Hi and welcome back to my blog! We just finished up with our Winter Exhibition, and it was an eventful process. We were focusing on the art of apology and how they are kept alive through memorials. This was all to get to the final product of, as I mentioned earlier, the exhibition where guests got the chance to vote on their favourite memorial model that we built. The driving question for this project that kept us going was “How can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered, and not repeated, today?”
At the start of this project we were separated into three different groups with three different subgroups, all at random. The three main groups were the groups that were officially apologized to by the Canadian government due to discriminatory laws from the past. These groups were the Japanese Canadians, the Chinese Canadians, and the Sikh Canadians. I was put into one of the three the Japanese Canadian groups with Silas, Jasper, and Callum. Once grouped, the research began. Between individual research and class lessons from Mr. Hughes, I had pages of useful notes that helped me throughout the project. If you want to skim through them you can here.
Armed with more notes and new knowledge that I knew what to do with, we began work on our memorial model. Our group decided to build a fishing boat that had the words Property of Japanese Canadians with the word Japanese crossed out. This was to represent how Canada stole all the Japanese Canadians possessions and sent them to internment camps. At our table we also had an interactive slideshow, a poster with a timeline, an informational slideshow playing in the background, and a trivia game where people could win prizes. Overall, I think our station turned out very well, with us also doing very well in the voting.
So, how can we keep an apology alive so the wrongs of the past are remembered, and not repeated, today? Well as we learned there are many ways to keep a memory alive. Weather it’s through storytelling or a memorial, as long as people are seeing and/or hearing about it often they are bound to think about it. Part of the memorial was determining where it would be placed, which is a vital part because the more people that just happen to pass it in their everyday life, the more people that might stop and read about it and think about it.