Author Archives: Nicole

Reading Logs

When I was in the process of doing them, most of the time reading logs felt like a huge pain in the neck. If the topic was something I wasn’t particularly passionate about, it was really hard for me to want to reflect on the article I just read. However, if it was a topic that I didn’t mind reading about – like the Women of the Fur Trade* or Charivaris**, I found it a lot easier to focus and get a good grasp on the topic as well as the authors’ interpretations on the topic based on the sources they had chosen to reflect on. Looking back on each reading log I’d done this semester, I realized that they weren’t all that bad. Yes, reading the articles took some time and some felt unbearably long, but in the end I think it’s safe to say that I benefited from them more than I lost. The only thing I may have lost at all is time, but for what it’s worth it wasn’t that bad.

With reading logs, I learned how to think critically; not just historically. I learned how to take something as short as a sentence and create my own interpretation of what is meant by it. It taught me how to dig deeper into a piece of writing and gain a new perspective on the topic. Sometimes the view was positive, sometimes it was negative, and others I found shocking to discover – such as the Beothuk*** and their short existence (and why they went extinct) or slavery in Upper Canada****. I will be able to take the tools I acquired in doing reading logs and apply them to other aspects of life. In becoming a high school counselor, I will need to learn how to think critically and deeply. I will be required to create reason and a remedy based on my interpretation of what I am counselling for at the time. This history class was a gateway for me for thinking critically, which is something I didn’t really know how to do before. Reading logs were the perfect way for me to start learning how to think deeper about a topic and acknowledge mine and other people’s views on something, and the tools I learned I will carry with me for a very long time.

 

*Read Reading Log Here: Women in the Fur Trade in New France

**Read Reading Log Here: Charivaris

***Read Reading Log Here: The Beothuk on the Eve of Their Extinction, The Collapse of the Beothuk World

****Read Reading Log Here: Upper Canada slavery

chilcotin war analysis assignment

This assignment was interesting because the resulting belief after looking through all the documents on this website could have gone either way. I think that my group would have gotten through the assignment a lot faster had there been more people in our group present, but despite the time crunch Brayden and I worked well together and as efficiently as possible. We both found it challenging to choose which documents to use, but chose to stray from newspaper media because it was most likely dramatized, and a lot of information articles were revealed as rumors in the following issue. We both agreed that the Chilcotin event was in fact not a war based on the information that we read. The documents we read proved that the Europeans were prepared for a war, but did not have to take the measure they’d planned on taking had there been a war – proving that a war never happened. We saw it as a retaliation of the Indigenous peoples against the European workers because of a conflict of interest over territory.

I was interested in this historic event because I did not know that this happened, and was surprised to hear of conflicts arising this far west in that time period. It was also interesting because it was so close to here. Being from a small, isolated town I don’t get many opportunities to connect to historic events to where I live, so for that reason I may have found this more intriguing than most.

 

Read Chilcotin War Analysis Here: