House Made of Dawn

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

What does it mean when someone says history is written by the victors? What are some tropes you are familiar with relating to the history of Indigenous people? Where and how do these stories get perpetuated? What stories have you heard that challenge these tropes?   

Teaching Suggestion: These questions best serve to segue into reading the following resources and discussing or reflecting on the concepts of dominant narratives and counternarratives. To make the prompt more accessible and engaging, students may appreciate the opportunity to choose a related concept to research and report on in pairs, such as tropes in the history of Indigenous people, the differences between dominant and counternarratives, and/or how these concepts are being challenged in literature, film, or other mediums.

• This video explains the differences between dominant and counternarratives with examples.
• This article from the EdCan Network provides a visual framework for counternarratives that challenge dominant narratives of erasure, victimization, and conquest of Indigenous people in Canada.

Short Activity