Back in November, my kids and I made it our goal to read every Canadian picture book published in 2024, some 370 books. Every night before bed, we read one to 10 titles, depending on time, and how tired we all are. In our first three months, we’ve tackled just over 200.
This includes around 30 from the Vancouver Public Library’s Indigenous Collection, including Circle of Love by Cree/Lakota author Monique Gray Smith, with artwork by Diné illustrator Nicole Neidhardt; What’s in a Bead, by Nbisiing Nishnaabe author Kelsey Borgford and Moose Cree Indigenous artist Tessa Pizale; and A Flock of Gulls, A Chorus of Frogs, a beautiful board book from Tsimshian artist Roy Henry Vickers and Lucky Budd, his regular collaborator.
I’ve written in the past about the importance of reading Black stories, especially Black picture books, to your kids.
This project has reminded me that reading Indigenous stories is equally crucial. It’s not just a matter of representation, inclusion or other progressive buzzwords. It’s about holistic education, anti-racism and the work of raising empathetic, understanding kids.
These stories are not hard to find. At the VPL, books from the Indigenous Collection are marked with a little green tab on the spine, which my kids have learned to recognize. I like that it makes the books easier to find on the shelves, though I don’t necessarily love the way it sets them apart from the rest of the picture book collection.
This is an ongoing debate among Indigenous authors, said B.C. writer Joseph Kakwinokanasum, a member of the James Smith Cree Nation and the VPL's 2024 Indigenous Storyteller in Residence.
“Some of them think it’s great. But then others are saying, ‘Well, why don't you just inter-file me with the rest of the books?’ One of the first things that I noticed when I got to the VPL is, like, all of the Indigenous books are set aside,” he said. “They’re over there. It’s like a reservation for Indian books.”
That said, these books stand apart on their own. Indigenous picture books offer new insights, and new ways of seeing the world, both for kids and self-righteous, woke parents, like me.
Between my English degree and my publishing history, I’d like to think I have a pretty good sense of traditional narrative structure. But nothing exposes my blind spots like work from Indigenous authors, who draw from folk stories I’ve never encountered, historic accounts I know nothing about, and a narrative framework that’s sometimes completely new to me.
Many of these stories, Kakwinokanasum said, are not easily explained. Nor are they supposed to be.
“What these stories are meant to do — and this is something that my uncle had taught me — is that when we tell our stories to our children and we give this knowledge, it’s opening the door for the kids to ask questions,” he said.
“I was really lucky that I had an uncle and a grandfather who nurtured that storytelling and that inquisitive nature in me. They didn't shy away from any of the questions that I had.”
“That is the moral,” he said. “The moral of the story is there are multiple morals. There are multiple questions. It's not just a question of how to act and behave. It’s a question of why we act and behave.”

‘We don’t shy away from reality’
Last month, my kids and I read The Giant and the Grizzly Bear by Rosemarie Avrana Meyok, a retired Inuinnaqtun teacher and translator residing in Nunavut. Her picture book adapts a traditional story from the western Arctic about a young boy adopted by a giant, who battles a huge grizzly bear to a draw.
Exhausted by the fight, the giant says they should set out to look for the boy’s real parents. To me, that’s a jumping-off point. But in Meyok’s book and, I suppose, other versions of this story, it’s the end.
Caught off-guard and left with several questions, I made the mistake of remarking, out loud, that it seemed like a strange place to stop. But my four-year-old son internalized the aside. The following night, when he was spoiling for a fight, he saw the little green tab on our next title and shouted, “I hate Indigenous picture books!”
Suffice it to say, I was horrified. I knew I’d hear one of them say something like this eventually, if only to get a reaction from me. You can’t raise a kid in this country without exposure to anti-Indigenous racism. It’s baked into Canada’s cultural fabric and plays out in all sorts of ways: persecution, appropriation, erasure.
My hope is that this reading list combats erasure, at least, and engenders a love for Indigenous culture, not to mention a sense of the need for Black and Indigenous solidarity. Instead, my big mouth gave him license to say something racist about our allies in the fight against colonialism.
Rather than scold him, I scolded myself and moved on, in the hopes that his mind would be changed, in due course.

