Today I will be making this blog about the kamagata maru incident back in 1914. This is a well known incident that occurred and you most likely have heard of it, but to summarize there was a law in Canada that made it so that you had to travel to Canada in 1 continuous journey from point A (South Asia) to point B (Canada). This was basically to stop immigration and was an early example of systemic racism in the 1900’s. The Kamagata Maru knew this when they departed but instead of following that rule they wanted to test it and in the end protest it. In the end it was a 3 month journey to canada and then a tree month wait in the ports without getting access into Canada. After a six month period from leaving for Canada, the ship was lead out of the place they were anchored by the Canadian military in July and made to return back to Budge-Budge, India where 19 of the people on board were killed by gunshots when getting off the ship and more people were put into prison.
The importance of the apology is a formal acknowledgment by the promise of BC that we did not live up to our ideals. As reflected in motion of apology “the house deeply regrets that the passengers, who sought refuge in our country and our province, were turned away without benefit of the fair and impartial treatment befitting a society where people of all cultures are welcomed and accepted.” And this resulted in tragedy for s lot of people.
The legacy is some of the policies that Harper put in place to help support immigrants and by formally acknowledging the tragedy it opens up the opportunity for remembrance such as this Kamagata Maru the opportunity for the legacy to live on in other forms such as the remembrance museum website.
The Kamagata Maru incident has been remembered through the website there is plaque in coal harbour and the Kamagata Maru museum at the Khalsa Diwan Society.
in conclusion the kamagata maru incident has and will help us learn from our mistakes with systemic racism so we can move forward with equal opportunities for everyone despite your background, skin colour, gender or religion.
This blog post is a reflection on the most recent project in PLP and the first project of grade 10. If you’ve been following along with my previous posts, then you know we have been working on a political party to run in the Canadian election. My group included Johnathan, Jordan and Keenan. We named our party the Hippopotamus Party of Canada and we based our campaign on the housing crisis in Canada. The housing cost in Canada has spiked to its highest point and it is harder than ever to get a home in populated places such as Vancouver and Toronto.
For those of you who haven’t seen the previous posts, or for those who want to watch it again, here is our campaign.
I really enjoyed making this video, especially the coming up with ideas part. the whole goal of our video was to be as professional as possible without actually being professional hence the shorts and a suit top. it was really funny to come up with crazy ideas with my friends for what we could do with our video. while we couldn’t put in all the ideas we chose some of the best ones to use on our video. Overall I would say that with only an hour and a half of filming and an hour and a half of editing we did a pretty good job with making a fun video about a new Canadian political party.
I think we could have improved on managing our time more wisely. while we did complete the video and we did do a good job of it, I think that managing our time better would have led to us having more shots that weren’t rushed so we could have better quality.
in working through the creation of our political party we realized that a lot of parties don’t actually pay attention to the bigger issues and instead focus on the ones that will get them elected. the only way to change this is if we the people demand that our political parties put forward larger scale and longer term detailed plans on how they will address larger issues that have a bigger impact on the day to day life of Canadians over the longer term. It is easy to use buzz words and hot button issues to convince people to vote for you, but as we learned earlier in the year and I discussed in my post ‘Politics In Canada’, politicians say a lot of things that they will never follow through on and do. Only when the people demand real solutions instead of fancy words, and hold our politicians accountable to follow through on promises will things really change.
Today I have a blog about a new political party for Canada made with a few of my peers: Keenan, Johnathan and Jordan.
The party we made was named the Hippopotamus Party of Canada. In our party we decided to pick a few issues that we saw in Canada’s current government, this way we could pick something we felt that needed our attention most and focus there. The main issue was the economy, the backbone of any country or nation. The next step was to go smaller as we needed one specific part of our economy that was heading in the wrong direction. Me and my group came to a consensus that this key issue was our housing crisis. The housing cost in Canada is at an all time high, with the cost of living being one of the highest in the world, ranking 21st highest cost of living out of 110 countries worldwide. So me and my team decided this was our biggest issue and we started getting ideas for how we could lower the housing price. After we were done our brainstorming it was time to share our idea with all of you, which is found in our press release at the top of this post.
