About the client
As an office of Mennonite Church Canada, Indigenous-Settler Relations helps Mennonite communities grow in their awareness of host peoples and the realities of settler colonialism and nurtures justice-based friendships. Its aim is to honour the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 49 Calls to Action and live into the United Nations' Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) in the pursuit of the costly path of Christ.
About the book
Be it Resolved started out as a small booklet exploring just a handful of key actions and statements by mennonites in solidarity with Indigenous self-determination, protest, and decolonization over the past century.
My Role
Editor Steve Heinrichs and I had already worked on the office's Intotemak TRC Trilogy together, and he approached me to help come up with a design or this small pamphlet or book. But the amount of history that existed was far more than what a book could handle.
In his own words: “I was aware of a handful [of actions and statements], but as soon as I started digging in the archives I found incredible, old, significant commitments,” As the project expanded, historian and author of Mennonite Central Committee in Canada: A History Esther Epp-Thiessen joined the project in late 2019. You can learn more about the book's backstory in an interview of which the editors and I were a part of.
Tons of content
Now topping 350 pages, the enormous book faced several challenges: 1) Making the volume appealing to a general Mennonite audience, 2) balancing hope and disappointment in the storytelling, and 3) presenting indigenous voices without tokenization in a book explicitly focussed on the actions and words of Mennonite and Anabaptist settlers.
Form factor challenges
The book would need to be physical wide enough to accurately represent original legal documents, letters, and statements with their original formatting mostly intact. A smaller book would also be too thick, and a colour interior would be too expensive.
An 8.5x11" or 8.5x10" size with nearly an inch of thickness felt too close to post-secondary textbook sizes, so we landed at 7.5"x9"--an approachable size that with enough space to properly display the source material.
Despite clear restraints, I was given a lot of cover-to-cover freedom in designing Be It Resolved, and my editor routinely deferred to my own artistic preferences and inspirations in how to make some key decisions.
Starting with the the 3-piece entry
90% of the book comprises 3-piece entries for distinct statements or actions. Each involves an 1) editorial paragraphs explaining that moment in history, 2) a quote from an indigenous voice in that time, and then 3) the original source document that records the statements made by the Mennonite and/or Anabaptist body at that time.
Style
Given that the book was in some respects just paper museum for dozens and dozens of these entries, the design would need to be clear but also inviting a touch theatrical. We explored several approaches, testing them with the editors and with other folks at Mennonite Church Canada.
Much of the inspiration for the finally selected concept n came from the late 1970s, which the editors had identified as some of the most radical years this book covers.
Building the entries
The funky oversize year number is set in Dharma Gothic at size that allows its subtle funk realy come out, and the use of Plantin & Gill Sans is evocative of editorial advertisments from the late 70s. The off-white paper stock and soft green also contributes to that look and feel.
Years and words
Every year in the book begins with a spread. The position of the year number moves from left to right across the left page from year to year, a motion that can be seen when the quickly flipping through left hand pages of the book. Set at the top of the page are Anabaptist or Mennonite institutions who made statements or took action in that year (these also move with the year), and set at the bottom are excerpts of events from world history in that year (a feature that I suggested).
Opposite on the right you find words spoken in that decade by an Indigenous intellectual, acivitist, elder, or community leader.
Context and Source
Each of the entries within each year contains a preceding context paragraph crafted by the book's editors, followed by a direct copy of the original source material, with original formatting preserved as much as possible.
Building the rest of the book
This style was built out further in the course of creating the rest of the book's interior.
Handling imagery
I chose to set archival images from wider societal context in their frames over black. However, whenever images of Mennonites and/or Anabaptists are shown, I decided to cut the backgrounds away in an effort to make the characters blend into the page and discourage the reader from perceiving an inappopriate amount of distance between themselves and these people. These people are their people. This is the reader's history. This is isn't just "general" history in that decontextualized western european sense.
Study Guide
A study guide was also created to aid readers and groups of readers to contextualize the book's recounted history in light of avenues of action in solidarity for Anabaptists and mennonites to take part in the present.
Though subversive and prophetic in its intention, Be It Resolved is nonetheless a book for Anabaptists to explore their own shared history, and they should see themselves in the work.
Deconstructing the dove
Many of our aesthetic explorations proved cliche or culturally inappropriate - variations on Indigenous wampum, for example. However, that exploration seeded the concept of a ribbon portraying the years that had passed. Exploring the use of ribbons led to the idea of constructing a dove--a symbol of Christian peacemaking and an icon of Mennonite collective history and identity--out of a ribbon inscribed with the years that Be It Resolved recalls in its chapters.
In addition to being visually distinct and mesmerizing, this symbol forces construction and inversely deconstruction upon what is often a boring boilerplate symbol for Christian communities that centre peacemaking, questing readers' understanding of their own history and inviting them to examine it. Additionally, while one can see the folds and where the years move through the shape, some years are partially covered or totally hidden (not to mention some years aren't even brought up at all).
Posing the Ribbon
Several dummy ribbon formats and designs were tested before printing the ribbon on a waterproof vinyl. This vinyl ribbon was folded into the intended dove shape, and fixed onto a backing to hold the shape and allow it to be mounted in a variety of positions.
I proceeded to explore the riverbanks around the forks in Downtown Winnipeg, placing the dove in various positions, experimenting with light, composition, and the meeting of land and water in various photographs.
The final selected image, in monotone, was selected for how well it visually and symbolically embodies all of the tensions in Be It Resolved. The skewed dove looks perhaps in flight on first impression, despite in actual fact resting crookedly on a wet rock. Though brightly lit, menacing shadows creep up behind it menacingly. It rests at the river's edge, but also looks lifelessly washed up.
The final iteration
The background of the image was separated, converted to black and white, and augmented with the addition of more water. The dove meanwhile, was processed so that the years in the graphic would print in the solid green pantone that runs through the book's interior.
A spread of the dove in its non-posed clinical appearance is shown just as the years are about to start.
For the final back cover design, A sequential progression of folds creating the dove moves from the left of the back cover across to the right and then to the spine in full, over to the cover and back around to start once again. This is a subtle nod to the cyclical nature of deconstruction and reexamination of a community's formative symbols.
The ribbon imagery seen in the top of the back cover is also derived from photographic content.
In addition to art direction, cover design, and typesetting the interior, I also handled the logistics of getting the book printed in Friesens in Altona, Manitoba.
And so, published in the fall of 2020, Be It Resolved is a cohesive whole built from concept, with cover and interior crafted from the same elements and visual language. A slight lull in Covid cases allowed for a distanced book launch at the offices of Mennonite Church Canada in October 2021.
In 2021, Be It Resolved was one of the two recipients of the Association for Manitoba Archives' Manitoba Day Awards.
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