By Chief Jake Swamp
The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, said the way Mohawk parents have taught their children to say it every morning — a real daily practice, put into a picture book by the Mohawk chief who spoke it at the United Nations.
It isn't a story. Nothing happens, nobody wants anything, and there is no ending, because it was never built to be a story. It is a message you say when you wake up. Thank you to Mother Earth, to the waters, to the grasses, to the fruit trees, to the animals, to the wind, to the sun, to the moon and the stars. Each one gets its own page and its own turn, in a long unhurried sequence that keeps going after a child expects it to stop, and the going-on is the point: the thing you are thanking is not a category, it is everything, one at a time. Printup paints in flat glowing color, so the pages look like something lit from behind. It takes four minutes to read and it is the sort of book a family can end up saying out loud without deciding to.
Every other book on this shelf is about a thing that was done to somebody. This one is a thing people do, this morning, at Akwesasne, and it hands your child a practice rather than a history lesson. That difference lands on a six-year-old faster than any explanation of it would: the words are in the present tense, they are simple enough to repeat, and repeating them is the entire experience of the book. It also happens to be beautiful and short and calm, which makes it the one to reach for when a class has had enough of hard things and needs an afternoon that asks nothing of them.