I am a first-year M.A. student studying under the supervision of Professor Nancy E. van Deusen. I completed my BAH in History at Queen’s and decided to continue my studies here. My focus is in North and South American Indigenous history, specifically contact and early colonization. The ultimate intention of my thesis project is to question the power that “contact” narratives have as foundational myths, how erasures and silences of Indigenous perspectives occur, how Indigenous outlooks on “contact” might add fresh insights into early “encounters,” and how we might re-think our understandings of modern states in North and South America that were built on colonial pasts. I have chosen a comparative study to show both the heterogeneity of European and Indigenous understandings and reactions to colonization and expose some of the common metanarratives that inform most contact stories.
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