And here we are, in the aftermath of another humanities unit that has come and gone. I’ll be attempting to briefly summarize what happened and what I learned along the way.

The point of this unit was to learn about people with power, along with some Canadian history as well. The driving question for the unit was: how does power alter relationships between individuals and society?

Throughout history, society has been greatly impacted by powerful people and their beliefs. These people inspire the people around them, starting a movement which can change the course of history. The movements are sometimes a drastic change for the rest of society.

In class, we started Chester Brown’s comic strip biography of Louis Riel. At first, I had no idea who Louis Riel was or if he did anything significant at all. When I started to read the book, I began to get a better understanding of the whole scenario.

Louis Riel (the book) was split into 4 parts. After each part of the book we had to write a brief summary of what happened. In the summary we had to list characters and also who held the power in that section. Here’s a look at my four. Don’t read them closely if you haven’t read them before.

If you don’t want to read it all: the book is set shortly after the confederation. John A Macdonald has created provinces. In one of the provinces is the Métis people. The Métis people have had verbal agreements with the Canadian government about how they keep their land. The Canadian government doesn’t hold these promises and tries to take over the Métis land. The Métis, enraged begin to fight back. At first, they write petitions but they don’t do anything. A man named Louis Riel is the leader of the Métis people. He forms a provisional government which gives the Métis people their rights that they deserve. In the end the Métis end up rebelling for their land. They lose and a number of their men are killed in battle. Louis Riel goes to court where he is executed for death.

Many people thought Louis Riel was insane. He was a strong believer in what he held in his own mind to be true. To help us understand the point and learn more about Louis Riel, we had an in-class debate. One side was arguing that Louis Riel was a hero, for his people. The other was trying to prove that Louis Riel was insane. Remember, the court ruled him sane and killed him back in 1885. If he was truly insane, he would have been ruled not guilty.

Back to the debate.

I was arguing that Louis Riel was a hero. My boy Kyle and I provided a killer opening statement and from there, the other team was history. Emerson finished them off with a closing statement that left them shell-shocked. In the end, both sides had a good argument but Ms. Maxwell said that our side came out on top.  I really enjoyed doing a debate because I find that everyone becomes engaged and passionate about the project, as opposed to just doing it because you had to.

While we were reading the book, we were also working on another project. The goal for this project was to tell the story of a powerful individual and how the empowered others. We could choose anyone from Canadian history, but it had to be before Confederation. The story had to be told through an animation.

I chose Billy Barker. Billy Barker was just another person who came to BC in the late 1850’s looking for gold. Along the way he discovered a ton of gold and built a settlement that still is around today named Barkerville.

Starting out, I didn’t know too much about Billy. I had been to Barkerville about 5 years prior but my memory of the place is not great. Not be honest, I’m not sure if anyone knew a ton about their person. That’s why we all had to research them. I took lots of notes on his life and how he empowered people. Here’s some of mine

 

After this, we had to create a story and then a storyboard which would explain what our story would look like animated. For my story, I stuck to facts mostly, where some people may have made up small details to make the story run smoother. Keep in mind that we were still in the early phases, so this was still rough sketches. Here’s a sample of what part of mine looked like.

After this we went into making our animations. I used PuppetPals2 to create the content for it and I used iMovie to put it together and edit what I needed to (adding music, voiceovers, etc..) Here’s a look at my final draft.

To conclude:

To be honest, I wasn’t happy with myself on this project. For the Louis Riel part, I think I did pretty good, but for the animation, not so much. Lots of other people used an app called FlipaClip. I wanted to use this, but I found it confusing and difficult to use, especially without an Apple Pencil. This made my animation look really sloppy because Puppet pals isn’t great and it doesn’t look very professional. Although I think I got the point across about his power and how he influenced people, it didn’t look as crisp or clean as the people who drew it and animated it. Using puppet pals really held me back and I think it’s unfortunate that I wasn’t able to use or even find an animation app that wasn’t as confusing or hard to use.

That being said, I really enjoyed reading the graphic novel. It made the book light and easy to read. I definitely preferred instead of a old book with small print and tons of facts. This graphic novel actually had action as well, making it it fun to read.

All in all, it was an interesting unit and I learned a lot of new things.

I hope you enjoyed reading,

Nik