When people ask me about At the Mountain’s Base and how that book came to be, a lot of times when I’m reading other picture books I will fall in love with the structure. And I read a book called In the Village by the Sea written by Muon Van, and it’s a circular poem, where it starts is where it ends, “In the Village by the Sea.” So I was like, ‘Oh, I want to write a story like that.’
Native families who are waiting for someone to come back from the service, but we always in general in this country talk about men in terms of military service that also is really the same among Native Nations. But if you look at the data, Native women serve the highest proportion across the military for their percentage of the overall population in the U.S.
So why aren’t we talking about the fact that so many Native women are volunteering when they make up a small amount of the population? So, I intentionally made the pilot female, but I don’t say in the poem, if you actually type out that 111-word poem I don’t say that she’s Native, because again, you don’t know with the publisher, like are they going to hire a Native illustrator or not, etc.?
And they hired Weshoyot Alvitre who’s from the Tongva Tribe in California. And I loved it because, again, this is where a book is a team sport.
Weshoyot just created some beautiful art and she’s a comics and graphics artist. If you look at the poem and how she breaks it up into panels, and then uses the double-page spreads very sparingly just like they would in a comic, I love that, because it is, like I say, a shorter poem, but it definitely, again, takes the emotion and the impact of the poem I feel like to a whole other level than I could have done with just the words. And I’m grateful to her for that.
Also, if you take off the dust jacket and you’re able to look at just the case cover [grabs the book] she decided to weave in the Cherokee culture, and you find finger-weaving. I’ll take the cover off here. So this is a lightning pattern, you see that a lot in World War II insignia, but you also see it in Cherokee designs as well.
But this is what I mean about her using panels [displaying book] to take the poem and break it apart, and then you see her using the double-page spread for those kind of bigger reveal moments. It’s just an absolutely beautiful book and I’ve been delighted with how it’s been received and I even heard from Native women who have served as well as non-Native women who are pilots in talking about how it’s given them an opportunity to talk to their children about the work that they’ve done and it’s opened, opened a path for them to be able to share about what they do.