Pipon

The book’s opening page is headed with the Cree word “Pipon” and on the bottom of the page is its English translation, “It is winter.” Placed between the Cree and English words is a colour photo of a snow-covered house nestled in a forest. In the photo’s foreground, a close-up of a thermometer provides an outdoor temperature reading below -40 degrees in both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales. Now, that’s winter!

Fontaine’s purpose in writing Pipon was to introduce her early years audience to a number of “basic Cree phrases about winter including the weather, winter sports and activities, and other delights of the season.” In total, the book has 21 colour photos, each accompanied by Cree and English text, and, when people appear in the photos, they are always children. The winter Fontaine portrays in her photos is largely that of a rural, even remote, area. Though some of the book’s illustrated activities, such as tobogganing, skating and building snowmen, can also occur in urban locations, the photos accompanying other texts underline the book’s rural setting. For example, the photo connected to “Maskomi maskaweso mina kispakiso/The ice is hard and thick” shows two semitrailer trucks traversing an ice or winter road, and the photo for “Tapakwewak/They are snaring” shows a wire snare set in a forest animal run. The book’s final page, titled “Glossary of Cree Words”, repeats the book’s text. A pronunciation guide for the Cree words would have been helpful.

My one small criticism of Pipon relates to number agreement between what is seen in the photo and how the English text reads. A photo of a boy shooting a puck is accompanied by “He plays hockey”, but there are six instances of a single child being seen in a photo while the English text uses the plural “they”.

Though Pipon has a Cree language building purpose, its seasonal subject matter would still be of interest to children everywhere.