This isn’t a joke, this is Riel
Hi guys and welcome back to another blog post! Today I will be reflecting on the most recent project we completed called Let’s Get Riel. The driving question is “How can we present past actions and decisions through images to help us make decisions of what is fair or unjust?”. The main idea for this project was that we would choose an event, and make a instagram post with three different images, a caption, a question and hashtags. The person that I was paired up with was Gabe.
Milestone 1: Current Event
For this milestone, we chose an article and just had to complete the who, what, where, when, why and how, also write down your thoughts on the article and ask a few questions at the end.
The competencies that we were being assessed on in this milestone were:
Connect: How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?
Understand Ethical Dimensions: How do we decide if the actions and decisions of the past were fair or unjust, or should or should not have been taken?
I found this a really good article to read since I had never really heard of the Oka crisis, plus, I got to learn more about the pipeline dispute over the Wet’suwet’en people. I also felt much closer to the article because they actually interviewed someone from the Mohawk people that had a close experience to the Oka crisis.
Milestone 2: Topic Research
For this next milestone, we have been put into our partners and have chosen a topic to research and indicate the who, what, where, when, why and how of our story. The topic that my partner (Gabe) and I chose was about the spread of smallpox amongst the First Nations that the leaders of the Hudson’s Bay company caused from putting that disease into blankets that they gave to the First Nations as a sign of peace, which later dropped their population by 90%.
Connect: How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?
Understand Ethical Dimensions: How do we decide if the actions and decisions of the past were fair or unjust, or should or should not have been taken?
Although there is very limited information on this story, I think that we could’ve tried to go even deeper in the internet and looked at some more books to try and find more details about our topic. That way, it would help us and others better understand our instagram post that we would eventually put on based on the research from this milestone. For the other competency, it is pretty clear that the decision that the leaders of the Hudson’s bay company made was very unfair, which made it pretty easy for us to accomplish this competency.
Milestone 3: Images Draft
Next, in this milestone, we started to actually create image drafts and captions for our instagram post.
First drafts:
Feedback:
Second drafts:
Feedback:
Connect: How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?
Understand Ethical Dimensions: How do we decide if the actions and decisions of the past were fair or unjust, or should or should not have been taken?
The role of our caption is to describe what happened in our story and the images are supposed to show wether the decision (in this case, the leaders of the HBC’s decision) was fair or unjust). I think that our connection that we made, for example our first one (the drawer on image), we made it more emotional and made it show how unjust this thing really was, which really helped with both of the competencies.
Milestone 4: Final Image Presentations
For our next milestone, we presented our captions and images to the class, here was our presentation:
Connect: How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?
Understand Ethical Dimensions: How do we decide if the actions and decisions of the past were fair or unjust, or should or should not have been taken?
I think that we pretty much nailed this milestone. Aside from the presentation looking really good, our caption was just the perfect amount of words and described the story and extra details very well. The images were also very good, I think that they showed the unfairness of this story with the symbols, graphs and quote and also helped people to understand the personal connection that the HBC has with those blankets even today, it also describes one of the many times that the First Nations were screwed over by the Europeans while they were trying to colonise them.
Milestone 5: Louis Riel Literary Response
In this milestone, since we had been studying Louis Riel for quite a while and even read a book on him, we wrote an in-class essay.
Connect: How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?
Understand Ethical Dimensions: How do we decide if the actions and decisions of the past were fair or unjust, or should or should not have been taken?
I think that I did well in both the competencies and had all requirements that I needed to include in it. But, for the actual essay side of it, even reading it now, I can’t really understand it very well because it’s a bit all over the place and has quite a lot of grammar mistakes. So, this was definitely not my best work.
To conclude, this project was really fun to learn more about the First Nations and other stories about them because I am always up to learning something new about them. In this project, this was also our first time to use instagram as a way to post our final products.
See you in my next blog post!