Seeing through the Dark, Breaking through the Silence: An Interview with Julie Flett

Swampy Cree and Red River Métis children’s author and illustrator Julie Flett began her literary career in 2004 when she illustrated The Moccasins, written by Ktunaxa First Nation author Earl Einarson. Having illustrated for many Indigenous authors, Flett has since begun to author and illustrate her own children’s books, notably Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer: L’alfabet di Michif/Owls See Clearly at Night: A Michif Alphabet, published in 2010 and for which she received the Christie Harris Illustrated Children’s Literature Prize and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature. More recently, Flett received the prestigious TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award for Birdsong. Here, I present an interview conducted with Julie Flett in May 2019 capturing her thoughts on her work and specifically on her first authored children’s book Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer: L’alfabet di Michif/Owls See Clearly at Night: A Michif Alphabet. In the pages that follow the interview, I offer context on the trajectory of her work to date and my reflections on our conversation and Flett’s artistic and literary story to date.¹

When Flett very kindly agreed to speak with me, we began our conversation discussing her inspirations behind Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer: L’alfabet di Michif. This bilingual alphabet book celebrates the Métis language, Michif. Michif is “a unique blend of Cree (Nēhiyawēwin) and French (Français) with some Saulteaux dialect of Ojibwe (Nakawēmowin; Anishinaabemowin)” (Flett, Lii Yiiboo). Its specificity, as linguist Peter Bakker—a leading authority on Michif, its variants, and its origins—notes, is that “[v]erbs, personal pronouns, and demonstratives are always Cree; nouns, numerals, and articles are always French” (9). Michif is then a linguistic curiosity or, as Flett so aptly puts, it: “[I]t is a complicated language that really shouldn’t work but it’s a language that does work” (“Atayokee!”). Bakker terms Michif a “mixed language” (9): a definition which speaks to the mixed heritage of the Métis people who were born from the union of European, specifically French, fur trade settlers with Indigenous women in the eighteenth century. Michif was once spoken widely “by thousands of people across the Prairies of Canada and the Northern US” (Lii Yiiboo), but is now critically endangered.

Jane Newland (JN):

Tell me a little bit about how Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer came about, what inspired you to write it?

Julie Flett (JF):

Well, I was learning about Michif myself… my family didn’t pass on their Indigenous languages to us, and between my grandmother and grandfather, they spoke a number of Indigenous languages. And so, it was kind of tucked away and, and they did that because they felt they were protecting us,² and you know, it’s a really difficult period. Anyway, as I was reading more about Michif, I realized that my grandmother had songs and words that I was seeing in some of the work that I was reading, so I wanted to know more. It was a learning project for me. I had had a publisher ask about a book I wanted to write, and I thought, well, maybe I could do this beginner book on Michif as an inspiration for, as a resource for children. As something that we never had. That’s how it came to be.

One of the things I feel that I can do as an artist and a writer is contribute something back to my community. All of this ties back to what I can speak to authentically and that is relationship, I speak to relationships. That’s something that I can do and contribute. So... in the book you see relationships to land, relationships with land, relationships with animals, relationships together, sisters.… The other part that happened very organically was that a lot of the phrases and words in Cree are so connected in the language. The book is not only about relationships, but being and doing. I’m not talking about objects in the...