Analysis Of The Blanket Exercise

The Blanket Exercise is a simulation of Aboriginal history from pre-European contact to the present. The Blanket Exercise was created in 1998 by Ed Bianchi, Suzanne Doerge, Chris Hiller, and Dr. Rose-Alma J. Mcdonald, from the Assembly of First Nations. A strong advantage of this resource is that it was created by a large group of Aboriginal peoples, including chiefs and members of major Aboriginal committees and organizations. According to their PDF document which can be purchased online, the goals of the Blanket Exercise include ensuring “that the living history between Indigenous peoples and newcomers is part of classroom learning”(Hill MacDonald, 2013, 4). The Exercise is “designed to help people understand how Indigenous peoples went from using and occupying all of the land [...], to a situation where reserves, [...] [amount] to only [...] 1%” of Canada (Hill MacDonald, 2013, 14). Throughout the Exercise, students gain an understanding of the many racist policies and practices that were imposed upon Aboriginal peoples and provides a critique of them. Critiquing these colonial practices is an important aspect of gaining a better understanding of the Aboriginal community, and this Exercise strives to teach students where the Aboriginal community came from and how they got to

At the beginning of the unit the Exercise could be used to active prior knowledge and get students into the right mindset for the unit. Students can create questions based on the activity and choose certain topics which they want to be covered in the most detail. Pictures of the students doing the activity could be taken and added to a timeline of Aboriginal or Aboriginal and Canadian history to remind students of the connections to history. As an end of unit activity, the Blanket Exercise could be a review, or a way of bringing all of the learned information together and make the connections between