Nostalgia and the American Girls

A couple of days ago, I wrote about sessions I'd attended at the 37th annual conference of the Children's Literature Association. This is a follow-up to that post.

On Saturday afternoon I attended a session called "American Dolls". The first paper was on Disney characters. The third paper, given by Bethany Dailey Tisdale, was "What Dolls Eat: The Fixation on Food for American Girls". Tisdale did a close analysis of food, class and period across several of the dolls. I wonder if she's published a paper on the topic? It was a thoughtful presentation.

This post is about the second paper, Suzanne Rahn's "Felicity, Addy, Molly, Josefina: Books for American Girls".  A retired professor, Rahn is now an independent scholar.  Her "An Evolving Past: The Story of Historical Fiction and Nonfiction for Children" was published in The Lion and the Unicorn in June, 1991 (Volume 15, Number 1, pp. 1-26). The article is a survey of historical fiction for children and young adults. She begins by praising older works of historical fiction, writing at length of the ways they preserved tradition and history and made it engaging to the reader.

But then the 60s happened...  Rahn writes (p. 17):

[T]he most powerful currents of the revolutionary sixties were set in active opposition to the past, and the historical novel was bound to suffer for it. In the 1950s, the genre had been valued for giving young people the security of tradition in a fast-changing world, but in the late sixties tradition was exactly what the young hoped to be liberated from. Teenagers warned each other not to trust anyone over thirty. Cigarette ads began assuring women, "You've come a long way, baby," making it seem (once more) a fate worse than death to be Victorian. History was, at best, not "relevant." At worst, it seemed inextricably associated with authority and the lies told by those in power--in the distortions and omissions of American history textbooks, for example. By the early 1970s, the historical novel had already plummeted to the low point of popularity from which it has still not fully recovered. Even historical novels and biographies which had been praised for featuring minorities in leading roles were under attack for racism.

The novels she says were under attack are Amos Fortune, Free Man, by Elizabeth Yates; I, Juan de Pareja by Elizabeth Borton de Trevino, and, The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox.  She doesn't say much about why they were critiqued, noting only that  The Slave Dancer "paints a darker picture of the slave trade than children had been allowed to see" (p. 18). I imagine she thinks the darker picture is a good thing, and while it IS important for children to have that darker picture, the scholars who objected to it argued that Fox excuses the whites in the story and their roles in slavery, and blames Africans for what happened. (If interested in the critiques, see Sharon Bell Mathis's "The Slave Dancer is an Insult to Black Children" and Binnie Tate's "Racist and Distortions Pervade The Slave Dancer" --- both available in MacCann and Woodard's Cultural Conformity in Books for Children: Further Readings in Racism published in 1977 by Scarecrow Press.) It seems to me that Rahn is somewhat displeased with critiques of those books, but its more than just critical discussions of race that she objects to...

She writes that Johnny Tremain emphasized ideals of the Revolution and presented war as just and necessary, and that My Brother Sam Is Dead (written by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier in 1985) is more cynical. She says that books published during and after the 70s provide "bleak" views of life in historical time periods that are are intent on refuting portrayals in older works. She says (p. 19):

Unlike the authors of the forties and fifties, who tried to make the past appeal to children, Skurzynaski, Conrad, and the Colliers seem to dislike the cultures they describe. The past, from this perspective, can be neither enjoyable for its own sake nor a source of alternative solutions--only a storehouse of folly that may enable us to perceive more clearly the follies of our own time.

Conrad wrote Prairie Songs in 1985. Rahn prefers the prairie life presented by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Little House on the Prairie.  Near the end of her article, Rahn happily says that good novels of the fifties are being republished, and, she points to a then-new series, the Americans Girls dolls and books. I provide these excerpts (above) from Rahn's article because of what she said in her session on the American Girl dolls. Nearly twenty years have passed, and Rahn's views have not changed. Here's a few items from her presentation last week:

• She began her talk by holding up Josefina, the Mexican American doll. She invited us (the audience) to come up after the session if we wanted to "cuddle" Josefina. 
• She talked about Rebecca Rubin, the Jewish doll who, Rahn said, has to learn "how to cope with being Jewish". 

Before that, however, she said that the dolls and books are "historically accurate" and can teach children about history. They, she said, are like Little House on the Prairie and Caddie Woodlawn because they educate and teach children how to be tolerant. She went on at great length about them, and it sounded more like a sales pitch than a conference paper.

She obviously likes the dolls and books very much.

That was clear when she referred to Roger Sutton's editorial about the American Girls catalog as "absurd". When I asked her to elaborate, she said that his mind had been twisted or warped (can't recall which word she used) by being at a conference about pornography. The editorial she was referencing is Roger's Dolls at a Distance where he said that he'd been at a conference where they pondered children's access to pornography on the Internet and he thought browsing the American Girls catalog would ameliorate his unsettled state of mind. Instead, the catalog gave him the creeps for the many ways its contents and presentation of the dolls is a lot like pornography.

