The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin

Join Massy Books and Tracey Lindberg for the launch of The Cree Word for Love: Sâkihitowin - a stunning collaboration of story and art to explore love in all its forms—romantic, familial, community and kin—in the Cree experience.

Friday, March 6th at Massy Books. Doors open at 6:30, event starts promptly at 7 pm.
Books will be for sale at the event, followed by a book signing!
Registration is free but required.

Venue:

The event will be hosted at Massy Books, 229. E. Georgia St., Vancouver, BC. The venue has a gender neutral bathroom. Please refrain from wearing scents or heavy perfumes. Covid Protocols: Masks keep our community safe and are recommended. We ask if you are showing symptoms, that you stay home. Thank you kindly.

For accessbility information on our store, please view HERE

The Book:

In The Cree Word for Love, author Tracey Lindberg and artist George Littlechild consider a teaching from an Elder that in their culture, the notion of love as constructed in Western society does not exist. Here, through original fiction and select iconic paintings, Lindberg and Littlechild respond.

Together they have created and curated this collaboration which travels, season by season, mirroring the four rounds in ceremony, through the themes of the love within a family, ties of kinship, desire for romantic love and connection, strength in the face of loss and violence, and importance of self-love, as well as, crucially, a deeper exploration of the meaning of “all my relations.”

Together, art and story inspire and move readers to recall our responsibilities to our human and more than human relations, to think about the obligation that is love, and to imagine what it could possibly mean to have no Cree word for love. The result is a powerful story about where we find connection, strength, and the many forms of what it means to live lovingly.

The Authors:

TRACEY LINDBERG hails from the As’in’î’wa’chî Ni’yaw (Kelly Lake Cree Nation) and grew up in small cities and towns in Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. She studied law at the University of Saskatchewan, Harvard Law School (LLM) and the University of Ottawa (PhD). She has co-authored books on law [ (Oxford, 2010) ] with authors Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Robert Miller and a book on Indigenous literature icon (Guernica, 2015) with David Brundage.

Her best-selling novel is widely read and used to teach courses worldwide. was a finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Award and the 2016 edition of CBC's Canada Reads and is currently in its fourteenth reprint. The novel was also long-listed for the 2017 Dublin International Literary Prize, the OLA Evergreen Award and was a nominee for the 2016 Alberta Literary Awards. Dr. Lindberg was a juror for the 2017 Rogers Trust Fiction prize. Her most recent novel, (2025) is writing about embodied self-determin

GEORGE LITTLECHILD is a Plains Cree artist who was born in Treaty No. 6 territory. He is internationally renowned for his work, and his extensive body of art is noted for its bold colours and playful images, which belie the serious undertones of his work. George lives a political life, and his work reveals the complexities of existence and autonomy for Indigenous peoples. His collages and painting grant viewers insight into the human spirit, the strong connection to our ancestors, the ways in which we view our worlds, and what needs to change.

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Host or Publisher Massy Arts Society