Book review: Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back: A Native American Year of Moons

Reviewed by Karl Hele

Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back: A Native American Year of Moons explores 13 different and highly summarized Indigenous stories from across North America. The work is aimed at kindergarten or younger children and intends to provide a flavour of Indigenous knowledge of the moon’s association with natural rhythms and seasonal changes.

Readers are introduced to stories by the Abenaki (Bruchac’s heritage), Northern Cheyenne, Potawatomi, Anishinaabe, Cree, Huron, Seneca, Pomo, Menomiee, Micmac, Cherokee, Winnebago, and Lakota Sioux. Within the stories, you see the role various other-than-human beings and trickster’s play among our nations as well as how lessons in harvesting and safety are drawn together through moon stories.

The book nicely illustrates and teaches how Indigenous peoples share and encapsulate knowledge, unfortunately, the stories and associated knowledge are shallow. I would like to have seen an entire volume of 13 stories from a particular nation. Such a work would be more useful in teaching and sharing how a particular group spoke of and shared knowledge via their 13 moon stories.

Overall, I would not recommend this work for anyone looking for specific teachings from their own or another Nation. Instead, it is more of a simplistic volume offering limited knowledge designed to show that our knowledge was relevant, knowable, transmissible, and provided us with the information needed for each season and moon as the natural cycle progressed. With the book being too generic, I would not use it as a reader for my child or offer it as a source for teachers, despite the interesting tidbits within.

Joseph Bruchac and Jonathan London. Illustrated by Thomas Locker. Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back: A Native American Year of Moons. New York: Paper Star Book, 1992. ISBN: 978-0698115842