By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Fry bread is more than sustenance. Fry bread is family. Fry bread is culture.
Fry bread is complicated.
Writer Kevin Noble Maillard and illustrator Juana Martinez-Neal were able to shape the story of the staple of indigenous cuisine into a picture book “Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story .” Last week they visited Bowling Green to speak about their work. On Friday night they spoke on the BGSU campus, followed by a presentation the next morning at the Wood County District Public Library. The visit was part of the university’s In the Round series that brings creators in a variety of artistic media to camps to discuss their work and indigenous issues.
At BGSU they said they had to deal with the concerns that fry bread, while beloved by many, is also associated with health problems that plagued indigenous populations – heart disease, diabetes, obesity.
Martinez-Neal said she had to slim down the figure of the grandmother, so as not to perpetuate stereotypes.
Yet, the food is central – Maillard, who grew up in Oklahoma and is a member of the Mekusukey of the Seminole Nation, Band, included his own recipe, based on grandmother’s recipe.
Martinez-Neal has written scholarly articles, a necessity for an academic who teaches at Syracuse University, and commentary for the New York Times.
“Fry Bead” is his first children’s book. When his first child was born 12 years ago, he searched for stories that depicted people like them. But all he found were stories of people in the past, Squanto and Sacajawea. Images of present-day native people were not to be found.
He felt, he said, like a vampire. He looked in the mirror and there was no image there.
Maillard said he found an example for the kind of story telling needed for a picture book on top of Mount Equinox in Vermont.
On a family drive up the mountain, they discovered a gravestone for Mr. Bardo. The dog was remembered as a good companion but was “shot and killed by a malicious hunter.”
He said, he understood from those few words the pain of man who buried his dog on this mountaintop.
His first efforts to write “Fry Bread” were not successful. His editor kindly sent his first manuscript back. She probably, he said, didn’t expect to hear from him again. But he persisted. And his second try showed how much potential the book had.
In Martinez-Neal, he was paired with an illustrator who had already earned acclaim, most notably for “Alma and How She Got Her Name,” which she both wrote and illustrated. “Alma” was a 2019 Caldecott Honor Book.
Martinez-Neal, born Juana Carlota Martinez Pizarro, grew up in Lima, Peru, seeing the images of indigenous people. While other Peruvian painters of his generation were drawn to more European subjects, her grandfather focused on portraits of his own people. Her father followed suit as an artist, but end up working going into printing, and then working for a toy company. His daughter loved to draw. One day when she was 16, Juana visited him in his office. He sat her at a table and asked her to draw something for him.
What she drew caught his attention. “I was hired, not paid.” And for the next five years or so, she worked, increasingly independently. She was an illustrator, but that really didn’t exist as a category in Peru. She had not grown up reading picture books. She read novels.
When she went to art school painting and sculpture, she was told at her review after three years that while her technique was good, she was an illustrator. The prospects for her seemed limited.
She set her art aside when she immigrated to California. Over the years, her name changed, her family grew, and she returned to art, finding a place in illustrating picture books.
Family influenced her work. She said that before her third child, a daughter, was born, she felt she didn’t know how to draw people, but after two months of staring in her face, Martinez-Neal found she could.
“She gave that to me,” she said of her daughter.
And that has been put to good use in “Fry Bread.”
Many of the figures are based on Maillard’s on family, and his hands, he pointed out at the library talk, make an appearance.
More than 1,000 free copies of “Fry Bread” were distributed as part of the project.
In the Round, which was started in 2021, and was expected to last the academic year, but it has been extended and will continue next semester when Ryan RedCorn, filmmaker, photographer, screenwriter, and graphic designer will visit BGSU on Sept. 8.
