Hello and welcome back to my very last school related grade 11 learning portfolio update! In this post I am going to be talking about the B.C. First Peoples (BCFP) we had the opportunity to participate in, and the 2024 Spring Exhibition/BCFP Exhibition.

We started off this course by recognizing why we are learning this: to properly inform students across British Columbia about Indigenous history and culture, ultimately graduating as informed learners. The BC First Peoples course allows students to put Truth and Reconciliation into practice, gaining a deeper understanding of the challenges indigenous peoples have faced. This enables us to effectively demonstrate reconciliation in the future and create a more inclusive and empowering education system for all learners.

In the course there were a total of 8 categories focusing on anthropology, naming, Residential Schools, The Indian Act, food and health/wellness, acknowledging rights, status and indigeneity, and story’s/storytelling. However, I found the food, health and wellness section the most interesting as I did not realize how many traditional uses and hidden meaning all of the plants and species around us held. That is why I decided to make “Plant Profile Cards” for my to answer our final product driving question “What can I give back, even if only in a small way, to be a part of Reconciliation?” So lets dive into that next.

My goal for my reconciliation project was to promote awareness and understanding of the Indigenous connections to the land and environment around us. Each one of my plant profile card includes the name, traditional use, cultural significance, and where you can find it around Seycove. I created a small booklet of cards for visitors to flip through but I also printed out copies of each card to hand out so others could find the plants later on. I am super happy with how my cards turned out, check them out by clicking on the image below 🙂

For this years spring exhibition we ended up merging two projects, so the other half of my project was a humanities picture book on upstander Audre Lorde. I connected these two projects through storytelling and interactive learning as these are both ways to spread awareness in a visual way. You can read more about this in my Cat and MAUS post and my Tpol 2024 post!

Anyhow, I am super happy with how both the exhibitions turned out as I had many engaging conversations with the students, teachers, and parents that attended! Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed not only this post but the many others that have been published on my learning this year.

-Makenna