As Rahn talked, I was aware of a lot of shifts in body language (my own, but others in the room, too). During the Q&A, she had several tough questions from people who don't see the dolls and books with the same warmth as she does. She's a fighter, however, and didn't yield at all.  I think she'd like to see the United States go back in time and be what it was before all of us radicals starting saying HEY and WTF? Is she in the minority? I don't know, but I hope so. Over at Shelf Talker (a blog on the Publisher's Weekly website), Elizabeth Bluemle's The Elephant in the Room suggests that a lot of people are paying attention to how white the children's literature profession is. Rahn's praise for American Girl may not seem like the same thing, but I think it is. The issue is power and control, who says what, what they say, and how they say it.

I did not like Rahn talking about "cuddling" Josefina, and said so in my comment to her. Cuddling Josefina, or Addy, or Kaya may feel like a "tolerant" thing to do, but Latino/a Americans, Blacks, and American Indians don't want to be cuddled by affluent members of society. We want respect for who we are. We want our history, our viewpoints, and our ideas to be treated with respect. Returning to the mindset and books of the fifties is not the way to get there.

For further reading, see:
Rethinking Schools article on AMERICAN GIRLS

American Girls Collection: Kaya

Rethinking Schools article on AMERICAN GIRLS

Elizabeth Marshall, a former elementary schoolteacher, has a terrific article on the Rethinking Schools site. Titled "Marketing American Girlhood" she makes excellent points again and again about what this well-marketed series hides or glosses over. Here's a paragraph about Josefina:

Josefina's story takes place on a rancho near Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1824 before the Mexican-American War. The nonfictional "Looking Back: America in 1824" at the end of Meet Josefina dilutes this colonial history by limiting discussion to two sentences about the Mexican-American War and pointing out that when it ended in 1848, America "claimed most of the land that is now the southwestern United States" (Tripp, 1997, p. 83). The author of this history then moves on to describe the benefits of this war. "Although Josefina would never have imagined it when she was 9 years old, she would one day be an American — and the cultures and traditions of the New Mexican settlers and their Pueblo neighbors would become part of America, too" (p. 83). It is important to note that this loss of sovereignty was especially significant for New Mexican women, who had many more rights as Mexicans than they had as Americans — like the right to own their own property. The creators at American Girl favor a whitewashed version of this history, and Josefina's narrative reads as a melting pot story in which difference is assimilated into a larger American girlhood identity. Like Meet Josefina, each of the historical fictions takes place in the past and in this way allows issues such as racism, colonization, and war to be presented as things that America has overcome.

In 2006, one of my students brought Josefina's World, 1824: Growing up on America's Southwest Frontier to class. Marshall quotes from Beverly Slapin's review of Kaya. A couple of years ago, Jean Mendoza and I visited the AG store in Chicago. I wrote about that visit, and Roger Sutton, editor at Horn Book, blogged about the series, too.

During our visit, Jean and I wondered about the stage performance they do there but didn't want to rearrange our visit to see it. There is, however, a review in Theatre Journal [to read the entire review, see Theatre Journal 60.2 (2008): 303-306]. The author of the review is Matt Omasta from Arizona State University. Do click on his name to read about him. He's doing some fascinating work, including a stage adaptation of Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue. Here's some excerpts from his review of the American Girls production. He begins with:

I believe that Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) is a cultural pedagogue. As corporations further their reach into today's world, I am interested in interrogating what these companies "teach" young people vis-a-vis their popular performances like The American Girls Revue. Viewing the production confirmed my suspicion that children would be indoctrinated into consumer identities and encouraged to avail themselves of the plethora of American Girl products available in the adjoining shop. More surprising and perhaps more troubling for me was the Revue's implicit yet deeply embedded hegemonic discourse that prescribed social roles based on children's race, class, and gender.

In the Revue, a group of girls show another how to play American Girl. Each one picks her favorite girl and acts out a scene. Omasta described three of them-- Felicity, Josefina, and Addy--and the scenes they act out. Then, he writes:

I see a troubling dichotomy when I consider these stories: affluent white people are encouraged to break free from their hegemonic roles, while impoverished minorities should rely instead on inner peace, since attempts at material social change will prove futile.

Of the males in the production, he writes:

With the exception of one kindly avuncular figure, males appeared only in apathetic or aggressive/hostile roles: a confederate soldier, a cruel animal-abuser, a drum-beating Native American who paid no heed to the troubles of his tribe.

Thank goodness, the shows are shutting down. The economy is probably the reason. Wouldn't it be great if they were going dark due to objections from the public? From teachers?

