News about Cynthia Leitich Smith's JINGLE DANCER

Jingle Dancer, one of my favorite picture books is in its 18th printing!

Congratulations, Cyn!

Here's some links:

Jingle Dancer Curriculum Guide

Read Cynthia's story behind the story about Jingle Dancer.

And buy a copy! Let's buy up all copies in the 18th printing so it'll move to a 19th, and a 20th, and a 21st......

Native musician: Darryl Tonemah

Take a listen to Darryl Tonemah! The clip is from a performance he gave at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, August 2008. If you're interested in learning more about him, read An Interview with Dr. Darryl Tonemah. He is Kiowa/Comanche/Tuscarora. He is not involved with children's literature, as far as I know, so that's not the reason I'm sharing this video. It is here because I like his music. This song makes me smile.



Also take a look at this clip. I don't know how to insert it.
"I Know" - from the Kennedy Center Performance. Before singing the song, he tells about a woman who questioned his identity, saying that Indians should play flute or drum and sing about eagles and buffaloes. He goes on to talk about oppression, and internalized oppression.

Books by and about American Indians: 2008

The Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison publishes CCBC Choices each year. It includes statistical data about numbers of books written by authors of color.

The information I share below is from "Thoughts on Publishing in 2008" by Kathleen T. Horning, Merri V. Lindgren, Tessa Michaelson, and Megan Schliesman. It was originally published in CCBC Choices 2009. I encourage you to become a Friend of the CCBC, which includes a copy of Choices.

In 2008, CCBC received 40 books that featured American Indian themes, topics, or characters. Of those 40, nine were created by American Indian authors and/or illustrators.


Here's two paragraphs from the essay, in the section titled "Multicultural Writing (and Illustrating, Too!)":

Louise Erdrich continued her chronicle of nineteenth-century American Indian experience in The Porcupine Year, which picks up the story of the Ojibwe girl Omakayas, last seen in The Game of Silence (HarperCollins, 2005). Now forced to leave their home, Omakayas’s family is on the move in a story based in part on Erdrich’s own family history. Joseph Bruchac, the most prolific Native author for children and teens, was inspired by family history to research and write what became March Toward the Thunder, about an Abenaki boy serving in the Union army during the Civil War. Update on Sep 30 2023: I (Debbie Reese) no longer recommend Bruchac's work. For details see Is Joseph Bruchac truly Abenaki? Nicola Campbell’s picture book Shin-chi’s Canoe looks at Native boarding schools through the a story of a boy enduring his first year away from home.

Horning, Lindgren, Michaelson and Schliesman note that few new picture books that show contemporary children of color were published. They write:

In fact, the only 2008 picture book featuring a contemporary American Indian child that we documented here at the CCBC was Niwechihaw=I Help, a bilingual (Cree/English) book published by Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press. The Littlest Sled Dog (Orca) features a dog rather than a child or children but does offer a glimpse of a contemporary Inuit village. And The Drum Calls Softly (Red Deer Press) is a bilingual (Cree/English) picture book in the voice of a child who might be contemporary or from the past, although the stunning illustrations by Native artist Jim Poitras (Cree, Salteaux, and Métis) have a historical sensibility.

On October 24, 2008, I posted a table of data from CCBC specific to books by and about American Indians. It covered 2002 through 2007. I'm reposting that table here, adding 2008 statistics to the table.

Year---Number of bks---About Amer Ind---By Native writer
2002--------3,150--------------------64-----------------------6---------------
2003--------3,200--------------------95----------------------11--------------
2004--------2,800--------------------33-----------------------7--------------
2005--------2,800--------------------34-----------------------4--------------
2006--------3,000--------------------41----------------------14-------------
2007--------3,000--------------------44-----------------------6--------------
2008--------3,000---------------------40----------------------9--------------

Boston Tea Party and 2009 Tea Party

The Boston Tea Party. There is one that happened yesterday, April 15, 2009, and there is one that happened way back when... When colonists threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773...

That event in 1773 is widely depicted with colonists dressed as Indians who are shown wearing feathers, fringe and face paint. Here's the most famous image, an 1846 lithograph by Nathaniel Currier.

And here's one from a children's picture book, The Boston Tea Party, published in 2001, written by Pamela Duncan Edwards, illustrations by Henry Cole:

In fact, the colonists did not wear feathers. 

They colored their faces with ash and charcoal 

and draped blankets on their shoulders.* 

Given the multiple misrepresentations of that moment, I wondered if it would be echoed in yesterday's "tea party" events. Watching Jon Stewart's coverage of it, I had my answer (see lower right image):

------------------------------------------

UPDATE, 6:45 PM, April 16, 2009
Jeremy Cote, Phoenix, AZ, posted (to Flickr) "On warpath against more taxes!" In it are two women and two children, wearing tan-colored shirts, feathers in their hair. The children have signs taped to their shirts that say:

"Paleface taxes no good."
"Let little brave keep wampum."

