The story behind We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga is — I mean, each book is its own distinct entity, of course, and it has its own journey. That book was the easiest to write. I sat down and I made a four-square grid with things that we do in each season. And as the book starts out it talks about the Cherokee people were taught to be grateful, not just for wonderful things, but also difficulties in our life.
And I wanted to have at least one thing in each season that might be difficult, whether that’s sending a family member off to military service. Whatever it is, I wanted something like that in there. And so the book really is like a poem because there’s an opening line in the stanza, then there’s the sub-parts of the stanza, and then each refrain is completed. And each season has its own stanza. And then there’s the ending.
And what, what breaks from that — of course — is that introductory paragraph on the first page. And I really just looked at, okay, now that I have this list of things that happened in each season, like gathering the honeysuckle to make baskets. It was like how do I make that as pleasing to the ear, as well as really tapping into also the five senses?
I mean, in our daily lives we encounter and deal with all five senses, and we do that across all the seasons, and that needed to very much be an intentional part of what I was working on in the book.
I wrote the text using ‘we’ meaning the Cherokee people as a collective, but if you look at the art you will see there is a family, a Cherokee family introduced on the first page whose members will appear throughout the book. You kind of follow them through the story.
It’s literally like the ancestors were right there helping me put everything on the page. The others I’ve had to work a little harder for.
