Indigenous Group: the Cañari People

Part A:
The Cañari people currently live in South America and parts of Ecuador. Thousands of years ago, the Cañari people had many clashes and rivalries with the Inca people and the Cañari people strove to make their capital, Tumebamba, better than the Inca's capital. Sounds like sibling rivalry if you ask me. The Cañari people even allied with the Spanish conquistadors in order to fight the Incas. But of course, the Spanish made the Cañaris learn and primarily use Kichwa and Spanish. The Cañaris original language died off a little bit after that.
The name Cañari has an interesting meaning. “Kan” meant snake and “ara” meant Macaw.
The Cañari people have a confederacy of united tribes across South America.

The Cañari people had a myth that is eerily but not entirely similar to that of the Christian Bible story of Noah's Arc. They had a myth similar to Noah and the Ark. Basically, there was this flood and two brothers were thought to be the only survivors, but they were going back to their home and they found that their home had been put back together and warm, cooked food was found on the table. One of the brothers left the house to go and start a new life somewhere else. The remaining brother, Urcocari, found the woman who had done this. She had a macaw face. He married her and thus, according to the myth they are the progenitors of all living things on the Earth today. This myth is very interesting considering the similarities of the two stories.
The Cañari people are a polytheistic group, many extraordinary things they would worship, like what they would call "The Supreme Creator", the moon, the snake and the Macaw (the Macaw is a beautiful type of blue jungle bird, like for example Blu in the movie Rio. He is a macaw.).


These are traditional Cañari musicians. As you can see, they use guitars, drums, flutes/recorders and I am actually not quite sure what the man standing up is playing.
Website Picture was found on:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Kanari_takiqkuna_01.jpg

Part B:

I believe that emotion is the way people feel, register and react to a situation.
Emotion plays a great role in the actions of the Cañari people. They were very near the Inca territory and therefore had a lot of fights and even wars with them. The Cañari people were constantly trying to outdo the Incas and their amazingly designed capital city. It's pretty obvious that jealousy, greed and envy were present and therefore, because of these emotions, the Cañari people constantly fought with the Incas.

WOK Questions:
How are the effects of the emotion of the Cañari people seen in the land that they once occupied?
How can we learn from the Cañari people's use of emotion, to impact our daily lives today?

"Culture"

The USA vs. Germany



I wasn't quite sure how to put a slide in here, so I just made a picture of one aspect of the culture of the USA compared to Germany. Last October, we had a German exchange student staying in our house. She was really nice and polite to us, and when we went shopping, I found a little bit of a difference in our cultures, relating to time. Being from the United States, I know that we have a very rushed and punctual way about being on time. For people from Germany, this is not the case necessarily. I found that people from Germany are more relaxed and don't worry as much about the time.

In my opinion, culture is the social environment in your country, town or neighborhood which you are surrounded by and are nurtured into by the people whom are older than yourself. It can be very easy to stereotype someone's culture, but very hard to describe the truth to one's culture. For example, it is very easy to say (and I can say this because I am American) that American people are mostly overweight and rich. This is not true for the majority of the US population. It's easy to use this stereotype to describe Americans because it's what people think of them and it's how they are viewed by people in other countries. People just assume that Americans are this way but we are not. Now, it's harder to describe the true culture of the American people because we have many other cultures in our country and you have to experience the culture yourself in order to understand it.
In the power point, I feel that the slide pertaining to transportation is incorrect about westerners. It says that westerners use bikes nowadays. In America, we constantly use cars because everything is really spread out and it takes too long to bike over to where we need to go. Also on the leisure time slide it says that all westerners do for leisure time is to sit and watch TV. Even as a generalization that is not true. We do a variety of things, like reading, hanging out with friends, bowling, etc. We don't just sit like couch potatoes watching TV.
If I were to describe the culture in the United States, I would say that many of the people live in suburban areas, but not all. Some live on farms, in the city, etc. Though Americans are very similar in how they treat each other. Most people that I have passed hold doors for the people behind them. Though not all people in the US are the most polite, especially on the roads. We as American people are more so conservative and don't really want to share extremely personal details with others, but we do like to tell others about the aspects of our life that we think will make us seem "cooler" by the people we are talking to at the time. Of course, all that I have said before isn't necessarily true for everyone in the United States. There is always an exception. 
When I was in Spain, it was a very different culture than ours in the United States. At first, I wasn't sure how to react to the locals when they tried to talk to me. So, I thought about how I treated people in the US and I treated them like I would treat in the United States. I was polite and courteous. Of course, this is how, from what I could observe, they treated other locals in the area. This helped me a lot since we interacted with the locals a lot during the trip in restaurants and when we went to buy things in shops. There is a major limitation to using our memory for knowing something. I forget a lot of things, so I don't remember a lot of things correctly and sometimes not at all. Other times, I remember different versions of the same event than my friends. Memory is a good resource, but you should always have other information from other sources in order to know something better.
We can use our imagination to appreciate other cultures, because we can imagine ourselves in those cultures and think about how cool it would be to be able to partake in their traditions and other aspects of the culture.

Why TOK???

Why TOK?

Part A:
Video: The Matrix: There is no spoon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAXtO5dMqEI (1 min 10 sec)

The IB has us take the Theory of Knowledge course is to challenge ourselves to see how we know what we know. How do we know that we are not really in a world fabricated by the consciousness of our own minds, like in The Matrix? The reason I chose this particular clip of the Matrix movie to explain "Why TOK?" is because there is really no way for us to know that our minds or artificial intelligence are making an alternate reality for us to believe it is real when it is not really the real thing. TOK helps us to realize the possibility and challenges us do debate it. TOK can broaden our horizons in how we look at the world.

Part B:

I believe that Sturgis does not exemplify the IB learner profile trait of communication particularly well. For example, every Sturgis student looks forward to the upcoming school events, such as Spirit Week, Color Wars, the Homecoming soccer games etc. Though, when it comes to communicating the dates of those events, or for another example what we would be wearing for Spirit Week, we only get the answer to these long-awaited questions the Friday or a couple days before the event actually happens.