Anishinaabe author Ashley Fairbanks invites children to honor ancestral Native land in her new book

Minnesota-born Anishinaabe author Ashley Fairbanks had her first book published on Aug. 27. The book is for children and is titled “This Land.” It invites kids to trace the history of their home and honor the Native people who lived on the land.

It is part of a larger children’s series “Race to the Truth” that emphasizes the importance of talking about race with children. MPR News digital producer Sam Stroozas spoke with Fairbanks ahead of the release. 

Can you give a synopsis of the book? 

“This Land” is a book aimed at teaching non-Native people mostly about the history of the land and this idea of, how do we keep it in our heads to remember who came before us on the land that we’re on.

A lot of people talk about, like land acknowledgements and it’s such a shallow level of like just naming the people who were there before. I wanted people to really envision the people who lived on the land before.

We start with a child who is reflecting on his own backyard and all the families that lived in his house before him, and then before the house and the Native village that would have been there one time. Then he learns from a Native neighbor and his grandmother about how everywhere you go, you should be thinking about what Native people live on that land and lived on that land before they were displaced. 

You are from Minnesota but now live in Texas, are there any references to your home state in the book? 

When I wrote the book, I intentionally left where exactly the main character’s family lives open, just so other kids could fill in the blank. But really, in my head, Duluth was kind of the place that I pictured. 

And then it was really interesting, because the illustrator of the book, who’s also Anishinaabe, lives in London, Ontario. And so I think between her thinking of London, Ontario and me thinking of Duluth, we just got kind of an Ojibwe city to fill in for kids.

And also, since I’m Ojibwe, the characters in the book speak Ojibwe. You know, we talk about ‘nookomis,’ which means my grandmother in Ojibwe. So it’s all very Ojibwe connected and not so much connected to, like the colonial boundaries of the state of Minnesota.

Why do you feel like it’s important to introduce these conversations to children at this age?

I actually started my career in museum exhibition development and design at the Minnesota History Center. I worked on an exhibit, it's still there, called “Then Now Wow” and it really lifted up to me that we only teach children about Native history in Minnesota, primarily in the fifth and sixth grades.

It’s really just like a weeklong curriculum for most kids, and other school districts have went farther beyond that, and expanded to other years, but the standard is very small for what we teach about Native history, and it’s like that pretty much in every state. 

I really think that it’s important that from the time kids are starting to develop concepts about who belongs where, who lives on their block, that they’re starting to also think about who lived there before them.

And the way that we talk about Native people in the U.S. is so much like “long ago,” so putting in this context of you know, before my house was built, there was a family who lived right here — I think makes it much more tangible for people that Native people lived on the land that they live on not so long ago, and that many of us, you know, even people who are young, have relatives that were displaced. 

My own grandparents were displaced from my reservation to the city. I just wanted to put that idea in the heads of kids very early, that they are not the first ones to live here. Columbus didn’t discover the U.S. People were here, people were thriving and people are still here — the present tense is still really important.

What is next for you?

I’m writing right now, almost finished with, my next book for the “Race to the Truth” series, which is a middle grades book. It’s for sixth to eighth graders and about the history of boarding schools and child removal from Native families, which is not a new topic to me.

I studied it in college and went to the University of Minnesota and worked with amazing faculty there like Dr. Brenda Child who I could not have written this book without her education and her own work on boarding schools.

That book will actually come out in 2025 and it’s much different than this. It’s not a children’s book, it’s not a picture book but it’s really a pretty serious primer on everything from boarding schools to the adoption era to ICWA and then now to cultural revitalization and language immersion.

Can you explain your writing process with this topic and how it affects you?

This has been such emotionally taxing process. It’s been really hard to write this next book compared to the last one. Obviously, it is 40,000 words compared to not a lot. So it’s been really challenging.

But when I was working at the History Center and the exhibit that I had designed there, I did the whole section on boarding schools. So I have a lot of familiarity, like talking about this stuff and the exhibit is designed for sixth graders and I spent a lot of time when I was working on that in the National Archives, reading letters from parents and reading letters from kids home that never got sent, seeing school records, seeing how many children died in the boarding schools.

I also have a 13 year old, so it’s been really challenging to think, how would I explain these things to her? How do you not sugarcoat history, but really, you know, give kids as much honesty as as they can handle.

“This Land” can be purchased locally at Moon Palace Books and Birchbark Books & Native Arts.