This project is focusing on raising awareness amongst high school and unive students about the first nations culture. We wanted this project to be useful in the classroom environment, therefore, we focused on poetry written by indigenous writers. We attempted to modernize the topic as well as staying away from stereotypes and have “intertwined” the indigenous voices and non-indigenous visualizations. This project was focused on illustrating those voices and making them heard. This idea reflects on the front cover.

We have organized the first few pages to be the table of contents and a few pages that have mini-biographies about the poets. This personalizes the authors and puts a face to remember them by. The table of contents has all the poems alphabetically ordered for better navigation purposes. Here is an example of these images down below.

  • Table of contents
Mini-biographies

After the introductory pages, the book body follows a spread format. Poems on the right and the illustrations on the left. The spread also credits the writers as well as the artists who worked on the particular spread. Abby and I have designed the illustrations for the poems ourselves reflecting on the poetry meanings.

We have illustrated “Mixtape” by Katherena Vermette in a more symbolic way. The poem talked about a missing brother, therefore we created his image out of tangled tape bits to show and show his absence at the same time. Looking closely, the reader could notice that the tape is also labeled “MISSING”.

This next poem that I have Illustrated called “I am graffiti” talks about how you cannot erase the narrator of the poem because they are the graffiti themselves. I have also chose a conceptual approach to create a bigger interest as well as reflecting on the metaphoric symbolism.

Based on my rationale, effort and support my self-evaluation rating for this group project would be 8/10.