Mi’kmaw Moons

Nominated for the 2024 Forest of Reading Yellow Cedar Award! 

"In their debut book, Cathy LeBlanc and Dave Chapman guide readers through a year in Mi'kma'ki... Mi'kmaw painter Loretta Gould complements the conversational text with playful and evocative art." — Our Children

For thousands of years, the Mi’kmaq have been closely observing the natural world and the cycles of the moon and the stars to track the passage of time. Each full moon in an annual cycle was named by the Mi’kmaq to relate to a seasonal event, such as tomcod spawning, birds laying eggs or berry ripening.

For the past decade Mi’kmaw Elders and Knowledge Keepers have shared stories of the traditional night sky calendar with authors Cathy LeBlanc and David Chapman. In this book Cathy relays this knowledge in stories told to her young relation Holly.

Each moon’s story is richly illustrated with an evocative colour painting created for this book by the noted Mi’kmaw artist Loretta Gould.

Alongside this presentation of the Mi’kmaw time-keeping traditions, this book offers a brief history of the modern Western calendar, and some basic astronomy facts about the moon’s phases and why the seasons change.

This two-eyed seeing approach takes young readers on a journey through one full year in Mi’kma’ki.