Apparently museums can be not boring?

Welcome back to my blog, everybody.

This project was quite a unique one, being heavily focused on museums. But! Be prepared for a whole lotta images because this project contained not only a field trip, but also a video. So, without further delay, let’s get started.

So we need a driving question, and for this project, it was “What role do museums and governments play in acknowledging and addressing historical injustices?”. To me, this question seemed to be really specific and not super open-ended, however, I came to realize that museums are more than just places where boring people and nerds hang out.

First of all, we started this project by being given a choice between 3 final products. We could write a letter to an MLA, make an audio recording, or we could make a video. And because I hate my free time, I decided to make a video…. From scratch….. using iMovie….. but we’ll get there.

This project was quite short, only lasting 3 weeks total, so I’ll mostly be focusing on the field trip. We started out by waking up at FIVE! AM! To get on a stupid boat. But after I was done zombie walking onto the sea bus, we continued towards Victoria and started to work on the ferry. We had to make a list of questions that we wanted to ask the museum staff, but that stuff is mostly boring, so here are a bunch of photos from the museum.

The museum was surprisingly quite interesting, and I really liked the exhibit with the fake animals.

The next day, we went to the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, Unfortunately, we couldn’t take a lot of photos, but since we were a school group, we got special VIP treatment. They were quite excited to have us there, and our MLA, Susie Chant, was very enthusiastic about showing us everything she possibly could. We started our tour with our guide, Nicholas, who showed us some very interesting ways that Indigenous communities were honoured throughout the building. We also went into sections that were usually off limits, but because Susie was so happy to have us there, she pushed us through. Unfortunately, I can’t share much information because…. You know….. I’m not allowed…. But what I can do is share these photos.

Now we were headed home after 2 very, very veeerrryyyy long days. And there were still more long days to come. Because when I got home, I had 1 day of rest, then I was off to Edmonton for a choir trip with 2 SEPARATE 16 HOUR BUS RIDES. So safe to say I was struggling, sleep-wise and mental state-wise. But when I got home, I got straight to work. And by straight to work, I mean I waited until the weekend because I was in much need of sleep.

Now I’m done complaining, let’s talk about what needed to be in the video. We had to provide a clear thesis that set the theme for our whole video. We had to provide 2 pieces of evidence that strongly supported our thesis. And we had to give a call to action on how museums and governments could improve. So now you know the work we had to do, let’s watch my video.

Well, what did you think? I worked pretty hard on it, so I hope you liked it.

Usually, I end my posts with my answer to the driving question. Buuuuuut I kind of already did that in my video. So I’ll end slightly differently. I’m going to ask you the driving question. I ask that you take a few minutes to come up with an answer yourself, for the question “What role do museums and governments play in acknowledging and addressing historical injustices?”.

That’s it for this blog post. I hope you like the added media, and I’ll see you next time.

The Seven Deadly Questions

Image credit to CBC

Hello Internet, welcome back to another blog post. This post will be quite different from any other in the way that it is formatted. I have been provided with 6 questions that relate to our project and I will answer these questions using resources, activities, and things we learned. But first I’ll tell you about the project.

This project was called Status and Indigeneity and was all about what identifying as an Indigenous person really means. This is reflected in our driving question for this project “How might understanding the sensitivities around Indigeneity, help us understand B.C. First Peoples?” Which is the secret 7th question for this post. But without further adieu let’s get into these questions.

What does “status” mean in Canada, and how does it shape identity and access to rights and resources?

So first of all we have to define status, and the way I see it, this can be interpreted in two ways. Number 1 is the legal definition, “Indian status is the legal standing of a person who is registered under the Indian Act. Registration under the Indian Act is not the same as applying for a status card. You need to be registered before you receive a status card, but you can apply for both at the same time.” This is a very clear and definitive way of describing it that makes sense in a Western society. The second way of defining it is left up to the indigenous peoples. I think they should get to say who is Indigenous and who is not because obtaining a status card can be a long and arduous process and using a little card to determine whether someone is Indigenous just seems wrong. Moving on to how it shapes identity, I think it can go multiple ways. Someone can either feel empowered by their status card, and use it as a symbol of their heritage, or someone could feel limited by status cards and see it as them having to prove they are Indigenous. For example, I am British and I know I’m British, so I would be pretty damn annoyed if someone told me I had to prove it to them by giving them a DNA test, especially if that meant I was being excluded from benefits. Either way, it definitely affects the way people identify and the way people are perceived.

Why do you think some people falsely claim Indigenous identity? What are the consequences of this?

For this question, I would like to look back on something we researched quite a lot in this project, and that is the topic of Buffy Sainte-Marie. You may have heard of her as she became one of the most influential Indigenous music artists ever, but recently evidence has surfaced that proves otherwise. There are a lot of loopholes in her story and the facts just don’t add up. If you would like to learn more about Buffy I recommend you watch this episode of The Fifth Estate. It goes in depth about her story and after watching it in class I can confirm that it does a great job of making sense of the whole situation. But after finding out what she did this sparked a whole bunch of new ideas to consider.

