A Story Of Power…
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power”
I find it great, when I’m sitting around and people start talking about a place in Canada and I can spurt out random facts about said place in the 1800’s. I think people think I’m crazy.
Some people say history is boring. And sometimes it is. But in the long run, it is also quite interesting.
How did we end up the way we are?
How did such and such place become how it is?
Who did what to make such and such happen?
History is a place of questions and guesses.
Our Question—
As the usual projects go, we have a inquiry question. The question we base our projects around and try to answer throughout our learning.
Sometimes we do this by specifically looking at the question, and sometimes we just look at it in the end result of our projects.
One of the ways that we look at answering our questions is book reviews, because we usually have a book to read during our units in humanities.
The “Graphic Novel”—
It was more of a comic book, but whatever.
So like I said a second ago, we usually read a book for our humanities units so that we can get some English in our brains.
This unit however, we were reading something a bit different. It wasn’t a novel, it was a kind of graphic novel. But it was more of a comic, but still kind of a graphic novel.
It was called:
The comic was about the life and challenges/successes of Louis Riel. The not so terrible human.
The thing about Louis Riel, he wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t necessarily good either. He did kill people, and put people in prison with no full cases.
Louis Riel- The Good, The Bad and The Middle—
For one of our assignments in this unit, we had to look at wheather or not we thought, after learning all about the life of Louis Riel, he was a hero or a villain.
Now I’m sure most people would have made up their minds. However, I looked at both sides and I just couldn’t decide. Louis Riel was a man of many sides.
In this video, the characters believe that Riel was a hero;
https://youtu.be/CpFNgdIrz3A
However in his heritage minute, they don’t really say much about it, however they do show how it ends
https://youtu.be/Cnr3gWgsdzQ
I personally thought he was neither a hero or a villain. He wasn’t good so to speak, but he wasn’t bad either. He did some bad things, but he did them for his people, for his land.
And he was mentally unwell, so that contributes to the “not born evil” kind of thing.
The Animation of Louis Riel—
While we were reading the comic on Louis Riel, we had to write up “summaries” about the sections of the books we had read.
On our third section, we tried a new kind of summary, based on our new project coming up.
Our new project would be an animation. So we were assigned to animate a short summary of the third section of the book.
This was my summary video;
Alongside that animation about Louis Riel I also made a few other animations as practice. I made a few for Pride Month, and I also made this VERY short animation about a skiing man falling down a hill. I gave up halfway through, but it was a very funny goal I was aiming for when drawing it. Kill the man with his cape:
The New Project—
Said new project was continuing the topic of power. And history of course.
Back in the 1800’s, there were a lot of men worth talking about now. People like, Andrew Onderdonk, or like…. John A Macdonald… maybe Donald Smith?
Yeah definitely Donald Smith.
We were all given different people of our choice to look at and create an animation about. And I chose the one and only Donald Smith.
Donald Smith and The Last Spike—
Back in September, my class went on a road trip to Calgary Alberta, Canada)
On that trip, we stopped off in a lovely little place called Craigellachie. That was where the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway was driven into the railroad.
The man who drove said spike into the ground was named Donald Smith.
Donald Smith was a Scotsman who moved to Canada as a colonist. He became a business man, a politician and a millionaire once in Canada.
This is his story;
I spent three weeks working on the research and animation of that video. To make Donald Smiths story come to life in a way that was only my own. And I have to say I’m pretty proud of it.
Although, while I don’t regret it, I apologize for the lack of me-made electro background music.
Conclusion—
The theme of this unit was power, and that’s what we looked at. Sometimes it’s right in front of you. And honestly, power did crazy things to normal men. Just look at the men of the 1800’s, all power, no cares in the world.
Power does strange things to a man, an honest man with power can become a liar.
Thank you for reading, have a g’day now.