Jean Mendoza: Reflections on THEY WERE STRONG AND GOOD

[Note: Today’s post is by Jean Mendoza, professor in Early Childhood Education at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois. Jean and I are both former schoolteachers and have collaborated and commiserated many times as we raise our children in a college town that embraces a race-based mascot (“Chief Illiniwek”). See our article "Examining Multicultural Picture Books for the Early Childhood Classroom".]

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Debbie,

The list you shared several weeks ago of top-selling paperbacks is disturbing, and resonated with an experience I had recently. 

I’ve been revisiting Louise Erdrich's Tracks, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and Four Souls. Recently, I noticed on a colleague's door a big poster of Caldecott (children’s book) Award winners, going 'way back. There on the bottom row was Robert Lawson's contribution to the "canon": They Were Strong and Good, a mostly uncritical look at some of that author's forebears. It contains the following lines (if I remember right):

"When my mother was a little girl there were Indians in Minnesota--tame ones. My mother did not like them. They would stalk into the kitchen without knocking and sit on the floor. They would rub their stomachs and point to their mouths to show that they were hungry. They would not leave until my mother's mother gave them something to eat."

In contrast, Erdrich’s accounts of the fictional lives of Nanapush, Kashpaws, and Pillagers reflect a different historical and personal reality situated in essentially the same locale at about the same time as Lawson’s family stories.

For an adult reader, Erdrich provides a kind of unintended backstory for Lawson's superficial and bigoted child-directed comments about those "tame Indians". In order for the Lawson forebears to settle in Minnesota, the land had to be taken from families whose own forebears had made their lives on it, and from it, for millennia -- forebears who could undoubtedly have been described as “strong and good” themselves.

Obviously we are to assume that Lawson’s “tame Indians” were too lazy or incompetent to get food on their own, choosing instead to rudely enter the rightful home of Lawson’s hardworking family to beg. Erdrich’s characters may have been fictional, but the waves of disease, famine, and land theft were horribly real to the actual indigenous people of Minnesota & the Dakotas. What a small, shallow, relatively ahistorical world-view Lawson’s book expresses, despite the array of countries his ancestors hailed from!

Lawson does not seem to question what might have led up to the situation he describes. Did none of his strong/good ancestors ever say, “Hm; we prosper while others in the same space starve. How did this come to pass?”

In Four Souls, Erdrich has a (Euro-American) character describe a particular house:

“On the most exclusive ridge of the city, our pure white house was set, pristine as a cake in the window of a bakery shop.”

In the preceding chapter, however, Ojibwe elder Nanapush tells a more complete story of that house: the origins of the stones, the brick, the iron – and most importantly (as it turns out), the wood.

“Once this stone had formed the live heart of sacred islands,” says Nanapush; but now to the couple who occupy the house, that stone “was a fashionable backdrop to their ambitions.”

Not sure where to take this line of thought now, except that this experience makes me wish that if a teacher, parent, or librarian is going to recommend that a child read They Were Strong and Good simply because it has the Caldecott stamp of approval and seems like a good All-American story, that teacher/parent/librarian would first read Erdrich’s books.

There’s another “All-American” story behind Lawson’s – one that any child in the US ought to have access to, so that he or she doesn’t construct a false picture of how the US came to be.

I guess then the next step would be for that adult to recommend Erdrich’s children’s novels, The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence to the same child. In fact, ideally the child would have read Birchbark and Silence BEFORE giving Strong and Good a second glance. Then Erdrich’s picture of Ojibwe life can become a lens through which the child can consider the picture of “tame Indian” life Lawson presents.

Books like Lawson's seem never to fade into richly-deserved oblivion. A visit to the Amazon.com reader reviews indicates that They Were Strong and Good is still making some people feel fine about themselves, 60-some years after it was awarded the Caldecott, which means that it continues to be a tool for the disinformation of children, whether or not teachers, librarians and parents mean for it to be so.

By the way, I appreciated the comments from the mother whose daughter kept encountering Education of Little Tree. Thanks for the account of what critical reading and writing can look like (and feel like). Many people have written eloquently about the problems that book has and presents, and still it manages to be beloved of many who resist any questioning of its value – and who are determined to continue its legacy of bigotry and lies.

I’ve asked this question before in other circles and had interesting replies: Is there, or should there be, some kind of “ethics of aesthetics”, that would have an answer to the notion that, for example, an author's background or bigotry "doesn't matter because the book was well-written". Is an award for illustration, for example, a good enough reason to keep Strong and Good in print and on Recommended lists, when it perpetuates negative images of Native people (not to mention an apparently sympathetic or apologist view of slavery)?

