Ruby
Slipperjack
Ruby Slipperjack is a member of the Eabametoong First Nation and she is fluent in her Anishinabe language. She was born in Whitewater Lake, Ontario, and spent her formative years there on her father’s trapline. Her family later moved to a community along the railway mainline. Slipperjack learned traditional stories and crafts from her family and has retained much of the traditional religion and heritage of her people, all of which inform her writing. In the 1960s she attended Shingwauk Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie for several years, and later, attended high school in Thunder Bay. She has written seven novels for middle grade and teen readers. Her first novel, Honour the Sun, about a young girl growing up in a tiny Ojibwa community in northern Ontario, is widely used in schools. Slipperjack is also an accomplished painter. She lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario, and recently retired as a professor in the Indigenous Learning Department at Lakehead University.