I think my team did well, with coming up with ideas for what Canada as a nation is lacking and what we can do to fix our problems. I think that my team could have improved with having more of a organized press release. I think my strengths throughout this press release were with my communication of ideas to my team and my ability to expand on others ideas.
A lot of what is said by politicians is say not do.
As many people know politicians don’t always tell the truth about what they are doing. This is the case throughout most elections, not just in Canada but around the world. But lets just use Canada as the example. Canada like most parts of the world has an election. Usually this takes place in October and it takes place every four years. In canada our leader is known as the prime minister. In order to become the prime minister you must be elected, in Canada our election is built around having electoral districts and voting a leader within them of the different parties to get seats in parliament. The party with the most seats wins the election. In this election we just had Justin Trudeau was the winner with 149 seats in parliament. Against the conservatives who had 117 seats.
That’s a lot of talk about seats and parliament, so how does the government actually work? Well canada is a constitutional monarchy which means that even though we have a queen we still have our own seperate government. The levels of government are as follows House of Commons, senate, monarch. Now that we understand how it is structured lets look more into what the government does and is doing currently. For the past 6 years Trudeau has been the prime minister of Canada and he has done a lot of things for this country but also hasn’t done some things he said he would. Trudeau promised back in 2015 that he would focus the military. But has had only 1 mission in Mali Africa. Along with this military promise he also promised that he would replace canadas fighter jets the cf-18 with the American F-35, he then promised this again in the 2019 election and for the past 2 years hasn’t bought it. Canada also has one of the largest phone bill costs out of any nation, Trudeau promised that he would reduce the costs of phone bills and internets monthly costs by 25% but hasn’t done anything since that promise.
So to summarize Canada has an election every four years and is a constitutional monarchy, in order to win the election you must have the most amount of seats in the House of Commons and politicians make promises that they will not keep just to get an edge in an election.
Driving Question: How might we use artifacts and film to show the significance of WWI?
This is me at the WWI Exhibition I had, and the Script of what I would say when you came up to my station. But how did we get up to this point? Lets start from Milestone 2 where we got our Artifact for the project and explained why our Artifact is Significant. My artifact that I chose was the Bullet Casing. Here is what I wrote for my Artifacts Significance:
After we explained the significance of our artifact it was time to make a video on the artifact and a soldier that we chose. for my soldier I chose Pte. Alfred Newburn, who was a Canadian Soldier from Victoria, during WWI. The Video I made Above is what I made About the Soldier and Artifacts Significance.
Curricular Competencies:
Establish Historical Significance: How do we make choices about what is worth remembering?
I think that I demonstrated this competency in Milestone 2 when I was writing about the significance of the bullet shell in WWI and why it is still significant today
Global Collaborator: How might I use technology to connect to the world?
I think that I demonstrated this competency when I was making my video. I think that I did a good job with using reliable sources to get my information and sharing it with the world.
Answer to the Driving Question: How might we use artifacts and film to show the significance of WWI?
I think that I used artifacts and film to show the significance of WWI in my video. I think that I did a good job with explaining the artifacts significance and bringing it back to today, as well as showing that it was significant to winning the war. I also think that I did a good job at putting that into a video.
Today I will be writing about my latest project in my Humanities and Maker classes. This is the final project of this quarter of the year. Lets go over the project. In this project we would make a new kind of video each week. This project was also my first ever project in PLP with 10 Milestones, each with the common goal of improving video skills, and learning about history and nationalism, The difference between the videos were the styles of them. Nationalism and history was the Humanities portion of the project, in this part we learned about history, mainly Canadian history, and the effect nationalism and history have on today. The Maker portion was all about expanding our video skills. Here was the driving question that we have been working on answering throughout the project: How can a understanding of Nationalism help us understand today?
we started out with an interview. Our task was to interview one of our parents to see what they know about Nationalism. My dad was a History minor in university so he knew a lot about this topic. Here is the video of me interviewing my dad about nationalism:
There were a few more video styles that we had worked on, there was a few common things throughout all of the videos. The first one being that all of the videos past the interview all had to do with continuity and change, nationalism, and historical events. I think I did a pretty good job with these things being incorporated into the videos I made, I think that I was pretty good at identifying the different historical events through the videos. A good example of this was in the Louis Riel documentary style video, where I think I did a good job with explaining all the different things that happened throughout his life. I think I did a good job with identifying nationalism in the video about British North America and the final video that we made which brought all the different videos that we made together, I think that an example of this was explaining the part that nationalism took within British North America.
