the British Columbia Book Review

November 23, 2022November 23, 2022

Six books reviewed by Linda Rogers:

Meet Your Family/ Gikenim Giniigi’igoog
by David Bouchard and Kristy Cameron

Victoria: Medicine Wheel Education, 2021
$24.99 / 9781989122662

They tried to “take the Indian out of the child,” but it never ended, the storytelling that united each generation of elders and ancestors to their children, watering the seeds that grow out of the oldest blanket, Mother Earth. And now the cultural renaissance witnesses translation of oral to literary tradition, making the garden inclusive as more and more Indigenous writers and artists show us how to talk with kids.

It’s a bitter irony that it has taken the disinterment of innocents to remind us that the Earth is not only home to lost children and humans waiting in line for sky burial, but the real stories of creation, which are far older than the dreams of voyageurs or shortsighted bureaucrats. It has taken this long for us to collectively understand that we are united in one story, which is told in the children’s books, variations on a theme, that came in the current sharing.

For those who argue that cultural recognition is only the beginning, we can be comforted in knowing that change happens in the minds of children as they assimilate the stories of their ancestors, narratives that remind them they are one with the universe and with each other as they go forward into a world that has been cursed with transactional values. We can hope children who assimilate their messages are the peace warriors of the future.

Meet Your Family, by David Bouchard and Kristy Cameron, is all you know and all you need to know about “all my relations.” Sometimes a book comes along that steals the breath, then gives it back, so we say “Soul come back” as after the happy sneeze. This is such a gift, the satisfaction no smaller than seeing the great Ian MacEwen finally control his ploticidal impulses in Lessons, his recent book of conjoined world and intimate family.

The only message that matters when Mother Earth is betrayed by conflict, man against man, man against woman, man against environment, humankind against itself is we are one, our finite partcles of being flowing through every living thing. The lesson is urgent and Bouchard and Cameron deliver it, in picture and verse, with deliberate gentility, love one another right now. Meet your Mother, they invite:

We all come from her
Those with feathers or fur
Those who walk on two legs
Birthed from water or eggs.

The format is perfect, verse embedded in delicious affirmations of life, a surround of art that is, by virtue of its Ojibway source, line and colour describing fellow creatures from the phenomenal and spirit worlds, at once personal and universal. It is a good thing that the book is hardbound because it will be read over and over by children and adults.

As we meet Grandfather Sun and Grandmother Moon holding up the sky, bathing the wakeful and sleeping Earth in light, lectures on matriarchy and world balance are made redundant. This is all we need to know. It is within the grasp of every child and every adult who listens and watches because the illustrations light up child world, a room with no walls. Just Meet Your family. Gikenim Giniigi’igoog. It is right in front of us, the real theory of relativity, no mystery, just a simple homily.

The format is perfect, verse embedded in delicious affirmations of life, a surround of art that is, by virtue of its Ojibway source, line and colour describing fellow creatures from the phenomenal and spirit worlds, at once personal and universal. It is a good thing that the book is hardbound because it will be read over and over by children and adults.

As we meet Grandfather Sun and Grandmother Moon holding up the sky, bathing the wakeful and sleeping Earth in light, lectures on matriarchy and world balance are made redundant. This is all we need to know. It is within the grasp of every child and every adult who listens and watches because the illustrations light up child world, a room with no walls. Just Meet Your family. Gikenim Giniigi’igoog. It is right in front of us, the real theory of relativity, no mystery, just a simple homily.