-Brandon Residential School-

“All My Relations”

Introductory: 

This podcast was to spread awareness of the residential school that took place for over 160 years. I worked with Yuka using the apps CapCut and Voice Memo to learn about the Brandon Residential school and how it affected many first nation children.

Podcast:

Reflection:

My experience with this podcast was pretty smooth, except for there were two major difficulties that we had to work through. One of the problems we had with this podcast was that I was not there for one of the classes, so we got behind with all the research. The next day, we immediately started working on the research and the script and giving each other an equal amount of work to research on. Another thing that was difficult was that I read the criteria wrong and assumed the podcast had to be 4-6 minutes long. However, when I was looking back at the criteria to make sure we had everything, I discovered that it had to be 6-8 minutes long, so in a few clips it sounds a bit choppy. Next time, I will definitely read the criteria before recording any sort of project. Other than those 2 obstacles, I would say that it went pretty smoothly.

I have been learning about residential schools for a very long time, ever since elementary school. I knew that residential schools were a thing however, we did not go into depth about the topic until the fourth grade, when they told us about this truly heartbreaking system that traumatized many children in Canada. They talked about people’s stories and experiences at the residential school. They made us do art projects, presentations and learn about the indigenous culture/beliefs in the hope of giving indigenous people reconciliation by teaching kids at a young age. However, the one thing they never mentioned was the fact that indigenous people still face a lot of discrimination to this day and how the government is putting little to no effort into resolving these problems. One of the main problems is that the living conditions on the indigenous reserves are terrible. Indigenous people still don’t have clean water, they have low levels of education, lower income levels, higher suicide rates, and many more awful things that other Canadians have. This is just truly unbelievable and heartbreaking and the government doesn’t seem to be putting any efforts into giving indigenous people any reconciliation that they deserve. This project has changed my perspective on how there is still a lot of inequality towards indigenous people, it has been over 30 years and they still fight for rights. I truly hope that they finally give indigenous people the reconciliation that they deserve.

Sources:

CBC

Discover Westman

Native Land

SFU

Statistics Canada

The Children Remembered

The Indigenous Foundation