Toward What’s Meaningful: Thinking-With Reconciliation
It gives me great pleasure to introduce guest blogger Dr. Catherine-Laura Dunnington. I have never met anyone else who uses a modified Dewey Decimal classification system to organize her picturebooks. Dr. Dunnington is a beautiful thinker and helps me remember to hang on tightly to the small and joyous moments in life, including the time that she told me that she was looking at a flower in bloom, and was annoyed that there was a piece of garbage beside it. Then she said: "I thought to myself, doesn't the contrast with the garbage make the flower more beautiful?" When the world feels impossible, I turn to her ideas to remind myself of all the tiny, beautiful things.
Here is her guest post:
My daughters made Bannock in nursery school recently. They came home and offered their honest daily reports: one of them liked it, one of them didn’t, and both wondered if I’d ever had any. When I answered that I had indeed, one of my daughters innocently asked me “what was yours made out of”? Cue the internal groan. My daughter had listened to some kind of mini lesson on Bannock, made it, ate it, and yet didn’t really learn anything about what it is, what it might mean or signal. In other words, she could imagine that Bannock might be made with alternate things, because it remained a shapeless word-concept for her. Bannock hadn’t been made meaningful. Let me assure you, I’m not blaming the hard-working teachers at her center: I adore them. I’m also not blaming my 3-year-old. In fact, I’m not so interested in blaming here at all. I’m interested in thinking-with. I’m interested in asking myself, and all of us, how thinking-with reconciliation might give us bigger-than-Bannock ways into meaning. I want meaningful reconciliation and I want to be a part of it.
In Rea Knight’s gorgeous paper called Help Us Stay: A Message to Yukon’s Policy Makers, she contests the idea of quality in early childhood education, positioning it within capitalist structures obsessed with measurable outcomes. “[Q]uality is a constructed concept based on an objective universal reality that fails to recognize the importance of culture, context, and diversity” (p. 17, 2023). Instead, she argues, we need meaningful early childhood education. Without meaning we have, at best, a long series of well-intentioned people and experiences that might be measurable yet hollow. Said differently: we might have Bannock, but we won’t necessarily have care and context.
So, enter the picture book again. Again (and again) we have books that can act as lamplights on our long journeys. I don’t know about you, but the word “journey” for me has been transformative. It harkens to Shoshana’s insight: “it’s all in the repair” (n.d., in that it is ongoing). For me, it’s all in the journey. That means that on the road to meaningful reconciliation I’m traveling, with intention, and the journey has good, bad, medium and forgettable days. Having recently taken a nine-day car journey with my family, that was full of all the days, “journey” proved a useful concept to cling to. My four-year-old told me “Mom, I’m so mad, but I’m willing to keep being on this team” (on day two!). Riiiight… well, it’s all in the journey. My three-year old peed in her car seat, we rinsed it in a fountain, and left it on the roof of the scalding metal car to dry: all in the journey. We sat on the banks of Lake Superior and I felt overwhelmed with the beauty of a place I couldn’t begin to understand, let along honor. There was sand in my peanut butter sandwich: all in the journey.
Jessica Whitelaw, who I’ve cited so often I owe her royalties (if you’re reading this, I love your work), has positioned picturebooks as unique spaces for our collective imagination. Imagination that, I think, is on a journey to re-learn and heal. She says “[t]he picturebook, with its defining verbal and visual synergy, has particular affordances for conveying the complex simultaneity of struggle and hopefulness and for serving as a platform for social sharing and collective engagement” (p. 33, 2017). Well, struggle and hopefulness, indeed. When I considered what kinds of books to include on a list of books aimed at meaningful reconciliation, I wanted those picture books that offered children not simply information or a lens, I wanted those that felt meaningful for young children, that respected the unique ways in which they move through the world. Below, I offer three recent picture books by indigenous authors, illustrators or both.
By Deirdre Havrelock, illustrated by Azby Whitecalf
I love this book so much. It’s relatively new (2021), but that hasn’t stopped my family from reading it until the cover feels loose. (I always feel that’s such a welcome love scar). The first time I read this book aloud to my youngest daughter she sighed contentedly and said “That was a good one!”. Then we read it again, then again, and then her play had an awful lot of wild buffalo and lacrosse sticks in it for… well, it still does.
Interpretative Sign: A True Story as Big as a Bison; FortWhyteAlive© all rights reserved
If you’re not familiar with the true story of how buffalo were rescued from the brink of extinction, it bears reading about (I recommend, Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask by Ojibwe scholar and professor Anton Truer; the Young Readers Edition is especially useful for those who work with younger children). If you ever visit the real-life Bison herd at FortWhyteAlive (in Winnipeg, MB), an informative and thoughtful interpretative sign will give you the highlights (photo above).
But, back to Havrelock’s tale where we have a young boy named Declan who lives with his buffalo-loving Kokum (Plains Cree for grandmother) somewhere on the Canadian Prairies. Having heard Kokum’s reverent stories of buffalo for years, Declan tires of waiting for the Buffalo to return from the sky to earth. One night he calls for them, slinging buffalo sculptures from his lacrosse stick up to the starry gate holding them in. What follows is, you guessed it, a Buffalo Wild night!