The cons:

There are some blatantly bad things that came from this. First of all, she abused the idea of being Indigenous to generate wealth and fame for herself. She not only profited from the struggles that real Indigenous peoples go through, but she also robbed other Indigenous artists of titles they can now never claim. Her first Indigenous-related awards included a Juno for Best Music of Aboriginal Canada, a Gemini Award, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from the University of Regina. These titles can now never be claimed by real Indigenous peoples.

The Pros:

You might think what she did was all bad but truthfully there was some good to come of this. First of all, despite coming from a corrupted origin, she still spread information that helped Indigenous culture and awareness become more mainstream. Without her, we may not even have the course that taught me all of this today. She also helped inspire this project by raising awareness of something called pretendians. Those who falsely claim to be Indigenous. If Buffy Sainte-Marie never had her rise to fame then not as many people would know about the danger of false claims of indigeneity.

How has your understanding of Indigeneity, identity, and authenticity evolved through this study?

I think through this project I’ve learned a lot more about what Indigenous people have to go through to even prove they are Indigenous in the first place. Through research and by talking to our Indigenous representative at the school, I can better understand the process of acquiring a status card and the effects that come with it. I’ve also learned how Indigenous people’s sense of identity is different than other races and cultures. Whether that be people not believing your background or the misperception of the benefits Indigenous peoples receive, I now know more about their struggles. Obviously I can’t know for sure, as I am unable to experience these things firsthand, but trying to learn is the best way to help fix it.

What is the difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation? Where do we draw the line?

I think the difference is subjective. The line is drawn by those who it affects and nobody else. This makes it difficult to give a definitive answer because there is so much to take into consideration, however I can give a general answer. Cultural appropriation is using or doing something that belongs to a culture, without going through the effort of learning the history and use purposes of that thing. Cultural appreciation is using or doing something that belongs to a culture after learning the history and purposes of that thing and being given permission by someone from that culture, who also understands the history of it. Other than this, it is up to people from that culture whether you are allowed to or not because at the end of the day, if it doesn’t belong to you, you need to ask.

How do media and institutions (universities, arts organizations, government) contribute to the problem of false claims of Indigeneity?

I think these contributions are good in intent, but not entirely great in execution. These institutions provide “benefits” to Indigenous peoples but there are some obvious flaws. First of all, things that are considered benefits are not really benefits, it is just repaying the debts and trying to fix the damage that was caused. Despite this being the truth, people don’t see it this way with some misinformed people interpreting it as “they get free stuff just because of where they’re from?” This leads to stereotypes that Indigenous peoples are freeloaders, while this just isn’t true. Next, there is also the incentive for people to fake Indigenous heritage to also receive these “benefits”, which leads to more restrictions on them making it harder for the real Indigenous peoples to receive the help they need. Overall there are flaws that need to be fixed, but no obvious solution of how this can be done.

What responsibility do we have when discussing these issues outside of class?

This question is more of a personal thing, but I’ll give some things that you can do, followed by what I will be doing. Some things we can all do to help is by squashing stereotypes or micro aggressions when we see them. These things usually fly under the radar as okay because it’s seen as just a harmless joke, but just because it’s a joke doesn’t mean it’s okay. So we can all fix these things little by little. As for what I am going to do, I will take all of these things into account while also spreading information about Indigenous peoples when I fly back home to England. Before I moved here I knew nothing about Indigenous history and that is the same for all my friends still in England. Since we are not taught about the wrongdoings that occurred, I am taking the responsibility of informing my loved ones of what happened and how they can make it right.

So that wraps up all the questions from the project but one. Special question number 7, “How might understanding the sensitivities around Indigeneity, help us understand B.C. First Peoples?” I think the things I’ve learned throughout this project will help me be more cautious around what I say, and what I believe when researching in future projects throughout the course. The insight I’ve gained has gotten me slightly closer to understanding the modern struggles of the Indigenous peoples and while I still have much to learn I have definitely taken a big step.

Thank you for reading my blog post, sorry for so many words but I had a lot to say about this project. See you in the next one.

My Honest Re(concili)action

What’s up internet people and welcome back to my blog. This is a very special blog post because not only is it an exhibition post, not only is this my first exhibition of grade 11, IT’S MY TENTH EXHIBITION 🎉🎉🎉🎊🎊🎊 So happy exhibtioversary everybody, I have made it to the double digits. With that being said they still aren’t easy and the fact that this time our whole theme was BC First Peoples made it new and scary I think this might have been my best looking exhibition yet. Now with that in mind let’s get started.

The name of this project was ReconciliACTION and the whole topic was about, you guessed it, reconciliation. The driving question for this project was “How might we engage in meaningful Reconciliation?” This question isn’t something that has a definitive answer, so instead of coming back to it at the end of this post, the answer will be showcased through my learning in this project.

