Dragonfly Kites

Description (Fifth House): 
Dragonfly Kites is the second book in Tomson Highway's magical Songs of the North Wind trilogy. Like Caribou Song, it has a bilingual text, written in English and Cree. And Highway once again brilliantly evokes the very essence of childhood as he weaves a deceptively simple story about the power of the imagination.

Joe and Cody, two young Cree brothers, along with their parents and their little dog Ootsie, are spending the summer by one of the hundreds of lakes in northern Manitoba. Summer means a chance to explore the world and make friends with an array of creatures.

But what Joe and Cody like doing best of all is flying dragonfly kites. They catch dragonflies and gently tie a length of thread around the middle of each dragonfly before letting it go. Off soar the dragonflies into the summer sky and off race the brothers and Ootsie too, chasing after their dragonfly kites through trees and meadows and down to the beach before watching them disappear into the night sky.

But in their dreams, Joe and Cody soar through the skies with their kites until it's time to wake up.

Author Biography (Fifth House Publishers): 
Tomson Highway, a full-blood Cree,  is a registered member of the Barren Lands First Nation, the village for which is called Brochet. He grew up in the spectacularly beautiful natural landscape that is Canada's sub-Arctic, an un-peopled region of hundreds of lakes, endless forests of spruce and pine, and great herds of caribou. His parents, with no access to books, TV or radio, would tell their children stories, and Tomson fell in love with the oral tradition of storytelling. When he was six, he was taken from his family and placed in residential school in The Pas. Although he resented being taken away from his parent and family, he did learn music, and had plans to become a concert pianist. He traveled to London to study, and earned his music degree in 1975 and a Bachelor’s of Arts in 1976 from the University of Western Ontario. But instead of becoming a professional concert musician, Highway instead decided to dedicate his life to the service of his people.

Subsequently, for seven years, he immersed himself in the field of Native social work, working on reserves and in urban centres across Ontario and, later on, Canada. He then decided it was time to put all this extraordinary artistic training and this extraordinary Native social work experience together – he started writing music, plays, and, later, novels. After years of working in the Toronto theatre industry, he achieved national and international recognition in 1986 with his sixth play, the multi-award-winning The Rez Sisters.

He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1994 and his latest award is a winner of the 2022 Governor General's Performing Arts Award.

Illustrator Biography (Strong Nations): 
Julie Flett studied fine arts at Concordia University in Montreal and Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. She received the Christie Harris Illustrated Children's Literature Prize and was nominated for the Governor Genera's Award for Children's Literature for her book Owls See Clearly at Night (Lii Yiiboo Nayaapiwak lii Swer): A Michif Alphabet (L'alphabet di Michif). Julie is Cree-Métis and currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Resource format: Picturebook

Age recommendation: Pre-K - Grade 3

Keywords: Manitoba, brothers, nature, Plains Cree Language, kinship, land based learning, dreaming, living on the land, family, summer, imagination, dragonflies, creatures, nehiyawak, dog, Northern Manitoba, bilingual, multilingual, brotherhood, brothers, dreams, Cree

Year of publication: 2016

Publisher information: Fifth House