A Thompson, Manitoba author has transformed a Rocky Cree story he remembers his father telling him as a child into a picture book with lessons that remain relevant today.
The book is the second for William Dumas of O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation at South Indian Lake, who previously released Pisim Finds Her Miskanow in 2013.
Despite the fact that he is listed as the author, however, The Gift of the Little People: A Six Seasons of Asiniskaw Ithiniwak Story is, like many Indigenous oral stories, both the product and the shared property of a much larger community.
Released Feb. 22 by Highwater Press, The Gift of the Little People, tells the story of a Rocky Cree elder who takes a trip to a parallel world to get medicine when members of his community fall ill and start dying after trading with Europeans in Hudson Bay.
While the story came from Dumas and other Rocky Cree community members in Northern Manitoba, they had help from university professors and others who belong to a team that received a $2.5 million grant in 2017 to create this book and several more.
“I became interested in the story of the Rocky Cree people where I'm from years ago, and one of my interests at the time from hearing various stories of the little people is I got interested in in that,” Dumas says. “I do recall my dad telling us a story one time about them. So I asked him to retell the story to me one night, about the little people, and that's how the book was written.”
The fact that the subject matter touches on a topic very familiar to people throughout the world in 2022 – the arrival of a new sickness and the need to find medicine to treat it – is more the result of coincidence than planning.
“It was written a few years ago,” says Dumas, at the beginning of the process of turning it into a book. “When Warren [Cariou] and I started working on it, it dawned on us. Hey this is a good time to write this story. It’s about faith and hope and all that. Society needs to have faith and hope in the world around them.”
Cariou, one of the other Six Seasons project collaborators and a professor of Indigenous storytelling at the University of Manitoba, says the creative process not only seeks to provide entertainment and to bring Rocky Cree stories to a broader audience, but to do it in a way that respects and builds on contributions from traditional knowledge keepers as well as from academic disciplines such as history and archeology and even education to ensure the details are historically accurate and that their information about the Rocky Cree way of life can be used for teaching purposes. as well.
“It’s been a great learning experience for us, as scholars in that regard,” Cariou said. “Probably one of the most important things is getting to know the folks in the Rocky Cree communities and learning from them. One of the things I’ve really loved about this project is having that opportunity to go on the land with William or with the other knowledge keepers. It’s been absolutely wonderful and really transformed my idea of how deeply storytelling is connected to a place.”
The Six Seasons series will explore the language, culture, territory, knowledge and history fo the 17th-century Rocky Cree with stories corresponding to the six seasons of sīkwan (spring), nīpin (summer), takwakin (fall), mikiskow (freeze-up), pipon (winter), and mithoskamin (break-up).
“For a long time, during the period of colonization, our stories were not taken seriously,” says Dumas. “Now we have the opportunity to say, you know, this is how it was, with research and knowledge keepers to bridge that gap that was missing for years.”
Another book in the series is expected to be published as early as this summer, Cariou says.