Omasta concludes his review saying that the Revue is the rule, not the exception, in theater for young audiences. Sounds a lot like children's and young adult literature. While some say American Girl is invested in diversity, we have to pay attention to what that diversity is. If it is just decoration, it's not real. It just lets people feel like they're living a liberal or progressive politic.

In short, in "American Girls" there's a lot to think about.

American Girls Collection: Kaya

A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children, edited by Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin, includes a review of the Kaya books in the American Girls Collection. Far too often, popular books aren't given the critical attention they should receive. And, far too often, the reviews they do get fail to note problems regarding the ways that American Indians are portrayed. Some reviews from A Broken Flute appear on this blog, but, by far, the best option is for teachers, librarians, parents, professors, editors, publishers and students to buy the book itself, and get it directly from Oyate. Doing so allows Oyate, a non-profit organization, to continue to do this work. [Note: the review is used here with permission, and may not be published elsewhere without written permission of Beverly Slapin at Oyate.]

______________________________

Shaw, Janet, “American Girls Collection,” illustrations by Bill Farnsworth and Susan McAliley. Middleton, Wis.: Pleasant Company. Color illustrations; grades 3-6; Nimíipuu (Nez Percé)

Book 1—Meet Kaya: An American Girl. 2002, 70 pages

Book 2—Kaya’s Escape! A Survival Story. 2002, 72 pages

Book 3—Kaya’s Hero: A Story of Giving. 2002, 73 pages

Book 4—Kaya and Lone Dog: A Friendship Story. 2002, 81 pages

Book 5—Kaya Shows the Way: A Sister Story. 2002, 73 pages

Book 6—Changes for Kaya: A Story of Courage. 2002, 70 pages

Kaya and the River Girl. 2003, 48 pages

Little girls have been playing with dolls for as long as we have been human. If you are a Native mother, you would be hard put to find a doll to give to your daughter that would come near to being a representation of herself unless you made it. And that is what makes this Nimíipuu (Nez Percé) doll in the “American Girl” series so enticing. It’s too bad that the Pleasant Company did not produce something that genuinely transmits the Nimíipuu culture.

This series of stories taking place in 1764 could have been worse. The young protagonist has a name, a family, and friends. In the course of the series, she grows and matures. The author does not represent the Nimíipuu people as savages. But whatever information she got from her advisors is filtered through a white consciousness and further adapted to fit the mold of this formula historical fiction series. All life-threatening conflicts are resolved by the end of each story, and all moral and emotional conflicts are resolved by the end of the series. This writing style is an especially bad thing in historical books about Indian people, whose conflicts—over, for instance, water and land rights, the government’s theft of treaty funds, the issue of sports mascots—are ongoing. And books conceptualized as teaching tools—or worse, books enlisted in the cause of selling a product—usually result in writing that is stilted and boring. This series is no different. Some of the problems:

• Indian parents and grandparents lecture so that the author can convey information about the people. Besides being culturally dissonant, this breaks the cardinal rule in literature of “show, don’t tell.”

• Anachronistic wording such as the Lakota word “teepee” and the French words “travois” and “parfleche” are used throughout, even in dialogue. Nimíipuu words during that time period might have been translated as “dwelling,” “pony drag,” and “carrying bag.”

• By having Kaya talk in similes and metaphors, comparing all her thoughts to nature—“her thoughts whirled like smoke in the wind,” “she glides over the ground like the shadow of an eagle,” “her feelings were all tangled up like a nest of snakes”—the author misses the subtleties of Indian language and thought patterns. Throughout, faces are “dark” and “gleaming,” eyes are “dark,” cheekbones are “high,” expressions are “fierce,” and Indian characters “cock their heads” in thought.

• Traditionally, Nimíipuu names given to children had to do with ancestors, place, and responsibility; and names were changed several times during a person’s life. Unless the baby was dying and had to be named very quickly, naming was done after great consideration, often by an elder or holy person. It’s unbelievable that any 18^th Century Nimíipuu mother would name her baby for the first thing she saw after giving birth—this is a stereotype that goes back even further than Will Sampson’s joke in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”[1]

• Swan Necklace was the English translation of a Nimíipuu leader’s name, but one wonders why—and in some cases, how—the author came up with names for characters such as “Speaking Rain,” “White Braids,” “To Soar Like An Eagle,” “Light On The Water” and “Bear Blanket.” Did she research traditional Nimíipuu name giving or did she just spin the wheels for authentic Indian names?[2]

• One can understand the author’s quandary in not wanting to use “Tonto-speak,” but sign language, a visual-gestural form of communication, has a different syntax than spoken languages and does not translate into standard grammatical sentences. Here, Kaya signs to Two Hawks: “But there’s hardly any game up this high. We’d still have nothing to eat.”

