For our final PLP 8 humanities project we created, presented and memorized a Tableaux Vivant which dealt with the question: “How can we use Shakespeares The Tempest to show the effects of colonization?” In this blog post I will Show you my creative journey.
Europeans and The First Nations: In our project, a major part of it and our learning was the relationship between the First Nations peoples and the Europeans. I think the most interesting thing was a paragraph that revolved around that relationship was a paragraph we’re we explained our answer to the question: Why did the first people trade with Newcomers?
Like my opinion on the subject most of the research is around the camps in New France and the surrounding First Nations tribes, the location of the tribes greatly affected the fur they traded which in effect affected the materials they got.
Here’s a photo show the different prices of items. 
My points in the paragraph boiled down to these.
– The Europeans respect of them affected the First Nations attitude of trading with the French
– The availability for different items with different companies gave the tribes many options for things to trade for
– The vastly new and more powerful resources gave them even more incentive.
You can see the paragraph here.
Shakespeare and The Tempest:
If you didn’t already know, the tempest was wrote by William Shakespeare and it was one of his last plays. Throughout this project we also talked about the themes it showed. I will know talk about those themes and the themes in our tableaux.
A brief synopsis of the play would be this: The Tempest is a play about magic, betrayal, love and forgiveness. It is set on an island somewhere near Italy where Prospero, the one-time Duke of Milan, and his beautiful daughter, Miranda, live with a sprite called Ariel and a strange wildman called Caliban. Prospero is a powerful magician who creates a storm, or tempest, that sets the scene for the play. In the events that follow we see a plot to murder the King of Naples, a drunken scheme to kill Prospero and a romance between Miranda and the King’s son, Ferdinand. In the end everyone is forgiven and they all set sail for home.That synopsis was from BBC, you can find the original article here . A large portion of the play is dedicated to Prospero who’s themes and character arc parallels Shakespeare himself as both characters careers ( and lives ) were ending as this was one of Shakespeare last plays.
The other themes are betrayal, love and forgiveness which I feel translated well in to our tableaux’s .
Conclusion:
Overall I believe that the themes we learned by reading ( and watching ) the Tempest really helped us alongside our research of New France on answering our driving question.