Hello fellow inhabitants of the universe and welcome or welcome back to my blog. Today we are going to be talking about our last humanities project of the year. Today i am going to be talking about our most recent humanities project, as well as our last, which was called New beginnings (A side note, as I am typing this, callum is staring into the depths of my soul and criticizing my typing technique ).

You may be wondering what the thing above is. Well its a long story. It was made with an app called flourish. It is essentially an app that allows you to have a visual with two photos that you can slide between. Here is the test that I made. The people that are in the photo are me and my friends.

You may be wondering what the focus of this project was. The driving question (geez it’s been a long time since I have seen those words) was: What did the establishment of New France mean for all the people involved? For this project, we learned about the construction of New France, and the roles of the people involved. We also learned about the different types of things that went on there, how they grew in population, how trading between different companies (HBC and NWC) and different indigenous groups (the Haudenosaunee and the Ouendat) and much more.

The trade simulation.

This was less of a learning experience and more of a comedic thing that happened but were going to talk about it anyways. How the simulation worked was: the indigenous groups started with beaver pelts and tokens, and the companies started with products from Europe. The goal was for the indigenous groups to get all of the products from Europe, and for the Europeans to get all of the beaver pelts through trading. There were fur groups, each with about ten people in each.  The simulation started off as normal, with people making trades, but then things started going crazy. When Cameron B tried to make a trade for his group, he started yelling “order in the court”. Then Owen ( the representative for the HBC) (Hudsons Bay Company) stood up and said “we declare mortal combat against the Haudenosaunee. Then all chaos broke loose. After things had settled down, there were a couple more successful trades before the first challenge came. Ms maxwell said that the companies had to have 10 (I think thats what it was) beaver pelts by the end of the next few rounds. Then Susan started making homemade beavers by pretending to kill beavers then writing “1 beaver” on a peace of paper. As I said before, it was chaos. Oh and not to mention, Silas somehow got killed in the middle of it all???? I don’t even know anymore.

Anyways…

One of the first things we did for this project was the Seycove advertising challenge. We had to make an advertisement for people wanting to come to Seycove. No, they were not for the school to use. Wee had to include the school’s name, make a slogan, take a captivating photo, and include helpful links, for example to the school’s website, their phone number, the address, etc. turns out we didn’t remember anything from the ENTIRE project on advertising that we did. There were some interesting results, but here are some of the most interesting things on the advertisements.

Now, for the main product, we had to create two visuals, each with three symbols and some form of text. We had to choose a topic of interest about New France. The choices we had were:

– The fur trade & the economy
– Indigenous alliances
– Filles du roi
– The construction of New France
– Cour de bois
– Surviving New France
– Missionaries & the role of the Church
– Seigneuries & land ownership

my topic was the  construction of New France.

A “brief” description of my visuals:

Visual one: the good side of the construction of New France

for the symbols, I had were a large variety of people, ranging from women, men, to children, and there were also a bunch of houses placed around. This symbolizes the new houses/other buildings that were built for the French to live in, as well as the growing population of New France. Although my topic was not the Filles Du Roí, I thought thta it was important to add people (including I women and children), because part of the construction was building their houses etc. I also had a sign, and for my text, I put “ welcome to New France! Houses are now for sale!”

Visual 2: the bad side of the construction of New France

For my symbols, I only added houses, though this time they were covered in snow. I took the people out because during their first winter there, all of the people except a few were dead, and those who were still alive would have stayed inside to attempt to not freeze to death. I also drew in tons of snow, both on top of the houses and on the ground, as well as in the air.  On the sign, I put “caution, new civilizations are subject to unpreparedness to the weather. Please proceed with caution”. This represents how unprepared they were for the weather. They didn’t expect their numbers to be wiped out over the winter but to the extreme cold.

That is about all that I have to say!

Thank you for reading.

Now go watch YouTube or something.

-keira.