In terms of working with Frané Lessac, the illustrator of We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga, I couldn’t have asked for someone who was more conscientious and caring, and devoted to doing the necessary research. As is typical in the trade book industry, authors can be consulted on and say, ‘Here’s a list of people we’re looking at, what do you think?’
But in this case, they asked me for a list of Native illustrators that I would be interested in working with, and then also some names of non-Native illustrators in case the Native illustrators weren’t available.
So some illustrators may not have time for something like this. This is a laborious process. It takes a long time to get a picture book out in the world. I saw Frané’s work and I thought, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of detail. Like, she has really put in the work on this.’
And of course she did on this book. She spent her own money to come from West Australia, where she now lives, she grew up in New Jersey. But she came from West Australia to the Cherokee Nation and brought her, what she calls her sloppy copies, her very, very rough sketches. We went over them and then I took her to meet a number of other Cherokee culture keepers and wisdom keepers to have them go over her sketches and for her to ask questions, so that when she got back to her studio in West Australia she had what she needed.
Another friend of mine is a very accomplished award-winning photographer, and he had over 500 photos of our Cherokee people, flora, fauna, our geography, and because a lot of people think of Oklahoma as like the prairie, and Northeastern Oklahoma is not like that. We’re up against the Ozarks, of course, we’ve got lots of rivers, and lakes, it’s very wooded and green, and that needs to be depicted in the book.