When Solomon Ratt was a little boy, he spent his winter nights in a log cabin in rural Saskatchewan, curled up cozily with his siblings as they listened to their mother tell stories in Cree. "There was no separate rooms for parents and children. There was just a cabin itself with the stove burning in the corner, and us against one wall away from the stove, covered up in our blankets," the Cree author and professor said.
"My mother would start telling us stories, and she'd tell stories until we fell asleep. And, the next night, she'd do the same thing." Those stories, mostly about the Cree folk hero Wisahkecahk, were his mother's way of teaching them about their culture, he said.
But in Cree tradition, those tales are only told in the winter. And from the age of six onwards, Ratt spent his winters at the Indian Residential School in Prince Albert, Sask. "So I did not hear the stories again," he said.
Live Canada marks 4th annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation Reading List 20 books to read in honour of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation He has since spent his life re-learning and re-telling those stories, and making sure that others have the resources they need to keep them — and the language they were meant to be told in — alive. He's an avid contributor to the Cree Literacy Network , an online resource aimed at revitalizing the language, and a professor emeritus at the First Nations University of Canada in Regina, where he helped build a Cree program.