Trail of Tears Presentation Questions!

Presentation questions!!

I have a few questions, but I’m really not sure how much discussion they’ll generate- you guys can pick and choose what you want to talk about. I’ll fill in this blog post after seminar on Friday, with sort of a summary of what you said, and also my own thoughts.


  1. Did any of you watch the Time Traveller series of videos? Did it affect your understanding of the text?


  1. I was wondering if anyone knows anything about the significance of the infinity sign to Aboriginal Americans/ Canadians. I was looking at the symbol on the front of the book, and initially figured that it was representative of the ‘loop’ which is a recurring theme throughout- but then I remembered that there is actually an infinity symbol on my status card. This isn’t really discussion-y, I was just wondering if anyone knew.


  1. Do you think there’s any significance in the fact that there are two pairs of twins? They don’t really seem to have any connection/parallels, but I just feel like two pairs of twins is spooky.


  1. Do you think that something like TREPP would be an effective learning tool (if everything worked the way it was supposed to), you do you think it would be more like “a continuation/amplification of colonial violence” (Gaertner)?


1 thought on “Trail of Tears Presentation Questions!

  1. Christina Hendricks

    We had good discussions from question 4! I am sorry so few people watched enough of the videos that we couldn’t discuss question 1. My thoughts on that were that the machinima might suggest a “good” use of virtual reality for educational purposes. At least, in most of the videos it seems like the person could go into the past and learn a lot from seeming to be there and interacting with people. But then by the end we see how it is a money-making venture, and Hunter becomes the face of TimeTraveller and stars in a video series, which turns out to be the video series we’re watching. So it’s still got some of the same issues as TREPP.

    I also found that the boundaries between virtual reality and reality were blurred in interesting ways in the videos. Hunter and the woman (whose name I can’t pronounce or spell) are going into each others’ times and eventually she gets to live in his time. He picks her up as small child in the third video at the Oka, Quebec standoff when her mother gets arrested and takes her to her grandmother’s house, and later in the series she explains that she met him when she was four and that after Oka her mother was arrested and she was taken to her grandmother’s. We could take this as the woman herself simply being a character in the VR all along, or as being a real person that Hunter interacted with through VR even though he should only be able to interact with VR people. In the latter case then there is a blurring of VR and reality in a pretty deep way.

    What I was thinking with that is that we can change history in way by interacting with it. History is the stories we hear about what happened, and as we hear them or think about them in certain ways it changes them; if I think about history in a different way because I’ve heard different stories, then history really changes for me vs. for you. So by going into “history” in VR one might actually be changing history by changing what one thinks of what actually happened.

    At any rate, those were some of my thoughts on the Time Traveller videos!


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