An Average Post About Feminism (and the Winter Exhibition 2023)

In a world constantly pushing for ideological upheaval, the battle between feminism and masculism isn’t just a clash of opinions, but a necessary battle that must continue in order for equality to form.

This was the main idea behind my exhibition project, which was a piece of conceptual art designed to get the observer to think about the past, present, and future of gender roles in society.

This was my station on exhibition night. Here you can see the art piece and artist’s statement on the right, with the balloons that viewers could add or pop on the ledge of the whiteboard.

My art piece aimed to bridge the views of feminists and masculists to demonstrate the ideal societal dynamic in a way that someone on both sides of the coin can understand equally. Through the people that I interacted with over the course of exhibition night, I think that I was successful in my effort to make my art piece this way, having people from diverse perspectives come and ask about my art. I do wish that we had been placed in a higher traffic area, as we were placed sort of out of the way at the end a hallway that few people walked through.

My art focus for this project was not on the ideas of feminism but instead, on the powerful effect that they can and needs to have on society in order to achieve real equality. I incorporated the interactive aspect of my art piece with the idea of using the art as an analogy for the real world. I wanted the people to see two sides of a conflict, and how they can work together to create a successful resolution. When doing this, I wanted to make sure that the person interacting with my art knew that it isn’t easy, though. That’s why I chose to use balloons that would be near impossible to perfectly balance.

In Vox by Christina Dalcher, the book that my group for the exhibition read, the patriarchy rules with an iron fist, dragging the women down, much like the blue balloons do in my art, but the reverse can also be true. If we, or even the world of Vox overcorrect after overcoming the oppression of one gender, then the sides will have flipped and the new group in power will be just as bad as the last one. The ending of this vicious cycle is embedded right in the middle of it.

Overall I’m proud of the thinking and work that was put into this project, especially how I was able to incorporate the physical interactiveness of my art to show people how complex and difficult to resolve and far reaching the issue of gender equality really is.

 

 

 

An Average Post About School

A Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Framework À La Hierarchy Of Needs - eLearning Industry

School has its issues. Everywhere you look, there is an imperfect school system. So does a perfect school system exist? I don’t think so, but we can get pretty close. In the modern world, kids are on their phones all the time right? Clearly we like our phones, so why not incorporate it into our schools? Here at Seycove, we do a pretty good job utilizing these tools to keep curiosity fresh and work a little more enjoyable. This is what I presented at our Spring Exhibition this year. We were tasked with analyzing our current school system, and coming up with ways to improve the system with the objective of creating more engaged and informed citizens.

Questions Stock Photos, Royalty Free Questions Images | Depositphotos
What is technologically enhanced learning?

Technology-enhanced learning refers to the use of technology, such as digital tools, physical technology and online platforms, to enhance teaching and learning experiences by allowing students to learn in a way that is more of their own. It encompasses various resources like online courses, educational apps, and interactive whiteboards that aim to improve learning outcomes and develop crucial digital skills.

What are the benefits of technologically enhanced learning?

Technologically enhanced learning benefits Canadian schools by increasing engagement, personalizing education, providing access to vast resources, fostering global connections, and developing essential digital literacy and 21st-century skills, ultimately empowering students to thrive in a technology-driven world.

 

My project is not only focused on technology, but also providing new, hands on learning environments for learners. This is similar to the field studies we do in PLP, but the idea was for them to be far more frequent and local. The main idea with this is to engage students by providing new environments, where a student will be invited to be aware of their surroundings and be engaged in the situation.

What are the benefits of experiential learning?

Experiential learning offers the benefits of active engagement, practical application, and personalized experiences, fostering deeper understanding, skill development, and increased motivation. By providing hands-on, immersive experiences, it enhances memory retention, critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and the ability to transfer knowledge to real-world contexts, ultimately leading to a more meaningful and effective learning journey.


The biggest part that I, someone who has experienced technology in this way can confidently say that access to things like the internet in the classroom is an incredible tool for enabling curiosity. The other big part for me, is that I don’t have to use my awful handwriting, instead, I get to type, which is also faster.

No matter who you are, you probably have a phone or a tablet or maybe a laptop that you enjoy using for different purposes. That enjoyment does transfer to school or work to some degree, and this causes people to be more engaged in the activities that they take part in.

