Hey guys welcome back to my blog today I will be talking about our most recent humanities unit.

Our first assignment was to find a current event that had a connection in some way to the indigenous. I found an article about my elementary school putting a indigenous drum in each classroom.

We next did a stepping stone where we answered some questions on our topics that we chose. My topic was The disappearance of the Bison of 1800’s, the essential questions I came up with were:

⁃ How did the buffalo disappear?

⁃How did the buffalo disappearance affect our relationship with Native Canadian people?

⁃ Have the buffalo reconstructed their population?

⁃How many buffalo were there before this major event?

⁃How has the buffalo disappearance affected our climate?

⁃How many buffalo were there after this event?

⁃How has the lost of buffalo affected our lifestyles?

⁃Did anyone try to stop this from happening?

⁃ How have the buffalo regrown?

⁃How has this event changed the food chain?

These questions helped me get a bit of an understanding of what happened in this time. Once we got our topics we started reading “Louis Riel, a Comic Strip Biography”. For each part of this book we had to wright a paragraph answering these questions:

• What important events happen in this section of the book?

• What characters are involved or introduced?

• How does this section of the book portray Louis Riel? (Heroic, coward, brave, crazy, etc?)

• Explain who holds the “power” in this section of the book.

After reading part 1 of the book we had to do a ton of research on our topics.

The next stepping stone after part 2 of reading was done was that we needed to start our caption, we were planning to create an instagram post on our topic and use the research as a caption:

There once were over 2 million bison that roamed the beautiful North America all of a sudden European settlers decided to move in and were looking for food and fur sources and sadly stumbled upon a beautifully elegant creature. These settlers depended on the bison for

food and fur and sooner or later all those majestic creatures downsized from over 2 million to just around 100. This was a tragic day for all bison loving people. Luckily those people have help

the bison regrow and avoid extinction now there now about 2,200 plains bison and about 11,000 wood bison roaming wild in Canada(13,200 total). Sadly there are still being hunted. Would you be a hunter or a preserver? #savethebison #animalrights #PLP9

We also had to include 3 or more hashtags.

After reading part 3 I got a fever and ended up missing around 5 days of school which meant I missed a little bit but gladly was able to catch up. Next we finished the book and our insta photos for our post and finally posted it. After that we still had work to do, we had an in class debate on if we think Riel should or should not have been hanged. The pro side won even though we got the most points deducted. We got all of Wednesday’s class to wright a paragraph/essay about if we think Riel was a hero and a villain due on what we read in the biography. And today we answered some treaty questions:

 • What is a treaty?

a deal that transfers land.

• Why are treaties a good way to negotiate co-habitation?

they are a good peaceful way to settle compromises

• How were First Nations people in many cases misled?

they didn’t give them what they promised

• How do Canadians view treaty negotiations today?

they are still being used today as a negotiation system and it is considered valid by law.

Our final milestone is the one you are reading right now, yes a blog post is a milestone for us.

The competencies that outlines this project were:

Connect: How do I understand my own and others’ personal connection to texts I read, listen, and view?

Understand Ethical Dimensions: How do we decide if the actions and decisions of the past were fair or unjust, or should or should not have been taken?

From reviewing and reflecting my entire unit and how I did personally, I think I did a really good job of making ethical decisions based on my paragraph on how Riel is either a hero or villain and our instagram caption. I think the assignment that best brought out the connect competency would be the current event, instagram caption and the debate.

Hope you guys enjoyed reading about our unit on Louis Riel, stay tuned for more fun post.