Memories of Childhood

Narrator: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith made these drawings with the idea of publishing them as a children’s book. Together, they form a kind of memoir of her early life. In the first one, we see a traditional cut-wing dress topped by a blank face. Six different women’s faces orbit around it. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: My mother ran off when I was two. And, I had to make up faces for her, when I did her portrait, because I didn't know what she looked like. I didn't have a picture of her. So these are all the faces I made up for maybe what my mother looked like.

Narrator: On each page, Smith recalled a story or moment from childhood. In the third drawing, she’s pictured her father and sister. In the fifth, she shows her home in the Nisqually Indian Community in a log cabin underneath the grandfather trees. The sixth image shows her in a field of red. 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Here I'm in a field of fireweed. I would love nothing more than to go out and lay down in a field of bracken fern and watch the clouds go by and identify them by the animal shapes. So that was one of my favorite things to do was to find a field like that of color. And so each one of these has a story, a real story about my young life. 

I always had flying dreams. Like I was taking care of my sister, which I had to do a lot. And to escape from unknown, horrific things that were chasing us, I would be flying and I would be carrying her. I still have flying dreams. Not as much as I did, but they say that's for people who have stress or something. But flying dreams, for me, was escape.