I’m writing another blog post, and it’s for humans. I mean, there are only two classes it could be for, and I just wrote a blog post for science.
I’m sure you could tell by the title of this post what we learned about this time around, but if you didn’t read the title, it’s about colonization, or more specifically, the consequences of colonization.
I’ll spare you the extra details for now, so we can jump right into what we learned.
The first keystone was, as per usual, just learning what it is we’re learning about.
we started off by learning about the fur trade, which was one of the main reasons people decided to start colonizing canada.
the fur trade was basically the Europeans trading goods with the indigenous people in return for beaver furs, as they were in high demand for hats back in Europe because they had hunted beavers almost to extinction to get their furs, so when they got to this new land and there were beavers, they realized they could make a lot of money from that they set up trading posts to trade with the indigenous, trading things like metal tools, firearms, liquor and tobacco, for the furs.
companies like the hudsons bay company, and later the northwest company formed to trade with the indigenous peoples. this opened up many job opportunities, which made more people move to Canada, starting colonization.
The thing with colonization is that we, Canada, started out as a French colony( we are learning about the colonization of Canada after all) and, without colonization, we probably wouldn’t be here, so that’s a good thing, right? Well, here’s the thing: there were many different people involved in colonization, and colonization affected them all differently. And that’s the problem: we can’t really say that canonization was objectively good or objectively bad for everyone because different groups of people experienced it differently, so that’s it. That’s the problem.
Now, for the other half of the problem, if we are going to investigate colonization, we have to consider all the perspectives of the people involved. Now, that would require a lot of research, so we all chose a group of people to study. I got the indigenous peoples, and I had to write a worksheet about their perspective and motivations for going to Europe, or in my case, interacting with the Europeans. That was the keystone one. Here’s my worksheet:
Now on to Keystone 2!
For Keystone 2, moving on from learning about the fur trade, we started learning about ethical judgment and presentism, as well as looking at the motivation for people to move to Canada.
Presentism is basically saying that if we are trying to decide if something is good or bad, we can’t think about it using modern values as a reason. Using an example our teacher used, back then you had to wait 3 months to write to someone in Europe from New France and get a response back. That seems like it would have sucked to us, but to them it was still great being able to communicate at all.
That isn’t to say that things weren’t wrong; another example is that people used to own slaves, but we can’t say that’s right just because that’s what people did back then.
The final product of Keystone 2 was a paragraph organizer where we outlined a paragraph about whether or not colonization was good and for whom.
This took a bit longer than I expected to do because I had a band trip and missed a day of school because of that, and I was busy the entire weekend.
Now for Keystone 3.
For keystone three, we actually started looking at the consequences of colonization, looking at the treaties put in place in the fur trade, the results of the colonizers continuing to colonize (i.e., they weren’t stopping for much), and how colonization continues to affect us today. I was really brief on this because it was more of the same as the other two keystones, and I want to talk about the end product.
The script, the final project for this keystone, was an AR MAKR video, made in the groups we had been working with from the beginning of this product, and of course, a video needs a script, so that was the final product of this keystone, and here it is:
script
[talk at a consistent speaking rate of 180 wpm]
The indigenous people are an important view from which to consider colonization, but, as the different tribes are diverse in their experiences of colonization I had to choose one, the assiniboine to examine colonization through.
the assiniboine originally inhabited the great planes region of present day canada and the upper united states, having split from the sioux around the 1630s , and sharing hunting grounds with the Cree and Blackfoot tribes.
when the europeans arrived and the fur trade started up they participated in the fur trade like many other tribes, trading beaver furs for goods such as cloth, liquor, tobacco, metal tools, and firearms.
as well as trading the assiniboine also acted as intermediaries, allowing the europeans to spread their trade to the tribes living further out in the plains.
as more people came to canada, they spread european diseases such as smallpox among the assiniboine, wiping out almost 4/5 of their population.
along with the spread of disease another negative effect of colonization on the assiniboine was the loss of their land from the treaties, a set of agreements between the indigenous peoples and the government that promised regular payments, education, medical aid and the freedom to continue following their traditions and hunt and fish on the reserves, however, many of these promises were not honoured by the government, who continued to take land from the indigenous people.
To wrap things up, the Assiniboines experience of colonization was far from positive, while in the earlier part of colonization they may have benefited from the fur trade, the spread of diseases which wiped out significant parts of their population and the treaties which caused them to lose large amounts of their land far outweigh any positive impacts of colonization.
and now, for Keystone 4!
It’s the video, keystone 4 is just making the video, I don’t know what else you expected I was just talking about the script after all. Anyways, after writing the script, all we had to do was, as a group, put everyone’s personal scripts together into one group script, put together answers to two more questions, and figure out who was speaking and when.
Then, after getting our script approved, we went into the woods behind our school, which are beautiful, save for the random garbage, to record our part, talking over a symbol of our group of people, and then we put all the videos together into one long video.
This is where I would put our video if I actually had a copy of it, but I don’t, so instead I’ll end this blog post here.
The End.
( I will put in the video, if I can get it )