Poem turned picture book finds a beautiful place in between the ancestors

Serendipity is the best way to describe how Métis writer Naomi McIlwraith’s poem “My Big Red Canoe” became the children’s picture book The Great Gathering Place.

Or as McIlwraith said, “It is an incredible story.”

McIlwraith wrote “My Big Red Canoe” in May 2020 as part of a 20-minute online presentation she made for the Jewish Senior Citizen Centre in her home community of Edmonton. McIlwraith had been invited by Mi’gmaq/Anishinaabe/Polish writer Anna Marie Sewell to participate in a series that featured Indigenous and Jewish speakers.

“I use the river as a metaphor for this place in between,” said McIlwraith. “My Indigenous ancestors are on the north shore, and my non-Indigenous ancestors are on the south shore of the river. And the river is this beautiful place in between.”

McIlwraith refers to her heritage as “very complicated.” Her mother is Métis and her father is Scottish. Yet, her mother was raised “separated from the land” while her father was raised for 10 years on Frog Lake First Nation in Alberta and spoke Cree fluently. 

“And this is the piece in between, caught in between. Because I'm white presenting, I don't feel like I belong anywhere and this is a very common feeling for Métis people,” said McIlwraith. “I say with all the passion I can muster up that I am not Indigenous because of my dad. I am Indigenous because of my maternal line.”

Fast forward to June 2022 and McIlwraith was working as an interpreter at the Indigenous Peoples Experience pavilion at Fort Edmonton Park. The International Women's Federation was slated for a tour, and McIlwraith was asked to be their guide. To end the presentation, she read “My Big Red Canoe”.

“There was a woman standing beside me…and she just said to me very quietly, ‘That is a beautiful poem. I love it.’ So I handed it to her,” said McIlwraith. Her e-mail address was in the header on the page.

Three months later she was contacted. As it happened, the woman McIlwraith gave her poem to was an editor with Kids Can Press, a part of Corus Entertainment and the largest Canadian children’s publisher.

So began the journey which saw the poem’s title changed to The Great Gathering Place, reflecting the first line in the poem and “evoking that sense of people coming together.”

McIlwraith asked for an Indigenous illustrator. Onedove, a Cree and Métis artist from Vancouver, was chosen for the project. Her illustrations are bright and vivid.

“The very first picture I saw (from her), the final version of this picture is the boy and the girl, they're swimming with the sturgeon. And I just cried because the angle of the children's bodies is the same angle as the sturgeon, the way they're swimming,” said McIlwraith.  “What I'm trying to get at in my poem is that we have our human relatives…but we're in an environmental crisis precisely because we have forgotten that we have non-human relatives. And the way she got at that message and painted the angle of their bodies, you could just tell that the children are in communion with the sturgeon.”

The book also focuses on the need to be gentle, generous, kind and to love.

“I was raised with the values that are in this book. Let's always be gentle, let's always be kind, let's always be generous, and let's always love our friends and relatives,” said McIlwraith. “Those are Indigenous values but I'm also careful to say that other human beings have those values, too.”

The Great Gathering Place includes Cree translation and phonetics throughout as did the original “Big Red Canoe”.

“Indigenous languages, like so much of Indigenous culture—smudging, the potlatch, spiritual ceremonies—were outlawed. They were suppressed,” said McIlwraith. “Indigenous people will tell you that language is identity. Without a language, so much of our identity, so much of our historical knowledge, so much of who we are fades away.” 

The Great Gathering Place was launched June 6 in Edmonton. The book can be purchased https://www.amazon.ca/Great-Gathering-Place-Naomi-McIlwraith/dp/1525310100