The Mètis List of Rights

 Instagram Post 

The text above me is a link that will take you to my groups final product for our newest project “Case For A Nation” in Humanities. This project focused on Nationalism in the past and the present. Our final product was to choose a topic, learn it, create images to demonstrate our learning and how it connects to nationalism.

We began this project with a quick jog of the memory from our blog post “The More Things Change” as it is an event that revolves around nationalism. We then moved onto some of the events after the fur trade. This had nothing to do with our final product, but was a good way to get us to understand nationalism.

Let me define a couple of terms using what i’ve learnt:

Nationalism: I’ve found nationalism to be the unification of people through a nation and is cultural, linguistic, ethnic, geographical, and religious similarities.

Separatism: However where there is connection there is divide. I’ve found that separatism is the idea that a group of people should divide based on the same variables.

Colonialism: The term that connects well with the Mètis List of Rights, Colonialism. I’ve found that colonialism is gaining control of land. This process is often followed by abusing the resources of the land.

Introduction Activities:

Introduction activities were things we did early on to introduce us the big ideas in this project. Our first activity on day 1 was the “Canadian Check” video. I was with Declan and Colton for this, and this is our video:

The next was Nationalism Jigsaw, which was where we read and took notes on a couple of stories in history that relate to nationalism. I found this segment interesting in the moment but didn’t add too much in my overall learning. (ie German nationalism, American nationalism, Italian Nationalism)

This one was the biggest and most in depth. We got into groups and pretended to be one of the provinces asked to join the confederation of Canada. I was apart of Canada East with Zach, Luca, Theryn, and Gwen. We read through an excerpt of our histories province and created some things we need in order to join Canada, as did every other group. By the end we created our own British North America Act and chose to sign it. We were close to historical accuracy, as 3/6 groups signed, while in real life 4/6 provinces signed.

Finally! We have been given our topic choices to create our final product around, I chose the Mètis List of Rights with Ben and Ava. I am very glad I got this topic as it was my first choice. Our first oder of business was creating some questions to answer to help with our research document, this is a document I would be referring to a lot during this project.

This project was quite short, so after learning about our topic we got right to creating our product. Our product was going to be an image, each person in our group would do either a: quote, drawn on image, and a choice image. I had the drawn on image, Ava had the quote, and Ben had the choice in the form of a collage.

I don’t have all the drafts of my image but this one is definitely not the first one. A critique from my group and the whole class in a gallery walk is what got me to my final image.

The next thing we made was our caption for the instagram post. Like the images we wrote our individual captions, then came together as a group to finalize it. Our caption focuses on what the Mètis List of Rights stated, that Louis Riel was the focus, and that it was not honoured. Our caption is of course in the post. The caption was a good way to figure out everyone else’s opinion on this topic and express it for social media.

The Mètis List of Rights is a huge topic, and will bring a lot of opinions with it. It would be such a waste to not formulate our own. So for the very end of our project we wrote our opinion piece. I found this section one of the most difficult but also my favourite part. We were given a small 250 word limit which really made me think about how to express my opinion.

We are nearing the end of the project, and our driving question of “How does an understanding of nationalism of the past help us understand today?” Is one I’d quite like to answer.

If we understand the mindsets of identity in the past, we will be able to see and point out those same behaviours in the future. Doing that will be able to help us prevent us from making the same mistakes, which becomes especially important in topics like the Mètis List of Rights.

This project was a challenge, but ultimately I am glad I did it. My view on nationalism, identity and the history with it has been opened, and I am glad to know about the Mètis List of Rights.

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