Louis Riel tastes good. I don’t know what that means, but it is one of many complex portrayals of Riel that we had to analyze in this project.

Our driving question for this project is, “How have the portrayals of Riel changed over time?” To somehow answer this driving question, we explored Canadian history and analyzed different representations of Riel. Meanwhile, we also worked on our writing skills to learn how to effectively convey our findings. This would lead us to our end goal of creating a multi-paragraph response answering the driving question.

To first understand who Louis Riel is, we read textbook paragraphs about him. We learned about the Red River Rebellion, the Métis, Riel’s actions, and his execution. This gave me a basic understanding of Riel, needed to write a paragraph about his portrayals. Another activity we did was looking at and discussing different statues of Riel. This activity gave me insight into the many different ways Riel is depicted. Some viewed him as a rebel or a madman, and some thought of him as a hero.

A main focus of our project was to learn to analyze ideas and make supported conclusions. We had to be able to analyze different historical sources and perspectives to support our statements and ideas in our paragraphs. Sources I used in my paragraph range from historic accounts to modern-day books. The portrayal of Riel varies in my sources, but I used them to support my topic sentence that the Canadian government’s relationship with Indigenous people has led to a shift in the portrayal of Riel. Additionally, I provided evidence in our paragraphs with quotes, sources, etc.

While studying Riel, we worked on our writing skills to be able to better articulate and present our paragraphs. One of our lessons was about synonyms, words that have the same or nearly the same meaning as another word. Learning how to use different words to more effectively communicate our ideas or to spice up the writing was a valuable skill, as it can completely change how you want to convey your writing.

My final essay on Riel:

The Canadian government’s relationship with indigenous people has led to a shift in the general portrayal of Louis Riel: “For decades, Louis Riel was condemned as a rebel and a traitor. Today, he is considered the founding father of Manitoba, a visionary thinker and protector of the minority rights and culture”- UM Today News, 2017. This statement highlights the shift in the portrayal of Riel from a rebel to a hero.  While the portrayal of Riel has become more positive in recent times he is still often depicted as a controversial figure. For example, in Chester Brown’s graphic novel “Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography,” the portrayal of Riel is quite complex. Despite being shown as a charismatic hero, the novel also touches on his mental health challenges. Not painting him in the best light. Another example would be the statueq of Louis Riel created by Marciean Lemay and Etienne Gaboury, where Riel looks disproportionate and malnourished. While some may argue these were abstract representations of Riel, heroes aren’t usually shown negatively. These representations may allude to the early reputation of him being a madman or insane. According to the Canadian Encyclopaedia, serval scholars have noted that it was usually Riel’s friends, rather than his enemies, who attempted to cast him as insane.

On November 16, 1885, Louis Riel was hung for treason. Since he opposed the government,(regardless of his motives)he was initially classified as a rebel by historians and citizens. He is often portrayed negatively in official Canadian historical accounts. The book “Canada and its Provinces: A History of the Canadian People and Their Institutions,” was published between 1913 and 1917 has evidence of Riel’s negative portrayal in earlier decades. In a volume, Riel is depicted as a selfish rebel half-breed. It is very one-sided and fails to mention the perspectives of Louis Riel and the Metis people.

Improving the relationship between Indigenous peoples, including the Métis, and Canadians has been a gradual process over recent decades. According to carnac.go.ca, an official website of the government of Canada, Reconciliation with the Indigenous means to acknowledge the past and its present-day impacts. That means understanding historical wrongs, like the unfair treatment of Metis people. Which allows more people to sympathize and understand Riel’s actions and motives. His motives were to protect the rights and land of his people. A Canadian Heritage Minutes video portrays Riel as a righteous hero for the Metis. It emphasizes Riel’s desire to lead his people to equality and freedom. In addition, it shows the perspective of the Metis people, and how they consider Riel their pride and hope. In conclusion, the various portrayals of Louis Riel have been due to the different perspectives on his actions. People understand more perspectives on Riel’s story, leading many more to view him as a hero.

– I got feedback from my teachers and classmates which helped me to create a better paragraph.

This short project taught me about how perspectives of people can change throughout history, Metis history, how to analyze sources, Louis Riel, synomyms, and how to write a paragragph.

Hello everybody, this is a blog post about our latest maker project -Methaphor machines. In this project, we learned about the concept of how ideas drive change. We explored how individual actions, decisions, and ideas have shaped events in history. Our whole project was centred around analyzing and studying revolutions. Our final project would be creating a Rude Goldberg Machine for a specific revolution of our choice. The goal was to create a machine that is a metaphor for a revolution. Each part of the machine should represent for an important event in the revolution. Lastly, our machine shows us how different events in our revolution/history are connected.

Our first keystone, we Crane Brinton’s Theory and created a Revolution Infographic. To understand revolutions we studied the different stages of a Revolution using Crane Brinton’s Theory. There are to this theory inbubation, moderate, crisis, and recovery. All these stages are charaterized by various events present in most major revolutions. This theory really helped me understand what a revolution is and the different parts to it. To showcase our understanding of this theory and revolutions we had to create a infographic on a revolution. I chose the american revolution because it seemed interesting. I first got started on some research on sites provided on basecamp then later switching to some other websites and sources. Gathering info was pretty easy, but I spent alot of time complieing. It was difficult deciding out all the key dates and events to include or leave out, but I eventually figured it out.

On our second keystone we analzyed a book called “Animal Farm” by George Orwell. A book that is about Farm animals that try to create a happy and fair society after overthrowing their human opperssors. Instead, the latter half of the story is about power hungry pig becomes a dictator of the farm that makes everything worse. This book is a good methapor of how in some cases the new system after a revolution slowly becomes the old regime again. If the people(or animals) in power are corrupt and do priorizes their own interests over the peoples. Our tasks for this keystone was mostly read this book and participating in book chats. Having these book chats really helped me futher understand the book better. Because I was able to pick up on key points I might have missed and I got to listen to different perspetives or interpretations of the book. Overall, this keystone help me futher devolop my understanding for revolution.

Our finish line was to create a Rude Goldenburg machine as a group and present in the Winter Exhibition. My group was the American Revolution.
Our first step was to learn about Metaphors so we could create a machine that represents our revolution.
Our second step to look at different Rude Goldenburg machine to get ideas .
Our third step was to indiviually find 7 important events in our revolution and come up with a way to represent it the machine.
Our fourth step was then to create a blueprint of our machine.
After that we shared our ideas with our group. Our group merged our different ideas into page to show all our connections that we where going to build.
We then presented our idea, got feedback, then created our final copy. And we also sketched out our blueprint to vizualize it.
Our next step after that was to create the machine, create a  documentry of our process, and prepare for our exhibion. To manage our work effectively as a group everybody choose one of seven roles to take on.
I was the scriptwriter and Exhibiton Visionary.