Historian, author and Red Lake Nation citizen Brenda Child had been working on a previous book of hers, Holding Our World Together, Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community, when a story from it stuck with her.
“I ran across a story that was in the archives referred to as the ‘Leech Lake story of Bear Woman,’” she said in a recent What We’re Reading interview.
"Bear Woman" was a story of an Ojibwe woman who, to protect her children and family, joined the fight when an enemy of the tribe attacked.
Child continued, “But what everyone at Leech Lake remembered about the bear woman story was a story of a very fierce female bear protecting her children.”
This story became the inspiration for her latest children’s book Blue Bearies, published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.
In Blue Bearies, Windy Girl is dropped off at school by Uncle. Windy Girl’s teacher Mrs. Mukwa is teaching her class about their Ojibwe animal relatives, specifically the bear, or makwa. In Windy Girl’s vivid imagination Mrs. Mukwa herself turns into a bear and continues to teach the class about their ancestors and how their people learned so much from animals.
This is Child’s follow up to her wildly popular 2018 children’s book Bowwow Powwow, which is in its seventeenth printing and has been adapted as a musical by Stages Theater Company and features music by Minnesota musicians Bizhiki and Keith Secola.
Child teamed up with Jonathan Thunder, an artist from Duluth who provided the vivid illustrations for both books. Thunder, who also has ties to Red Lake Nation, described his process for illustrating the story.
“I just sit down and start to dial in the imagery as close to what I imagine Brenda is describing in her storytelling. Thinking back to my childhood when I would visit Red Lake, because I grew up in the Twin Cities, but I would visit and hang out with family and thinking about that warm sun that Red Lake has and some of the wildlife and plant life that are around there.”
Thunder noted that readers from Red Lake might recognize some familiar sites in the background on the pages. He said, “It's fun for me to do silly little things like add the Red Lake water tower, which is this bright red water tower that could be seen for miles and just have that somewhere off in the distance.”
Both Bowwow Powwow and Blue Bearies are retold in Ojibwemowin by Gordon Jourdain of the Gakijiwanong Anishinaabe Nation. Child noted the importance of offering her stories in dual languages.
“It's good for everybody to know that we have our native languages that are endangered that we need to preserve for the future. But I also think that we wanted to offer something to kids language learning at places like Red Lake and the Waadookodaading School over in Wisconsin and all those places where children are learning Ojibwe and need materials in the Ojibwe language,” she said.
While Bowwow Powwow featured singing and dancing dogs at a powwow, Blue Bearies is all about bears. Child wanted the book to speak to what we learn from the natural world.
She explained, “Sometimes we like to think we're at the top of the chain, we know everything … but it's also important to remember that the natural world is full of thinking, sentient beings. And a lot of what we know, in fact, is from observing how they live in the natural world. I wanted children to think about bears as being very smart and what we learn from bears.”
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