Tag: history

So Many Lies And Incongruences

Content warning; there will be mentions of residential schools, missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, and other traumatic events for First Nations peoples.

This is not the first time we learned about Canada’s wrongdoings towards indigenous peoples in class, and it wont be the last.

Keystone 1

Keystone 1 for this project was reading the book The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline and filling out reflections and contributions each week relating to the chapters we read. This reminded me a lot of the “Lit circles” we used to do in elementary school, and I really enjoyed it. First of all, The Marrow Thieves is an amazing book that I had heard of prior to reading it in class, so I was super excited to be analyzing it. I would like to share with you my journal of reflections and contributions, so SPOILER WARNING if you havent read it yet.

Reading Journal pdf

As you may have seen, for some of my contributions I chose to make art pieces, and in one case an animation (that you would not have seen because that file is a PDF and cannot play the video but trust me it was cool). I usually don’t like making art because I find that my perfectionism gets in the way and I end up just giving up on  the art. But I really wanted to do something different that wasn’t just a piece of writing and I am super proud of how they turned out.

At the end of the journal there is a reflection answering the question “How does The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline reflect Canada presently and historically?” And I would like to charge a clip of that reflection with you now.

The characters in the book experienced loss of family, both chosen family and biological, just like indigenous people did during the time of residential schools and especially the sixties scoop. They were unable to know if their loved ones was alive or where they were taken, a heartbreaking type of pain to feel that was felt by a whole race of people. This type of pain is felt heavily even to this day because of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada. The ramifications of the colonizers treatment of indigenous peoples in both the book and real life have long lasting consequences that will not be forgotten.

Keystone 2

DQ – How can art and text reflect both the history and our current place in time?

The driving question for this project can be answered by the work I did in keystone 2. Here is a brief look at what keystone 2 is about and the competencies that went along with it ⬇️

Keystone 2 was completed in 3 parts; history, contemporary issues, and civil disputes, and how each of those topics could be found in art. For each topic we had to find an art piece (could be any kind of art including music) and tie it to a specific topic or event that related to the main topic (I.e. Canada’s peace and friendship treaties for history or MMIWG).

For part 1 I chose to focus on historical peace and friendship treaties. I chose a piece of art that I found on a website with a research paper dedicated to Canada’s peace and friendship treaties. Lnuey.ca was an excellent source that I found for this topic and extremely helpful for writing.

Here is the art I chose that directly symbolizes the peace and friendship treaties. I encourage you to go to this link to see my write up on what the peace and friendship treaties ment and how this painting is represented. Keystone 2 pt 1. Treaties & Art 

Part 2 was about contemporary issues that indigenous people face culturally and how that can be seen in art.

For this I chose to focus on cultural appropriation. I was researching artists who were indigenous activists when I came across Kent Monkman, a Cree artist from Manitoba. With some help, I searched through his gallery on his website to find a painting that I felt could tie into the cultural appropriation topic. This lead to us finding a painting called “Welcome to the Studio”. This painting is actually too large to be imbedded here without me cropping it up so you will have to see it in my writing reflection -> Contemporary issues and art.

The final part of keystone 2 was a similar task to the first 2 parts, but this time it was related to a civil conflict. I chose to focus on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls because I think it is a powerful topic that is still very prevalent today. My reflection shows the connection to the red handprint and red dress movements that we see today as activism for this issue. The link to my full reflection can be found here -> MMIWG and art

The Collage

The final product of this project was a collage (physical or digital) showing what we had learned over the course of the project. Along with this came a short written reflection on our learnings and what we can do for truth and reconciliation.

I feel guilty now as a Canadian looking back on what my country did to the First Nations peoples. I had a pretty good understanding of most of this information before we started this project but I always felt that it didn’t affect me much. I learned much more about how the history of Canada’s wrongdoings against the First Nations people still affects them to this day through intergenerational trauma, lateral violence and cultural appropriation. I can contribute to Canada’s truth and reconciliation by continuing to learn and take seriously the lessons we are taught on this topic. Especially next year in my BC First Peoples class.

 

Conclusion

So this project contained a lot of heavy topics and was very impactful. During this project I heard someone say “If you feel comfortable about truth and reconciliation, you’re not doing it right.” And that really hit home for me because it is on the shoulders of us white colonizers to right the wrongs of our ancestors in any way we can. I did excellent work throughout this project and really showed off my authenticity and raw willingness to learn and participate, some skills that have grown immensely for me over the past year. Thank you for reading this post.

