I was describing that scene to Jean Mendoza.
Thin ribbon like streams flow from their open mouths and take shape in the form of a raven that is being captured in a bird cage by a priest: The illustration for this part of the story shows a group of children. When asked who took them away, he replies that it was "men and women dressed in black" who locked their words away and punished them if they used those words.
Their words, he says, were taken to the same place he and other children were taken away from home and from their mothers. Slowly we read that he was at a residential school. She asks "how do you lose words" to which he replies that "they took them away." Her subsequent questions build on the answer her grandfather gives to the previous one. He doesn't remember how to say it, he tells her, sadly. Why, I wonder, were they making dream catchers at school?Īs she walks home with her grandfather, she asks him how to say grandfather in Cree. And brightly colored feathers." Apparently that was a craft project at school. She is holding a dream catcher that "she had made from odds and ends. Stolen Words opens with a seven-year-old girl skipping and dancing on her way home from school. Without a tangible connection to Cree people, the risk that we have a story that is more like something a Scottish person would write, is very high. In other words, she didn't grow up as a Cree person. She also writes that she never had the chance to talk with her grandfather about his Cree heritage and that Stolen Words is about a relationship she imagines she had been able to have with him. On her website, Melanie Florence writes that she's Cree/Scottish. It is very hard to do well, especially when the writer is crossing into a place and time that is not their own, where every word they write is drawn from that imagining. They imagine a place, a time, and the people of that place and time.
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