It didn’t take long. We read the book anyway. Julie Flett’s Let’s Go pairs its title with the Cree expression, haw êkwa!, which roughly translates to “okay then.”
The kids in the book say both phrases to work up the courage to skateboard with big kids, a feeling my children identified with, and the repetition thrilled my son, who now shouts haw êkwa! whenever he’s ready to do something brave.
It was the first book on our list that he asked to read twice in a row.
A few days later, we read Spirit of the Sea by Rebecca Hainnu, a teacher from Clyde River, Nunavut, whose latest, an Inuit origin story, is far and away the most violent picture book we’ve read so far.
Spirit of the Sea follows a young Inuk girl who is tricked into marrying a shape-shifting shaman, and taken away to the desolate island where her husband is king of the gulls. When her father comes to rescue her, they flee in his boat, with the birds in pursuit. The shaman whips up a storm.
In a panic, the father throws his daughter overboard. She clings to the side of the boat, begging for her life. So he cuts off her fingers, which turn into whales, and she drowns in the ocean, becoming its spirit.

When we finished, my six-year-old daughter looked up at me, eyes wide, and said: “Mommy would never do that!”
Neither would I, sweetheart. But I get it. The bond between mother and child is its own special thing. I firmly believe that, and it was heartwarming to see my daughter process a father’s betrayal by reminding herself that her mother would drown before cutting her loose.
Between the warmth of reassurance and the thrill of their first horror story, they asked me to read the book over.
We also got to have a fun conversation about origin stories, their function as a means to understand the unknowable, and why an Inuit origin story would cast the ocean in such an indelible and terrifying light. The Arctic is no English Bay. You go for a dip and you never come back. It is not to be taken lightly.
Modern storytelling, Kakwinokanasum said, often "protects the kids from something that they should probably already start learning.”
“In Indigenous storytelling — whatever place you're indigenous to, whatever continent you come from — there is that interwoven understanding of the process of life and death,” he said. “It isn’t about hiding anything. Sometimes they are a little dark. Sometimes they are a little cruel, and it seems unfair. But that’s life, isn’t it?”
“We don’t shy away from reality,” said Kakwinokanasum. “We live and we die.”
Last night, we read Barbara Olson’s Wolf, Gull and Raven, another traditional Inuit story adapted into picture book format. This simple tale speaks of three animals, neighbours, who share their favourite foods with one another. The wolf likes caribou. The gull likes arctic char. The raven loves garbage but, desperate to be a good host, tells his friends that it’s whale meat.
They know, and they leave. But the raven’s unbothered. More garbage for me!
In addition to permission to like what they like, my kids thought the raven was downright hilarious.
My son asked to read it again, shouting, “I love Indigenous picture books!”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
The gift of slowing down, and sounding out the words
He isn’t the only one learning to really appreciate Indigenous literature. Reading these books to my kids, I find myself struggling, at times, with multi-syllabic words I can’t pronounce from Indigenous languages I’ve never spoken.
Granted, I understand the importance of not only normalizing these words, but teaching them, and keeping them in regular rotation, lest we lose them. The preservation of Indigenous language is such a big part of the art.
Nevertheless, until this project exposed yet another blind spot, my instinct has been to avoid books that make me feel stupid, or guilty for not knowing words I might know if I hadn’t avoided these books in the past.
But that’s the same sort of erasure that keeps you from growing, from knowing your neighbour, and teaches your kids that your words and your actions don’t have to align.
Some of these books are fully bilingual. Others use Indigenous language to great effect, like Andrea Fritz’s Crow Helps a Friend, in which the crow is named Qwiwilh and his friend, a duck, is named Q’uleeq’e. These are the words for these birds in hul'q’umi'num, a Coast Salish language related to Cowichan.
By the time we got to that one, the second of three books in Fritz’s Coast Salish Tales series, I’d gotten accustomed to consulting the pronunciation guide that’s included in most of these books. This one, however, included a note from the author that really cleared up a few things for me.
“Learning a language takes time and patience,” writes Fritz. “The book includes words from hul'qumi'num (hul-quh-MEE-num). Some of the sounds of this language may be new to you, but remember that proper pronunciation is not important for learning and enjoying this story!”
I read this aloud, not only for me, but for my six-year-old daughter, who’s currently learning to read. She’s a bit shy when it comes to words she can’t yet pronounce — tricky words, her first-grade teacher calls them.
I try to reassure her whenever possible, but kids don’t really listen to what you say — they just watch what you do.
Reading Fritz and feeling likewise reassured, I realized that I had been feeding my daughter’s anxiety too, in large part by acting a little embarrassed when Indigenous words tripped me up the same way.
Ogichidaa means “warrior” in Anishinaabemowin. Ninitohtênân means “we listen” in Cree. Tseehw-tsus means “branches hanging over water” in hul'q’umi'num.
There are always new words to discover, even for grown-ups, who read and write books for a living.
A month into this project, I get excited when I come across a truly tricky word, and so does my daughter, who knows that there’s no shame in learning to read.
Her father is still learning too.
What children’s books would you recommend to the young families in your life? Let us know in the comments.
Read more: Indigenous, Books, Rights + Justice
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