What's in a Bead?

Quality children’s literature delights, educates, and offers enduring, tangible and intangible gifts. Delight beckons from the cover to the last page of What’s in a Bead?. Rich in visual details and told from the perspective of Tessa, a First Nations girl (Cree), What’s in a Bead? documents educational, social, and cultural practices of beading in her family and community. It contains colour-rich, carefully rendered visual images, beaded objects, and ceremonies related to beading.

The education of readers begins with this declaration from the child-focalizer: “Kohkom [grandmother] always smells of campfire stories when I wrap my arms around her.” Her mother replies, saying, “It is because her hands-sew colourful beads all day long onto smoked hides.” Thus begins the child’s apprenticeship to social and cultural practices of her people. The word “Kohkom” and the explanation provided insert readers into the rich cultural world where Tessa announces that she “wants to bead too.” “‘Kohkom will teach you, but there are some things you must know before she does,’ her mother says. ‘You need to know the stories about beading first.’”

The mother, “Nii-gahwee”, then states: “You should always offer tobacco before asking for something from Elders,” and, through demonstration, assists the child in making “a tobacco tie”. The passing on of this cultural knowledge is accompanied by beaded images of green leafed, flowering tobacco plants boasting white petals/rays. In the ensuing double-page spread, readers/viewers witness the ceremony involved in making a “tobacco tie”. The process concludes with a “prayer”. Tessa says, “I want to know what Kohkom knows, please help her teach me.”

The next episode shows mother and daughter wearing mukluks decorated with colourful, floral beading on their toe caps. The remaining events occur at “Kohkom’s house”—the site of knowledge keeping, intergenerational connectedness, traditional practices of making “cedar tea” and gathering at the kitchen table. Here, information is shared, culture is ceremoniously passed, and positive/warm relationality across generations is centered and enacted.

The subsequent double-page spread features ceremonious offering of the tobacco tie. This is a not-to-be missed powerful image of loving intergenerational exchanges by beautiful russet-brown hands, transferring, enduring sociocultural practices that bind and sustain.

Thereafter, Kohkom “pulls” the child “onto her lap, grabs a piece of her beadwork from the table, “puts her hands on it” and says: “There are many stories in a bead. We must listen to the stories they tell us…” The child “runs her fingers across the beaded flowers in her hands” and listens to the stories… Stories of colonial suppressions of “the ceremonies and gatherings where …”traditional regalia were banned.”

Historical informant/Knowledge keeper, Kohkom explains: “We kept beading though to make sure our ways weren’t lost forever. Our beads wanted to be used. Their spirit called to us, and we listened,” she divulged, pulling out a wooden chest of old beadwork.” She then adds, “We listened because they helped us stay strong in our culture. They told stories about who we are.”
And it is here that the question posed in the title is answered. Holding up a pair of “moccasins with bright beads in the shape of flowers and plants on it”, Kohkom explains that they “tell stories of the Anishinaabe people, these are their moccasins.”

In contrast, “the florals beaded on Kohkom’s Cree moccasins look different from the Anishinaabe ones.” It is then that Tessa “understood that bead tell us stories” …that can be seen “in the designs of the beadwork. [And], that “[b]eads can show people who we are.” Beading is a socio-cultural practice, and the style of beading can show distinctions and uniqueness in art and craft practices of different Indigenous groups. Thus, beads are markers of ethno-cultural identity.

This story is brought to a satisfying conclusion with Tessa snuggling “against Kohkom’s chest, hugging her tight and breathing in the smell of campfire stories that [she] loves so much.” This loving gesture of familial connectedness and warmth is reciprocated. The child now “know[s] what is in a bead” and is invited to “get started” in this educational, social practice that is at once, art and craft.

Ideally suited for children in grades one to three, What’s in a Bead? is thoughtfully written and proficiently illustrated. The book is also available in a dual language edition, with the languages being Cree (N-dialect) and English. The bilingual version, titled kekwan etakwak mîkisîhk = What’s in a Bead? (ISBN 978-1-77260-367-5), has the Cree translation being provided by Duanne Linklater and Angela Shisheesh.