About this book

Robert Munsch wrote this story for Jillian, a Mohawk girl from Kahnawake, who came to a storytelling wearing her new ribbon dress.

Shaikara David is an Indigenous artist from Akwesasne Mohawk Territory. She studied at Algonquin College and worked in animation before starting to illustrate picture books. For this book she was inspired by her own childhood ribbon dress and the generous and giving culture of her family and Mohawk people. Shaikara lives in Ottawa with her partner, two cats and an axolotl.

Behind the scenes

In 1993, Robert Munsch was in Montreal making a video. A boy and a girl came in very early to be in the audience, and nobody paid any attention to them. They stood in the middle of the huge TV studio looking lost, so he made up some new stories for them. One of the stories was about a ribbon dress that the little girl was wearing. Munsch had never seen a ribbon dress before. The next day, Munsch decided that the ribbon story was too good to forget and wrote it down, but he couldn’t remember the girl’s name. The people at the TV studio said that maybe she was from the Mohawk reserve at Kahnawake, across the river from Montreal. So Munsch called around Kahnawake and tracked down Jillian. He also learned that there were lots of ribbon dresses at Kahnawake. To dress up really fancy, Mohawk girls wear ribbon dresses and Mohawk boys wear ribbon shirts. Years later, when it looked like the story might become a book, Munsch went to Kahnawake to visit Jillian and her family. He took lots of pictures, which Eugenie Fernandes used to help her illustrate the book. After Ribbon Rescue was published in 1999, Munsch did a storytelling at Jillian’s school. Lots of girls wore their ribbon dresses! In 2004, a local Mohawk edition of the story was published. In it, Jillian is called Teiohathe, her real Mohawk name.

Reviews

Praise for Robert Munsch:

"[Munsch is] a kindergarten superstar he ranks up there with Pablum and Pampers in name recognition arguably the most published Canadian author ever, in any genre." —The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Magazine

"Munsch's parade of bright funny picture books has been a sales phenomenon in children's book publishing. . . And as Munsch books are requested by kids over and over every day in countless homes and schools, at story time and bedtime, the distinctive storyteller's voice will undoubtedly continue to be echoed for years to come by parents, teachers, babysitters and whomever else young kids can get to read to them." —The Chronicle Herald

"Arguably the most successful kid-lit writer in North America." —Toronto Star

"More witty, creative and entertaining than most of what passes for adult literature." —The Globe and Mail

"Munsch is now as important to a whole generation of children as any television character." -—Quill & Quire