The Echos of Colonization

Heeelloooo and welcome back people! It’s been a while since I posted my last blog post, because I have better things to do in my time (protecting Gotham 🦇), but you probably didn’t miss me so it doesn’t really matter🗿. Anyways, for this post I will talk about my humanities project, called Echos of Colonization. It was all about, well, colonization! And if you don’t know, colonization is the act of taking a piece of land and calling it your own, regardless of people living there previously. This project was about the colonization of North America, specifically Canada. In 1603, French explorer Samuel Du Champlain arrived in the St. Lawrence River, with the intent of setting up the first ever colony in Canada. Many explorers had come before him and had been trading with the First Nations Groups for centuries earlier but none had actually made a permanent settlement. It all went downhill from there. 

Consequences of Colonization:

The driving question for this project was “What were the consequences of colonization”? There were many consequences that came from colonization, but for this project my group (consisting of Eloise, Evelyn, Brooklyn, and Myself) and I decided to focus mainly on health, and gender roles. I think that the ultimate answer to the driving question is, Indigenous people losing their identity’s. After the Europeans came to North America they striped the First Nations, of their identities by putting them in residential schools in order to make them lose their language, culture, connections, beliefs, and there for losing their identities as Indigenous peoples. But with reconciliation on the way, and by learning about our previous actions towards indigenous peoples, we can help anyone who has lost their identity to gain it back.

Craft:

I learnt a lot with this project but I think that the most I learned was about Craft. If you didn’t know, Craft is a really good note taking and document creating app on our IPads, that lets us organize our thoughts however we like! Before I learnt about Craft, I would just take unorganized notes in pages or other apps but now I can be really organized with my documents. (And no, this blog post is not sponsored by Craft). 

The Keynote: 

For our final project we made a 15 slide keynote that we would present to the grade 11’s (uh oh…😳) talking about the significant consequences of colonization. We made the keynotes in groups of 3 (except for my group which was a group of 4) my group consisted of Eloise, Brooklyn, and Evelyn. I will link to their blog posts down below if you want to check those out. Anyways, for the keynote, we got to choose one or two main topics we would talk about, my group chose to talk about health before, at the time, and after colonization, and gender roles before, at the time, and after colonization. We talked about many things like small pox, covid, mental health, infant mortality, malnutrition, and many more health related things that were impacted by colonization. As for the gender role side, we talked about clan mothers, two spirited people, patriarchal structures, violence towards indigenous women and girls, how men get paid better for sports and get better opportunities and how now, we have more equality. We also had a fun quiz at the end of the presentation, to keep our viewers listening. All is well and ends well…. OR SO WE THOUGHT!!! [insert dramatic music] We were assigned ANOTHER keynote! But there was a huge twist…. The keynote could only be 2 slides and only have three words per slide! It was also timed, it couldn’t be over two minutes, or else we would be FAILED!!!! (I’m kidding with that last part) Anyways, this keynote had to answer our driving question which was (if you were paying attention you would know by reading above) What were the consequences of colonization? I chose to talk about loss of identity, residential schools and reconciliation in my slide. 

ANYWAYS….. That’s that! Thanks for reading! Don’t forget to check out my group members blogs which I will link to down below. 

Brooklyns blog:

Eloises blog:

Evelyns blog: