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If you haven’t read our recent interview with Métis author David Bouchard yet, then head on over there right away! In the interview we talked only a little bit about his recent book Seven Sacred Teachings of White Buffalo Calf Woman (More Than Words, 2009), which he co-wrote with Dr Joseph Martin, is stunningly illustrated by Kristy Cameron, and has an accompanying DVD with music by Swampfox, and for which Swampfox created seven flutes out of seven different woods, each in a different key.

David considers Seven Sacred Teachings to be one of his most important works to date. The seven teachings (Humility, Honesty, Respect, Courage, Wisdom, Truth, and Love) are universal to First Nations peoples, and are the strongest link between First Nation, Inuit and Métis communities. Read on to find out more, for in this post David explains in more depth the background to this fascinating and ambitious project, which brought together six languages: English, French, Ojibwe, South Slavey, Bush Cree and Chipewyan.

The Aboriginal people in Canada have had to deal with many negative experiences over the past century and more: but one of the golden, shiny spots from coast to coast in our country is the spirituality that remains intact. If you go into any one of our schools, any school from coast to coast in Canada with Aboriginal kids, you’ll see posters or writings on the walls that refer to these teachings. Different people call them different things. Among the Ojibwe people they’re called the Grandfather Teachings, amongst the Lakota and Dakota people (who used to be called the Sioux), they’re called the teachings of White Buffalo Calf Woman. Among the Dene of the north and their cousins the Navaho in America, they call them the Dene Laws.

But the teachings are very, very constant and I thought it would be wonderful to take those teachings and express them through art and in different languages in a top-quality book. So I started working on the project a few years ago. At around the same time, I came across a young artist, Kristy Cameron, a Métis of Ojibwe descent. I just loved her art, and I talked to her about doing the book with me.

In our culture, there are seven sacred directions – the four of the medicine wheel (East, South, West and North), and then Up, Down and Within our Hearts. Each direction has a teaching associated with it, a colour that we associate with that teaching, and a trait that we associate with the colour; each direction has an animal or a bird that we think of as being representative of that teaching. So I put all of that together and then I said, “Well, if we’re going to do this, we can’t do it on a cd as a cd’s too small, so we’ll have to do it on dvd. So the dvd has me reading the whole book in English and then in French; then it’s read in Ojibwe, Chipewyan, Swampy Cree and in Slavey. Those were the people I was

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“The oral traditions of the Aboriginal people taught them from an early age the art of listening and remembering”, says Nyoongar Elder Rosemary van den Berg, PhD, of the south-west people in Western Australia, in a paper titled “Aboriginal Storytelling and Writing”. Among other things, her paper explores the different roles storytelling played/plays in traditional times and contemporary times, and talks about the legacy of traditional stories transcribed into the written word. To illustrate the latter, she uses as an example a story about the Nyoongar sacred serpent (the Wagyl or Waakal) told by two different generations and gender of Nyoongar people. I encourage you to read the paper and the two versions of the story (they’re not long).

The first version is by a Whadjuck/Balardong man who was the Keeper of the Stories, the late Mr Tom Bennell; the second is by a Nyoongar woman, Mrs Dorothy Winmar. Dr van den Berg notes about the two versions that she transcribed herself: “Tom Bennell, The Keeper of the Stories, gives an in-depth, very detailed telling. His generation of Nyoongars were more attuned to their old people and lived more closely with the Dreamtime stories that were a part of Nyoongar life back in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. Mrs Winmar’s version is more contemporary, makes more use of the English language and uses less Nyoongar words.” Then she goes on to ask: “Whose story is more authentic?”

Questions of authenticity in relation to literature are often tricky. In this case, it’s tempting to pick the first one, but the answer she gives instead is: “Both are. Both stories were told by Nyoongars and both have authenticity because both were passed on to younger generations of Nyoongars, both are parables, and both depict the Dreamtime tenets handed down through generations and generations of Nyoongar people for countless millennia.”

Her paper reminds us that “in aboriginal cultures, children learn from an early age how to survive their environment by listening to their elders” and that, now, the autobiographies, poetry, fiction, drama, short stories, academic papers and children‘s stories written by aboriginal peoples about their own experiences are, in addition to helping rewrite Australia’s history, also helping them learn about their own cultures. In fact, now in Australia, Canada and also in the United States readers “can get a different perspective on Aboriginal life because stories are being written from Aboriginal points of view,” as opposed to those of historians, anthropologists and others from academia.

The aim of PaperTigers’ Apr/May focus on Canadian Aboriginal Children’s Books has been to support and encourage the writing and publication of more such first-hand stories. Our world needs them all.

First published in 2002 and recently reissued in paperback by Groundwood Books, Lessons from Mother Earth

This book by an author born in the Yukon and a member of the Na-Cho Nyak Dun First Nation is about respecting and caring for the planet. Five-year old Tess visits her grandmother’s mountain cabin and learns about her garden, which consists of nature itself. The first rule grandma teaches Tess is: “You must always take good care of our garden.” Following that, she tells Tess to say a prayer of thanks while picking fruits and vegetables; to harvest just enough and at the right time; and to take care not to trample the vegetation or leave rubbish behind. For dinner, they gather wild edibles-lamb’s-quarters, dandelion shoots, and blueberries.

Wood’s realistic yet impressionistic watercolors are glowing and lush, with dabs of color for close-ups of berries and woodland animals. This book would work particularly well for Earth Day or as part of a nature/ecology unit.

Lessons from Mother Earth is also mentioned in Paul De Pasquale’s article recently reprinted on PaperTigers, Imagining Home in Children’s Picture Books by Canadian Aboriginal Authors.

Established in 1978, Groundwood Books is a small children’s book publisher, associated with House of Anansi Press, that specializes in Canadian authored books (with a special interest in books by First Nations authors), bilingual books in English and Spanish, translations from around the world, and a non-fiction line aimed at young adults. Their catalog features a long list of award-winning titles that reflect individual experiences and are of universal interest.

Patricia (Patsy) Aldana, founder and publisher of Groundwood Books (and president of IBBY , the International Board on Book for Young Readers since 1997), answered our questions about My Little Round Rouse, one of the seven titles selected for inclusion in our Spirit of PaperTigers Book Set Donation Project; her commitment to publishing books by First Nations authors; the multicultural titles on their Fall list, and more.

In our series of interviews with the publishers of the books selected for our Spirit of PaperTigers project, I normally start by asking how the book in question came about as a project for the publisher. Since we already know the answer to this question in relation to My Little Round House, both from our interview with author Balormaa Baasansuren and from translator Helen Mixter’s article, My Little Round House: The Journey of a Picture Book from Mongolia to Canada, we’ll start by asking…

PT: What in particular attracted you to My Little Round House?

PA: I thought it was a really special book about people whose lives are very different from ours. I also thought it was a very unique look at a baby’s life, a life that despite being nomadic seemed wonderfully cosy and safe.

PT: The books you publish often tell the stories of people whose voices are underrepresented. What first motivated you to start on this path and how do you manage to stay true to your mission?

PA: Being a Guatemalan, I guess that seeing the world through the eyes of the marginal has always come naturally to me. There are so many books published from and for the mainstream that, for me, focusing on underrepresented authors and illustrators was one way to justify being a publisher. As a small Canadian house, this focus has also been a way for us to distinguish ourselves from the huge multi-nationals with whom we have to compete.

PT: How did the decision to stop selling rights to the American market and to start publishing your books in the US come about?

PA: As US publishing changed from the editor-driven houses that I first came to know (Margaret K McElderry, Dorothy Briley, Susan Hirschman, Phyllis Fogelman, etc.), it became harder and harder to sell rights to our books in the US. At the same time Canada began to cut funding to school libraries and as a result our domestic market really shrank. We had to publish ourselves in the US or die. And that meant we had to bring our best books to the US in order to establish our list. We had very little money, but we had the quality of our books and needed to show our whole list in order to make our way.

PT: Since 1998 Groundwood Books has been publishing stories in English and Spanish by people of Latino origin under its Libros Tigrillo imprint. What motivated the creation of this imprint, and how has this part of the business grown since then?

P

Expanding on our current focus on Canadian Aboriginal Children’s Literature, I’d like to remind readers about Cree author Larry Loyie’s work. He has written the following children’s books that focus on the modern history of Aboriginal people and deal with native traditions, residential school, HIV awareness and prevention, the meaning of war and other challenging topics: Goodbye Buffalo Bay (Theytus), As Long as the Rivers Flow (Groundwood), When the Spirits Dance (Theytus) and The Gathering Tree (Theytus). Study guides for all four books can be found on his website.

As Long as the Rivers Flow was selected as an honor book for the 2006 First Nation Communities Read Program, and this year, along with Goodbye Buffalo Bay, it was chosen for inclusion in a literacy project whose goal is to encourage learning and understanding of First Nations histories, cultures and perspectives in Ontario schools.

Together with his partner, writer and editor Constance Brissenden, in 1993 Larry created the Living Traditions Writers Group to encourage writing within First Nations communities. If you’re not yet familiar with his work, you’re in for a genuine treat.

You can read our 2007 interview with Larry here. His next book, The Moon Speaks Cree, will be published by Theytus in 2011.