Contributions of religions for citizenship education in Canada: A Christian religious educator’s perspective

Abstract

Canada is a country of immigrants. Under Great Britain’s North America Act, the Dominion of Canada was established in 1867. Canada was built at the price of many lives of Aboriginal people. While it is impossible to know exact numbers, it is estimated that 80% of the Aboriginal people living on the Eastern Seaboard from the 18th and the 19th century disappeared, according to Thomas King, a professor of English literature and an educator of Indigenous knowledge and history (2012, 60). Not only did they experience tremendous loss of population, but they also suffered the loss of their cultures and their ways of life that are inseparably connected to their land.