In this project we learned about the consequences of colonization. For this project we did a deep dive into how the indigenous were affected by colonization.
Craft
For this project we learned about an app called craft. What is craft? Craft was designed to share your documents and capture your notes to share with your team. For this project we mainly used it for taking notes. Here’s an example of my notes on colonial wars: https://ghosts-wink-qxs.craft.me/lOVenS3vkUnqDW. As you can see from my notes I love to use toggles. It makes everything more organized and easier to understand from my perspective. Craft will be one of my most used apps by the end of the year!!!
New France
New France was led by Samuel de Champlain. New France is what we now call Canada. Samuel de Champlain traveled to Canada with his men and when they arrived and colonized, they needed to get to work quickly because winter was coming fast. Samuel de Champlain and his men built a camp for them to live in. With the help of the indigenous, they survived the winter. This is one of the first recorded acts of colonization. After New France’s first winter in Canada, many men were lost but Samuel de Champlain had to push onwards and think “What does New France need?” He realized they need women to encourage people to settle and grow the population.
Final project
Everybody learned the basics about the topics and with our selected group (my group included Brooklyn, Elsa and Evelyn) we picked two topics we all wanted to do a deep dive into. Our two topics were Gender Roles and Health. These both played massive roles in colonization. Gender Roles: As women in the 21st century we were curious to see the lives and roles that the different genders played hundreds of years ago. Health: We picked health because we wanted to learn more about the deadly disease, smallpox. Here’s all my notes about each topic:
Now that we had our to topic, we put it in a keynote that we had to present in front of grade 11s. This was really scary but we pushed through it. Here’s our keynote presentation:
Health and how the Indigenous were affected by it (my favourite topic)
There we are bunch of diseases that affected the indigenous people. Europeans didn’t even know they were carrying a deadly weapon small pox. Small pox was a deadly disease that a lot of Europeans were immune to but the indigenous had never come face to face with it. This killed thousands of indigenous people. An example would be the Beothuk people who went extinct after colonization.
Gender roles of the Indigenous/ Europeans
Women’s rights in Europe were horrible. Everyone thought of them as lesser and men thought they were better than them in most ways. Now the women who travelled to New France had more rights. They got to pick out their husbands but also had to do all the house work and give birth to a lot of babies, so New France could get a bigger population. For the men who came to New France, they were looking to restart their lives or were looking to be a big part of New France and luckily most men in New France got some opportunities.
Answer to driving question
After we presented to the Grade 11s, Ms McWilliam asked the Grade 11s, what the end of the project should be. They suggested we use a keynote presentation to answer our driving question “what are the consequences of colonization?” Here’s my keynote and my answers:
Colonization
Colonization had a huge affect on the indigenous people and changed their lives. One of the biggest things that affected them was population decline.
Population
When the Europeans arrived, they introduced new weapons and guns that the indigenous had never seen before and the guns made warfare more deadly but, that’s not the only thing that played into population.
Health
This played a massive role because the indigenous people encountered new diseases that they were not immune to which was deadly.
Nature
The indigenous would only take what they needed for the land and treated it as equal, but when the Europeans arrived they saw it as an opportunity to take resources from the land and take advantage of its wealth.
Heritage
A lot of groups lost their heritage which created loss of identify and a forgotten language.
Reconciliation
We are now trying to rebuild our relationship with the Indigenous people and make up for how we treated them.
These are my biggest learnings from the project. Hope you enjoyed it. Make sure to check out another one of my blog posts.