Nationalism

Before this project I didn’t know the difference between patriotism and nationalism. In this project the final keystone was to create a board game to represent nationalism and to learn about the creation of the Canadian confederation.

to start of this project we did some research on symbols of Canada. I made a keynote about the wide spread use of “sorry!” In Canada. We then did a confederation simulation where we were all split into diffrent colonies and we had to create demands based on our specific colonies and then debate our demands to create a confederation. After we finished the simulation which gave us the information about confederation we needed, we started on our board games. In this process we brainstormed ideas for our board game and once we figured out what we were creating we started to build. Once of board game was made, we had lots of trail and error to try and figure out how to fix the problems it had and how to make it better. We realized we needed more incentive to choosing diffrent options so we added money in to our game. We also realized we needed to write short information cards about each colony so the players would know about how they may deal with certain events.

So the definition of nationalism is « identification with one’s own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or detriment of the interests of other nations » to have a nation is to have a group of people connected by shared beliefs  or other things such as geography, history and culture. The idea of nationalism is often harmful to some if not all other nations, this is where it differs from patriotism. Susan and I’s board game shows this by seeing how the player would have acted during the creation confederation and it is an experiment to see if the players will just look out for their own colonies (nations) interests our join with he other colonies to form one new nation.

We learnt about confederation while preparing for our simulation. During this research period I started thinking about how people would have dealt with the creation of confederation today. If we change the date the creation of the colony of canada to now how would Canada be diffrent. While playing our board game we had specific scenarios that would have been prominent during the creation of Canada, Susan and I were then able to see how modern people would have dealt with the same issues that were faced during the creation of Canada.

so “what did nationalism mean for people around Canada”? If we look at the people from the past it meant security from external threats, a sense of new found nation (which is a group of people with shared beliefs”, and depending how you look at it loose of independence from your own colony. Nationalism created many positive beliefs and actions but lead to the oppression of First Nations people as they were not involved in confederation. Nationalism can bring people together but also start to simmer hatred to anyone who is not believed to be in your nation.

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