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When parents in Ontario’s Lambton Kent District School Board learned the mandatory Grade 11 English course was being replaced with an indigenous literature course, their responses often invoked that 500-year-old icon whose shadow still falls over all English writing.

“So my kid doesn’t have to study Shakespeare?” was the common reply, said superintendent of education Mark Sherman.

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As of this September, for those in Grade 11 at least, the answer is no. Instead, they will be reading and studying novels such as Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, Medicine River by Thomas King, My Name is Seepeetza by Shirley Sterling, or As Long as the Rivers Flow by former Ontario Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman.

This indigenous turn of a high school curriculum is an abrupt departure from the Canadian high school standard of mainly studying literature from the two great cultures against which Canadian-ness is traditionally triangulated — Britain and America.