About the Book

Histories of Indigenous Peoples and Canada was conceived in 2016 as material in support of a new 3rd-year History course at Thompson Rivers University – Open Learning. The need for such an online course was underlined with the release of the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015. In the process of developing the curriculum, it was decided that the part you see here could be shared as a stand-alone Open Educational Resource (OER)^[1] in the form of an open textbook. Thompson Rivers University actively endeavours to decolonize and Indigenize its larger project; making this document available as an OER is consistent with those goals. Open textbooks are OERs created and shared in ways so that more people have access to them. This is a different model than traditionally copyrighted materials. OERs are defined as teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by others. This open textbook is openly licensed using a Creative Commons licence and it is offered in various e-book formats free of charge. For more information about open education in British Columbia, please visit the Thompson Rivers University – Open Learning website and the BCcampus Open Education website. In particular, please consult the BCcampus Adoption Guide (2nd edition or later) and the Faculty OER Toolkit, both of which you may find useful.

Written by John Douglas Belshaw along with Sarah Nickel and Chelsea Horton, the project complements the BC Open Textbook Project undertaken by BCcampus. It is based in some sections on Belshaw’s earlier open textbooks, Canadian History: Pre-Confederation and Canadian History: Post-Confederation, some of which was contributed by other writers. Again, it was devised with a specific curriculum in mind and is not intended to meet the goals of every similar course, nor could it hope to do so. As is the case with any open textbook, it is a resource that you are invited to explore, use, revise, improve, set aside, return to….