This book is funny, it’s beautifully illustrated in a unique blue/purple/pink palette, and the characters are instantly likeable. One of the most popular illustrations in my family is of Declan’s Kokum, asleep with a face mask, earbuds, and a thin sliver of drool; if you’re going to have a Buffalo Wild night, you need a very asleep Kokum! Havrelock and Whitecalf take a complex and often painful history and give it their collective imagination by reimagining the narrative history of the Buffalo. This team has recaptured the spiritual power of Buffalo for children by deeply considering what might feel powerful for a young child, because ultimately it is Declan himself (clad in his pajamas!) who frees the Buffalo and saves the day. In the Author’s Note Havrelock tell us about her take on the future of Buffalo “I believe our journey leads to an extraordinary time of healing and restoration. Our sacred journey is a celebration of resilience” (2021, emphasis added). Buffalo Wild! is exactly that, a reimagined journey where the power for meaningful reconciliation comes from a child and their imagination.
By Tanya Tagak, illustrated by Cee Pootoogook
This book is art, and who would be surprised? Written by breathtaking Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq, an award-winning improvisational singer, composer and writer of Split Tooth, it’s no surprise that her first book for children is art but, It Bears Repeating (2018, note: adult).
I would urge anyone who reads this book to start by taking it incredibly seriously. What seems, on the surface, like a counting book that features polar bears is really a subtle work of resistance and celebration. On each page we have a number of polar bears, from 1-10, written first in Inuktitut and then English (pronunciation at the back). After a short poem, three-lines only, that illuminates those bears and lingers in your memory. Here is an example (p. 11, 2024).
Arvinilii nanuit
Six polar bears
Six staring bears.
Seals beware!
Six crafty bears.
I would argue that the power here comes from the brevity and cleverness of Tagaq’s words. Young children will remember these poems, they will “carry” those bears with them, taking a piece of what makes a Polar Bear whole. My children have been practicing the Inuktitut words of their own hearts, gently correcting their stuffies who sit lined up before them; “No Edamame Doll, it’s nah-noo-it”. Their favorite punch line taken directly from this work, I had the following early morning conversation while I ushered them, none too gently, out the door for Nursery School.
Me: “Put your shoes on, not your sandals, it’s not summer anymore”
Daughter, to her sister: “Yeah, but it’s not summer anymore, because it bears repeating”
I think meaningful reconciliation must include joy in resilience. How can thinking-with polar bears and the art of Tagaq and Pootoogook facilitate that? For one, this counting book is so clever. The bears on each page are all cream colored, save for one with darker fur. Recently, visiting Polar Bears at the zoo, one had rolled in the mud and was quite dark too. Obviously, those who know Polar Bears knew this might be the case. In an educational context, the darker bear serves as a wonderful spot to start and stop counting, reinforcing principles of early numeracy. Again: this counting book is so clever.
Let's Go! haw êkwa (en français On y va! haw êkwa)
By Julie Flett
Right, well, Julie Flett, the genius behind Birdsong and Wildberries (2019; 2013), just to name a few, has struck perfectly here and it almost physically hurts me this work is so good. In Let’s Go! haw êkwa! she brings us a story of a boy so filled with longing to skateboard and join the skateboarding community. Flett describes the inspiration for this story coming from her son and his friends having a “creative urgency”, an “I have to go” feeling, that skateboarding physically manifested (n.p., 2024).
One morning, my mom brings home
A bag from Grandma’s house.
Her skateboard from when she was my age!
Haw êkwa! Let’s go!
The book is gentle and relatively sparse in text, but between the illustrations and words the energy of desire manifests beautifully. Books that feature the past experiences of First Nations Peoples are important, but so are those that feature their current experiences.
When Stephen Marche wrote a piece for The New Yorker about Canada’s practice of land acknowledgement, he passionately signaled to Canadians the ways in which passive acknowledgement isn’t enough. The platitude-esque writing, featuring impossibly passive sentences structures, gets away from what is current and live today. He says “the essence of the colonial mentality is the belief that history is happening in some other place” (September 7, 2017). It isn’t the only answer to that painful truth, that lingering colonization we can’t shake, but I do know that picture books giving us visceral experiences of happening-today/playing-today/right-here-right-now First Nations children are a lamplight forward.
So, we are invited above to think-with Buffalo and reimagine their resistance, we are invited to count and delight in Polar Bears as we think-with them, and we are invited into current community, centered around urban-ness and the experiences of Cree children skateboarding like rivers.
To return to Rea Knight, working in the Yukon to amplify the voices of overworked and underappreciated Early Childhood Educators, we might view the above books as a small moment of kinship. Thinking-with reconciliation, sharing these books and others, and “sharing their [ECEs] visions for the future of early learning in Yukon, [we] have actively resisted the prevailing discourses surrounding the field” (p.30, 2023). Said differently, we have assumed that the work of caring for our youngest citizens is work worth valuing hard. In that valuation, we can start with picturebook texts that work to think-with reconciliation and focus on meaning. So, Let’s go! haw êkwa!
Until Soon,
Dr. Catherine-Laura Dunnington
Assistant Professor
University of Winnipeg