How does this all create more informed and engaged citizens?

I’m glad you asked. The way that you engage with society and gather information heavily depends on if you have the motivation or reason to do so. Someone who is determined to learn in school, is far more likely to have the drive to contribute to society later on. This also applies to curiosity. The current system does not foster creativity, as characterized by Logan in his project, School Kills Curiosity. Having technology that students are familiar with, and are more than willing to use helps boost engagement.

“Children often struggle to stay on task or interested, particularly if it is not interactive. One of the main benefits of technology is that it can make even the most mundane school tasks more engaging, which will help your students to stay focused. This is particularly poignant when we consider the earlier point of just how comfortable and normalized technology has become for young kids nowadays.” (Emma Cullen What is technology enhanced learning?)

Students who develop 21st century skills and are engaged in their community and school while growing up develop more sophisticated skills and thought processes, resulting in citizens who are naturally more active in society, whether it be as voters, or just developing humanity in one way or another.


Anyway, I think its time I give a little info about the exhibition now that you have an idea about what my project focuses on.

The Metaverse Is on the Way: Here's What You Need to Know - CNET

My project for the exhibition was a short Virtual Reality experience that I created using Unreal Engine. the idea of the experience was to give visitors a short insight into the experiences of many students who end up unengaged in class, with the experience designed to be bland, dreary, and have aspects of “zoning out”.

This is a screenshot of the Unreal editor showing the first scene that I wanted to show people at the exhibition. This scene is of an empty classroom, to show that the student is off in their own headspace, and there is white noise in the background to reinforce this fact within the visitor. The lights of the scene are rather prison like, showing the students attitude towards school.

The next scene worked while I was creating it, but unfortunately there were some fatal migraine-inducing visual bugs when running it off of the headset, so I had to cut it out of the exhibition product, but I still spent a couple of hours on it so I’m showing it here.

This is a frame you could see while wearing the VR set. This environment is designed to be a nice forest area where you can relax with the birds chirping in the background. This is a representation of a more engaging environment a student might find themselves in if this program was implemented.

I had two iPads on the desk next to me displaying articles pertaining to my project as well, the first being the aforementioned “What is technology enhanced learning?“, and the second being “The benefits of learning outside the classroom“. These articles were there to mostly serve as props for my spiel, but I pointed them out while talking so that the visitors could read more if they wanted to (this includes you, reader).


Overall, I think that the exhibition went over pretty well. I developed a pitch early on with my pre-established knowledge, and people clearly thought that my pitch was pretty good, because I came second place in the somewhat convoluted vote at the end. All in all, I think that creating this product and research was a test of my skills and perseverance, (especially the random errors while trying to import and export my project) and was a somewhat enjoyable experience trying to learn something new while under a tight time constraint!!!!

Thanks for reading this far,

Keenan

An Average Post About Stories of Hope

In a world often fraught with challenges and uncertainties, stories of hope shine as beacons of light, reminding us of the incredible resilience and strength of the human spirit. They serve as powerful reminders that, even in the face of adversity, we have the capacity to overcome, grow, and create positive change.

Today, we embark on a journey of inspiration as we delve into remarkable tales of hope and reflect on the valuable lessons they impart. Furthermore, I am thrilled to present a video that I have personally crafted, taking you on a transformative story of hope that aims to ignite the flickering flame within each viewer. So, let’s dive into these stories, embrace the power of hope, and discover the hidden potential that lies within us all.

After watching my video, consider the story of hope that you went on while watching the video. Throughout the video, did you ever feel disappointed or disheartened? Did you feel sad at all? Did you have hope that the video would get better? These questions, if yes, are the essence of a story of hope.

The four key words for this project were:

Adversity

Resilience

Hope

Survival

After examining the definitions, did you experience any of those, whether it be from watching my video, or from previous experiences in your life? Do you feel you grew from that experience? If you did, you likely experienced all four of those things. They’re kind of like a package deal.

What lessons and inspiration can we draw from the stories of individuals that have faced tragedy and overcome adversity?

The growth that one experiences after overcoming adversity is one of the greatest contributors to humanity’s greatest achievements. Could the civil rights act have been created without the lack of civil rights to begin with? Could we have reached space so fast without the space race? Could we have movements and organizations coming together to prevent climate change if there was none?

