Red Dress Day book for kids by Surrey lecturer<\/p>\n
Published 5:00 am Tuesday, May 5, 2026<\/p>\n
A Surrey author\u2019s new children\u2019s book offers a gentle introduction to National Red Dress Day, observed annually on May 5 to raise awareness of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls and 2SLGBTQI+ People (MMIWG2S).<\/p>\n
Fleetwood-area resident Carolyn Roberts uses empathetic and age-appropriate language in Tess\u2019s Red Dress, about a family preparing for a Red Dress Day march.<\/p>\n
Tess\u2019s parents share stories of her auntie, among the missing, while showing the girl how to honour her memory by wearing her red dress.<\/p>\n
The 32-page book, illustrated by Kelsey Mata Foote, aims to highlight the unbreakable bonds of family and the importance of keeping ancestral stories alive, even in the face of loss.<\/p>\n
A member of Squamish Nation, Roberts is an Indigenous academic and faculty lecturer at the University of British Columbia, where she works to embed ancestral ways of knowing into the education system.<\/p>\n
She wrote Tess\u2019s Red Dress to help parents and educators navigate difficult conversations about Red Dress Day with kids aged six to nine.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of teachers were saying to me, \u2018We don\u2019t have any resources to teach the younger grades, so how do I teach them? What does it look like?\u2019\u201d Roberts told the Now-Leader in a phone call from Ontario, where she was doing rounds on TV news and talk shows.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery time I would start to tell them about what they could do, I\u2019m like, \u2018Man, we need a book for this. So then I put the book together with the thinking of we need to talk about strong Indigenous families. We need to talk about strong matriarchs and families and women in those families and how we navigate that loss of community. All of that went into the writing of the story of Tess.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tess\u2019s Red Dress is sold on Medicine Wheel Publishing\u2019s <\/a>website<\/a>.<\/p>\n