Kevin Maillard: My name is Kevin Maillard and I am the author of Fry Bread. This is my debut picture book and the illustrator is Juana Martinez-Neal. I have two kids, they're seven and four. And when my older son was about two years old, I was looking for books so I could read to him. And we're native. I grew up in Oklahoma and my mom is Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. So I thought maybe I'll find some books about native kids written by native people, so I did look. Started at Amazon or you go to your local independent children's book store. It was really difficult to find books about native people that were not about living people. Everything that I've found was about Thanksgiving or Pocahontas or Sacajawea, somebody that lived a long time ago or they would talk about American Indians of North America, right? Something that was not contemporary and modern.

And the searches were so extensive. I found it very, very few books. But when I did find them, there weren't a lot of other ones. And so, naively, I thought, since I can't find one, I'm going to write one myself. So the book is about the way that people make fry bread. It's usually, how they grew up. Someone who grows up in a native family pretty much all the time, has some old lady that makes fry bread. And so, every family has a fry bread lady. And in my family, all the old ladies died out. And so before they died, I asked them if they would teach me how to make it, if they would give me their recipe. And they did. So the way that I make fry bread is very different than other people. Even within my own nation. It's different than the way that other people in other tribes would make it.

And I've always been a little thinking about, is my fry bread actually fry bread. It's the way that I grew up. It's the way that I was taught. But everyone has that same subjective feeling. Everyone has maybe some type of questions about their authenticity. It could be a lot of different subjects. And in this one I talked about fry bread and so my fry bread, it might be a little bit darker, I might use a little bit different ingredients. I fry it with a different oil. I use coconut oil and not lard. And the way that we look at fry bread is also the way that we can look at Indians in North America. And then Indians or any type of group or identity in any way. We all have this central unifying characteristic and that would be that we all make fry bread. But then the way that we come to this is different.

No matter where it is that we grew up or what our blood percentage is or what tribe we are, we're all native. And so we could be different colors. We could be different shapes. We could grow up in cities, we could even grow up in different countries. I know this one Osage guy that grew up in France and he totally fully identifies as native, but he speaks with this French accent and it's just great. But he's also native. He didn't grow up on a reservation. You might look at him, you might think that he is white, but that is his own identity. And so, our subjectivity and the way that we represent ourselves, fry bread is a way that we can be confident about that. We can celebrate our commonalities instead of thinking about who doesn't belong, who is not authentic, who does not have the right characteristics to determine that they are the most real native person. And so just like we think of fry bread, it's different for everybody. We can also think of native identity, which is very different, rich and diverse.