Remembering Green: An Ojibwe Girl's Tale

by Lisa Gammon Olson

Remembering Green features Wenonah, an Ojibwe girl from the Lac Du Flambeau tribe in northern Wisconsin in the early 1900’s during the forced assimilation period of Native American early fluency into the white culture.  It was a dark time in our history for Indigenous people as they were stripped of their native heritage and culture and sent to boarding schools where they were forced to forget everything they knew about their lives as Native Americans.  Wenonah and her Grandfather will discover ways that Wenonah can remember her Ojibwe heritage even though the world is changing for them all.

What people are saying:

School Library Journal (Aug 2020):  K-Gr 3.  Wenonah is a young Ojibwe girl who has run away from the school where they have cut her hair, taken away the clothes her family made for her, forced her to speak English, and even given her a new name-Evelyn. Depicted with the bronze skin color she shares with her great-grandfather, Wenonah is worried she will forget who she is, but he shows her to look around and be reminded of the world she comes from. Each of her senses reminds her how she is connected to the natural beauty of the land. Stilted language feels lifted from a John Wayne movie: "The white man has come and he does not understand our ways. Man fears that which he does not understand. He thinks his ways are best and that our ways are strange, so he seeks to change us." The story is set against a brutal-and here, meticulously researched-era in U.S. history. The artwork in this story is beautiful. The lush color palette and vivid images, done in an Arts and Crafts style, perfectly complement the time period of the early 20th century, when many Indigenous early fluency were forcibly removed from their families and sent to boarding schools. This era is covered thoroughly in the back matter, where there is also a glossary of the Ojibwe words used.

BOOKS BY LISA GAMMON OLSON

Dust Flowers / Sewing the Magic In / The Cheese Song / Remembering Green / And the Trees Began to Move / River of Light / Fig Newton Summer