Charlene Willing McManis and I met at Kweli Journal’s Color of Children’s Literature Conference in New York City in 2016. I had just sold We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga and was ecstatic to be at a conference where it was going to be other BIPOC creators. So there were seven of us Native writers there that day. And we all went to lunch and Charlene was telling me about this book.
And immediately I just got chills and I said, ‘Charlene, you have to finish this book and it has to be out in the world because we have nothing for young people, and really for adults that talks about termination and relocation in a way that’s not like an academic textbook.’ I mean I had studied that in undergrad and graduate school, and I knew the tremendous impact that it had on Native Nations and their citizens, with 109 tribes that were terminated in the 1950s and the displacement of so many people being moved from reservations into urban areas, you’re talking hundreds of thousands of people.
I said, ‘This needs to be out there. We don’t talk about this at all,’ and nobody knows this has happened unless it’s happened to your family or you happen to attend a tribal school or a publicly chartered Native school that studied this. And so she’s like, ‘Yeah, no, I’m definitely working on this.’ And she’d gotten a mentorship from We Need Diverse Books from the acclaimed Margarita Engle, and so she was helping her with the book.
And then in early 2018, when we were getting ready to go to Kweli again, that spring, and I was super excited — it had been announced that Lee & Low was going to be publishing the book — we were planning to get together, and then Charlene emails and she said, ‘My cancer has returned and I’m not feeling well. I don’t know that I’ll be able to finish the revisions for this book and get it ready for publication. Would you be able to finish it for me? I’ve talked to my editor at Lee & Low.’
And I was like, ‘Whoa, you’re going to get better, everything is going to be fine.’ She said, ‘But if I don’t, will you finish it for me?’
Charlene died very quickly after that initial conversation, less than two months later.
She was just one of those people that walked into a room and she lit it up. I mean, she just was the brightest, most beautiful cheerful soul.
I’m so grateful for all the love that this book has received. It won the middle grade category for the American Indian Library Association’s awards. It’s been on many state lists. For the Global Read Aloud it was picked as the upper elementary selection in 2020.
And I look at how many young people and adults have read this book in the two years that it’s been out and I’m, I’m just so grateful because, like I say, that’s what Charlene wanted. She wanted people to know what had happened to her and so many other Native people as children, and what had happened to their families, and their communities, and their Nations, and many more do now because of this book.
