Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Debbie--have you seen BLACK SHEEP WHITE CROW by Jim Kristofic?

A reader writes to ask if I've seen Jim Kristofic's Black Sheep, White Crow.

Published in 2017 by the University of New Mexico Press, I'm hoping that anyone who buys it will read the preface carefully and then set it aside. By that, I mean--I hope they choose not use it with kids, as-is.

Here's why. In the preface, Kristofic writes:
Some stories were told to me while I was growing up on the Rez. Some stories are blends of my own imagination with the traditional ideas of the Animal People and the lessons they can teach.



That passage in the preface prompts several questions. For starters...

Did Kristofic have permission from the tellers to publish the stories told to him? If yes, how did he get that permission? Did he use the tired and exploitative "if we don't do this, the stories will be lost forever" approach?

Does Kristofic realize that--in blending his imagination with those stories--he is, in effect, assuming that he has the right to tinker with the religious stories of another peoples' traditions? Of course, that's been done a lot, so he may think it is fine. I do not, and neither do a lot of Native people. Too many writers think they can just add, willy nilly, to our creation stories. That they can come up with their own stories, based on ours. That's disrespectful to us. Maybe Kristofic would do that cherry picking sort of thing to the Bible, too, but would he then label the stories as "Bible Stories"? I think not. They wouldn't be Bible stories. They'd be his fictions.

Because of the preface alone, I'm tagging Kristoff's book with a not-recommended. I know I'll catch heck from some people for saying "not recommended" before I've "read the whole book" but that's ok. I stand on what I said.

When someone who is not of the people a book purports to be about, the act of rewriting and adding to that peoples stories and then labeling them as stories of those people, is not ok. It is, in my view, misleading to the reader and disrespectful to the people who shares stories with the writer.

In summary: I do not recommend Jim Kristofic's Black Sheep, White Crow. 

2 comments:

  1. But but but Debbie.....fiction is considered to be the engine of possibilities....the motor or potential, the driver of the future...and hasn't it always been so....since...wewll since..oh, yes..Robinson Crusoe...the Bildugsroman...the developmental story....and over and over and over again...the developmental story is the one of the settler, the oppressor, the "builder" who changes the word to suit his own image....of course that is the problem....the reproduction of the image that lies in the gestalt of the writer....rather than providing survivance strategies for the young readers....

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  2. Actually many people change/add details to Bible stories and then call them Bible stories for kids. As fewer people are reading an actual Bible they don't always recognize it. Christians and non-Christians alike.

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