Driving Question

“What can I do, even if only in a small way, to be apart of Reconciliation?”

This year, we were required to take a course called “BC First Peoples” (aka BCFP), and we were able to take it through PLP. Through this course, we learned about the injustices committed against Indigenous peoples, and how we, as Canadians, can contribute to Reconciliation. 

There were many projects, each with different topics, so I can’t talk about all of them specifically. However, I’d like to share a snapshot of the work that I completed for this class… 

“My project was inspired by the “Orange Shirt Movement” and how children’s shoes were placed at residential school sites. It served as a visual reminder of how these instituitions targeted thousands of the youngest and most vulnerable. Each pair represented a child who never made it back home. I wanted to take part in this movement and create a pair of shoes of my own.”

The Exhibition

Our final project would answer the driving question and summarize all the work we’ve done in BCFP. We would also present this project at both the spring exhibition (alongside our Humanities project) and a special BCFP exhibition with the other non-PLP students. 

In particular, I was interested in what we learned about traditional knowledge and how botanicals Indigenous to BC were used in the past. I’ve always been interested in plants, so being able to learn about and recognize the plants that grow naturally around me, was very intriguing. 

In the end, I decided to create my own botanical book about BC’s Indigenous plants and their traditional uses. 

I was very inspired by this novel, which had a lot of information about this topic. I very much recommend reading it! 

I was also inspired by old botanical artwork, and I decided to draw all my plants like this.

I’m very proud of my book. For the exhibition, I book bound a physical copy for guests to flip through (with the good paper 😎). I also decided to hand out little plant book marks with their Hul’Q’Umi’Num name and a QR code leading to the digital copy of my book. This was very helpful in attracting visitors, and I started a lot of good conversations with them.

I think I’m most proud of how I interacted with people who came to my stall. I had a very enlightening conversation with a documentary director, who worked on a documentary about my very topic! I also attracted many grandmas, who would talk to me passionately for 10 minutes, and then drag their husbands later on to see the book again. It was very sweet to connect with the community, and be able to share what I learned. 

As part of the project, we had to answer what Reconciliation means to us individually. My response was this: 

#MyReconcilationIncludes fostering a deeper connection and mutual respect, by learning to appreciate the beauty of the natural world through the lens of traditional Indigenous knowledge.

In a twist of events, we also had to tie in our Humanities alongside our BCFP ones. So, my partner, Ariane, and I decided to make our collective theme about “healing” and “regulation” as both projects included art in some form. We also added an interactive sticky note board, where guests could write/draw about what they did to regulate. 

In the end, I’m very happy with how things turned out, and I hope we were able to share our learning with others!