After five years of writing, research, and edits, a Boise man’s new book finally hit the shelves.
Blas Telleria is an English teacher and athletics coach at Capital High School. Like many English teachers, Telleria had always dreamed of writing a book. Now, his dream has become a reality.
Telleria’s book, My Father Once Told Me, is a children’s book that takes a myriad of Indigenous creation stories and melds their different elements together into a single narrative.
Telleria said he wrote the book, which incorporates legends from different native nations in the United States, in an effort to help his own sons connect to their Native American heritage. Telleria said there is a shortage of children’s literature which includes Indigenous themes and characters, this shortage also inspired him to pursue this subject matter.
“I’m trying hard not to tell a specific story, but to introduce those stories so that others can read those,” Telleria said. “The best way to describe it is the book is mine, but the stories belong to the Native American people.”
The book’s premise involves a boy and his father sitting around a campfire when the boy asks how the world was made. The father then unfolds different stories about how The Great Spirit’s animal children formed the earth’s many features. Ben Konkol created the artwork for the book.
“It’s based on a (partially) true story of we were out camping. We were under the stars and one of my kids did ask how the world was made,” Telleria said. “And I could have gone a number of different directions. But I just started telling Native American creation stories that I had read and had read to them in their youth as well.”
Telleria, who is Basque, said it’s important to him that his sons, who belong to the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, feel connected to and proud of both their Basque and Native American roots.
“We’ve always celebrated the idea of being Basque in the Treasure Valley, and I wanted my children to understand their Native American roots as well,” he said
Telleria said he did a lot of research and read lots of material from advocates of Native American literature and culture because he wanted to be sensitive to their history and properly tell these stories.
Telleria said he’s not trying to tell a specific story in his book, but instead, he wants to introduce several different elements of native nation creation stories.
“We wanted to include as many animals that were inclusive to as many Native nations as possible so that the children in other Native nations can see their see their culture in a book,” Telleria said.
My Father Once Told Me can be purchased here.
