The Beaver Wars

This years first project is pretty fun sounding. Our class was put into groups of 4 students, and we are making our own video. The video is a “Heritage Minute”, or a one minute video about a person, place, event, or invention during Canada’s history. My group consists of Emily, Jessie, Lauren, and myself. We chose to do a video on the Fur Trade, or more specifically the Beaver Wars.

Beaver Wars! (Semi-inaccurate picture)

But first, some backstory. We’ve been studying Canada while it was still a British nation before Confederation. The topic of our video had to occur sometime during the 1700’s to confederation in 1867. Our topic does take place during the 1600’s, but the wars had long lasting effects on fur trade throughout the 1700’s.

The Beaver Wars were a series of raids, battles, and other events between 1610-1701. These battles were fought intermittently between the native Iroquois tribes and the European settlers. Most of the time, the Iroquois would raid small villages and settlements during the night.

In our video, the main character Louis is running to his house to warn his family of the raid. As he’s running around his home grabbing supplies, explosions and gunshots can be heard in the background. After running out with his family, his wife gets worried the furs are slowing them down. Louis dislikes the idea of dropping them, as their worth a lot of money. His wife convinces him to drop the furs, just as their house and village burns down. We then switch to Louis’s great great grandson holding a picture of an older Louis. The Grandson flips the photo around, and on the back it reads “my great great grandfather, Louis”.

We had plenty of other shots we didn’t use. One shot that I thought was really cool was of the fur pelt I was holding. It had been dropped on the ground, and an arrow hit it, lighting it on fire. Unfortunately, the arrow was actually just a stick, so it didn’t get stuck in the fur like we had wanted. It also didn’t have a pointy tip, so you could easily tell it was fake.

I was actually in two heritage minutes. The one above and one for Kiefer’s group. I was a soldier in Kiefer’s Redcoat Army. Kiefer actually used an interesting filming technique where he took multiple videos of us (me and Robin) in different locations with the camera in the same spot. He then layered the videos so it looked like there were more people. It was really funny to see an army of me and robin take over a church.

This project didn’t teach me as many organization skills or teamwork skills as another project might. This project just taught me the same things you may read in a text book. Although we did get to chose our own topics and a subtopic with that topic, so my group would know different facts compared to another group.

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