UPDATE, 6:56 PM, April 19, 2009
A few minutes ago, a reader submitted a comment, pointing to a photograph in the NY Times. It accompanies a story titled "Tax Day is Met with Tea Parties." There is no reference in the article to the photograph, which shows a boy in a headdress.


UPDATE, 8:10 AM, December 16, 2014
For writing about how the colonists were dressed, see:

• A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-party: With a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes published in 1834 by S.S. Bliss.
• The Historic Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773: its men and objects, by Caleb Arnold Wall, published in 1896 by Press of F.S. Blanchard & Co. (see accounts by various participants: Slater, p. 24; Hewes, p. 42; Wyeth, p. 47) 

UPDATE, 9:20 AM, December 16, 2014

Here's the cover of The Boston Tea Party, December 1773, "text" by Josephine Pollard, "drawn" by H. W. McVickar (used quotations marks around text/drawn because those are the words on the title page). Published in 1882 by Dodd, Mead & Company, it has been digitized. Don't buy it from Amazon. You can read the entire book, free, online.  

Here's a page from inside:

The text on the left page is: "Like sons of the forest, a poor imitation." The phrase "son of the forest" stood out to me because it is the title William Apes's book, published in 1829. 

And here's McVickar's drawing of "a Chinaman":

Some of McVickar's cartoons appeared in Harpers Magazine. Josephine Pollard wrote many books for children. 

An (Incomplete) List of Illustrators that Got it Wrong with Feathers and Colored Face Paint:

1882: H. W. McVickar got it wrong in The Boston Tea Party, December 1773 (by Josephine Pollard)

2001: Henry Cole got it wrong in Boston Tea Party (by Pamela Duncan Edwards)

2013: Lauren Mortimer got it wrong in What Was the Boston Tea Party? (by Kathleen Krull)

2013: Peter Malone got it wrong in The Boston Tea Party (by Russell Freedman)

Reflections, Observations: "After the Mayflower" - WE SHALL REMAIN

I watched "After the Mayflower" on Monday night. It was the national broadcast of the first film in the We Shall Remain series on PBS. My thoughts here are not about the film. They're about the context of my viewing.

Without a doubt, it is informative in ways that most people have not seen before. It provides a lot of thought provoking material. It isn't blood thirsty savage Indians, nor is it tragic and noble warriors. There's an honesty to it, of emotion and fact.

When it was over, I stayed in my chair, TV still on the PBS channel. I was going to turn off the set when I heard the lead-in to the next program... "A story of savagery and survival... Handed down through seven generations..." And, "the Lively Family Massacre."

I glanced up at the screen. I was shocked and stunned with what I saw. Clips of what was to be shown in the next hour or so.... A white family, their cabin behind them, tending to their yard... Indian men in the trees watching, then, attacking, killing.

For the next half hour, viewers in central Illinois who watch WILL-TV (housed at the University of Illinois), were given a savage-bloodthirsty-Indians-story that We Shall Remain is challenging with its Native voice and viewpoint. The Lively Family Massacre is a documentary of a woman in Illinois seeking her family roots. A documentary of genealogy research that goes back to the 1800s when the Lively family set up a homestead. A professor is interviewed. He says that we don't know why the Kickapoos attacked that family. Maybe they were retaliating for something that was done to them, the professor said, "we don't know." The woman said the Lively family was scalped and one of them was beheaded.

Then there's an article about a high school teacher in Illinois who is working on a book about Geronimo. He's also involved in the episode of We Shall Remain that will focus on Geronimo. The opening sentence includes this:

"...passionately teaches his students about the 19th century Apache Indian who slaughtered countless Americans in order to ensure the survival of his tribe."

That is not a quote from the teacher. It's the reporter's words.

I'm pointing to the local PBS scheduling decision, and the reporter's words because they offer a glimpse into un-critical, maybe biased, maybe racist thinking in Illinois. It is weighing on me because of damage done last week to the public art exhibit we're sponsoring on the UIUC campus.

Intended or not, efforts to educate the public about past and present day American Indians takes place in contexts that are so negative. I'm hoping the local PBS station would have a 'doh!' response if this juxtaposition was pointed out to them. And I think that reporter would say "oh" if someone engaged him a conversation about biased writing, but I don't know what the individual(s) who damaged the public art would say. "I was just messing around, I didn't mean it?" or, "I'm sorry."

Grumpy today, thinking about context.