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Ontario Tech acknowledges the lands and people of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation.

We are thankful to be welcome on these lands in friendship. The lands we are situated on are covered by the Williams Treaties and are the traditional territory of the Mississaugas, a branch of the greater Anishinaabeg Nation, including Algonquin, Ojibway, Odawa and Pottawatomi. These lands remain home to many Indigenous nations and peoples.

We acknowledge this land out of respect for the Indigenous nations who have cared for Turtle Island, also called North America, from before the arrival of settler peoples until this day. Most importantly, we acknowledge that the history of these lands has been tainted by poor treatment and a lack of friendship with the First Nations who call them home.

This history is something we are all affected by because we are all treaty people in Canada. We all have a shared history to reflect on, and each of us is affected by this history in different ways. Our past defines our present, but if we move forward as friends and allies, then it does not have to define our future.

Learn more about Indigenous Education and Cultural Services

Common Reading Program

To help support student learning through the development of critical reading, thinking, and writing, the Common Reading Program offers students a common text that is used across all courses in the common first-year program. Texts are usually timely and tap into an issue of social, cultural, and political importance. The text acts as a touchstone, a way of connecting first-year courses through ideas about social justice and social change.  

Benefits of the Common Reading Program:

  • Creates a sense of community between incoming students, as well as between students and their faculty.
  • Helps develop students' awareness of social issues as well as the relationships between public and academic conversations. 
  • One piece of the larger goal of improving students' writing and critical thinking skills, as these are intimately tied to reading practices. 

Past texts

  • Secret Path - 2019
    Secret Path, a graphic novel by the late The Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie and artist and author, tells the story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old boy who died trying to escape the Cecilia Jeffrey Residential School near Kenora, Ontario back in October 1966.