Grade 7 students learning with Mme Geneviève's jumping point was of course the news story about the 215 unmarked graves in Kamloops... they talked about it as a class and were asked to think and discuss/write about "What have you heard? What have you learned? How do you feel about it? What should we do about how we feel?" A student's response to the last question was "We should make art."
Michelle Stoney's work, particularly her feather was the inspiration to this full blown mural.
Students brainstorm in table groups, then they shared back to the whole class and after some discussion, this is what they came up with. They were going to create a mural using this art as a base, with descriptions of what the 215 child victims suffered, written in the first person, all around it, and then 215 thumb prints in coloured paint to represent each child.
Math was also involved in the process as they needed to be enlarge the feather, so they created a grid system. Mme Geneviève cut it up into 12 sections, students chose which one they wanted to work on (in pairs or threes), and got to designing and drawing. They had to check with adjacent squares before painting to make sure everything lines up.
Consult the illustrations to see their impressive and well documented process.
nə́c̓aʔmat ct – “we are one” in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm.