One of the first tasks of organising myself for the semester was ensuring I had all required books for my courses. For 4 out of 5 of my courses, the lecturer will provide online links to the readings which we can easily access. For the course GIS and Public Health however, there are two required text books that my lecturer cannot provide access to. Initially, I didn't think this was a problem as I assumed that there would be plentiful supply of the books in the library, like I'm used to back at UCL. But searching through U of T's library catalogue I found only 1 copy of the book "GIS and Public Health" and no 5th edition of the "GIS Tutorial for Health", with the 4th edition of that book not even being at the central St George campus, but out in the Mississauga campus. So I went down to the U of T bookstore to check out prices, finding myself just one of many students milling around inspecting textbooks. When I found my two books, I was duly horrified by the price and in disbelief asked one of the workers in the bookstore whether it was normal for Canadian students to have to pay hundreds of dollars for their own books. I got a cheery "Yep! Welcome to Canada!" as a reply. After considering changing modules to avoid textbook costs, I ended up forking over just under $200 on two textbooks, which I was not happy about. I am not impressed that on top of tuition fees U of T expects students to buy many of their own textbooks; it's unfair on students who cannot afford pricey textbooks, and you would think that with such a large student population (around 85,000 students) and fees, there would be enough money to adequately stock the libraries with all the books students need. Considering I've never had to buy a single textbook in 2 years at UCL, I realise now just how grateful I should be for the well-stocked UCL libraries.
On another note, I started doing the readings for my course Culture, History, Landscape. One of the readings for the first week was a chapter by William Cronon "Bounding the Land" which looks at Native American systems of land and user rights, as well as how European colonisers brought a new set of cultural views of using land (based on land commodification and privatisation). The European colonisers didn't consider Native land use systems as legitimate and so justification of colonisation and dispossession of Native lands was based on taking over this "illegitimately" used land and making it legitimate under European values. While the chapter is in itself very interesting, I was amused by my own reading of it. In the chapter, Cronon refers to the Native Americans as "Indians" and it was the very first reading I did for this course so I didn't have much context as to what I was about to read. As I began reading about the "Indians" my geographical imagination was rampant in the country of India, but within 2 pages of increasing confusion, I found my geographical imaginations and understandings of the country India didn't match the landscapes and histories I was reading about on the page. I reread the start of the chapter, and while I had happily glossed over "New England Indians", somehow concluding in my mind that this was some newly colonised part of India, I suddenly realised the whole article was talking about Native American "Indians", not Indians from India. I found it interesting that my mind immediately jumped to the country of India even when it was glaringly obvious ("New England Indians") that the chapter was based in North America.
I feel this could be because the British school curriculum teaches the era of the British Empire in a way that perhaps still evokes national glory and success, with India being mentioned often and being portrayed as the poor country that Britain charitably helped develop. By contrast, the school curriculum does not devote much time, if any, to the Native Americans or what British colonisers did in the New World, perhaps because with limited time to teach history, there is a preference for teaching about the glory days of the British Empire rather than the colony Britain lost (upon the American Revolution). With my greater knowledge of the British Empire in India as opposed to North America (due to growing up in the British education system), it is possible to see how my mind jumped to India first. Regardless, this course is challenging my existing knowledge of the British Empire and it has already been enlightening to learn the extent of injustices in the British Empire, from the various ways in which India was exploited to the dispossession of land from Native Americans.
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I feel this could be because the British school curriculum teaches the era of the British Empire in a way that perhaps still evokes national glory and success, with India being mentioned often and being portrayed as the poor country that Britain charitably helped develop. By contrast, the school curriculum does not devote much time, if any, to the Native Americans or what British colonisers did in the New World, perhaps because with limited time to teach history, there is a preference for teaching about the glory days of the British Empire rather than the colony Britain lost (upon the American Revolution). With my greater knowledge of the British Empire in India as opposed to North America (due to growing up in the British education system), it is possible to see how my mind jumped to India first. Regardless, this course is challenging my existing knowledge of the British Empire and it has already been enlightening to learn the extent of injustices in the British Empire, from the various ways in which India was exploited to the dispossession of land from Native Americans.
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