Dr. Jenny Kay Dupuis

Visiting our daughter for her 24th birthday, my wife and I give her a picture book read aloud marathon (Book 9 of 11).

It's getting way too late in this marathon to have to deal with a picture book with this many words. I admit to drifting in and out as my wife read aloud the very dull story of a little girl learning to do beadwork with her Anishinaabe grandmother.

I did perk up in the middle of the story and for the Author's Note when the blatant gender discrimination of Canada's First Nation policy was discussed. For more than a century, women lost their First Nation status if they married non-Indigenous men, but men could keep their status if they married non-Indigenous women. I wish the whole book had been about this injustice and the struggle to overturn it instead of sewing crafts.… (more)

This book opens when a man is trying to take Irene and her brothers to a boarding school. She was taken to a residential school in Canada. She became homesick, terrified, and frightened by the abrupt change. When she arrives, she tells them her name and the person tells her that they are only known by numbers. It was the first of many traumatic events that happened while she was at boarding or residential schools. Her family actually decides not to send her back after she is home for a holiday. It will remind people who read this of the terrible events that took place at boarding schools.… (more)