No. No we could not. But what separates a story of hope from a story of tragedy? The answer is growth, and in turn, survival. While the definition of survival might just be:

the state of continuing to live or exist, often despite difficulty or danger”                                                                                                                                                                                     – Oxford Dictionary

You might simply look at that and think,  “I’m surviving, continuing to live and exist”. But I think that true survival requires adversity and resilience. This means that in order to truly “survive” you must first be faced with difficult circumstances, and then flourish upon overcoming them. This is seen in my video above, as well as (hopefully) within yourself after watching it.

This is am image that I took of the “Survivor Tree”, a tree which holds it’s own special story of hope, on our visit to the Oklahoma city bombing memorial.

Throughout this project, and especially our trip to the US, we saw many examples of people who saw the light at the end of the tunnel and reached past it even after emerging, taking lessons from each one. The lesson which I thought was most important, is that we can never give up. No matter where the determination comes from, there is always a positive to be had, even in the face of the darkest darks, and the lowest lows. The lessons that we learned and saw should, and will be carried with us for the rest of our lives, moving our fulcrum of adversity further to the side.

 

Thank you.

An Average Post About mPOL 2023

Thank you for coming to my presentation of learning. I am the expert on my own learning. I am also responsible and accountable for my own learning. You can expect me to give an honest evaluation of my progress. We will discuss my strengths and opportunities for growth. Thank you in advance for listening and for offering feedback that I can use to improve as a learner.

In this year’s mPOL, I want to shift focus. In the past couple years, my POLs were mainly focused on my struggle with procrastination, but lately I feel like I have the habits and strength to overcome the struggles that I put myself through. This year, I want to focus on something that I feel really helped me from the first couple years of PLP. This being specific feedback on each assignments. My goal for the second half of the year is to improve the quality of my work by making a habit of asking for feedback from my teachers or peers when I feel that I need a little something for my work to be up to standard.

 

While preparing for this mPOL, I reviewed my learning plan to see what I had in mind for improvement at the start of the year, and I could see quickly that it needed to change. While reviewing the learning plan from the start of this year, I found that it wasn’t very focused on anything. The main thing that i felt needed to be stated, was that I think that I no longer need to keep my focus on procrastination. It may sometimes still be a problem for me, but I think that I’m ready to focus on new things. While revising my learning plan, I decided that much of my work could use revisions, just like the learning plan. But the problem here is that hindsight is always in 20/20 right? That’s just me looking back much later and using knowledge that was gained far later than when the work was done to begin with. So what’s the solution?
Feedback.

Feedback is something that can be very helpful and can point out what’s missing in your knowledge or work, allowing you to correct it before it becomes a bigger problem. In the last 2 years of PLP, I’ve felt a distinct lack of this very thing, and have decided that this is the best and most efficient way to improve the quality of my learning and work.

A great example of when I could have used some feedback from others was during the winter exhibition. This is because, as stated in my blog post about the topic, I felt that there were many things that I needed to consider while translating my idea into play form that I did not. The main issue I found with my presentation was that the audience might have a hard time understanding what the specifics of the scene meant, as there were minimal props and my play was not long enough to establish these things. If I had consulted someone else with my ideas, I think that we may have came up with a way to make my section of the play much more comprehensive to the audience.

I think that this solution is applicable to almost every single assignment that we do, and that sometimes there will be feedback given to me, but I think that having more than that is important to me reaching my full potential as a learner.

This post started with my chosen solution, not the only one, and I want to recognize that asking for feedback is not the only way that I can increase the quality of my work. Other methods for increasing my work’s quality is to simply use the tools that are given to me. One of the tools that is given to us as students is the rubric for an assignment. A good mark isn’t the only thing that determines the quality of work, but it helps quite a bit. But this brings me to why I chose the solution I did. I felt that throughout my thinking the best solution to help me grow as a person and a learner is to make use of the people around me and ask for feedback when I feel it may benefit me or my work.

The final way that I would like to build on my habits and learning this year is by asking more questions. In my science related classes, I find that I haven no problem asking for clarification or help when I don’t understand something. I think this is because of the way I think, but it works out great for me in those classes. I want to bring that skill into my life in other regards and be able to ask for help and such in any situation.

 

Thank you for coming to my mPOL.

