Salt Spring Island Métis Cree artist and author Sherry Leigh Williams will launch her debut children’s book, Papaashi Bufloo: The Buffalo Who Raced Horses at Indigenous Peoples Weekend 2026 on Sunday, June 21 — National Indigenous Peoples Day — at 1 p.m. at the Farmers’ Institute on Salt Spring Island. The event is free and open to the public.
Illustrated with original acrylic paintings by Williams, the 32-page book tells the story of her great-grandmother Mary Anne Deschamps Rabaska, born in 1875 near Pigeon Lake, Alberta. As a young girl, Mary Anne finds a buffalo calf alone near an old cabin and names him Toneur — Thunder in Southern Michif. They grow up together, and when her Mooshoom enters Toneur in a town horse race, Mary Anne places her Koohkoom’s beaded tuppie on his back. Together, they win.
The book introduces young readers to Southern Michif, the traditional language of the Métis people, and includes a Michif glossary, cultural pages about Métis beadwork, and the history of the Deschamps dit Rabasca family and the Papaschase Cree. The Michif language content has been verified by Elder Bruce Dumont, Former President of Métis Nation BC, and reviewed by Métis Nation BC.
Williams is also a songwriter and community organizer, president of Sweetgrass Arts and Music Society of Salt Spring Island and founder of Salt Spring Music Events. Celtic ancestry on her maternal side and Papaschase/Red River Mètis ancestry, Williams’s work honours her family’s history and the Métis tradition of storytelling through art. “Papaashi Bufloo: The Buffalo Who Raced Horses” is her first book.
“My great-grandmother Mary Anne was a remarkable woman, and I have carried her story with me my whole life,” said Williams. Her home, the cabin they lived in, still stands today as part of John Walter Museum in Edmonton.
“This book is for the children — so they can hear her name, learn words in our language, and know that our Métis stories belong on the shelf beside every other story. When a child reads ‘Toneur’ out loud for the first time, that is our language living.”
Indigenous Peoples Weekend 2026 runs June 18–21 and features music, ceremony, workshops and cultural exhibits. The festival is presented by Sweetgrass Arts and Music Society and is supported by the Canadian Arts Presentation Fund, Salt Spring Island Foundation and the Capital Regional District. A reading at the library is also planned for fall 2026.