I often get asked about the illustrations for We Are Still Here and how that came together.
When it came time to figure out the art, it’s like, how are we going to do this in a way that invites young people into the experience? And Karen Boss, our editor, and Frané Lessac and I, the illustrator, sat down — we were actually all at the American Library Association conference in Washington DC — and we talked about how can we do this in a way that doesn’t take away from the factual text?
And I said, ‘Well, there are kids that are actually learning this information, even though it’s not taught in like public schools.’ You have kids that are at tribally run schools that have developed their own curriculum, and then there are also charter schools, public charter schools that have a predominantly Native population, and so they have developed their own curriculums, and that is the students that are learning.
So we talked about situating it at one of those type schools. It’s set at an urban public chartered school where there’s Native students and they are teaching in essence their family members, their community members about each of these topics. They’re assigned one. And the reveal, the wordless reveal at the end shows them with the tri-folds and they have taken their topic, and done their artwork, and so what you see on each page is — we came up with a list of names of kids that, again, Native people are going to recognize some of those names as coming from certain tribes more than others.
So Frané creates this art in her folk art style that really does look like, — you know, it’s not a fine art type motif — so it really looks like something that students would relate to, it doesn’t seem like anything out of what they might themselves envision for that topic, or how they would put something together. And I just love it, I absolutely love it.
