Your Next Read: The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin by Tracey Lindberg

by Meenal Shrivastava

Award winning local author Tracey Lindberg’s new book, The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin (Harper Collins), was released in September 2025 and is available to order from your favourite bookstore or library. 

An exquisite collaboration of prose and paintings with the renowned artist, George Littlechild, Tracey explores love in its various forms – romantic, filial, community, and beyond – in this stunning book.  

This exploration is a response to the teaching from an Elder that the notion of love as constructed in Western society does not exist in the Cree culture. In this contemplation of what it could mean to have no Cree word for love, Tracey weaves together iconic paintings and original fiction to recreate love as the power and the dynamism of connections, to our human and non-human relations. 

Traversing the four seasons, reflecting the four stages of life, the stories in the book mirror the four rounds in Indigenous sacred ceremony. They express love within a family, romantic love, self-love, and finally an evocative exploration of love beyond filial, physical, or binary classifications – the essence of “all my relations.”

As the author explains at the end of the book, the fluidity in identities and relationships of the protagonists leaves room for the “fantastically normal”. Allowing the reader to get comfortable with change and shifting, of genders and of the more than human beings.

This book is also a reminder of the unmet promise of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which will remain unfulfilled until the non-Indigenous peoples in Canada shoulder the responsibility to understand and work towards its Calls to Action. 

Here’s my favourite quote from the book:

She knew that our children are a promise, reciprocally, between the Great Mystery and the people.

It makes you wonder about the Newest Tribe, like, when they see our babies crawling and walking around with untethered autonomy and infant agency, does their Tribe know that we are teaching them self-determination while the babies teach us sovereignty. (p.33)

After all, it’s the children who will build the future yet to be written, with love, in all its splendorous forms.