Hi my friends and welcome back to yet another blog post! Todays post is about everyone so favourite topic, historical injustice! This project we were learning more about image creation, Canadian history, Louis Riel, and the injustice the First Nations faced. For the project we were assigned an event in Canadian history and had to create 3 images about said event. One was a draw on image, one was a quote, and one was an image of choice. The event my partner (Anthony) and I got assigned was the Douglas Treaties. At the same time as creating these images we were also reading a comic strip about the life of Louis Riel.

Our first milestone was the current event. We had to pick a current event in the past 30 years of Canadian history. I choose to do the signing of UNDRIP. Basically this event was the BC government passing a piece of legislation that forces all BC laws to meet the requirements of UNDRIP (The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples). This was a really interesting milestone for me and one of my favourites, as I quite enjoy looking at the news. It was also a great example of the CONNECT competency. This competency is all about understanding and sharing perspective based on the texts we read and create. By being able to analyze a current event I got a chance to understand opinions and eventually share my opinions on and about texts. It was probably my weaker of the two competencies. Although I think I’m pretty good at understanding the texts we read, I often have trouble sharing my opinion as well, as I’m not the worlds best writer. It is definitely something I need to work on as I’ve said many times before, but I think I’m getting a lot better because of exercises like this.

The other milestone I really connected with was milestone 4. Milestone 4 was the milestone where we shared our final images. At this time me and Anthony had created 3 images and an instagram caption and were ready to show them to the class! This milestone I also felt was a perfect example of the other competency we learned about ethical dimensions. The competency ethical dimensions is all about deciding if historical events or actions were fair or not. We demonstrated that through our images. By showing what we thought of the events in the past, we demonstrated our understanding of ethical dimensions. We used images, colours, and symbols to show our opinions on past events. I think I did a fairly good job with this competency, my images showed emotion and how I felt about “justness” of said event. I also did a good job looking at the event and deciding if I thought the event was fair or unjust, and finding evidence to support my opinion.

For the other part of this project we read a comic book! It was a comic about the life of Louis Riel, and showed the ups and downs of his very controversial life, and was a fun insight into more Canadian history (which has been the topic of so many of our recent projects). This milestone was yet again a good opportunity for me to practice interpreting texts. I really enjoyed this part of the project, and it’s definitely safe to say that Louis lived and interesting life. It was fascinating to learn more about him, and figure out for myself, from the reading of the different texts. If he was a true Canadian hero, or just a guy who caused a lot of trouble.

This project, although quick, ended up being quite a learning experience. Strangely, I really enjoyed the writing parts of this project. I found it very fun to share my opinion on the various activities. As I’ve said in many a blog post, I relish a chance to improve my writing, and I just happened to enjoy the small lessons we did that surrounded the project. I also enjoyed the more individual aspect of this project. Although it was a group project, the production of the images were mostly a singular activity. And it’s always good to have to refine and create things by yourself. Because you’re not always going to have other people helping you, so it’s always useful to be able to have skills for yourself. In the end I had a lot of fun with this project, I always love creating images, and I’m mostly excited to see what the next project will bring.

Ok let’s hope that we get out of quarantine real soon, because I’m about to lose it.

Anyways,

L8r (I’m cool)

Holly