Cards of Confederation! Never coming to stores near you. Recently in humanities, my business partner, Blondie, and I created a card game involving Canadian nationalism and the confederation. 

After learning what nationalism was we had to find a “current” event that showed aspects of it. I ended up choosing an article about the difference between Canadian’s views on nationalism and the United States view. It also talked about Justin Trudeau saying when the country’s population no longer trusts their government (ie, public institutions), they start to look for their own answers on how to address the problems that the country is facing like lack of jobs/resources, high inflation, government corruption, etc. Some examples of what people might start considering as solutions are closing borders to immigrants (immigrants could take their jobs/housing, and compete in other ways with the citizens); stop trading goods with other nations and more. You can check out the article here! https://globalnews.ca/news/4745341/canada-nationalism-surveys/

To even further deepen our learning of confederation we created our very own simulation of how Canadas confederation came to be. Our class got split up into groups of 3 and each was assigned one of the following colonies: Canada West, Canada East, Newfound Land, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and PEI. Blondie, Jessie and I got PEI, and together we thought of what conditions we wanted the confederation to grant and what we could bring to it. At the final confederation meeting we pitched our needs and they were met. So then we officially joined the confederation. You can read my reflection on the simulation:

The last thing we were doing in this project was making our board games. We were split into partners and like I said above I was with Blondie. Blondie had an amazing idea of making a card game. The point of our card game was to join the confederation by fulfilling your requirement card.  You can read more about our game in the rules:

Here are some pictures of the game in action and how it looked like set up.

The driving question of this project was what did nationalism mean for people around Canada. Based on what I have learned from this project, my opinion is…

Nationalism is a group of people with the same ideas, culture, beliefs, values, ideologies etc. It is a sense of belonging between people that create a nation. Nationalism had different effects on each group of people in Canada. For the Indigenous people it was bad news since the people in confederation were white which was looked upon as the superior race. So the Indigenous people and culture were crushed by confederation. In order for colonies to keep growing settlers and colonizers stole Indigenous peoples land to build on without permission. Settlers started creating new infrastructure to help unify the colonies like a transcontinental railway. The railway was a critical part of trade and travel across Canada. Nationalism allowed settlers to feel unified with a shared identity. For colonizers nationalism meant making sure everyone was on the same page as them and reinforcing their control to make sure everyone had the same views on nationalism.

Thanks for reading have a nice day! ❤️