An average post about the North Shore

Hello, and welcome to my reflective post about our latest projects in humanities. This project was called “Shore to the Core” and had us dig deep into a part of North Vancouver’s history and write a zine about it.

This zine was to be created about a subject that was interesting to me. I chose to write about the infrastructure in North Vancouver. I was interested in the infrastructure and the development of the land because I thought that the way population grew in the North Vancouver way after WWII was interesting. Infrastructure is also important to drawing in population because people will want to have roads and such when they move to a suburb.

You can read my full zine here. In the zine I talked about the lumber industry, and how it initially grew the population and economy, allowing the city we know today to be kickstarted. Another factor for population growth I talked about was the “white picket fence” ideal that was increasingly popular at the time. This ideal was all about having a calm, peaceful, suburban life, usually characterized by a white picket fence. My zine mentions the addition of paved roads and bridges that connect to the larger city of Vancouver, and how that helped the population grow even further, as well as the ports in North Vancouver that contributed to the overall growth of the region, in addition to the developments of Simon Fraser University and Capilano University that happened due to the population reaching a level where such facilities would be needed.


The research that went into the zine was much more complicated than the works cited section of my zine shows. To find each source I had to look up different terms related to each subject I was looking for. A particularly interesting source that I found was the BC Ministry of Transportation and Highways’ “Frontier to Freeway”. This specific file was a history of the roads and such in BC, which accurately describes the way transportation worked in BC throughout the 20th century.


Was my zine compelling? You can answer me in the comments on this post if you want to, but I’m going to answer my own question. I DO think that I have created a compelling piece of text with my zine. I think this because of the detailed examples and research that I have shown in my zine and the connections that I have made to the modern world have helped create a convincing argument as to how the development of the North Shore was, if not significant on it’s own, interesting or representative of the world post WWII. I think that this zine shows how the development of Infrastructure and population growth in the North Shore is significant because these events affects the whole population of the North Shore and some businesses for the simple and obvious reason that we all live here and are thriving as a population.

 

Thank you for reading my blog post, you can check back here for more whenever my next project ends. Bye!

An average post about WWII

Hello and welcome back to my blog. In this post I am going to be talking to you about our recent project on WWII. In this project we got to select a subject from WWII that we could connect to the book that we read for class. I Read the book Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys, and my subject of choice was Unit 731, a Japanese biological and chemical warfare research station located in China.

Spotify

You can listen to all of the episodes of the podcasts here. An episode will be released each day for the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned for episode 16! (Thats mine)

We started this project by looking at some of the causes of WWII. Some of these were directly linked back to WWI and the sanctions that were put on against Germany after the war had ended. I think that learning about the causes of an event of such scale is important because we can recognize patterns that are similar in real life events like the current situation in Ukraine. If you try to connect the start of WWII and the current Russia-Ukraine conflict I’m sure you could find many similarities. I think that if the nations involved fail to play their cards right, we man face the start of WWIII.

You can read more about the current status of the conflict at NBC news here.

We then began reading through our book with our group, and had regular book chats that sparked meaningful and thoughtful conversations about the topics of each book. As I mentioned earlier, my book was Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys. The book follows a group of refugees from countries affected by the war and their individual stories. The main event of the book is a fictional representation of the Wilhelm Gustloff, an event of a ship sinking during WWII that was more deadly than the Titanic, but is still unknown to the majority of people. It tells the consequences of WWII by transporting the reader to the future at the end of the book and describing the fate of one of the main characters in a letter to a different character from the book. It describes how the war took many lives, innocent and military, indiscriminately.

We then chose a topic from WWII (I chose Unit 731) and made a podcast episode which will be airing daily starting March 13th. My podcast was on Unit 731, a very unethical biological and chemical warfare “research” station run by a man by the name of Shiro Ishii, located strategically in China for easy access to new test subjects. The acts that were committed at Unit 731 are absolutely disgusting. They experimented on, raped, and tortured innocent prisoners from China and Russia in order to “research” the effects of various pathogens and injuries. These include blood loss (limbs were severed), having severed limbs reattached to the opposite side of the body, freezing of body parts and thawing to study frostbite and gangrene, or surgery. All of these operations would be conducted without any anaesthesia of any kind to “prevent disruption of test results”. If you find this topic particularly interesting, you can find my podcast episode on it in the Hidden Chapters of WWII podcast Ep. 16: Unit 731.


