The Maple Thanksgiving

by Joseph Bruchac, Anna Vojtech (Illustrator )

Little Celebrations offer you a full array of leveled fiction and nonfiction books for guided reading and beginning independent reading.

Genres: Picture Books

16 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1997

About the author

Joseph Bruchac lives with his wife, Carol, in the Adirondack mountain foothills town of Greenfield Center, New York, in the same house where his maternal grandparents raised him. Much of his writing draws on that land and his Abenaki ancestry. Although his American Indian heritage is only one part of an ethnic background that includes Slovak and English blood, those Native roots are the ones by which he has been most nourished. He, his younger sister Margaret, and his two grown sons, James and Jesse, continue to work extensively in projects involving the preservation of Abenaki culture, language and traditional Native skills, including performing traditional and contemporary Abenaki music with the Dawnland Singers.

He holds a B.A. from Cornell University, an M.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from Syracuse and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the Union Institute of Ohio. His work as a educator includes eight years of directing a college program for Skidmore College inside a maximum security prison. With his wife, Carol, he is the founder and Co-Director of the Greenfield Review Literary Center and The Greenfield Review Press. He has edited a number of highly praised anthologies of contemporary poetry and fiction, including Songs from this Earth on Turtle's Back, Breaking Silence (winner of an American Book Award) and Returning the Gift. His poems, articles and stories have appeared in over 500 publications, from American Poetry Review, Cricket and Aboriginal Voices to National Geographic, Parabola and Smithsonian Magazine. He has authored more than 70 books for adults and children, including The First Strawberries, Keepers of the Earth (co-authored with Michael Caduto), Tell Me a Tale, When the Chenoo Howls (co-authored with his son, James), his autobiography Bowman's Store and such novels as Dawn Land, The Waters Between, Arrow Over the Door and The Heart of a Chief. Forthcoming titles include Squanto's Journey (Harcourt), a picture book, Sacajawea (Harcourt), an historical novel, Crazy Horse's Vision (Lee & Low), a picture book, and Pushing Up The Sky (Dial), a collection of plays for children. His honors include a Rockefeller Humanities fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship for Poetry, the Cherokee Nation Prose Award, the Knickerbocker Award, the Hope S. Dean Award for Notable Achievement in Children's Literature and both the 1998 Writer of the Year Award and the 1998 Storyteller of the Year Award from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. In 1999, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.

As a professional teller of the traditional tales of the Adirondacks and the Native peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands, Joe Bruchac has performed widely in Europe and throughout the United States from Florida to Hawaii and has been featured at such events as the British Storytelling Festival and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee. He has been a storyteller-in-residence for Native American organizations and schools throughout the continent, including the Institute of Alaska Native Arts and the Onondaga Nation School. He discusses Native culture and his books and does storytelling programs at dozens of elementary and secondary schools each year as a visiting author.

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well personally speaking, I would probably not consider using Joseph Bruchac's 1996 picture book The Maple Thanksgiving with children over the age of seven (maximum), as Bruchac's presented text is in my humble opinion just a bit too simplistic and lacking in verbally descriptive detail for older children (and to the point that they might even feel a bit annoyed and talked down to).

However and that having been said, for children below the age of seven, I do think that with The Maple Thanksgiving Jospeh Bruchac's printed words do a really wonderful and easily understood job simply and clearly pointing out that for many Native American tribes, there are in fact multiple Thanksgiving celebrations. And indeed, that in early spring, that after the maple syrup has been harvested by those tribes where sugaring is part of their culture (such as the Iroquois in A Maple Thanksgiving), there are not only communal celebrations of this with maple sugar and maple syrup treats being consumed and enjoyed as sweet and delicious treats (such as at school in The Maple Thanksgiving), no, Jospeh Bruchac also describes in The Maple Thanksgiving that at major reason for the celebrations (and perhaps even the primary one) is for the Iroquois to pray to and to personally thank the sugar maple trees for sharing their bounty, for allowing their sap to flow, to be harvested, to be turned into maple syrup (something that I personally do very much appreciate in an of itself and that I most definitely love how Jospeh Bruchac lovingly and simply shows the Iroquois school children's gratitude towards the sugar maples by having them in The Maple Thanksgiving often directly addressing the trees and saying a heartfelt and appreciated thank you to them, and that having the maple trees being addressed as persons and thanked as persons really does make me majorly smile).

And combined with the fact that Anna Vojtech's artwork for The Maple Thanksgiving is not only delightfully descriptive and provides many visual details not found in Joseph Bruchac's text, but that all of Vojtech's pictures show the Iroquois school children and their teachers as not some kind of exotic beings clad in buckskins and wearing feather headgears but simply as everyday people enjoying a maple syrup celebration, yes, for a picture book geared towards young children, The Maple Syrup Thanksgiving is both delightful and also educational, and demonstrates both verbally and visually that for the Iroquois, there indeed are many different Thanksgivings and that during those celebrations, giving thanks also means being grateful and thanking what is being harvested (and that for The Maple Thanksgiving this of course means thanking and being grateful to the sugar maple trees).

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bruchac's Native heritage has recently come into question, which is disappointing. However, one thing that I have always found odd about his books is that he writes about traditions that are not his own, whether he is Native or not. He writes about all kinds of tribes, not just his Abenaki roots (which are under speculation now). That's fine, but I don't know why that would be any different than a white person writing about a tribe that isn't theirs. Tribes are not interchangeable.

However, just at face value, this is a simple, but pleasant, book about maple sugaring and the fact that thanksgiving is an ongoing event for the Indigenous community in the book. I really enjoyed the simple artwork as well.