Whitecalf, Sarah, mitoni niya nêhiyaw—nêhiyaw-iskwêw mitoni niya / Cree is who I truly am—me, I am truly a Cree woman (A life told by Sarah Whitecalf), Edited and translated by H.C. Wolfart and Freda Ahenakew, with a preface and photographs by Ted Whitecalf. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. 2021, 362 pages

Sarah Whitecalf’s book, mitoni niya nêhiyaw, makes a significant contribution to Indigenous life history studies and is an outstanding example of the collective oeuvre of H.C. Wolfart and the late Freda Ahenakew, the book’s editors. Wolfart and Ahenakew are known for publishing recorded oral accounts by Cree Elders in Saskatchewan and Alberta, recorded in the Cree language—typically, as here with Whitecalf, in the Y Dialect (Plains Cree). This book is the second publication resulting from the collaborations of Whitecalf with Wolfart and Ahenakew, following on kinêhiyâwiwininaw nehiyawewin / The Cree Language is Our Identity (The La Ronge Lectures of nêhiyawêwin) (1993). In contrast to the public teaching and counselling lectures documented in Whitecalf (1993), mitoni niya nêhiyaw focuses on the speaker’s own life story, as well as her accounts of other twentieth-century events and narratives documented in oral history around Sweetgrass First Nation and Moosomin First Nation, in west-central Saskatchewan. This book will be of interest to those studying or participating in Cree oral traditions, as well as to scholars of the life history genre, translation of Indigenous languages, and Indigenous women’s lived experiences during the twentieth century. Sarah Whitecalf (1919–1991) recorded elements of her life story and other narratives in discussion with Ahenakew, Wolfart, and other interlocutors, between March 1988 and December 1990. While Whitecalf is the main speaker, generally uninterrupted in the tradition of the âcimowin genre, the text includes several interjections by Ahenakew and other Cree women, as well as Wolfart. As with Wolfart and Ahenakew’s previous work, the original Cree recordings are painstakingly transcribed and translated, published in a side-by-side Cree-English format, with the Cree text first. As the Cree title and its English version may indicate, the translation emphasizes the rhythms and structures of spoken Cree. There are elements of Whitecalf’s narrative that seem typical or illustrative of broader histories and experiences for those who lived through the punitive restrictions and isolation, in the guise of tutelage, which characterized the reserve period in the Prairie Provinces. Other aspects of her story are more unique and surprising, which makes for a book full of rich moments and passages. One part of Whitecalf’s life story that was atypical for her time and place is that her mother managed to avoid sending her to residential school, despite the interventions of a priest. As such, Whitecalf was raised by her grandparents, and she grew up essentially as a unilingual Cree speaker. While many Indigenous people in the north who were born in the early twentieth century did not attend school or learn much English, this was more unusual in the reserve communities of the plains region. The principal reason Whitecalf’s mother did not want her to attend school was that she had already lost a daughter, who became ill while attending residential school and ultimately died at home, highlighting the high mortality of students in such institutions. Whitecalf’s childhood involved travel between her mother’s home at Sweetgrass and her maternal grandparents, with whom she primarily lived, at Moosomin. As an adolescent, she moved to Sweetgrass and eventually married a man from there. After raising her family, she left her husband and moved with her grandchildren to Saskatoon, where she was living when she began her collaboration with Wolfart and Ahenakew, who had been seeking fluent Cree speakers for their work. In this book, as in Whitecalf (1993), Sarah Whitecalf explicitly draws connections between Cree identity and fluency in the Cree language, being, as she says, “truly a Cree woman” in part due to her fluency in Cree. There are notable points for comparison between Whitecalf’s narrative and those …