Hi today I’m going to talk about Spaces and exchanges. To do so I will be using two texts, the first one is about The
Underground Rail road written by William Still and the second is about War resisters and it was written by Hugh
Brewster. These two texts have in common the subject of immigration to canada. First let me explain the key word in
this presentation :
Space and exchanges : those two terms deal with the geographical and symbolic areas that all societies occupy and
the interaction between men and different societies. Our world is built on the exploration and conquest of new spaces.
The diffenrent cultural, economic, sociological, and langage interactions have shaped and characterised our modern-
day world
Immigration : Immigration is the international movement of people into a destination country of which they are not
natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle or reside there, especially as permanent residents
or naturalized citizens
So we will try to answer the following key question : For what reasons do people leave their country ?
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Many reasons can push people to leave their country, in the current world most people leave their home land because
of the war or starvation. In fact, in subsaharian african countries people are fleeing to Europe because of the war but
it wasn’t always because of that. Indeed, during the 19th century slavery was still authorized in the United states of
america, the north part of the country were free states and the south part were slave States. This separation in two
parts of the country created many migrating flows. In fact, we studied one of these flow in class, the underground
railroad : Its a letter to the editor of a newspaper, the provincial Freeman and it was written by William Still. He wrote
this text so the editor could publish it and it would have warn people about arrestation being made between Delaware
and Pensylvania. Delaware was a slave state and Pensylvania was the first free State. So we read that people were
using a clandestine system of trail and safe house around the USA to reach Canada. In fact, a lot of slaves were trying
to escape USA during this period to move to the promised land that was Canada. This text is a good example of reasons
that pushed people in the past to leave their country. By that time it created illegal flow but we can reconsider it and
say that it was probably the best option for those people.
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Most of the time being a soldier is the sign of a high hope in the country and an important feeling of patriotism, but
during the vietnam war many people tried to aviod to go to the war. As a matter of fact those people were called War
dodgers. The vietnam war was the first war to be retransmited in USA on the TV, soldiers were filming during the war
so people could watch the progression the US army in the vietnam war. This media coverage of the war did not bring
only good things, in fact the US army did many bad deeds by using napalm bomb and burning whole villages and killing
civilian. Furthermore, the casualties amoung US troups were the highest of any American war. Those different facts
created american moovement against the war. We saw those uprising through a text about war resisters. It’s a story
written by Hugh brewster on everythingzoomer.com. It’s about war resisters and particularly war dodgers. Those were
people that tried to escape the draft and flee in other countries so they weren’t being sent to vietnam to fight. Those
people fled to Canada with their family because it was a more pacifist country, around 100 000 people fled to Canada
during this period. Again this is another example of reasons that forced people to flee their country.
To conclude we saw different reasons that encouraged people to leave their Home Land. Most of the time people are
being forced to leave their country as we saw in those two examples, but sometimes persons can just leave their
country to discover new horizons and live a different life. In both case it creates flows, exchanges between people and
cultures.
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