When most people think about the necessary courses they will take in college, they think about courses specific to their major and, therefore, their interests. Although few people are specifically interested in Indigenous studies, the idea of ​​a compulsory course for all has been brought up several times in the past and in his article "Why Indigenous Studies Should Not Be Compulsory", Josh Dehaas makes passionate arguments against this idea. . He first begins by presenting both sides of the problem. Julianne Beaudin-Herney is a First Nations University student who started a petition to introduce mandatory Indigenous studies courses at the University of Regina, where she witnessed blatant stereotyping of her people as " Indian princesses” at a school party (Dehaas par. 19). .Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Dehaas finds Beaudin-Herney's opponents among engineering students at the University of Regina. Many non-native students believe that the subject is already covered in depth in each grade before they graduate from high school (Dehaas par. 13). By focusing solely on engineering students and giving Beaudin-Herney little voice, Dehaas ignores or trivializes why these courses are integral to building bridges between Canada's different cultures. Dehaas focuses much of the first half of his essay on the struggle that an additional required course would bring to engineering students. To earn an engineering degree, students must first take 45 courses and are often so overwhelmed that fewer than 64% of them meet the requirements to graduate within 6 years (Dehaas par. 4); even fewer finish in standard levels 4-5. Of those 45 courses, they can only select one humanities elective course, many object to this single course becoming a requirement for Indigenous studies . It is important to note that Indigenous Studies is not currently on the list of available humanities electives. Dehaas provides a list of what they are allowed to choose: women's studies, English, philosophy, or religion (par. 5). The only student mentioned by name, Kyle Smyth, openly states that he is not willing to drop the English elective already chosen and that he is not willing to increase his course load, which would the total number of required courses at 46. Another argument Smyth makes against simply adding the course is that he and his classmates are not willing to spend $650 and "countless" hours on a course they did not ask (Dehaas para. 6). At this point, it is worth mentioning that, assuming the University of Regina has a standard of 3 hours of teaching per week for a single semester course, Smyth and friends would only devote 36 hours to the maximum to indigenous studies materials. The second half of the essay is a series of statements explaining his already deep understanding of Indigenous issues and asserts that, from kindergarten through graduate school, general Canadian history was pushed aside to consider relationships between Indigenous people and non-natives. By his own admission, in fourth grade [he] filled out cards detailing the different indigenous linguistic groups, in fifth grade [he] prepared bannock with the Algonquin grandmothers and in sixth grade [he] listened attentively to a woman screams [talking] about how she was flown out of Hudson Bay everyone falling into the 2018.