Background
Julie Flett is an award-winning Cree-Métis illustrator and author. She was born in Ontario but currently lives in Vancouver, BC. After graduating from Concordia University, Flett returned to Vancouver and became the visual communication program coordinator for First Nations. She also did some advocacy work for women on Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. She worked for the Positive Women’s Network as an outreach worker. She loves educating children through her work. This work tends to focus on Indigenous children and keeping the Cree language alive. She frequently uses Cree terminology and names and illustrates their meanings in an easy-to-understand way. Some of the main themes in the stories she illustrates are nature, family, and change.
Close Looking
The first book I will be looking at is Birdsong, which was both written and Illustrated by Flett. This story follows a little girl with Cree heritage as she and her mother move into a new home. The story is broken up into sections for each of the seasons of the year.
Flett is able to use her words and her illustrations to provide insight into the Cree language and culture. On the page below is a very minimal illustration of the phases of the moon. This image compliments the text on the page in a simple way, providing a visual guide to “waxing and waning moons”.
Flett also uses warm color and details to illustrate the joy of friendship in Birdsong. The page inserted below has a very warm tone with spots of bright colors like yellow, green, and red which add life to the otherwise neutral page. Typically, an illustration with lower saturation like this one could create a somber effect for the reader (Doonan, 31). In this case however, I would use the word peaceful, instead. Additionally, there isn’t much negative space on the page. This illustrates the fullness of the characters’ hearts.
Even though there is no text on the page, Julie Flett lets the characters’ expressions and other details on the page speak for themselves. The open window connecting the characters to the outside world is symbolic of their connectedness to each other and to nature.
The other book I will be doing a close look at is When We Were Alone by David A. Robertson. This is the story of a little girl who learns about her grandmother’s experience in a Native American boarding school. The illustrations in this book utilize empty space, harsh lines, and dull colors to show the darkness of the boarding schools and the despair that the characters feel.
This image, for example, shows the general gloominess of the schoolchildren’s experience. The children are all drawn on the lower half of the page which creates a feeling of heaviness in the story. Objects on the bottom half of a page can more easily take on negative emotions like sadness and failure (Bang, 56). Julie Flett uses that phenomenon to convey the way that the children are feeling. The use of grey, brown, and white hues emphasizes the lack of bright color in the lives of the characters and creates a dark tone for the viewer. Lastly, the lack of details on the page is symbolic of the emptiness in the characters’ lives as so much of their identity is stripped away from them.
Bibliography
Bang, Molly. Picture This: How Pictures Work. Chronicle Books, 2000.
Doonan, Jane. “Close Looking in Action .” Looking at Pictures in Picture Books. Thimble Press, 1993.
Emma Talks. “Jullie Flett”. 4 November, 2015. http://emmatalks.org/speaker/julie-flett/
Flett, Julie. Birdsong. Greystone Books, 2019.
Robertson, David. When We Were Alone. Portage & Main Press, 2017.
Wright, Daryn. “Illustrator Spotlight: Celebrating the Artwork of Julie Flett”. 11 March, 2019. https://www.readlocalbc.ca/2019/03/11/illustrator-spotlight-celebrating-the-artwork-of-julie-flett/
Sincerely, Gabriella E 