How might we use stories to understand the causes and consequences of WWII?

My topic of Unit 731 can display the causes and consequences of WWII from the perspective of Japan by demonstrating the reasons Japan joined the war i.e. prejudice the Imperial Japanese felt at the time against most of the world at the time, and pressure to compete with military strength. And the consequences being the many lives that were unrightfully sacrificed and defiled by the “pursuit of science”. Understanding these things and why they happen is important because it allows us to spot them while they are growing in our lives and stoop conflicts and issues, whether you’re having a squabble with a neighbour, or you become the leader of a country.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Keenan, out.

An average post about Shakespeare

Hello and welcome to my post about our humanities 10 Romeo and Juliet project. You may think of romeo and Juliet as some boring play and an even more boring english unit, but this project was actually a lot of fun.

This was the final video for the project, where we took the part of the play we chose and remade it with a modern audience in mind. My group recreated Act V Scene III. Our story was reworked with each family from the original being the leaders of worldwide drug empires.

You can read the script for the original act 5 scene 3 at this handy website that even has some translations for the wacky old Shakespearean English.

Throughout this project, we watched some modern versions of Romeo and Juliet that if you didn’t already know they were connected you would never guess (except Gnomeo and Juliet, you could probably guess that one) in order for us to grasp some of the more important concepts or ideas from the play. The main messages that we were on the lookout for were: the nature of free will, honour and obligation, the naivety of youth, the power of love and hate, violence and death, gender roles, revenge, and the multiplicity of identity. Our short video above had elements of the power of love and hate, violence and death, honour and obligation, and revenge.

Because of our current school system, and the new variants of COVID-19, this project was cut very short, like, an extra week on top of the already shortened project, so we really didn’t get the full scope of things (for the better or worse) but we read and watched adaptations of all the most important scenes. The parts of the movies we watched included: Romeo and Juliet; Directed by Franco ZeffirelliRomeo + Juliet (1996), West Side Story (1961), Gnomeo and Juliet (no resources unfortunately), and Warm Bodies (2013). You can feel free to watch any of these and try to figure out the connections to the original Romeo and Juliet yourself!

Now the driving question for this was “Why does Shakespeare continue to be relevant to a contemporary audience?”. This question is quite complex, despite you maybe being able to give a light answer like “oh it’s taught in schools” but here’s mine. Not only are his plays considered to be beautiful works of poetry and literature, but also they provide some great concepts and realities related to each of them. I mentioned each of these concepts earlier in the post, and see that these concepts can help to teach and understand pieces of literature or texts more deeply and help further your comprehension of more intelectual or deep messages within different mediums such as films, books, or something like a game or even an advertisement.

 

Thanks for tuning into another one of my mindless rants about a recent project,

later!

An Average Post About a Winter Exhibition

Hello, and welcome back to my blog, today we’re going to talk about our most recent event, the PLP Winter Exhibition. This event was pretty big because we were finally able to host it inside again. Unfortunately there was no food or drinks though.

The driving question this time was “How can we create a public memory of past wrongs so they are not repeated today?” This question mentions a “public memory” which refers to the circulation of recollections of members of a certain community as defined by Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Phillips. In our case, the public memory is a memorial, which would refer to a place or structure created to commemorate or remember a significant event. During this project, we learned about 3 different events in Vancouver’s history where some form of discrimination occurred.

The first being the Komagata Maru, and event in history where the Canadian government issued a law called the Continuous journey act causing all sorts of trouble with a certain ship in Vancouver’s port.

The specifics on the event of the Komagata Maru can be found here, in my post about it.

The second event we learned about was the Chinese Oppression in BC. We focused most from the construction of the railways to the Second World War.

And last but certainly not least was the Japanese internment in BC during WWII. This was the topic of my groups project for the exhibition.

For each of these different events we went on a field trip to various areas to get first hand experience in memorials and culture of the affected groups. This way of learning really helped me personally because it gave me a personal connection to each of the events that not only helped me remember some information on each one, but also helped me understand what made a successful memorial because I could take on the role as spectator. For example I found the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen gardens where you went to new areas often to be an much more enjoyable experience than the first half of the Nikkei Cultural centre where it was almost exclusively writing on the wall.

