This is it folks! My last Humanities post of eighth grade! Interested about the final product above? Keep reading!

Our driving question for this project was: “What did the establishment of New France mean for all people involved?”. We had the chance to learn about the impact of settlement on the multiple groups involved in this territory in the 17th and 18th century, and then dive deeper into research about a topic or group that spoke to us.

To launch into this project, we watched a long, interesting video that presented us with the main groups of people we’d be learning about, but also an overview of the story of New France colonization. You can watch that video here.  

I learned some of the main groups involved in the European settlement. There were French and British explorers and settlers. Les “filles du roi” were women young and poor, that were forced by the king to go to this new world to start the colony, have lots of kids. A huge main group in this, were the Indigenous people who had already lived in Canada for generations, way before French settlers came and “claimed the land”. Watching this video helped me piece together when Europeans arrived in New France, compared to when people first started travelling across to the “new world”/ the Americas. This is another long term consequence of European exploration that we learnt about in our Aargh Matey project.

To clarify, New France was not actually in France. It was in Canada, in a place we now call Québec. The first European settlements on that territory were made by the French, who called it New France.

After reading about what life in a colony in New France was like, each student had to make their own visual sketch or representation of living in a colony. Here’s my drawing with explanations:

The next step in this project was building knowledge. Although every class we would learn about a different aspect about the establishment of New France, the research was very self driven. I really liked that you could choose the topic you were interested in. I chose to explore the construction of New France. To justify your explanations when describing your final product for this project, you have to include evidence. So what is evidence? Evidence is the information or proof that we have available to us. When trying to figure out or know what happened a few years or thousands of years ago, we sometimes have to rely on sources instead of physical evidence. To make sure we are relying on actual sources, we must verify that the source is reliable and check with multiple sources of information before coming to a conclusion. Here is my drawing of “what is evidence?”.

I used six main sources to gain knowledge about the construction of New France. My research notes were not very organized, but I tried to only write down the key points. 

The final product for this project consisted of 2 visuals of 2 different perspectives about your chosen topic. You already saw my final product at the top of this post, but I’ll describe how it became what it is and what it means. Each visual needed to include an original scenic photo that you edited, 3 symbols ( supported with evidence), and a word or writing of some sort. As a class, we went on a nature photography walk to capture photos we could use for our visuals. I wasn’t pleased with the photos I took on that walk because some of them had small blemishes, like you could see an electrical wire or tip of a building in the background. I didn’t want any traces of our modern society in my New France visuals, so I took some more forest photography on a dog walk. I used my editing skills learnt in our photography unit bring the photo to life.

Then I added symbols and words to my two visuals. Here’s explanation backed up with evidence:

We used Flourish to show the two perspectives in an interactive way. In case you didn’t know, you can slide the white bar from left to right to view both visuals.

So, to answer the driving question: “What did the establishment of New France mean for all people involved?”. Well, there were a range of impacts on people. First of all, the establishment of New France, caused contact between the Europeans and the Indegenous peoples, which led to the Indegenous peoples population getting almost entirely decimated, either by new diseases or war. Through colonization, the indegenous populations were enslaved and forced to abandon there own cultures and convert to Christianity. 

The French gave European goods to Indigenous people for beaver pelts. The Europeans used beaver pelts to make waterproof and durable hats and fashion items. After a while, both groups depended on this system to survive, and thrive. So when beaver almost went extinct because of all the hunting for it’s fur, a single beaver pelt got 5 times more expensive, and Europeans didn’t want to pay up. As you can assume, scams and bargains were made, and leading to an unbalance in the system. Indegenous people needed food and materials they bought from the Europeans.

The “filles du roi” were forced to the knew world, which had positive and negative impacts on them. They had a fresh start in New France; they got to choose their husbands and were more likely to survive pregnancies because there was more food in the colony, than if they had stayed back home. But, they only got payed extra if they had 10 or more kids, and they had to do clean up and excruciating work as well.

The establishment of New France affected lots of groups of people in different ways.

Thanks for reading!