To Walk The Sky: How Iroquois Steelworkers Helped Build Towering Cities

(Hardback)

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Look to the sky!

High above the ground, generation after generation, Native workers called skywalkers have sculpted city skylines, balancing on narrow beams, facing down terrifying heights and heartbreaking loss. These skywalkers who dared to touch the heavens have built a legacy of landmarks all over the North American continentand even today, there are Native Americans still climbing up among the clouds, brave enough to walk the sky.

With impactful and illuminating prose, Patricia Morris Buckley (Mohawk) tells the soaring story of the remarkable skywalkers, whose bravery and tragedies are warmly captured in moving watercolors by award-winning artist E. B. Lewis (Lenni-Lenape).

Reviews

"By turns solemnly reverent and enthusiastic, Buckley's elegant text will leave young people keenly aware of the historical and present-day significance of these groundbreaking workers, as well as their strength and resilience. Awe-inspiring." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Graceful language honors skywalkers throughout this stirring telling, while fluidly rendered watercolor illustrations in a desaturated color palette employ sweeping perspective and scale." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The text, even with all its facts and figures, is deeply emotional, capturing the giddy danger of skywalking, the relentless need to better one's life, and the sorrow in a preventable tragedy...blurring faces and bodies in a way that emphasizes the comradery and connection between the workers." -- Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

"Here, a descendant of one of the 75 workers who died in the 1907 collapse of the Quebec Bridge pays eloquent tribute to the first generation of Mohawk "skywalkers" who came out of the Caughnawaga (later Kahnaw ke) reserve in Canada." -- Booklist

Author Bio

Patricia Morris Buckley (Kahnaw:ke Mohawk) is the regional advisor emeritus for SCBWI San Diego and taught writing for children for the University of San Diego extension program. A newspaper reporter and editor for many years, she followed her passion for children's literature to become an elementary school librarian. She is the author of the Step into Reading book First Woman Cherokee Chief: Wilma Pearl Mankiller. She also blogs on nativeamericankidlit.com, a site she runs to celebrate Native creators of books for younger readers.