As Always, Brooke

Our Second Official Language – French.

Hello all, Welcome to my blog. Today I’m going to be talking about a project called “A Case for a Nation”. This project was about Nationalism and the ripple affect that comes along with it. We did most of our whole class learning on Nationalism in Canada, but some people later picked different cases of nationalism to research.

Driving Question

“How can an understanding of nationalism of the past, help us make sense of today?”

I think that the best answer to this question would be the caption that my group came up with for our instagram post (this will make more sense later on in the post).

“French Canadian nationalism started with France’s exploration of North America. New France showed their distinct culture through their language, religion, & way of life. Harsh conditions led to their defeat in the 1756 Seven years’ war. After the war, British rule suppressed French Canadian culture while the economy in lower Canada dwindled. In 1837 French Canadians started the “Patriot’s War”, a rebellion in Lower Canada. Holidays like Saint-Jean Baptiste Day were created to give the French Canadians a further way to celebrate their individuality & nationalism. Today, Quebec even has political parties that are devoted to the idea of separatism.”

In the last few sentences of that paragraph, it links the two timelines together by showing the connection of French Canadian nationalism to present day, which is exactly what the driving question is asking.

Current Events

After briefly looking into the concept of nationalism, we worked on an assignment to understand nationalism in todays world, thus revealing the “Current Events Presentation”. For this, we researched a relatively current event that was happening around the world that could relate to Identity and Nationalism. We than made a document with some images, sources and facts. We than presented our documents to a small group of people through the first portion of the project. I did my presentation on the boil water advisory crisis affecting First Nations communities across the country. This little exercise helped me practice my research skills/presentation creating and was a start into identifying nationalism.

Building Knowledge

Before we split into our final groups for the project, we needed to form bit of a backstory as to where we are in history. We learned about the formation of Upper and Lower Canada, the Canadian Confederation, and cases of nationalism across the world. We did a few different knowledge-building activities to dive into each of those three topics. First, we started to learn about nationalism as a concept across the globe. We read printed out pages from a textbook that discussed different places and their struggles with nationalism, and conferred with our groups to take notes and discuss. Then, we learned about Upper and Lower Canada. We did a pseudo-simulation called the “Rebellion Scene Investigation”, taking us back to the two colonies to explore their differences and learn about the people who lived in the majority French vs majority English parts of Canada. This part of the project helped us practise taking historical perspective of life back then to learn why they may have acted certain ways or made certain decisions.

The Product

Finally, we split into groups of 3 based on which topic we chose, but I accidentally picked a group who already had three people so we became the only group of 4. There were many topics to chose from and the topic we chose was “Quebecois / French Nationalism in Canada”. I chose this topic because I felt like I had enough prior knowledge to do a good job at executing the work that would coincide with it. Plus I think that it is important to learn about the French existence in Canada because it is a big part of how our country was formed. 

The finial product of this project was an Instagram post. We had to create 3 images with our group that would be the images displayed in the post. So to start off with, we individually had to create 3 images. One had to be a image digitally drawn on, another had to be a quote, and the last one was a choice. My first three images were as follows ; 

The people in my group also created 3 images, Declan, Faith, and Zach. We picked in class one image from everyone to make a compilation that we think best showed French Nationalism in Canada.

Next, we worked on the caption. We looked at our topic and thought about the story behind it. We used different strategies like the “story spine” and started to condense the years of change and nationalism into just the most important points.  Again we first created a caption individually and then later would combine ours with our group. Here was mine; 

“French Canadian nationalism has been prominent in Canada since upper and lower Canada were formed way back in 1791. From Politics and economics to social ramifications, French Canadians have a history of being oppressed by British rule in the formation of the country that we now call Canada. Citizens had to fight long and hard for French representation in their government systems even in areas where it was a 95% majority of French Canadians. Modern day Quebec even has political parties that are calling for Quebec to separate from Canada and become its own independent nation.

#frenchcanadian #quebecois #canadianhistory” 

We then sat down as a group and looked at all of our captions in a shared pages document. We highlighted what we liked and wanted to keep on each others captions and then glued them together to create one final masterpiece. Here is my groups final caption;

“French Canadian nationalism started with France’s exploration of North America. New France showed their distinct culture through their language, religion, & way of life. Harsh conditions led to their defeat in the 1756 Seven years’ war. After the war, British rule suppressed French Canadian culture while the economy in lower Canada dwindled. In 1837 French Canadians started the “Patriot’s War”, a rebellion in Lower Canada. Holidays like Saint-Jean Baptiste Day were created to give the French Canadians a further way to celebrate their individuality & nationalism. Today, Quebec even has political parties that are devoted to the idea of separatism.

