On the 11th of april 2016, Attawapiskat, a small isolated town in Northern Ontario, Canada, was in the news around the world. On that day 11 people tried to commit suicide. Some of them were only 11 years old. Due to the Residential School System indigenous youth were taken away from their families for 10 months a year. It was a way of assimilating the youth to Western culture and Christian beliefs. Many children in the schools were neglected, harmed and didn’t get proper education. This resulted in a high rate of unemployment, intergenerational trauma, addiction, mental health problems and a high rate of suicides. Next to that many people in Attawapiskat live in overcrowded, substandard or condemned housing.
‘ECHO’ is a collaborative project that attempts to give Attawapiskat’s youth a voice and therefore attention to their life, while in the same time making critical remarks about the media’s portrayal of social minorities and about the consequences of our colonial past in the everyday life of indigenous kids. The project combines cold, empty and lonely landscapes with dark, warm and intimate family pictures. Next to that, drawings, writings and pictures of local kids show their actual thoughts and worries.
The dummy, designed by SYB, was nominated for the Luma Rencontres d'Arles Book Dummy Award, the BookDummyAward La Fabrica & PhotoLondon and the Photo Book Prize Cortona On The Move.
The project was published in Trouw