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Beaver Steals the Fire; Arctic Memories
Mar. 11th, 2012 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanguinityTwo picture books!
4. Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Beaver Steals Fire. Told by Johnny Arlee (Salish).
Pushing the bitter end of the appropriate season for this story...
Traditional Salish story of how the animal people, led by Coyote, stole fire from the sky people. Beaver may officially get credit in the title -- and to be sure, he was brave and fleet! -- but it was very much a group project. Everyone else worked together to make sure that Beaver could get away clean, and that the sky people wouldn't thereafter be able to extinguish their newly-stolen fire. (Well, they mostly worked together: Grizzly was so greedy that he was too busy goofing up to be useful, and Bull Snake... Well, never send Bull Snake and Frog on a recon mission together, 'kay? Just... don't.)
The illustrations are simple but lovely (I especially like Prairie Chicken shelterng the fire from the rain), and there are excellent cultural notes at the end about Salish uses of fire, and the effects of the past century of fire suppression on traditional Salish lands. (Really, I can't rec that "Note to Teachers and Parents" enough.) Additionally, there's a second section at the end on the Salish alphabet and its pronunciation: in the text, all the characters' names are given in both Salish and English.
Very highly recommended. And gosh, but it makes
5. Normee Ekoomiak (Inuit), Arctic Memories.
Felt applique and embroidery artwork (as Ekoomiak learned from his grandfather) depicting scenes based on Ekoomiak's childhood on James Bay, with narration of each piece in Inuktitut and English. "Scenes based on his childhood" is very broadly defined: some of these are scenes of daily life, some are illustrations of stories he learned as a child, some are illustrations of Inuit spiritual beliefs (including how those beliefs are sometimes synthesized with Christianity), and so on.
The art is gorgeous -- I only wish that many of the reproductions had been larger or more detailed. A few pieces have both a detail and an overview shot, but I wished for more detail shots than we were given. The narrations are strong, and accumulate deeper meaning over the course of the book. For instance, the first time Okpik, the snowy owl, is introduced, we are told that he watches over the people and the polar bear; in later pieces, we see him warning people that a polar bear is approaching (so that they may take in their drying fish, thus saving both the humans and the bear from a clash). In another piece, he watches over the Nativity. One story ("The Curse") is deeply shocking to me, and would be my only reservation in generally recommending the book. Altogether, however, this book is strongly evocative of a particular time, place, and people, and would make a nice companion to Danielle Corriveau's The Inuit of Canada.
4. Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Beaver Steals Fire. Told by Johnny Arlee (Salish).
Pushing the bitter end of the appropriate season for this story...
Traditional Salish story of how the animal people, led by Coyote, stole fire from the sky people. Beaver may officially get credit in the title -- and to be sure, he was brave and fleet! -- but it was very much a group project. Everyone else worked together to make sure that Beaver could get away clean, and that the sky people wouldn't thereafter be able to extinguish their newly-stolen fire. (Well, they mostly worked together: Grizzly was so greedy that he was too busy goofing up to be useful, and Bull Snake... Well, never send Bull Snake and Frog on a recon mission together, 'kay? Just... don't.)
The illustrations are simple but lovely (I especially like Prairie Chicken shelterng the fire from the rain), and there are excellent cultural notes at the end about Salish uses of fire, and the effects of the past century of fire suppression on traditional Salish lands. (Really, I can't rec that "Note to Teachers and Parents" enough.) Additionally, there's a second section at the end on the Salish alphabet and its pronunciation: in the text, all the characters' names are given in both Salish and English.
Very highly recommended. And gosh, but it makes
5. Normee Ekoomiak (Inuit), Arctic Memories.
Felt applique and embroidery artwork (as Ekoomiak learned from his grandfather) depicting scenes based on Ekoomiak's childhood on James Bay, with narration of each piece in Inuktitut and English. "Scenes based on his childhood" is very broadly defined: some of these are scenes of daily life, some are illustrations of stories he learned as a child, some are illustrations of Inuit spiritual beliefs (including how those beliefs are sometimes synthesized with Christianity), and so on.
The art is gorgeous -- I only wish that many of the reproductions had been larger or more detailed. A few pieces have both a detail and an overview shot, but I wished for more detail shots than we were given. The narrations are strong, and accumulate deeper meaning over the course of the book. For instance, the first time Okpik, the snowy owl, is introduced, we are told that he watches over the people and the polar bear; in later pieces, we see him warning people that a polar bear is approaching (so that they may take in their drying fish, thus saving both the humans and the bear from a clash). In another piece, he watches over the Nativity. One story ("The Curse") is deeply shocking to me, and would be my only reservation in generally recommending the book. Altogether, however, this book is strongly evocative of a particular time, place, and people, and would make a nice companion to Danielle Corriveau's The Inuit of Canada.