In order to start this project we need to first actually define reconciliation. I’m sure we’ve all heard this word before, and we know what it means, but when we try to define it we struggle and find that most people give a similar answer but there is variation. Through this project, we found out that reconciliation is a word that means something different to everyone. Being from England I hadn’t really heard this word before moving here, and so I felt like everyone had a head start in this course, but slowly I’m realizing that I’m figuring out my own definition at my own pace which is important and central to what reconciliation means to me.

Because in the past our teachers have waited too long to tell us our exhibition projects and we have been super panicked on the day of, we were told what our project was, what our topics were and who was in our group almost immediately, I and everyone else in the class really appreciated this because we knew what we had to eventually do and we could plan ahead accordingly with 2 months of advance. The final product of this project would be our whole class diving into 8 different groups, each dedicated to reconciliation efforts being made in Canada, and we essentially had free reign and complete control over what we did to explain our topic to the public. My topic ended up being Indigenous language revitalization which I was interested in because I had heard some things about the indigenous peoples having tons of languages and I wanted to know the history behind them and how they were being brought back from death after getting lost in residential schools.

Although we knew our end product in advance, we decided to hold off on starting on it immediately because we first had to expand our knowledge of reconciliation as a whole so we could understand how our topic showed reconciliation. We first decided to talk about why reconciliation actually matters. We learned this by doing many activities such as talking about what we already knew before this project, learning about why residential schools were made, learning about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and seeing why reconciliation matters to indigenous peoples today.

To further our research we went in-depth on what is and what isn’t reconciliation. This was important because we needed to understand what parts of our topic to include and be able to tell the difference between reconciliation and general apologies. At this point, we had moved into working with our final groups and we were given an assignment to all separately gather 5 different sources that backed up research we had done about reconciliation attempts being made In Canada. Using this research we all came to a decision of what is and isn’t considered reconciliation in our topic (language revitalization).

After completing our research we began to actually start working on our actual product. We first were told that we would have to have some kind of interactive element, typical PLP, and we had some class discussions about how to actually engage our audience so they didn’t just come in and see their kid and leave. We had to get them to actually care about our topic first and then we could teach them about how they can reconcile. Some of the suggestions were making a game they could play, having something they could add to at the exhibition and over time it would grow, or making something they could take away with them, my group decided we would make a game.

Now we could actually start working on our project but before we had complete control we had to pitch our design to our teacher with a drawing and a keynote presentation. We worked together as a group and came up with some really solid ideas.

 

This was our initial design for our station, however it would receive changes in the future. Our interactive element would be a memory game, where we had 5 language names and 5 common greetings in each of those languages, then would give the contestants a cheat sheet that contained a ton of languages and their common greetings, but they would only get to keep it for 15 seconds, they would then have to match the cards with the right languages and words. We also had a listening station where there was a website set up called BC First Voices that teaches you how to speak indigenous languages by giving you a catalog of languages to pick from that you could learn the alphabet of and search for translations of words or phrases. It’s a great website that you can use, find it here. We also decided to serve mint tea to the guests, now I know you might be thinking “How on earth does that relate to your topic”, that is a great question…. I don’t really know, but my group mate Susan had a whole story behind it that involved her and her mum at a camp finding mint tea leaves and making tea for everyone so we rolled with it. We also had a sign that said hello in English and then below had hello in many indigenous languages. Another thing we added was a map of BC that showed where all the languages in BC came from. At first, we were going to have a timeline that showed the evolution of languages in BC, however, we scrapped this idea because we all realized it didn’t really fit and none of us knew how to do it well. That’s pretty much everything we had planned, so now we just had to actually make it.

Everything was going super smoothly, we had a lot of time, and everyone had their individual roles, there was a slight scare when I ran out of my ADHD medication and couldn’t refill it but we got over it and everything was perfectly fine. Until it wasn’t. One of my group mates was supposed to draw the map, but then around 10 days before the exhibition, he got pneumonia. This was a huge panic for our group because none of us were artistically skilled. We had a 2-day freakout but then our teacher said we could use her map of exactly what we wanted to do, this was perfect so we were relieved, but then 2 days went by and there was no map. I went to ask my teacher about it and she said she had lost the map! Now we were in panic mode but luckily we had the design digitally so Susan locked in and drew the whole thing by herself and it looked great.

Exhibition day came around and we were so….. actually prepared? We all knew what we had to do and we just had to set things up because we had finished all the work in the days before. After a few minor hiccups hanging up the sign, we were done with our station around 20 minutes early. So with nothing to do, we just hung out and prepared for visitors. Here is what our final product ended up looking like.

I think it is the best-looking exhibition I’ve had to date. Huge shout out to to my group members Susan, Sofia and Jasper for being so awesome throughout this project.

Like I said I won’t be ending this post with a driving question answer but I will give you what I found out reconciliation means to me. To me, reconciliation is working together to make up for past wrongdoings and moving towards a better more equal future.

Thank you for reading my blog post, sorry there weren’t too many pictures but I hope you enjoyed, and maybe you learned something while you were here. See yaaaa!