Description
Monique Gray Smith is an award-winning, bestselling author and public speaker. Her books cover a broad spectrum of ages, topics and emotions. Woven into all of Monique’s writing and her speaking engagements is the teaching that Love is Medicine. Karlene Harvey is Tŝilhqot’in and Syilx and currently lives on the unceded and ancestral home territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. They studied at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, earning a BFA in visual arts. Dorothy Thunder is a Plains Cree (nêhiyawiskwêw) from Little Pine First Nation, Saskatchewan and full-time Cree instructor in Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta.
When Charlie’s Kohkom asks him what the best part of his school day was, he knows right away: Indigenous drum circle!
Kohkom tells him that not very long ago she was gifted her very first drum at a ceremony for children who never returned home from residential schools. But Charlie doesn’t understand. How could she only have gotten her first drum so recently?
Kohkom explains that she was taken from her family when she was very little because of something called the Sixties Scoop. She was raised by an adoptive white family and only later learned what being Cree meant. It’s taken her a long time to feel like she belongs. Kohkom's story gives Charlie the idea to teach her a song so they can play their drums together.
This bilingual book includes full text in both English and Plains Cree.
There is also an English and a French version of this book
Audience: Ages 3-5. This book contains 17 Colour illustrations.