Thoughts from a conversation I had with the author that we've had the first of two author visit days at the school I work at for Indigenous History Month:
In between class visits, we got to chatting about how fascinating languages are, and how they're often wildly different ways to communicate thought and organize the world.
For example, in her dialect of Cree (Wood Cree) the names of the months don't teechnically have a distinct proper name (in the grammatical sense of "proper") like English does. Instead, the names of the months all hinge around the moon and something that typically happens at that time of year (e.g. Ice Breaking Moon, because the ice is breaking because it's getting warmer).
I mentioned that we have a picture book in the library (Birdsong by Julie Flett) that talks about this. It's the story of a little girl who becomes friends with her elderly neighbour, and the story is broken up by the seasons as they pass, and we're taught some names for different months(I can't remember whether in Cree or Blackfoot).
