Thought 53: Lies and Incongruencies 

Welcome to my blog post on our final Humanities 10 project, Lies and Incongruencies. For this project, we went to Canada’s past to analyze the idea of truth and reconciliation.

The first thing we did to start this project is a poem. Specifically, we each wrote a poem about where we are from, and how that affects how we are today. I did feel a little bit out of my comfort zone for this, because I don’t like to get really introspective in my school work, so I decided to not include it in this blog post. 

After that, we started the main knowledge building piece of this project; The Marrow Thieves. The Marrow Thieves is a dystopian novel by Cherie Dimaline. This book makes several connections to events in Canada’s past and present. We spent about a month reading it, and I thought it was alright. There were some parts I thought were really good, and some parts I didn’t like. Click here to read my full reflection. We also spent about a week learning about cultural appropriation and stereotyping.

For our first of 3 written reflections, We were tasked with finding a discriminatory law in Canada (past or present) and finding a piece of art about it. I decided to do something not related to the Indigenous people, and I decided to write about 2 recent laws on Quebec, Bill 62 and Bill 21. Both of these laws prevent people from wearing religious clothing when interacting with the government. These laws specifically affect Muslim women and Sikh men. 

The 2nd reflection was about a contemporary issue that effects First Nations people and art that connects to it. For this one, I actually chose the art first. Ms. Pitches gave us a list of places we can look for art, and one that caught my eye was an Indigenous hip hop group called A Tribe Called Red. I chose to do more investigation on the group because I am a fan of the more popular group A Tribe Called Quest, and I found out they did a song with Mos Def, another legendary rapper I like, so I used that song as my art. The song is called R.E.D. and the main themes of the song are about manipulating and hiding information between the Canadian government and Indigenous people.

For the final piece, we had to write about a civil issue and art that connects to it. I chose to research the Oka Crisis, just because it seemed interesting. I decided to be a bit lazy when choosing the art, and I just took a picture from the event. I thought this was a really interesting an important event, but I had never heard of it before this.

Finally, we put all of the information we learned together in one photo collage. I decided to theme my collage around the idea of the Canadian government fighting Indigenous resistance. My art isn’t really a collage in my opinion, I think its more like a poster design that uses elements from different photos. I linked the 3 reflections in the main photo, so if you click on that, it opens them. To see my collage, click here.