I would read Beverly Cleary and I enjoyed those books. Ramona’s having her adventures and I felt like I had adventures when I was a kid, and they weren’t anything exciting, but hers weren’t either, they were just kind of everyday things.
And then I would read books like Judy Blume’s books about these kids in a high-rise apartment in New York City, and that was just bizarre to me because when I went up an elevator in a building with twenty-some floors my brother was getting an allergy shot at the doctor. It’s like nobody lived in that building, people worked there, but I couldn’t fathom that this child had no yard. You know, it was a completely different reality for me.
I loved Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder: Hear My Cry, which of course was set long before I was born, but it was a very moving portrayal. But many books, like I say, would be entertaining like that, but again, nothing that related to my upbringing. Now, of course, Where the Red Fern Grows and The Summer of the Monkeys are written by a Cherokee author Wilson Rawls, those aren’t centered though in Cherokee culture. I mean, they are set in Northeastern Oklahoma, so it was like their geography kind of landscape was familiar.
So, yeah, in terms of when I actually got to see myself in books, that didn’t happen until I was an adult, and it’s been much more recently. But the reason that I wrote We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga is because there wasn’t a picture book about contemporary Cherokee life and that disturbed me, everything was historical. Or biographies about prominent Cherokee people.
I was like, okay, what about our everyday lives? I’ve had lots of feedback from Cherokee families and Cherokee children about the book, and they love it, and it’s a well-read and well-loved book in their house, but one woman she said, ‘You know, I just love that it’s a book about us doing the things that we do.’ I was like, ‘Yes! Right?’
