For this humanities project my partner Alex and I worked on the topic of “The Hudson’s Bay blankets and the spread of small pox.” For this project we had to create three images that were related to our topic. We then had to post them on a class instagram account.

The driving questions for our project was:

How can we present past actions and decisions through images to help us make decisions of what is fair or unjust?

Here is a little more about our topic in the form of our Caption. Our caption should’ve explained what happened in the story as long as some thinking questions.

Our next image was a gif I made. The task was to make an image that was black and white and draw things overtop of it in colour to make it standout of pop out. I wanted to go up and over so I made a gif “outlining” all the things I drew.

It was difficult to make because I had to import the image into Explain Everything, and then draw all the outlining there. But if I wanted it to be fast and not 1x speed then I needed to put it into another editing app and make it faster.

Alex made both our second images. She worked very hard on them. One of them had to be a quote, and the last one could be whatever we desired, so we made it a statistic.

We had two competencies for this project.

• Connect: I can understand my personal connection to the text because I i can relate to it. By relating to the text and putting myself in the characters shoes I can feel what the character is going through and what they are trying to accomplish, and wether they are succeeding. I did this by reading the book Louis Riel and connecting to the characters, seeing what they are thinking, putting myself into their shoes. 

• Understand Ethical Dimensions: I can decide wether the actions of the past were fair or not by talking about it with my peers. In class we had a debate wether Louis Riel was a villain or a hero. This way we were able to come to a conclusion together as a class that Louis Riel was a villain. We talked about it, debated, and now we agree.

So, How can we present past actions and decisions through images to help us make decisions of what is fair or unjust?

Well, we can present past actions through images to help us make decisions of what is fair or unjust. In my first image I showed a weeping First Nations women surrounded b all the things that caused terror in her life. Because, her life was going great until the Europeans showed up. They took her land, took her animals to hunt, and eventually killed her loved ones through blankets, and shaking hands. Now she is terrorized by the Hudson’s bay logo. 

My favourite part of this project was having the debate. I enjoyed the debate a lot because it was an opportunity to fight for a side that wasn’t necessarily in the right and still be able to win.  My group worked together in finding a list of 24 total crimes Louis Riel committed. This was our main arguing point and the judge got a little tired of it😅

All in all, I really liked this project. It taught me to see things from both sides and use several different techniques to analyze events and see wether they are just of unjust. I also learned about an event that I never heard of before and that was interesting.