Still This Love Goes On

If the title of this picture book didn’t ring any bells in your memory, I’m sure after reading the excerpt you recognize the voice behind it. If you guessed the Academy Award-winning Cree singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, you are correct! Based on Sainte-Marie’s song of the same title, Still This Love Goes On is a celebration of nature and community, a love story between the seasons and the traditions that come with it, and a beautiful ode to the Indigenous experience. In the endpapers, Sainte-Marie compares the process of writing this song to “taking photos with [her] heart of the things that [she] sees on the reserve”, a nod to her everlasting love for her community and land.

To accompany this beautiful song, Julie Flett, the award-winner Cree–Métis author and illustrator, provides beautiful full-page images of nature and love that are guaranteed to bring sweet memories to the mind of the readers. Flett’s illustrations here are made using pastel and pencil and were composited digitally. The images are tender, and their striking colours successfully portray the emotions Sainte-Marie wrote about, conveying a sense of happiness tinted with longing. All in all, the text and the illustrations work together in a striking way, and you can almost see the jingle dancers performing and the bison running through the field, which might be explained by Flett’s habit of listening to “Still This Love Goes On” constantly while working on the illustrations for the book.

Beyond the body of the book, Still This Love Goes On also provides enriching endpapers, with notes from the author and illustrator about the song and their creation processes, and the sheet music, in case the reader wants to learn how to play along. In addition, the copyright page also presents a short glossary with the Cree words for “I love you,” “thank you,” and “we’ll see each other again.”