For this week’s response I chose to reflect on Marie Battiste “Decolonizing The University” which I found to be something that’s not new to me but it was interesting. Battiste writes about the times of early European takeovers had noticed that the Indigenous people were literate. “ When Europeans did encounter undeniable evidence of a literacy equivalent to their own, such as Toltec and Mayan paper books, they did their best to eradicate it as a threat to the teachings of the scriptures they brought with them” (Battiste, 111-112). After reading this it made me question to why the Indigenous language was seen as a threat? Living in a world today where communication comes in all different forms, neither of them are a “threat” to the other.  If anything, having different forms of communication can be beneficial to others because communication is what makes us not afraid of each other. The early Europeans probably had feared the Indigenous because of what they believed them to be, which was being uncivilized.

 

 

Cited Works

• Marie Battiste. “Print Culture and Decolonizing the University: Indigenizing the Page: Part 1.” The Future of the Page . University of Toronto Press, 2004.