Hello! For our second official project in humanities we learnt about the ology of apology. This project helped us learn what a proper apology was and helped us compare it to some miss-doings in the history of BC.

The first thing we did was watch a video about some of the racial injustices against asian people that had taken place in BC. This included things like the Chinese head tax, Japanese internment, racism against asian people, and more. After we watched the video we had to narrow out some of the thing we learned and took away from the video and compose a short paragraph of our takeaways.

This is mine:

I learnt how hard it was for people of colour, specifically people from Asia to immigrate to Canada. I also learnt how hard the Canadian government tried to move and get rid of Asian people and culture from this ‘new world’ that is BC. Id definitely like to learn more about the Japanese Internment camps and the issues they faced and how they prevailed and fought through such a tough time. A big takeaway of mine was how different yet simpler the old BC is to the modern day BC and I would like to see some of places and areas that these interment camps were set up, I already know one area was just behind the PNE but I would like to see more sites and if they still hold some of the history of what happened there.

Next we were sorted into our different topic groups, the three topics were: Japanese internment, Chinese head tax, and the Komagata Maru. I was sorted into Japanese internment. Once we had these groups we created keynote presentations that showed the event from start to finish, in this keynote we needed to create an interactive timeline for the event as well. This was something like a bubble or photo on a timeline or line that when clicked on brought you to that event slide. This is what mine ended up looking like:

Along with that we needed to create a script and record ourselves reading it out, the script was meant to house our thoughts on the topic through ethical judgment. Ethical judgment is when you put yourself in the mindset of someone from the time period of an event to judge if it was ethical or not, without using the judgment of an everyday mindset. I ended up doing mine verbally with my teacher for the project so I don’t have much to show for this keystone.

Next we were sorted into groups of 3 to create monuments for our topics, mine was a bit tricky cause each member of my group had a different topic. Gwen had the topic of chinese head tax and Brooke had the topic of Komagata Maru and I had japanese internment (you can go check out there reflections of this project on there blogs!). We needed to create a monument that encompassed all three of our topics, we ended up with this:

We called our monument “The walls of oppression”, It was designed to show someone breaking down walls that signified oppression. The walls kept getting bigger and bigger as they kept going, the person chipping away at the walls only had two small tools and had broken through one of the walls already. The walls had racist propaganda against the groups in our three topics on them aswell as moss and barbed wire. We used styrofoam for the walls and floor and cardboard for the rest of the structure, we then painted and added details to the walls and base.

Next we showcased our monument in the winter exhibition. The exhibition was a good time for us to show our work, this years theme was based off the James Cameron Avatar movies. This was the because it related strongly to some themes in the majority of our projects and the sequels release.

That’s it for my blog post!

Thanks for reading,

Ines