Hiya!

Welcome to my final project of Grade 11.  This project incorporated elements like reading and creating books, going on trips, and of course, the exhibition.  We wanted to summarize our overall learning of the year by displaying it to the public in our annual winter exhibition.  To do this, we had to dig up

Driving Question: How do the motivations and internal conflicts of characters influence their actions and decisions, and in what ways can exploring these motivations deepen our understanding of human nature?

To explore this, we studied two key texts:

• The Golden Spruce, a nonfiction story about environmental protest, cultural loss, and personal conflict
• Klee Wyck, a memoir by Emily Carr that showed the complexities of settler-Indigenous relationships through art and observation

We started off by reading the Golden Spruce, an interesting novel that explores multiple themes like land stewardship/destruction and more.  We analyzed how Grant Hadwin grew to hate the logging industry his family was so long part of, and cut down the Golden Spruce to spread “awareness” for his cause.  He believed that thousands of trees were being logged, so what makes this tree different.  Why is it protected by the logging industry?  His unravelling was shown throughout the book, with it showcasing the results of his actions.   Though Grant was the main focus on the book, it still went into details around the Vancouver environment and local Indigenous people who lived here.  Here is my research document that I used throughout the book:

https://christianl.craft.me/goldenspruce

After finishing the Golden Spruce, our class departed to Haida Gwaii to learn more about Indigenous history and be able to be hear information directly to the source.  Unfortunately, I was unable to go on the trip, and was assigned the book Klee Wyck to read while they were away.

We created a scrapbook based on Klee Wyck, where we analyzed each chapter through a personal, reflective lens. It helped us connect Carr’s stories to modern issues like cultural erasure and land stewardship. We asked hard questions about who gets to tell histories, and why some voices have been left out.  This scrapbook was our basis to create the exhibition that we later did that week.

Our class was split into three different groups for our exhibition: Time Immemorial, Truth Before Reconciliation, and Big Tide Low Water.  The people who didn’t go on the trip was placed in Truth Before Reconciliation, whilst the trip-goers were split between the other two groups.  Truth Before Reconciliation had to focus on the history, the actual past that reveals the truth about what happened when the colonizers first arrived in North America.

Our section was the most darkest of the exhibition; we had to focus on the nitty gritty of what happened, showing a full truth about how badly the Indigneous peoples were treated.

We wanted to focus on four main points that showed the results of colonizers on Indigenous peoples.  I focused on one of the main points:  Stripping of Culture.

I worked on this section with Keaton, we built a mannequin that represented an Indigenous person having their culture removed. We attached sticky notes all over the figure, each one representing something sacred. Words like language, ceremony, family, songs, and land and invited visitors to peel them off. As they did, the figure became more blank, more controlled, and less of themselves.  That was our goal: Stripping off culture was the goal of colonizers. They wanted Indigenous people to feel weak and alone, to become what they saw as the “ideal” white subject.  After we were done talking with the guests, we allowed them to stick the sticky notes back on the mannequin, symbolizing how we are now trying to reconcile and “help” give back their culture.

Even though Keaton could not attend the event, he recorded facts that we installed in a voice box inside the mannequin. Visitors could hear truths about cultural destruction.

I talked a lot about residential schools and complete banning of cultural ceremonies. Residential schools entire purpose was built for erasure. They banned Indigenous languages, took children from families, mentally broke, physically abused, and left them with trauma that lasted generations. Cultural ceremonies like potlatches, naming gatherings, and community feasts were outlawed. Even if Indigenous people gathered peacefully for any reason, it was often illegal. The goal was full cultural erasure, not just control.

This booth felt important to create. It reminded me that these are not stories from centuries ago. These were laws. These were real children. This was policy. The harm was not accidental. It was designed.

To reverse that, visitors could place the sticky notes back on. This symbolized reconnection. It showed that culture is not gone, but it needs to be restored actively, with respect.

After all this what does Reconciliaction mean to me?

Reconciliaction is not about guilt. It is about responsibility. It means doing something with what I have now learned. It means listening to Indigenous voices. It means seeing how my education and comfort were shaped by systems that harmed others. It means asking questions even when the answers are uncomfortable.

I do not want to move on from this project and forget. I want to keep reflecting, keep noticing, and keep pushing for change, even in small daily ways.

To Answer the Driving Question:

This project revealed that human nature is full of contradictions. When I looked deeper into each character, I realized their actions weren’t random. Each action is shaped by pressure, guilt, shame, and especially greed.  Greed was a hunger for control, influence, and the belief that your way of living is more important than someone else’s. Exploring these internal conflicts made me understand that even people who seem good can still make harmful choices because they are caught inside systems or emotions they don’t fully understand.

Grant Hadwin in The Golden Spruce is an example of someone who broke down because of his unresolved conflict. He came from a background of logging, but eventually grew to hate what it was doing to the land. He wanted to stop what he was doing, he wanted to preserve the land around him.  However, his method, cutting down the Golden Spruce, hurt the people who respected that tree the most. His actions were rooted in a desperation to expose the truth, but led to him doing more wrong than right. That made me think more deeply about how people unravel when they feel powerless, and how pressure mixed with anger and guilt can lead to bad choices that may lead to destruction.

In Klee Wyck, Carr’s conflict wasn’t as explosive, but it was still powerful. She was respectful and curious. But she still wrote from within a colonial mindset. Her words sometimes reduced people to symbols or exoticized their traditions. She tried her best, but even her best was shaped by a belief that her own view had value just because it came from her. That showed me how even well-meaning people can cause harm. Not because they are evil, but because they never questioned the system they were part of and took it for granted. This opened up something important for me. I began to reflect on my own perspective, my own assumptions, and the way I was raised to view the world. If Carr’s lens was shaped by colonial thinking, then I had to ask where my lens came from too.

Colonialism itself is a perfect example of human greed at its worst. It wasn’t just about land or power. It was also about identity; Colonizers wanted to erase Indigenous culture. Residential schools banned languages, punished ceremonies, and tore children away from their families. Even things like naming ceremonies or potlatches were made illegal. Not because they were harmful, but because they were Indigenous.  The goal was to create a blank slate – to replace diverse, rich identities with one narrow version of what a person should be. That kind of greed, the need to make everyone else disappear to feel superior, is something I now see as part of the darker side of human nature.

To conclude this project, I felt like the flow of this project was a bit off, we were given time to read and reflect on two different books but given only a few days to do the exhibition.  Although it was short notice, I believe that it was also a good thing that really allowed for us to get our act together quickly, and be able to present in a short amount of time.  I think we demonstrated really good communication and teamwork, we worked together and was able to pull off an exhibit that I felt proud to present.

Overall, this was a really long and hard project that ended with a bang.

Thanks for reading!

-Chris