The Winter Exhibition. Oh boy. This was an experience. Now the way I’m talking about it might make it sound terrible, but it really wasn’t all that bad. We had the room arranged so each group got a 6th of the room’s space. We had a corner halfway through the visitors journey. During the exhibition I noticed that our text based way of explaining our project only worked for a handful of people.

Our project was on the Japanese internment during WWII, we decided to make a statue that reflected a shadow onto a large wall at night, signifying the large part of life the Japanese Canadian parents had to keep in the shadows, hidden from their children so they could live a happy life.

This was the statue we made. It doesn’t specifically depict anything, except for a hard working Japanese Canadian. To my group it looked like a farmer or a soldier but it could look like something completely different to you. But the thing they most all have in common is that they work hard and push through tough times.

Earlier I mentioned that out text based descriptions didn’t really work for most people. This is probably because they weren’t interested or they figured it wasn’t important. We tried to circumvent this problem during the exhibition with some improv changes to our pitch where we would tell the visitor that the may not have to read the first 2 paragraphs because we were placed after the other Japanese Internment group. We explained it by saying the other group likely other already explained the content. This is the kind of place we needed to use our teamwork skills. This is because not only did we have to make changes midway through our exhibition we also needed to make sure everyone knew what they were going to say. Another part of the teamwork part we didn’t do too well was communicating outside of school. We were using an iMessage group chat to message each other about the project but most of the time it went unused and we failed to communicate some extra ideas that may have made the final cut.

 

Now this exhibition may have seemed pretty laid back so far, but the was a vote going on between each team from each event. Now in my group I don’t think we were too concerned with the votes, and I think it was better that way. But the results of the voting were clearly biased, but when the votes were counted we found that probably about 60% of the ballots all voted for the first option from each category. This is probably something like what this article is talking about. Now I can still hold my pride high and say that we would have won it if not for the poorly designed ballots I think that we could have presented our project a lot better. I think the biggest culprit of our democratic failure was our large amounts of text. If we had spent some more time refining the paragraphs and making them look slightly less intimidating then filled in the blanks ourselves when the visitor asked a question we could have had many more votes.

 

If I were to pitch this to a city hall or propose it as a real monument I would most likely not change much about our pitch. I’m proud of the way we explained the metaphoric value of the shadow and the interpretations of the mysterious figure at the same time and think it might even have a chance of being a real thing. But I don’t think thats going to happen. I have better things to do with my life like binging series upon series on Netflix.

To give credit where credit is due, this was my group, unfortunately I didn’t come up with this whole thing myself, and I owe it to my team members: Sophia, Josh, and last (and maybe least? Just kidding) Nate.

Finally, we come full circle and I get to answer the driving question. “How can we create a public memory of past wrongs so they are not repeated today?” And I think that the best answer I can give to that is to choose the right event for the job. You will always want to take something local, or something the people you need or want to affect will all associate with. It gives them the kind of sense that they have experienced it or if they have a distant relative that experienced the event they will care more or be more interested in general.

 

Thanks for coming along with me on my extra long rant today, peace

Keenan

An Average Post About the Komagata Maru

Hello, and welcome to my first post on our newest project, “Ology of Apology”. This project focuses on the Canadian Government’s injustices towards minorities. This post will focus on a more specific event though. The Komagata Maru.

The Story

Passengers of the Komagata Maru
Image: City of Vancouver Archives/James Luke Quiney fonds/AM1584-: CVA 7-127

The Komagata Maru is a story of injustice, and a story of bravery, testing the limits of the law. The story starts in Hong Kong, where a wealthy Sikh man name Gurdit Singh came into possession of a boat named the Komagata Maru. 150 Punjabi passengers boarded the ship in Hong Kong, all Punjabis. But this wasn’t enough yet. The ship travelled through Japan and picked up 226 more passengers.

Passengers aboard the Komagata Maru
Image: James Luke Quiney fonds/City of Vancouver Archives/AM 15984-:CVA 7-122.

The ship then began its 2 month journey into Canadian waters. Although Gurdit Singh and the passengers were aware that Canada had been turning away south Asian immigrants for almost 5 years, they thought that being British subjects would be enough to be allowed admittance. This was not the case. Only 20 passengers (and a few special cases) were allowed onto solid ground due to the fact that they were returning residents and could prove it. The other 350 some passengers were kept on the boat for 2 months with food or water supply all while the local police were harassing them hoping to get them to leave by their own volition.