At what point might an author, an illustrator, a publisher, a librarian, a teacher have a responsibility to say no to what's in a book in the interest of "doing no harm" to the child reader? Always, sometimes, never? And then, what constitutes "harm"...

---Jean Mendoza

LeAnne Howe, American Indian Studies at UIUC

Since the late 1980s, Native American students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have lobbied for the establishment of a Native American cultural house and an American Indian Studies program, and we've called for the retirement of "Chief Illiniwek."

With the support of former chancellor Nancy Cantor, UIUC opened its Native American House and American Indian Studies program in 2003. UIUC has yet to rid itself of "Chief Illiniwek," but I am confident its end as the officially sanctioned symbol of UIUC's sports program is near. (Some think UIUC's support of our program is an effort to buy us off or shut us up, but a glance at our website and public statements we have issued calling for its retirement indicates otherwise. )

In 2004, I was hired to be an assistant professor in American Indian Studies (AIS). Since then, we've hired four American Indian professors and will hire more.

Among our faculty is LeAnne Howe. Perhaps you've read her novel, Shell Shaker. It received an American Book Award in 2002. That year, Wordcraft Circle named LeAnne as Writer of the Year. Her collection of poetry and prose, Evidence of Red, came out last year. It won a 2006 Oklahoma Book Award. Later this month, her documentary Indian Country Diaires: Spiral of Fire will be broadcast nationally on PBS. Her books and poems can be used in high school junior and senior English classes.

Take a moment to visit our Native American House website. Encourage high school and college students to look over our pages. We have a lot to offer. UIUC is an exciting place to be.

One family's experience with THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE

A reader of "American Indians in Children's Literature" wrote to me, describing her daughter's experiences with The Education of Little Tree. I invited her to write it up so I could post it to the blog. Here it is (I welcome others to write to me with similar accounts. You can remain anonymous or disclose as much personal information as you are comfortable with.)

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A Georgia family's experience with The Education of Little Tree:

As a family, our experience with The Education of Little Tree has been both frustrating and enlightening. My daughter, now in 9th grade, essentially has had three readings of ELT. In 7th and 8th grades, it was a required classroom text for her. Since I knew Asa Carter's background, I gave both teachers copies of articles that discussed the book's authorship. The 7th grade teacher took the position that the author's background didn't matter because the book was well-written and gave an "authentic" representation of Cherokee life. She told the students about Carter's racist history but said that he had a change of heart before writing ELT. The 8th grade teacher, on the other hand, knew of his past and used the book to spark an investigation of writing "fraud" and misrepresentation, getting into the question of who should tell a story and for what purpose. My daughter's understanding of the book became very complex given the juxtaposed treatment of the text by both teachers.

However, her readings of the book extended beyond the classroom. Since she has a reading disability, she and I initially read the book together and had many discussions about some of the more unsettling aspects of the book that we uncovered--issues of racism, classism, sexism and ableism. She ultimately decided to counter ELT with a homework project based on another writer's memoir of growing up in America--Zitkala-Sa's American Indian Stories. My hope is that through these multiple readings and multiple lenses she is developing not only a sophisticated understanding of ELT, its author, and the issues surrounding both but also a keen critical eye towards reading in general.

Cooperative Children's Book Center: Books By and About American Indians

The School of Education at the University of Wisconsin is home to the Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC). At CCBC, they devote resources and attention to multicultural literature. On their website is a page called “Children’s Books by and about People of Color Published in the United States” that documents the number of books published by and about African Americans, Asian/Pacific and Asian Pacific Americans, Latinos, and American Indians. 

Here’s their stats on American Indians for the period from 2002-2005. In each of these years, CCBC estimates about 5000 children’s books were published.

In 2002:
6 books by Native authors were published
64 books about American Indians were published

In 2003:
11 books by Native authors were published
95 books about American Indians were published

In 2004:
7 books by Native authors were published
33 books about American Indians were published

In 2005:
4 books by Native authors were published
34 books about American Indians were published

Prior to 2002, CCBC’s data combined the “by” and “about” totals as follows:

1994: 70
1995: 83
1996: 50
1997: 66
1998: 50
1999: 61
2000: 54
2001: 96

CCBC publishes several excellent print and internet resources. For example, take a look at their page on the Native Peoples of Wisconsin. You can access CCBC Choices (their annual review of recommended books) via the internet, in pdf format.