When We Were Alone

A young girl notices things about her grandmother — why she grows so many flowers, why she speaks Cree, why she keeps her hair long, why she wears bright colors. Each answer is the same: because at residential school, they took those things away, so now she keeps them close. Robertson is Cree and wrote this as a way to talk to children about residential schools without trauma being the whole story. The grandmother's answer is always an act of reclamation — here is what was taken, here is why I have it back. The most important Canadian Indigenous picture book and the gentlest possible entry point to a history that must be told.