Holy smoked salmon! What a project. This one was the one that we presented in our spring exhibition as well. So much happened in this project I don’t even know where to start, but I guess an introduction to it will be nice huh? This project was call ReconciliACTION with the essential question “How can we share what we’ve learned in B.C. First Peoples 12 to engage our community in the process of Reconciliation?”
If you’re familiar with PLP, you might’ve noticed that I said essential question instead of driving question. That’s because we had a different project based learning for this project. It isn’t that different from the usual system, so it was okay. For this project, we got to go on a field study to Haida Gwaii! Haida Gwaii is an island off the coast of BC. It’s a very cool and isolated place that’s run by the Haida people.
The trip there was fun. We had many wonderful opportunities to talk to interesting people like Dale Lore and Jaalen Edenshaw. There was just so much fantastic things to learn about the Haida culture, the history, and the present days of Haida Gwaii. It was also really cool to be able to go down to Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, where we camped in Windy Bay for 3 days. Along the way, we made scrap books of each day. If you want to know more about the trip, check mine out! There are a bunch of interesting photos that I took.
Once we were back from the trip, it was exhibition creation in full swing. The class was divided into 3 groups: Time in Memorial, Truth Before Reconciliation, and Big Tide, Low Water. I was in Big Tide Low Water. We were super rushed in the creation of our things, and we were pretty ambitious as well. I got to contribute a lot during brainstorming and the creation part, which is really good because I’ve always struggled with that in the past.
The exhibition was on Thursday, June 12 and we had to present our exhibition again the following day to the whole school. This exhibition was outside, which was really cool. I honestly like it better than being indoors because I think it gives us more space for our creativity to flow. Here is our group’s exhibition! (My section is shown in the first 3 photos).
In this exhibition, I was able to really feel what it’s like to be a part of a team, and it was great. I got to learn a lot about the Haida culture and the turning point for reconciliation and environmental protection, which is the Stand at Lyell Island. There is a really cool book about it called Athlii Gwaii: Upholding Haida Law at Lyell Island that talked all about this event. There’s also a documentary called The Stand that will be coming out on June 19, 2025.
The highlight of the exhibition for me was the fact that all the people that I talked to were interested in what I had to say. What’s really amazing is that there were a couple people that actually remember seeing or hearing about the Stand on the news. It was such a fun exhibition and I hope the next ones will be as great, maybe even better, than this one.