#frenchcanadian #quebecois #canadianhistory #francophone 

@that_snail_kid @declan.rattray @zachv24 and Faith”

Conclusion

Overall, I think this project was rather enjoyable. I learned much more depth into the formation of Canada, and the impact that French Canadian history has on Canada today. I also gained a lot of skills on how to write your opinion and support it with all the stuff it needs to make your writing effective.

Here you can check out the instagram account that the whole classes posts will be up on soon. Hopefully you will go quickly check those out and drop a few likes :D.

Historical perspectives instagram account!

Thanks for reading!

As always, Brooke.

How is it going?

Hello all 👋🏼

It is time for another summative blog post.

The project that we just finished it was called “how it started, how its going”, The title coming from a meme that boomed in early 2020. As you may have guessed, the meme was all about showing how something started versus the present. Here’s an example:

source

Before we go any further I should probably tell you what this project is. In this project we made a “how it started, how it’s going” meme with a painting from the Renaissance or medieval times being the “how it started” and a “how it’s going” of present day. We needed to do a bunch of research on the important historical events and worldview of the mediaeval and Renaissance times comparing to western worldview. The final Memes went into a virtual museum for all the world to see.

 

At the beginning of the launch,everyone had to make their own introductory meme comparing thebeginning of September 2020 to the present. Here was mine:

 

We also learned about establishing historical significance and what makes a great museum. We visited several virtual museums and took notes on what made them a good museum and what common similarities they had. We also looked at art from the medieval and Renaissance and took notes of what we noticed. All of that information was compiled into a MindNode so that we could easily refer to it.

Next we learned about worldview. Worldview (noun): a collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or group; the lens through which the world is viewed by an individual or group; the overall perspective from which the world is interpreted. You may have heard the term “western worldview” referring to the views and norms of western society. We learned that there are seven main aspects of worldview, society, knowledge, time, economy, values, geography, and beliefs. We did work on identifying worldview and how worldview is represented. Milestone 2 of this project was a collage about our personal worldview. We established historical significance of certain events in our lives and connected those events to our worldview. The collage was supposed to follow a story line that had an exposition, rising action, climax, falling actions, and a resolution, those steps are also known as a story mountain. In this milestone, I think that I showed how I can respond to text and construct critical and creative connections between myself, the text, and the world around me and be able to support my ideas with credible evidence. Here is the collage that I made along with a short explanation.

There is also a book of all of the collages that we made as a class. It is our companion book for the museum.

As I already mentioned, the end product of this project was an art meme in a virtual museum. If you have ever been to an art gallery or museum, you may have noticed that the art is usually accompanied by an artists statement about the piece. Therefore, to accompany our art we had to also have an artists statement. Our artists statement was an argument about what lessons from history we could apply to our worldview. Everyone was put into one of seven different groups, each group was representing a different aspect of worldview, and your argument and art were supposed to tie into that aspect of worldview. We previously did a lot of building knowledge on medieval and Renaissance times so that we could identify historically significant events that shaped our worldview in certain ways. I was part of the beliefs worldview group and here is my Argument.

Hopefully you have been curious about what the actual art was going to look like. The first step in making the meme was to find the portrait that would be used for the “how it started” side. Our main source for the art was Google arts and culture. I ended up choosing “Portrait of Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi” by Raffaello Sanzio created in 1518. Then we took that art and made it our own by adding our face onto it. Everyone also edited and added things on the painting to show a specific statement about their worldview aspect. In all of this editing you had to use your technology creatively and be an empowered learner. I used an app called Procreate to edit my art with some help from another app called PicsArt.

My art was trying to show how beliefs help people make decisions. It would be great if in the comments you could tell be what your first impressions were about the statement of my piece.

Now  I haven’t really talked about the driving question to this project. It was “What can we learn from the past, and why does that matter to us today?” And I think that my Argument and History test answer that best. And if i had to summarize both of those long answers in one sentence it would be; “It is important to remember what happened in the past because we don’t want history to repeat itself.”

Here is the link to the final museum and I hope you enjoy!

As always, Brooke.