Hurray! I figured out how to add links to my page, in the space beneath my profile.
I finished the Duncan book Season of the Two Heart and didn't like it any better than when I posted about it earlier this week. Lots of problems in language, bias, tone.
The book is no longer in print, but my search of WorldCat at UIUC indicates that 189 libraries in Illinois own the book. Curious, I called a few of them to see when the book last circulated. At the Cissna Park library (I apologize for not providing more info about where (in Illinois) these libraries are located), their copy went out once since they added it in 1992. The head librarian said it would likely be weeded out. At the Crestwood Library, the book went out once, in 2000. At the Harvey library, it went out 7 times in 2004. And at our local public library (Urbana Free Library), it last went out in July of 2003.
So, people are still reading it. I wonder what they think about its negative representations of American Indians... Are the perceptions they have before reading it affirmed? Or are they jolted by the book?
Established in 2006 by Dr. Debbie Reese of Nambé Pueblo, American Indians in Children's Literature (AICL) provides critical analysis of Indigenous peoples in children's and young adult books. Dr. Jean Mendoza joined AICL as a co-editor in 2016.
1 comment:
I would be very curious to know what you might think of a book called "Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jamison," by Lois Lenksi, likely still being circulated in libraries, as it was a Newberry honor way back when..I just saw it at a used bookstore and picked it up to study it.
An EXTREMELY difficult subject, an edgy topic, I would think to even try to cover in a book for middlegrade age(Mary became interracial in many ways)and likely a brave attempt on Lenski's part, but I'm just not sure what to think of it. I guess I feel that most middlegraders wouldn't be that interested in reading it. Should they be more interested in reading books with subjects like this? And how accurate isthe portrayal of this particular tribe's life? It is difficult for me to gauge. I felt there might be things Lenski might be missing, how important, I don't know.
We have so many interracial children where I live in the U.S. now--I am one myself (Mainly Thai, American, Native American). Each one's experience is so unique. It's hard to know what to think sometimes. Thanks!
Rinda M. Byers with
my mother's mother of the Chickasaw tribe (whom I knew very well), myself born in Thailand, raised for 14 years in Chiang Kham, a very small village in northern Thailand.
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