By David A. Robertson
While they garden together, a girl asks her Cree grandmother about her bright clothes, her long hair, and her language, and each answer goes back to the residential school she was sent to as a child.
A little girl is out in the garden with her grandmother, pulling weeds, and she keeps noticing things and asking about them. Why do you wear so many colors, Nókom? Why is your hair so long? Why do you speak Cree to me? Why do you spend so much time with your brother? Each question gets a real answer, and each answer leads back to the same place. When Nókom was a girl, she was taken from her family and sent to a residential school. The people who ran it cut her hair, took her clothes and dressed her in a plain uniform, punished her for speaking Cree, and kept her apart from her own brother. But each answer has a second half too, which is what she and the other children did anyway. They tucked colored leaves into their sleeves, whispered Cree when no adult could hear, found each other when no one was watching. That is where the title comes from. When they were alone, they could still be themselves.
It hands a six-year-old a true and painful piece of history at a size they can actually hold, and it does that by keeping the whole story inside someone who loves them. Your child isn't dropped into a school. They meet a grandmother in a garden, still here, still in her bright clothes, still speaking Cree, and only then learn what all of it cost her. Telling it in that order is a big part of why it works for a young child. The book closes on what the children did to hold onto themselves rather than on what was done to them, so your child comes away carrying the reclaiming and not only the loss. The telling stays quiet and the facts are not softened, and a young reader can take in both at the same time.