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Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Oliver Herford's THE PETER PAN ALPHABET

A colleague in children's literature, Perry Nodelman, has been sharing his collection of images of Indians in Peter Pan books illustrated by various authors over the last 100 years. If you want to see them, search twitter using #EthnographicInaccuracy.

Among them is Oliver Herford's The Peter Pan Alphabet, published in 1907. Here's the cover:



Here's the title page:



You can read the whole thing if you want to: The Peter Pan Alphabet.  I'm interested in two pages. Here's the page for the letter I:



And here's the page for the letter R:



Some of you might be sighing with relief, thinking that the 1907 publication year of this book means that such things are of-the-past. They aren't.

In the ever-popular Caddie Woodlawn a "scalp belt" figures prominently. The townspeople fear being scalped. And I trust readers of AICL are well aware of a professional football team in Washington DC that is named "Redskins." Setting aside that word, note Herbert's "What a Treat to see "Injuns" sit up and Behave!" Why did he put Injuns in quotation marks? The "sit up and behave" indicates he thought that Native people were... Lazy? Wild? Out of control? Naughty?!

Interestingly, that "wild Indian" appears in Caddie Woodlawn! Caddie is a tomboy. People ask her mom when she's going to make a "young lady" out of this "wild Indian."

My point in sharing these two pages from Herford's 1907 book? To note that those sentiments are still very much a part of today's society. 
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2 comments:

  1. Perry NodelmanTuesday, December 9, 2014 at 10:25:00 PM CST

    I put all my pictures, and some others contributed by Debbie (many thanks) and others, into a Storify: https://storify.com/perrynodelman/ethngraphic-inaccuracy

    ReplyDelete
  2. Perry NodelmanTuesday, December 9, 2014 at 10:26:00 PM CST

    I put all my pictures, and some others contributed by Debbie (many thanks) and others, into a Storify: https://storify.com/perrynodelman/ethngraphic-inaccuracy

    ReplyDelete


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