On The Road Again

What is up internet. Welcome to the third and final blog of this weekend. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about maybe read the two posts before this 😉). 

B.C. First Peoples is a course that students are required to take in high school in British Columbia, however because of my special little iPad kid school, it is now a plp course. Sooooo welcome to my first ever BCFP blog post. 🎉🎉🎉🎉. Let’s get started shall we.

This project was called Road to Rights, and believe it or not it’s all about the road to the rights of indigenous peoples, are you shocked, I know I’m shocked too. If I’m being honest I was not looking forward to starting this course because culture isn’t really my thing, but hey this project wasn’t that bad so who knows, maybe I’ll come around to it. One last thing before we get into the details is that this was a relatively short project so this may not be too long of a post.

Now it’s time for the driving question of the project. “How might the acknowledgement of rights impact Indigenous peoples now and in the future?”. Going into this project I wasn’t at all prepared to answer this question, as I barely even knew what the Indian act was, but by the end of this project I think I’m a lot more familiar than I was but I know there is still much to learn. 

We started off by just looking into what the Indian act is. We used this infographic as a baseline introduction.

Image Credit: 21 Things by Bob Joseph Sketch Note by Michael-tdsb

This infographic was the start of what we would eventually do at the end of put project, but I’ll get to that later. We were then assigned the task of making our own infographic about the Indian act that focused on one of these facts in the image. I was assigned Band Council Systems. I would explain to you what they are, but why tell you when I can just show you my Infographic.

After this we mostly just did research for the rest of the project. We looked into a lot of the different really important and significant events in Indigenous history. If I talked about every single thing that happened, we would both be here for hours, so for the sake of time I’ll just list some of the ones we talked about. 1831: The first residential school was created, 1876: The Indian Act is created, 1949: First Nations Right to Vote in BC, 1951: The First Indian act revisions, 1973: Calder v. BC, 1985: Bill C-31 Gender Equity, 1996: last residential school closes, 1997: Delgamuukw v. BC, 2007: UNDRIP.

And now it is time for the big reveal of the final product of this project. Drumroll please. 

🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

It’s another infographic….

But hey I’m not complaining, they’re relatively fun to make. But first we had to pick our topic. After everything we had looked at, the only thing that really stuck with me was the Indian act. I was interested in looking deeper into it, and seeing what thing it banned and what rules it made, but I was also interested in why they thought making those rules was okay, and how people allowed that to happen. So there was my topic, “The Indian Act, How and Why?”

In terms of designing the Infographic, my teacher was in love with the design of the drawing I showed you earlier and wanted out class to do something similar so she could hang it up in the display case in our school’s hallway. She wanted it to follow this format.

So our infographics had to line up with each other like this with a road going through them to connect them. We were given numbers based off the year our event happened so that the infographics would line up chronologically, but the number I was given was number 5, and in my opinion that is the hardest one to avoid the road in. So I had my first draft look like this. 

But then I realised as long as most of the road is visible it’s okay to overlap and my final project, which I think looks much better, looks like this. 

And now it’s time to answer our driving question. “How might the acknowledgement of rights impact Indigenous peoples now and in the future?”. The acknowledgment of Indigenous rights will change the ways that First Nations peoples live and breath. By doing this we recognize that we not only owe them the same rights as everyone else, but because of past wrongdoings we realize that they are owed more than we know.

Thank you for reading my blog post. I hope you learned something new about Indigenous peoples because I know I sure did during this project. Thank you again. Goodbyeee 👋👋👋👋