Hello and welcome back to my blog. This humanities post is about our latest project, Lies and Incongruencies. The main focus of the project was finding out whether incongruencies is actually a word. (Spoiler, it isn’t.)
The side focus of this project is taking a deep dive into Canadian history and the historical mistreatment of Indigenous people. We learned about the Indian Act and other government policies and bills that have made things the way they are for Indigenous people today.
Driving Question:
How can art and text reflect both the history and our current place in time?
Through several investigations and keystones, we learned about historical and current Indigenous issues using art. Using different articles and pieces of art I found, I was able to get a better understanding of current and historical issues through an Indigenous perspective.
Project Path
Our first keystone was a reading journal for the book our class was reading throughout the project. The book is called The Marrow Thieves. It was set in the future and was about a dystopian reality where Indigenous people in Canada were being hunted for their bone marrow. This book was very applicable to current day and historical canada and we made those connections in our reading journal.
For our second keystone, there were three parts to it. This keystone was where we drew connections and information from art.
The first part of keystone 2, we had to take a historical government act or bill and find a piece of art to make a connection to it. I chose to learn about Bill C-31, which you can learn about in my paragraphs below. The art I chose was a memorial for missing and murdered indigenous women, and I explain the connection below.
For the second part of keystone 2, we had to pick a contemporary Indigenous issue and find art to relate to it again. The issue chosen was lateral violence, which I didn’t know about before this project. It was interesting to learn about what lateral violence is and how the term was coined with Indigenous communities in mind. The piece of art I chose was a song and music video by Snotty Nose Rez Kids. This video and song is a celebration of Indigenous culture and combats lateral violence through a pride of identity.
The third part of keystone 3 was to investigate a civil dispute that relates to Indigenous people and find art to accompany it. The civil dispute I chose was water rights and protest. The struggle to get clean water to reserves in Canada has interested me for a while now. You can read about a project I did in grade 9 that relates to this issue!
The art I chose was a digital art piece that reflects safe healthcare for Indigenous people. This relates to the clean drinking water protests by reflecting the historical struggle for government ensured Indigenous safety throughout history.
Overall, I was pretty pleased with the way my keystone 2 turned out. The collection of art and issues I chose lined up pretty well and I was able to draw lots of connections between the two.
Keystone 3 involved two parts. The first was planning for our final project which is a collage that represents the learning done in throughout the course of this project. The second was a short reflection of how your thoughts shifted about Canada as a nation since the beginning of the project.
I chose to focus my collage specifically on the water rights and protests because I thought it would be easier to work on a collage if I had a specific vision and idea to assemble it.
Then, was the actual making of the collage. I decided to make it digitally because I had a set of digital images in mind to make the collage. Honestly, the collage process was a lot easier and less time-consuming than expected so I was pleasantly surprised. Here is how the final collage turned out.
I’m super proud of this project in specific, because I managed to get an extending grade on all my assignments and keystones. This is probably a first in my whole time in PLP, so it just seems fitting that I would achieve this in my last humanities project ever. I learned a lot in this project about current and historical Indigenous issues, and also developed my summarizing and connection skills.
That’s it for today’s blog post! I hope you enjoyed my last humanities post of the year. Thanks for reading and get ready for the end of year storm of blog posts coming very soon.
Sincerely,
Me
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