Louis Riel is a major figure for many people living in Canada. He was a very controversial heroine though. Before I start my post about this fascinating man, I should explain why he is so important.
Louis Riel was a Metis living in the red river valley in the late 19th century. Riel was a very knowledgeable young man, and knew how to speak english, french and the language of his Metis people. At the time the government was not very fond of the Metis people, and wanted them out of the red river settlement immediately. This brought up a lot of violence and aggression from both parties, the english and the Metis, and this is how Riel got his title as leader of the Metis.
Now that there is a little bit of history of Riel, I would like to share what my class and I worked tirelessly on to show our concept of Riel’s story and of power itself. So to do this we have to start way back at the beginning.
We started our Louis Riel section, with a book. 
This book is called “Louis Riel. A comic strip biography,” by Chester Brown. A comic strip biography might sound a little dodgy, so I will try to explain.
The biography was aimed towards more diverse learners, people that would loose focus on a huge book of information, but hold on to the pictures. Ms. Maxwell assigned it and there were four chapters, and for each of the chapters we had to write a summary and figure out who held the power in this section of the book. I learned a ton from the book, in a way that I wouldn’t have in a normal biography. I feel like if someone asked me about a specific event in Riel’s life I could know it and remember it, but mostly from the images! The images painted a story in my head, and so when and if, it got confusing, I could look to the photos for clarification.
While we were reading the book we were learning about certain aspects through Ms. Maxwells modules in class. We learned about the First Nations groups, and how the government treated them, treaties, and lots more.
Our final project was to create a short animation to show power, but in someone else’s story. The criteria was simple so there was a lot of space for us to show our learning as a student through this section. I chose to do my animation on the Beothuk people.
The animations were to be made in either Keynote Magic Moves, FlipaClip, or Explain Everything. I chose to do a mix of both FlipaClip and Keynote. For our stories we had to incorporate the essence of power into them. So for me that meant describing how the english had a terrible outlook on the Beothuk people, and found it was there duty to show that they had power over them, and deprive the Beothuk people of any of their rights.
We started by researching the topic that we chose, and trying to find a specific story. Since my story is quite old, and went largely undocumented, there was little to no information about it, but I did find enough to write a proper story. I wanted my story to be more about the facts and the story itself then the made up conversations, so my story started to take shape. The next step was to create a storyboard, to guide us when we got to filming. And after those two aspects above were approved, we got to film!
I really enjoyed the challenge, and found it fun to try animating things. In the end I learned so much about Louis Riel, and the Beothuk people, but also about Canada before all the crisp flags and the flashy smiles, the truer history of our identities, which I am grateful for.
This is my final product, and I hope you enjoy it!
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