The videos were all explainer type videos but with a few variations. One of which being a animatic video, which was our second video that we made. I didn’t completely finish the video, but that is ok because now I know how much time I will need to give myself the next time. On the other hand I think that I did a good job with getting information about the Crimean War for my video. I think that it was really effective to start by reading sources from museums and historians. Then look into the specific events with articles that focus on a certain aspect. Here is the video I made:
The next section of learning in this project was about British North America. In this section we had to make another video. This time the video was a tutorial style video, but not a regular tutorial video, in this tutorial video we had to teach 2 different things. For this, we had to take something that we were already able to teach, and use metaphors from it to explain how the British North America Act happened. For this I chose to teach how to backflip since I have thought multiple people in the past how to do it. I think that in this video I did a really good job at improving on editing. I think it was challenging to only have videos from the past for demonstrations of the backflip. Despite the challenge it helped with knowing how to take any clip and cut it down to show just what you want it to show. something that I really improved on was showing things that stayed the same and changed. I think I improved by telling a story and then pointing out what changed and what stayed the same. I also think I improved on camera work. It really helped me to have a layout of all the different angles I wanted and try all of them out with different scenes to see what worked best. Here is the video that I made:
The next big video that we made was a video about the freedom fighter and founder of Manitoba Louis Riel. For this video we had to make a documentary of his life. I think that this part of the project was the most up and down part. Sometimes it was really hard, and others it was very easy. A good example of this is the research part. It was pretty easy to find reliable sources of information, one of the more challenging parts was understanding some of the information, some of the information was easy to understand and some of it was a little confusing. Something that was hard to do was putting all your information into a screenplay. It was hard to come up with all of the information that you needed to tell the story of his life. But after doing the screenplay it was easy to talk about his life. I think that I improved my vocal parts of the film, it was really helpful to actually follow the screenplay and not just look at it a few times and then simplify it when your in front of the camera. I think another way I showed improvement was with storytelling. I really think I showed a lot of information in a short period of time. The video wasn’t finished because of the change of mind of how we were just going to hand in our rough draft. Here is the video:
Now it is time to move onto the last video that we made. This video was a video that would tell all the stories of the other videos. We had a few options for how we would do the video. The first choice we had to make was wether we were doing this project as an individual or a partnership. I decided to go with the partner option because it motivates me more to finish my parts when I have someone relying on me. The partner that I was with was my friend Dries. The second choice was what kind of video we were going to make, as a team we decided to make an explainer video. I think that this video was overall a pretty easy video. It was really useful to have prior knowledge of everything that you had to incorporate. And the execution of the video was not too bad. I think that it really showed all the video skills that I had learned over this quarter. I think that I improved on few different things. The first one being the way that I wrote a script. Before I would just write cues of what to say, this made it hard to speak in an engaging way and it made it hard to say everything that I wanted in one take. then when I started to write out exactly what to say and enlarge the key words, it made the process take less time. I think another thing that I showed improvement on was the editing. I think that I showed this by making the cuts as clean as possible with as little set movement and body movement. I think that I also did a good job with filming on different days and making them look as similar as possible. Here is the video:
Now I will talk about the final part of the project. For this part we were tasked with showing our last video to the person that we interviewed in the beginning, which was my dad. Overall the video was pretty easy. No need to make any script or anything. It was just setting up a camera and showing them the video that you already made and tell them to show reaction to it. I think the hardest part about the video was doing the editing. It was hard to show all there reactions in the editing, especially because there reactions don’t make any sense without context so I had to keep in some extra parts before his reaction. Here is the video:
Now lets answer the driving question which is: How can a understanding of Nationalism Help us understand today? Here is my answer to this: I believe that a understanding of nationalism can help us build an understanding of today because the past tends to repeat itself and when we see the way it effected us in the past then we can identify Nationalism and understand what effects it has on today.