• A prepubescent Indian girl in 1764 would not have had a relationship with her father that included physical touching. Generally, girls stayed with their mothers or aunties and grandmas; and boys stayed with their fathers or uncles and grandpas. Unless it was an emergency, it is not likely that Kaya would have ridden behind her father on a horse, holding onto him. Nor is it likely that she would have “put her arms around his neck while he held her tightly against his chest for a long time.”

• Horse-stealing raids were not the same as raids to capture women and children, nor were they done at the same time. Nor would raiders feed captive children “only scraps from their meals.” Captive children were taken into adoption, often given to a family to take the place of children who had died, and treated as well as the other children.

• The “enemy tribe” is unnamed; in any event, people from horse cultures did not whip or otherwise abuse their horses. Previously owned horses were accustomed to being ridden and wild horses were gentled—not “tamed”—by their owners.

• Hunters would not have brought back buffalo to camp and given “the meat and hides to the women.” Rather, the camp moved to the hunting grounds so that the women could butcher the meat right there.

• Kaya’s sightless sister, “Speaking Rain,” as all Native children, would have been taught to take care of herself. She would not have to hold hands while walking with someone, nor would she be constrained from picking berries or gathering firewood, nor would she ask questions about things she could figure out for herself.

• The people all look alike, they are all the exact same tone of brown, and their facial and physical features are the same, too. In pictures where the women and girls are sitting, they’re sitting in the wrong position. Indian women in this time period would not have sat with their legs crossed, nor would they have sat with their legs up, hugging their knees.

• Kaya and the River Girl, a 2003 tack-on to the series, is the most stupefyingly contrived of all of them. Here, Kaya loses a spontaneous foot race to a girl named Spotted Owl, who is from the “River People.” For 21 pages, Kaya obsesses about losing the race: she’s angry and miserable, her pride is injured, her feelings are bruised, her voice is grim and cold, she struggles with her shame. Finally, when the two girls come together to rescue an elder woman named Elder Woman, they become great friends.

• The non-fiction sections at the end of the books, called “A Peek Into the Past,” are uneven. While some parts convey good information, particularly the boarding school story in Kaya’s Escape! and the story of the Dalles Dam in Kaya Shows the Way, other parts are rife with error. For instance, in Meet Kaya, the author states, “Early white explorers, including French fur trappers, mistakenly believed that all Nez Percé wore shells through their noses and gave them that name.” How could anyone look at someone and “mistakenly believe” him to be wearing a shell through his nose? The Nimíipuu people were called “Nez Percé” by the French because they pierced the septa of their horses’ noses so that the horses could breathe better and run faster.

• By setting these books in 1764—before white encroachment—the author and publisher were able to sidestep the nasty parts of what happened to the Nimíipuu and to relegate some of the history to the “Looking Back” sections. The series oversimplifies and sanitizes Nimíipuu history, and by doing so, makes history more palatable to the contemporary sensibilities of the young non-Native girl readers for whom this series was conceptualized.

The Kaya series exactly illustrates the problem with which we are constantly contending: It’s almost impossible to tell another people’s story in a believable way, no matter how good one’s intentions may be and no matter how many cultural advisors there are. And writing to formula is never a good idea.

—Beverly Slapin

---

[1] The punch line is too raunchy for this publication. Rent the movie.

[2] Thank-you to Tom King, Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour.

Josefina, An American Girl

Today in class, one of my students shared a book in the American Girl "Josefina" line. The book is Welcome to Josefina's World, 1824: Growing up on America's Southwest Frontier. From the American Girl website is this synopsis:

Inside this beautiful hardcover book you'll see what growing up was like during Josefina's times in 1824 New Mexico. Look inside a Pueblo Indian village, and welcome a trading caravan from Mexico. 

To her credit, the student is critically analyzing the ways in which the series portrays dolls of color, and is finding problems with those portrayals.

One page of Welcome to Josefina's World includes an old, black and white photograph of two Pueblo women. One woman is sitting in front of the other. The camera position is behind and to their left. The woman in back has her hands on the shoulders of the woman in front of her. It is not clear what they are doing, but the caption says that lice were a problem, and that these two women were likely removing lice from each other.

Were lice a problem? Yes. Are they a problem? Yes. Only for Native people past or present? NO. Lice don't care about race, ethnicity, or class. Yet, it is one of those things that is attributed to lower class people of color. I'd have to get a copy of the "Welcome to..." book for each of the American Girls, but I'm willing to bet that the white dolls don't have lice. (If you're in a library with these books, you could help me and readers with this question... Send me an email or post your findings in the comments section of the blog.)

Thanks, Fi, for bringing this book to class.

Update: One of the other "Welcome to..." books (about Felicity, a white character) shows a lice comb as an artifact. I'm glad it is there, but I think that the two images are vastly different in what they convey and what they invoke in the reader. See comments below.