british-columbia-historical-textbooks/index.php

^[3] Chaa’winisaks: I am Nuu-chah-nulth, with family and community ties to Cheklesaht, Kyuquot, and Tla-o-qui-aht. My place in this work comes from my relationships and responsibilities, as well as from many years of teaching and research. When I bring oral histories into a classroom, I am making a decision about what I can share, why I am sharing it, and what I am asking listeners to carry, which is most often responsibility. I do not bring oratory into a course to make a difficult historical subject more engaging.

Pia: I am a White settler of Danish and Scottish heritage, born in Musqueam homelands. I work as a librarian and historian at the University of Victoria (UVic) and curate the British Columbia Historical Textbooks (BCHT) collection in Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA). Work with these materials has made me attentive to what a collection preserves, how it names people and places, and what its records cannot tell us on their own. I regularly teach about the histories of Canada, childhood, education, and the book in the Departments of History, Indigenous Education, and Teacher Education.

^[4] Brookfield, S. (n.d.). Critical Incident Questionnaire. Stephen D. Brookfield. Retrieved September 11, 2026, from http://www.stephenbrookfield.com/critical-incident-questionnaire

^[5] As BCHT’s curator, Pia helped students locate related scholarly and archival sources and ask how these books had been produced, used in schools, and preserved as a collection. Understanding the broader social, political, and economic networks that these books existed in was an important teaching goal.  Students could examine the books as evidence of how children were taught to understand history, while remaining alert to what those books could not tell them about the peoples they described. This research work mattered to the assignment: it gave students ways to question a textbook’s authority and find other accounts before providing their own analysis.  

^[6] These laws are incorporated in UVic’s Indigenous Plan: https://www.uvic.ca/ovpi/_assets/docs/uvic-indigenous-plan-2023.pdf. Qwul’sih’yah’maht, Dr. Robina Thomas, helped lead the renewal of the 2023 plan with its steering circle and many contributors.