Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada

CHAPTER 5: Home and Native Land: A Study of Canadian Aboriginal Picture Books by Aboriginal Authors

For the past four years, we have been engaged in the rewarding, though often challenging, task of compiling a comprehensive bibliography of Aboriginal children’s literature by Aboriginal authors.1 Our work on this bibliography has given us a unique opportunity to survey the wide range of books aimed at or read by audiences up to and including young adults, written by authors who identify as Aboriginal, and published from 1967, the year of George Clutesi’s Son of Raven, Son of Deer, to the present day. Perhaps the most immediate surprise has been the sheer number of these books. Although Alexandra West notes in her historical overview of English-Canadian children’s literature in the International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (1996) that, while “Native writers of adult text are growing in numbers, in children’s literature this is happening more slowly” (866), the number of books and authors on our list immediately belies this view. Certainly adult fiction has received more scholarly and popular attention than children’s books, but approximately 300 books for children by approximately 125 Aboriginal authors are on our list. West further claims that of the two categories that dominate the field of Aboriginal children’s literature—retellings of traditional tales and legends and fictional stories about Aboriginal youths in historical and contemporary settings—the fictional books have lagged significantly behind the tales (867). Again, our bibliography contradicts this view. Roughly 70% of the books are fictional stories.° C H A P T E R 5 Home and Native Land: A Study of Canadian Aboriginal Picture Books by Aboriginal Authors Doris Wolf and Paul DePasquale 87 Both categories have, of course, been crucial for Aboriginal children and Aboriginal communities who, given the devastating impact of colonization on the Native peoples of North America, need the positive affirmation of their cultures and identities that these books without exception offer. As Clare Bradford notes in “‘To Hold Up Prisms’: Australian and Canadian Indigenous Publishing for Children,” while non-Aboriginal children might valuably enlarge their horizons of understanding and empathy through these books and are included as part of their target audience, Aboriginal children are typically the primary audience of Aboriginal production . Indeed, Tse-Shaht author and illustrator George Clutesi suggested nearly four decades ago in his introduction to Son of Raven, Son of Deer (1967) that Aboriginal peoples’ estrangement from their own cultural and artistic traditions “could be part of the reason so many of the Indian population of Canada are in a state of bewilderment today” (12). Motivated in part to counteract this “state of bewilderment,” Clutesi, as James Gellert observes, saw his art as contributing not only to a better understanding on the part of non-Indians of Aboriginal cultural and artistic traditions, but also to Native peoples’ own understanding of these traditions, in order that they might counteract the “civilizing” influences of alien cultures (79). By helping to recuperate traditions often damaged or lost through colonization , tales and legends have contributed to the resurgence of Aboriginal identities and pride in the past four decades. Many of these books— such as Clutesi’s collection of Tse-Shaht legends, Son of Raven, Son of Deer (1967); Tales from the Longhouse (1973), traditional stories written by Aboriginal children from Vancouver Island and the village of Kingcome Inlet; Why the Beaver Has a Broad Tail (1974), an Ojibwa legend told by Susan Enosse of the Wikwemikong Reserve on Manitoulin Island; and Mohawk clan mother Alma Greene’s Tales of the Mohawks (1975)—draw from a wide range of traditional knowledges that originate in specific First Nations communities. These authors, the forerunners of today’s wellknown writers of legends such as Bill Ballantyne, Joe McLellan, and C.J. Taylor, sought to record and transmit traditional knowledges to future generations of Aboriginal peoples long before the historical and cultural value of preserving the voices of the elders was recognized, and made, as it is today, even somewhat fashionable.2 Children are not necessarily the sole intended audience for traditional stories: for example, in its catalogue Theytus Books, an Aboriginal-owned and -run publishing company located in Penticton, British Columbia, which publishes Aboriginal authors only, lists its legends under two categories, children’s stories and oral traditions , indicating that adults, too, might well and do indeed read these books for their own pleasure and knowledge.3 88 Doris Wolf and Paul DePasquale In the second category, fictional...