When a Book Makes you Cry: Reader Responses to Stories of the Carceral Child in Indigenous Picturebooks

Abstract

Indian Residential Schools in Canada and Boarding Schools in the United States are continuous tragedies. The discovery of over 1,300 unmarked graves at the sites of five Catholic-run former schools in Canada in 2021 ignited our investigation of children’s picturebooks using an anti-colonialist lens. This paper discusses public reader responses on Goodreads to 28 picturebooks about residential/boarding schools published from 1993 through 2022. Using inductively developed codes, the authors report adult readers’ responses with implications about readers’ appreciation of the picturebook format as an educational resource and personal reflections and awareness of underrepresented information about the history of Indigenous populations.