Monday, January 18, 2016

Books and goals

Wild Berries
I had been greatly looking forward to reading the novel "Broken but not Dead" by Joylene Nowell Butler.  Not only is this novel set in Prince George with the main character a former Professor of the university I went to, but she is also Metis.  I made it through five chapters and the writing is fine, but I found that the abusive mother was triggering me and I had to stop reading.  So if you don't have mother issues, this might be a good book for you.  I found the sadistic stuff a bit much but it was really the mother that did me in.

We also read "Wild Berries" by Julie Flett.  This is a children's book and the pictures are nice.  The text is short but there is enough to talk about on each page that this is not a problem and I liked the inclusion of a relevant Cree word on each page.  The story is about a little boy going out with his kokum to gather berries.  It speaks to the animals they see and provides and example of how to say thank you for the abundance of the land.  I think it would have been nice to have the Cree words also in Syllabics, but otherwise this book was a nice compact discussion to remember our relationship to everything.

This reminds me, that a few week ago, I found a Wikipedia page where students had put up short articles in Syllabics.  These are very short articles about common things (like dogs) but this seems like such a potentially awesome way to share language resources and teachings.  I am going to try to add to this once my Cree is a little better.  What are you working towards right now?

No comments:

Post a Comment