People coming to watch the conflict between the law and the Komagata Maru
Image: City of Vancouver Archives/James Luke Quiney fonds/AM1584-:CVA 7-129.

The Punjabi people on land did their best to get food and water to the ship while raising money to bring the issue to court. They raised an incredible sum of money and hired lawyers to take the case to court. The court later ruled that the ship had broken the continuous journey act and the ship began its journey back to India. The ship stopped in Japan where approximately 20 passengers got off of the ship. The ship then arrived in the port of Budge Budge in India, where some distrusting police members got into a scuffle with the passengers resulting in the death of 20 passengers.

This is a brick that was used to fight against the police officials trying to force the Komagata Maru to leave

Source: Museum of Vancouver


The Apology

in 2008, Stephen Harper made a public apology to around 8,000 people in a local event in Surrey, BC. The Sikh community thought that this apology was half hearted and demanded it be said on the floor of the House of Commons, which didn’t happen until 2016, when Justin Trudeau made the decision to apologize in the House of Commons as the Punjabi community asked.

This is the stage where Justin Trudeau gave his formal apology

Recent events such as residential schools are getting the same sort of apology in an attempt to make things write and move forward as a society. These sorts of apologies are important because they allow the general public to be educated or just acknowledge the events and it shows the remorse and responsibility the government is taking on because of it. It also allows the community affected to observe this and forgive.


The Conclusion

This event isn’t just some random thing from history class. This event is even significant to our lives today! This is because of the effect that it had on the way it has functioned as an example for discrimination and how we have pushed against systemic racism evident by the great variety of people now living in Canada. But overall, I think the most important part of this whole story to remember are the people that took the journey knowing it may not work out, eventually leading to the society we live in today.

 

Thanks for reading this post on the Komagata Maru, and I hope you look out for my next posts on the other racial injustices in Canada!

Signing off.

An average post about Canadian politics

Hello, and welcome to this post on our latest project, “Think You Can do Better?”. This project was about taking on the role of a political party in the Canadian federal election and creating the basis for a campaign. My party was comprised of Jordan, Jonathan, Liam, and myself.

Here you can see our campaign video, detailing our intentions and plans.

The video above was the final product of the project.


The HPC (Hippopotamus Party of Canada)

You can read more about our party and our ideas here, on my post detailing the party if you want to read more. Our party believed the current inflated housing market in populated areas, as well as our ever-growing national debt to be problems that need fixing before they get even more out of hand. Our reasoning for the housing crisis is self explanatory. This is seen in our campaign video with a decent sized Vancouver home costing as much as $2,000,000. Thats a lot of money! The debt crisis is more of a controversial topic. The main reason people will denote national debt is because they believe government to function almost indifferently under debt or not. And they are partially right. The big issue with that though is the large hit the country will take if another event like the pandemic occurs, because the debt a country holds directly affects the amount of monetary support or budget the country can afford to spend attempting to recover, as well as the large interest rates. These interest rates can be observed here.


How should we govern ourselves?

This project had a very difficult driving question; “How should we govern ourselves?”. This question is particularly hard to answer because the answer will change depending on who your asking and what values and experiences they have. For me, I think that the best political system is one in which every different problem and angle on those problems is presented and heard. One such system, known as proportional reprentation (here is a great in-depth explanation from Fair Vote Canada). Proportional representation is a system where seats in government are spread throughout parties based on percentage of votes, for example, if a party were to get 15% of Canadian votes, they would get 15% of seats in the House of Commons. This means that the large percentage of Canadian’s who don’t vote on the grounds that their vote doesn’t matter, would lose their excuse.


Reflection

Overall, I think that this project put me into a new perspective on politics and showed me that the ideal system I have been talking about is very difficult to implement due to how the current system works. And I also think that despite advocating for such a this as an individual, as a party it is disadvantageous to have proportional representation due to the fact that there will almost never be a majority government. On the work side of things here, I think that our campaign video was very successful, even though we were missing some shots due to poor weather and tight time constraints. During this project I’m sure I could have made use of my new Zettelkasten to make my work easier on me, and I hope that I can do that in the future.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, and I hope you’ll join me later for more!