New Beginnings (that’s the name of our project) was all about discovering New France. The point of this project was to understand the importance of the past and make connections too it; the driving question was “What did the establishment of New France mean for all the people involved?”.
This projects end result was originally going to be an ad for a certain accept of New France. So we started off creating an ad for our school. We looked back on our skills we learned during the Medium is the message project.
Soon after that we watched a video about New France and the fur trade. We had to take notes during the duration of watching the video! When taking notes we had the choice to use the note taking template or do it on a separate document. I chose to do mine both ways:
Since our final product was going to be a visual we had to have an image go out into the forest near school and take photos. We used our photography skills we learned at the start of the year. For example, birds eye, bugs eye, and having foreground, background and mid ground.
My favourite photos I took on the walk where:
After we grew our knowledge on the topic we moved on to picking a part of New France to focus on. As you know we were going to create an ad for New France for our end wrap up of learning. But that got changed, we ended up having to create 2 visuals about a singular topic of New France. We had a variety of topics to chose from like;
- 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
I ended up choosing the Missionaries and the roll of the church. I knew I could have had a easier time choosing something like “Filles du roi” but I decided to challenge myself.
To ease our way into our chosen topic we did some researching. When researching about our topic it also strengthened our note taking and researching by abilities.
As you know we now had our topic, so using our knowledge we collected about our topic and we had images of the forest we made our first draft of our New France visual.
I created my visual on keynote! I was super duper rushed when creating the first draft and it look very bad. I can’t say anything good about it really: 
The next class I got help from my peers and just updated it myself to make it better. Again, I did it on keynote (that you Blondie and Charlie R for the tagline) : 
It’s still not perfect, but it is wayyyyyyy better then my first one 😭.
We had a fun activity which was doing a fur trade simulation. We separated our class into two separate rooms with 4 different groups in each room. Each group represented a trading company or group of aboriginal people. I don’t fully remember but I think I was a member of the North West Company (they where the ones trading to get the furs). The other people in my group where Daniel, Naomi, And Callum.
We were instructed to go over or for other groups to come over to our “posts” to trade. We set prices for our goods like shoes, weapons, resources, and food like things. The NWC and HBC would trade their goods for the beaver pelts. My group struggled trading with Ruby, we had a battle about shoes. Near the end we ended up selling everything for like 5 beaver pelts. We obviously did amazing and definitely didn’t give up. Overall it was a fun experience and I enjoyed learning that way. We had to write what we thought trade was like between aboriginal people and the NWC and HBC based of the knowledge we had and the knowledge we just acquired.
At this time we were nearing the end of the project, so I had created more drafts for visuals, but this time it was two visuals, not one. The reason we had to create two images was to show the different aspects of our chosen topic. For the missionaries I showed the missionaries spreading religion and then I showed the result of the missionaries being highly successful in spreading region.
We then put the two images into a platform called flourish! On flourish we were able to use a template where we can make an image hide behind another and then appear when we move the slider. I tested it out on my flower:
Then, I got even more feedback on my images from my friend Hannah/Blondie. This was too add colour, make the crosses wood, and Mr Harris said to make my teepees different and sent me some images to base them off of!
I took charge with that feedback and ended up with these two final images:
Here is an explanation of my images and their symbols…
“Visual 1 is too show the missionaries trying to convert the aboriginal people. I tried to use the following symbols/things to represent that.
I had the missionaries silhouette to represent the missionaries who went to aboriginal people villages to teach them about religion. I had a cross to represent religion and Christianity that the Europeans revolved around. Lastly I had the aboriginal peoples tepees to represent them. They where the people the missionaries where trying to convert and teach their religion too.
Visual 2 is showing the missionaries being successful in doing so, and how I showed that was by using similar symbols as the first.
The materials and tools are there to show that they built churches in the aboriginal peoples villages. From the materials came the church that is showcased on the image to again show the churches built up in the villages in an attempt to spread religion that way. The orange people are to show the converted people holding crosses to represent they have been converted to religion.
The two images are showing the start of trying to convert people and then being successful in spreading religion around.”
As you know we had to put them into flourish and here it is completed:
Im happy with my final result but the text is still a little bit off from where it is supposed to be to match up.
After learning about the establishment of New France I feel like I better understand all the different aspects of it. I think it depends on the person and your rank of power to see how New France treats you. For the aboriginal people, many of them died because of being exposed to diseases; and for the Europeans many of them fought for power and also died. Yet the trading between groups brought new resources to different places. Also, many people thrived off the money and power they got from selling beaver pelts, but the beavers slowly went extinct. New France has many pros and cons just like everything.
Thanks for reading!