The Circle of Thanks

by Joseph Bruchac, Murv Jacob (Illustrator )

Fourteen poems with themes of thanksgiving and appreciation of nature, based in part on traditional Native American songs and prayers.

Genres: Poetry, Picture Books, Native American, Childrens, Indigenous

32 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1996

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]

With his 1996 The Circle of Thanks, Joseph Bruchac achieves two prime and very much important if not even essential directives and purposes. For one, both Joseph Bruchac’s introductory notes for The Circle of Thanks and the fourteen featured Native American poems of thanksgiving absolutely and glowingly demonstrate to readers that our annual Thanksgiving Day holiday (in both the United States and in Canada) is in fact not really or rather not only a celebration supposedly FIRST engaged in on North American soil by the so-called Mayflower Pilgrims in 1621. Because yes indeed, long long before the settlement (and the subjugation) of North America by us Europeans, there were indeed and also of course quite naturally a multitude of different and various Native American (and Native Canadian) thanksgiving ceremonies, festivals and customs honouring the harvest, the earth, the sun, nature in general (and with many of these festivities actually also taking place in the autumn, at the same time of the year when harvest festivals are celebrated world wide).

And for two, the fourteen celebratory and thanksgiving poems of The Circle of Thanks, they are not only a wonderfully poetic and delightful teaching and learning tool (for both children and adults) regarding Native American and Canadian culture and his, these verses of song also in my opinion represent a great way to change up Thanksgiving celebrations by incorporating these verse like songs, by using them to celebrate the earth, the sky, the harvest, the world, without religious dogma and the in my opinion for many Native people’s tainted and sullied tradition of how the first American Thanksgiving supposedly manifested itself (because there is most definitely much about the American Thanksgiving story and legends that is at best painful for Native Americans and Canadians).

Highly recommended and definitely both a poetic and spiritually engaging as well nature and the universe honouring reading treat is The Circle of Thanks, with the poetic songs of Native American thanksgiving which Joseph has included delightfully and with imaginative realism visually mirrored and complimented by Murv Jacob’s accompanying wood-cut like artwork (pictures that with their expressiveness aesthetically show and demonstrate what the poems in The Circle of Thanks achieve and present textually and verbally).

[Bookseedstudio]

THE CIRCLE OF THANKS: Native American Poems and Songs of Thanksgiving told by Joseph Bruchac (Abekaki) with pictures by Murv Jacobs is an important refererence for thoughtful storytelling.
Poems celebrate 14 Native American cultures with the emphasis on times when living off the land was everyday life.
I read selections from this in elementary school, through the volunteer program, BookPALS & find every year that children are able to appreciate snippets of these prose poems with the right lead-in & set up.
It seems important that during the Nation's Thanksgiving celebration, a reader would want to see what First Peoples have said about giving thanks.
The presentation and the stunning artwork make the hardback version I found in a bookstore years ago, a treasure for our family.The Circle of Thanks

[Eden Silverfox]

Everyone knows Thanksgiving. It is the one day a year that we celebrate with family to give thanks. But Native Americans have many celebrations of thanks and did before the holiday of Thanksgiving. Natives gave thanks to everything and Joseph Bruchac expresses that wonderfully in this book of poetry. It's a great read for Thanksgiving.

[Jenny]

While not specifically a Thanksgiving book, I think these poems of thanks for the Earth certainly evoke feelings of gratitude perfect for the Thanksgiving season. I appreciated that the poems come from several tribes. My children and I loved both the poems and the illustrations.

[Karen]

A new additional to our Thanksgiving collection for children. Collecting poems and songs taken from Native traditions and will help open up conversations about thankfulness and why we don't have to limit thanksgiving to one day a year.

[Margaret]

The Circle of Thanks: Native American Poems and Songs of Thanksgiving (BridgeWater Books, 1996) told by Joseph Bruchac with illustrations by Murv Jacob presents thirteen poems or songs from ten different peoples. Both Bruchac and Jacob draw on their Native American culture to present authenticity in the words and illustrations. Giving gratitude for everything every day, especially the bounty of our natural world, is inherent in those Native American cultures represented here.


My recommendation: http://bit.ly/1yn4lic