Data Book Progress

Getting a move on this research book was a process. Yes, I’ve changed the name from “infographic book” to “research book”, since that was one of the issues I ran into over the past couple of weeks.

The topics I’m covering in this social campaign don’t all have research that can be displayed as infographics, specifically loss of culture and exploitation. After a class critique, I got suggestions to just use imagery instead, and this was a perfect idea. For loss of culture and exploitation, I used images to convey the research I gathered to get my point across to the reader. For the first page, I found images of Native American youth who were forcefully taken to boarding schools and stripped of their culture. The before and after photographs are jarring and always leave me feeling horrible. The hope is that just by viewing these images, the reader of the book will feel this way too. I did have one statistic that I’m still workshopping on how best to show, and I mentioned the explosions at the Native American burial site of the Tohono O’odham Nation in 2020.

For exploitation, I used examples that I have already pointed out in a narrative video I made last semester for the same topic. All these examples showed how people in the United States, especially white people, and corporations, take pieces of Indigenous cultures and identities and use them for their own benefit. As they do this, they completely ignore the current Indigenous populations and their struggles. My images included Pocahontas, Johnny Depp’s Tonto, the cultural appropriation of the traditional Native American headdress, and the controversial name and logo for the Washington Redskins (now known as the Washington Commanders after 83 years).

After designing all the main layouts, I decided I wanted to add an “about” spread for myself and my inspiration behind the whole campaign. This was tough for me as I didn’t want to make this project about me at all. Many of the struggles I researched don’t apply to me as I’m only a quarter Native American, which grants me a lot of privilege from my other identities. But I am a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, and I grew up dancing at our Pow Wows and always felt the closest to this heritage, among all the others that I carry with me. So, in my “About the Creator” section, I wrote about that and about how this is still personal to me, despite not all of it directly affecting me. I included pictures of myself and my brother in the traditional clothing that we wore as we danced at our Pow Wows.