When asked to describe a Canadian, one of the first words that might pop into your head is the word: Sorry. One of the biggest reasons for this would be the common stereotype that Canadians are always apologizing for things. This isn’t to say that this stereotype is unjustified (I have said sorry when someone has bumped into me before, which is ridiculous, they should be saying sorry to me), but in this project we learned all about apologies and some of the biggest times that the government of Canada apologized.
To start the project off, we talked about three types of apologies; Personal apologies (the kind that one person would say to another that they wronged), Organizational apologies (an apology a business makes to its employees) and Official Government apologies (apologizing for a wrong that a government has done to its people or to another country). For most of the project we focused on the Government apology, specifically the Canadian government’s apologies for the Komagata Maru incident, the Chinese head tax and the Japanese internment camps. Out of all these apologies my group and I were assigned to make a memorial to the Japanese-Canadians who were interned during WWII.
The Taken Tree
The taken tree was my group’s memorial to the Japanese internment camps. My group; Myself, Dylan and Jessie (you can find their blogs linked) decided that for our memorial, we would create a Japanese maple tree, to represent both Canada and Japan. On this tree we decided that we would fold little paper boats to attach to the tree to represent how the first thing that happened to the Japanese Canadians was that all of there fishing boats where confiscated by the Canadian government. One last thing that I would like to mention about the tree is that it is NOT a “Turkey Tree”. If anyone tries to tell you that it is, just know in your heart that they are wrong.
That’s all from me about this project, but I’ll see you next time I have to create something. Till then, see ya!