Missy Whiteman's Video: Indigenous Holocaust

Stunning video and commentary about boarding schools... Created by Missy Whiteman, titled Indigenous Holocaust. If you teach Shirley Sterling's My Name Is Seepeetza, consider using this video along with it.

Brianne Grant's thesis on Education in YA Lit

Back on July 9th, 2007, I blogged about Brianne Grant's article "Opening the Cache of Canadian Secrets: The Residential School Experience in Books for Children."

Today, I point you to Grant's thesis: Where Hope Lives: An Examination of the Relationship Between Protagonists and Education Systems in Contemporary Native North American Young Adult Fiction.

She considers educational systems as portrayed in four novels:

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
• The Porcupine Year, by Louise Erdrich
• Good for Nothing, by Michel Noel
• No Time to Say Goodbye: Children's Stories of Kuper Island Residential School, by Sylvia Olsen, written with Rita Morris and Ann Sam

I'm partway through it (gotta stop and do some writing of my own) and look forward to sitting down with it when I have more time. Her thesis may prove perfect for my History of American Indian Education course next spring.

Barbara Cooney's MISS RUMPHIUS

Though it is much loved and winner of an American Book Award, every time I think of Barbara Cooney's Miss Rumphius, the image that I recall is not the lovely lupines she walks amongst... Instead, I remember the page with three Indians. Did you see them?

Update: Try really hard to remember them... and if you can't, I've uploaded the page at my Images site.

Here's the image (added to AICL on September 20, 2012, 9:40 AM CST):

(Source for image: http://theartofchildrenspicturebooks.blogspot.com/2011/03/miss-rumphius.html)

And, here's the text for that page (also added on Sept 20, 2012):

Now he worked in the shop at the bottom of the house, making figureheads for the prows of ships, and carving Indians out of wood to put in front of cigar stores.

Source: Oklahoma Historical Society

Noted Creek writer, Alexander Lawrence Posey, said that the cigar store Indians "are the product of a white mans's factory, and bear no resemblance to the real article." Posey died in 1908. Is Cooney wrong for including this information in her book? It is factual as Cooney wrote it--carvers of that time period did carve figureheads for ships and wooden Indians, too--but given that Miss Rumphius was published in 1982 and the information about these carvings being stereotypical is quite old, perhaps she could have inserted "stereotypical" in front of "Indians." If she had done that, it would read:

"Now he worked in the shop at the bottom of the house, making figureheads for the prows of ships and carving stereotypical Indians out of wood to put in front of cigar stores."

Course, if she did that, the story wouldn't be as charming, but it would be more accurate, and it could prompt teachers, parents, and librarians to address stereotypes whenever they read the book to children.