Canadian residential schools are government-funded religious schools designed to integrate indigenous children into European-Canadian culture. However, schools destroy lives and communities and cause long-term problems for indigenous peoples. In all, an estimated 150,000 first nations, Inuit and Metis children attend Canadian residential schools. Since the last Canadian residential school closed in 1996, former students have demanded recognition and compensation, leading to a settlement agreement in 2007 .
To meet this need, this infographic was created as a teaching tool for high school age students. The purpose of this work is to let more people know about Canadian Residential Schools because many people do not know what Canadian Residential School are, and do not know what terrible trauma has been imposed on Indigenous people.
The biggest difficulty of this project is how to effectively convey important information about the residential schools to the target audience and how to get more people to pay attention to indigenous people. Besides, giving a second life to the infographic is also a hardship rather than just making a simple printed infographic. If it is just an ordinary infographic, people will throw it away after reading it, which is very wasteful.
The overall design of this project becomes the appearance of a folder. The front of the folder has an original illustration about the experiences of residential school survivors. The handwritten content of the illustration is associated with hope, and is create to look like the doodlings of a teenager. Although the residential school is a very maddening and sad thing, the project still want to have some positive, hopeful expression. The inside page of the folder is the infographic, it contains some important facts and statistics about Canadian residential schools.
