“Education got us into this mess, and education will get us out of it.”
– Honourable Justice Murray Sinclair
This year we were required to take a newly added course: B.C. First Peoples 12. This course was dedicated to learning about the horrific treatment of Indigenous people in Canada. One of the first assignments we did for this course was a short paragraph about why it’s important that we learn about this topic:
Since the projects for this course were considerably smaller and more disconnected from each other, the purpose of this blog post is to share the work I did for this course with a short description of what the objective was.
⚠️ Please be advised that content on this blog contains detailed information about residential schools and the mistreatment of Indigenous People that could be upsetting for some audiences. Continue reading at your own discretion.
✍️ Weekly Notes
Over the duration of this course, we created “weekly notes,” which were notes about topics of our choosing in smart brevity format. Click here to learn more about smart brevity, or read my weekly notes below and I think you’ll figure it out. I really enjoy using smart brevity as it’s easy to read and overall pretty quick to write. Check out all my weekly notes by clicking the cards below:
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🧡 Honouring the Children Artifact
For this unit, we created a display case artifact in honour of the mistreatment of Indigenous children and impacts of the residential school system. Here’s mine:
My painting, Reconciliation Drum, represents the actions towards reconciliation needed as a result of the Indian Residential School system. The words written on the mallet describe the abuse and experiences of Indigenous children in the residential schools. The sound waves and words radiating from the drum symbolize Canadians hearing the truth about, and working to reconcile, what Indigenous people experienced in residential schools. The background, Whey-ah-Wichen (Cates Park), represents the First Nations groups who were affected by residential schools, and on whose traditional and unceded territory Seycove resides. The sunrise represents the dawn of Truth and Reconciliation.
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📺️ Animated Education Videos
We created several educational animated videos in this course. To create these, I used Keynote for animations and audio and DaVinci Resolve to make any edits. Here they are:
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👤 Indigeneity
For this topic, we learned about the complicated topic of who can claim to be Indigenous. To reflect on this, we wrote a paragraph response which you can read below:
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🍃 Elderberry Poster and Slide
In our exploration of Indigenous traditional food, health and wellness, I created this poster about Red Elderberry:
I also created this slide deck variation of my poster:
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🌸 Exhibition Final Project
Finally, it was time to create our final product. My original plan was to give a guided tour of Indigenous and invasive plants in Myrtle Park (a park right next to Seycove). This changed several times and I kept creating new plans as the criteria changed. Originally, our final product for this Humanities was to be presented at the PLP Spring Exhibition and our BCFP work was to be presented for Seycove’s National Indigenous People’s Day event the following day. After much confusion and changes in plans, we (Faith and I) were allowed to create a combination project of both our BCFP work and our Humanities Holocaust project about Irena Sendler. Irena was an incredible woman who saved an estimated 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto. After being given the go-ahead, Faith was on FIRE with ideas and we were able to write down our entire plan within a few minutes on this whiteboard.
We then spent a lot of time together in class and at each other’s houses creating our project. I had so much fun, and I’m really proud of our final product. On one side of our table, we had an interactive timeline about Inena’s life and the Holocaust, for which visitors had to try to arrange the events in the correct order.
We also had three milk bottles with old paper inside in representation of the documents Irena buried in order to reunite families after the war. In front of the milk bottles was a plaque with a short description of Irena’s life.
On the other side of the table, we had a slideshow on my iPad about the discrimination experienced by Indigenous people in the Canadian healthcare system.
We also had a hand-painted map of all the cities in B.C. with Indigenous Patient Navigators: Indigenous people who work for the hospital and ensure that Indigenous people who come into the hospital are treated fairly. A visitor to our exhibition actually shared this map with the Indigenous Patient Navigators at Lions Gate Hospital, and they were so thrilled and happy to hear that students were sharing about their work!
Additionally, we had a quiz and a pile of cards with a QR code to a website we put together with organizations people could send an email, donate to or volunteer for to help end Indigenous discrimination in healthcare.
Faith and I were really proud of our final product and we had a lot of engaging conversations with visitors to the PLP Spring Exhibition. One thing we were particularly proud of, was how crisp we got the paper taped onto the table: those edges were perfect! Here’s some photos of our exhibition:
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This course increased my knowledge on the subject of Indigenous people in Canada. Although I feel it could have been organized a bit better, I did learn a lot and I’m really proud of the work I created. I hope that my work in some way was able to contribute to reconciliation. I encourage you to consider what YOU can do to contribute to reconciliation. We created a #myreconcilliationincludes statement for our exhibition. This was mine:
#myreconcilliationincludes
Raising awareness for what individuals can do to help stop discrimination and mistreatment of Indigenous People in the Canadian healthcare system.
What’s yours? Add it to the comment section below!
Thanks for reading!