Lies and Incongruencies 🤥
So there are only seven school days left, and we just finished our final project for humanities titled “Lies and Incongruencies.” At first, I had no clue what an Incongruency was and had no clue what this project was going to be about. We began this project by learning who we were with an I Am From poem; I decided to write about my interests in basketball, my family cabin where I’ve had lots of memories and the place around me where I live, North Vancouver
I am from the empty early morning courts, the packed back-to-back AAU games
The hotel breakfasts as a team, the long travel days and the feeling of winning tournaments
I’m from the sound of the ball bouncing, the opponent’s student section yelling,
The thrill of trying to make Provincials and the competitive game of high school basketball
The love for basketball and the culture that surrounds it
I’m the fan in the crowd at an oversold NBA game
I am from the sport of basketball
I am from the warm and humid August months at my families cabin
The hundreds of mosquitoes trying to bite you, the friendly fire during the cool evenings, and the loud thunderstorms every couple of weeks
I am from a refreshing dip in the cold water and the exhilarating feeling of tubing at high speeds
The late summer algae bloom and the peacefulness of the still lake
I’m from the evening runs to the Icecream shop, the midnight board games with the entire family
I’m from the 26-hour car ride on the drive to get here, being crammed in the middle seat between my siblings
I am from Brereton Lake
Keystone 1 🧱
On the second day, we began one of the main parts of our project, reading the book The Marrow Thieves. Before I tell you why we read the book and what we did with the information, let me tell you what happened in the book. “The Marrow Thieves” is a dystopian novel written by Cherie Dimaline. Set in a future where an environmental crisis has ravaged the world, people are hunted for their bone marrow, which contains the cure to a pandemic that has caused humanity to lose the ability to dream. The story follows Frenchie, a young Indigenous boy, as he joins a group of fellow survivors and tries to outrun the relentless recruiters who seek to harvest their marrow while also exploring themes of identity, family, and resilience in the face of adversity.
Our goal with this book was to create a reading journal entry for each couple of chapters, and we had to find a quote, make a drawing, make a connection or write a poem for each of these entries and then, in the end, we would connect the whole book to problems indigenous people face today. For most of my entries, I chose quotes as I found it the easiest to connect quotes to sections in the book. In one of my entries, I made a drawing to represent the emotional weight of one of the characters stopping them from reaching their goal. You can see my graphic below.
At the end of this, the final question was,
“How does the Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline reflect Canada presently and historically?”
My Answer
Cultural Assimilation and Resurgence were the main themes I took away from The Marrow Thieves. When the book starts, you are instantly introduced to how French and his group, who are First Nations characters, are running for something at the time; the book does not provide much context. All you know is that in the futuristic and apocalyptic setting of the book, the Indigenous people have no power. As the book progresses, you slowly get introduced to the backstory explained by each character coming to stories. The people hunting the First People are “recruiters,” They aim to send them the schools to harvest the Indigenous dreams as everyone else except for the Indigenous peoples have stopped dreaming. As the story progresses, French and his “family” go through numerous obstacles like traitors, sneak attacks from recruiters and conflicts between them. Minvera, one of the elders in the family, was a quiet old lady; she was the only one in the group who could fluently speak the native Cree language since the language was diminishing over the decades from Indigenous always being in danger on the run.
Some time passes, Minvera gets captured by the recruiters, and the family finds a whole community of indigenous people hidden away. They plan to save Minvera as they hear she has broken the machine harvesting dreams and could be the only way to stop the schools. The rescue attack gets carried out, and sadly, Minvera dies; hopes are lost. Nevertheless, French and one more person from his group keep venturing north. As they are leaving, a group of people from the community inform them that unknown people are setting up camp near the community, they investigate and find that another one of these people speaks fluent Cree, and they discover that knowing the language and culture can take down the schools, this could be the only way to save them.
In reading this book, I found a couple of metaphors and connections to the tragic events that happened in our past toward First Nations people. First, we can see a link from this book to Residential Schools. The “dreams” the recruiters seek is the First Nations culture. Capturing the Indigenous people and sending them to these schools takes the culture, language and traditions out of them, in short, Cultural Assimilation. That is why when they find someone who knows the language, it is so exciting as then cultural Resurgence can happen, and they can recover from the schools.
This book is written beautifully; how the Author can make the situation feel like such a dystopia, but in the past, something very similar happened when you realize how it has connected to the past, it helps you learn how vital reconciliation and culture Resurgence is towards the indigenous people.
You can see my reading journal here
Keystone 2 🧱
Moving onto Keystone 2, Keystone 2 was a multi part keystone consisting of three parts, about 3 Indigenous issues one past, one present, and one current civil dispute. For each one you needed to find a piece of Indigenous Art to link to your topic
Keystone 3 🧱
Our final product of this project was a collage that had a deeper meaning about an indigenous problem, I chose to make my college about cultural resurgence, I decided to make a tree animation where indigenous art slowly starts appearing around the tree to symbolize the culture blooming and moving back