A few weeks ago, I attended a reading by First Nations authors at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission session held in Winnipeg (which I also posted about recently) and was introduced to the stories of the engaging and entertaining First Nations writer, Richard Van Camp. I immediately sought out his books at the library and came home with What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You Know About Horses, illustrated by George Littlechild (Children’s Book Press, 1998) and A Man Called Raven (Children’s Book Press, 1997).
As soon as I got these books, I read them to my daughter and she was completely taken in by
them. She was struck especially by the lesson conveyed in A Man Called Raven wherein a mysterious man teaches some boys not to be cruel to ravens. She also thought the books were very colorful and indeed, George Littlechild’s illustrations are very vibrant. A week after we read the books together (and we’d been to the zoo and seen a crane which I pointed out to my daughter was the bird in the famous Japanese folktale, the Crane Wife), my daughter kept asking me for the ‘crane’ book. What crane book? I wondered. The one we read before, she said. I was puzzled until I finally clued in that she was referring to A Man Called Raven, except that she’d mixed up the birds! That was a funny moment in mixing up symbols! However culturally disparate, both stories do feature shape shifting birds. I’ll not tell you anymore though; you can seek out the stories yourselves!
For more about Richard Van Camp, you can check the PaperTigers website here in Personal Views and here for an interview with Richard.