I read THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE

So! Scott (a colleague) wrote to ask me if I'd read The Education of Little Tree. I've written about that book here on AICL several times because it is not really a memoir. It was published as the memoir of a Cherokee named Forrest Carter, but that author's brother outed him as Asa Carter. Yeah, that guy. Of the KKK.

Scott said that a friend's daughter is reading it as a class assignment. She is telling the teacher that there are problems with it, but the teacher things there are valuable lessons in it, so I guess that means the teacher thinks they can ignore the problems. I don't know what the daughter is pointing out. Scott owes me big time for having to read this book...

This afternoon, I read The Education of Little Tree. Published in 1987 by the University of New Mexico Press, it is set in the 1930s. Little Tree and his grandparents are amongst the Cherokee people who did not go to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears.

As I read, I was shaking my head, sighing deeply, again and again as I read. I just can NOT see what ANYONE would see of value in this book.

There are several words in the first chapter that we are meant to understand as Cherokee words. Using the Cherokee Nation's translator, I found that one or two of Carter's words are close to what I found as being good translations but most of them don't work at all. So--if you think you're learning Cherokee words by reading this book, you're not.

That first chapter is called Little Tree. It sets the stage for why this five-year-old is now living with his grandparents. His mother has died. He gets on a bus with his grandparents who've come to his mom's funeral. As his grandfather is paying the bus driver, that bus driver turns to the passengers, holds up his right hand, and says "How!" They all laugh, and Little Tree thinks they are friendly people. There's another part there, where a passenger calls out "Wa...hooo" as they walk past her seat.  We, the reader, know what's going on, and we go along with Carter, thinking that the driver and the passengers are racist. Maybe that is what draws people into the book. The thing is, with Carter being a fraud, I think readers are the ones who are the butt of his joke.

Once they've gotten off the bus and are walking into the mountains where his grandparents live, he hears his grandma singing an Indian song and that makes him feel safe. I guess that means his mom sang those songs to him? Nonetheless, he's about to learn a lot of what it means to be an Indian by living with these grandparents.

Like in "The Way" --- which is chapter 2. Here we learn of "Mon-o-lah" or "earth mother." If you search on "Mon-o-lah" you're going to get a lot of hits about this book. You're also going to get some hits to New Age sites and some odd stuff, too.

In "The Way" Little Tree and his grandfather see a hawk hunting quail. It gets one, and Little Tree is sad. His grandfather says:

"Don't feel sad, Little Tree. It is The Way. Tal-con [I think we're supposed to think that is the Cherokee word for hawk] caught the slow and so the slow will raise no children who are also slow." 

That was one of the shake-my-head moments. That struck me as a twisted eugenics philosophy. Grandpa continued:

"Tal-con eats a thousand ground rats who eat the eggs of the quail--both the quick and the slow eggs--and so Tal-con lives by The Way. He helps the quail."

Not only does Tal-con kill slow quail, he kills the rats who eat the quick and slow ones before they're hatched, too. I know Carter's trying to get us to buy into some Circle of Life thing but, this hawk/quail/rat cycle is kind of messed up.  And then, he says:

"It is The Way. Take only what ye need. When ye take the deer, do not take the best. Take the smaller and the slower and then the deer will grow stronger and always give you meat. Pa-koh, the panther, knows and so must ye." 

That's just baloney. Animals do that "smaller and slower" hunting, but human beings do not do that. Human beings leave the female deer alone. That is the way it is done. A doe is smaller than a buck. If you kill the smaller, you kill the females and then guess what? No more deer! This seems silly to even say, but my guess is that a pregnant doe would be a bit slower than the rest of the deer, too. According to Carter's "The Way" she's the one to kill! This is just a bunch of nonsense.

But it must work! For millions of people who love this book, it works. WHY?! Because the portrayal of Native people as animals rather than humans has been done so well, that readers don't notice this nonsense!

More animal-like framing happens in chapter six, "To Know the Past." Little Tree's grandparents tell him it is important to know the past, so, they tell him about the Cherokee removal. According to Carter, the soldiers came after harvest time. That harvest time, though had been preceded by springtime, when

"...the Cherokee had farmed the rich valleys and held their mating dances in the spring when life was planted in the ground; when the buck and doe, the cock and peahen exulted in the creation parts they played."

Mating dances?! EVERYONE should stop reading at that point. Why bother reading this book? How 'bout we just all agree not to assign it any longer?

(Note: There's a lot more sillyness in the rest of the book. You'll find the stoic Indian who feels no pain. Carter's going to give you a bogus explanation for the word "How." In "To Know the Past" Carter tells us that the Cherokees refused to ride in the wagons on the Trail of Tears. He goes on and on about the empty wagons behind them. That doesn't reflect anything I've read about removal, including the accounts on the website of the Cherokee Nation.)

Update, Saturday September 13

In an earlier post (Where is Your Copy of The Education of Little Tree), I quoted from Daniel Heath Justice's article. In a comment to this post last night, Daniel pointed me to a documentary on Carter.

There's also a short film about the words Carter uses in the film. The people in it are Cherokee speakers. The words Carter uses are not Cherokee.

PBS documentary on "Forrest Carter" and THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE

On August 26th, a handful of PBS stations will air The Reconstruction of Asa Carter.  He wrote The Education of Little Tree, passing it off as an autobiography by a Cherokee man named "Forrest Carter." It was accepted as an autobiography upon publication, as evidenced by the abstract in WorldCat: "The autobiographical remembrances of the author's Indian boyhood with his eastern Cherokee hill country grandparents during the Great Depression." Some library systems still have old information in them:

Forrest Carter is best known for his autobiographical work, The Education of Little Tree (1976). Carter was orphaned at the age of ten and raised by his grandfather. In the Education of Little Tree, he wrote of his happy childhood in the isolated woods of the Tennesee Hill Country and lovingly recalls his grandfather who gave him a unique education based heavily on his Cherokee heritage. Carter once estimated that he never spent more than six months in a formal educational setting.

The Education of Little Tree is not the autobiography of a Cherokee man.

In fact, Asa Carter was in the KKK and a speechwriter for George Wallace, and the book itself is a hoax.

A couple of years ago, I asked librarians "Where is your copy of The Education of Little Tree? Though Carter's book was exposed as a fake in the New York Times in the 1990s, there are still a lot of people who don't know it is a fake. About one-third of the libraries in the Illinois Heartland Library System, for example, still have it cataloged as biography or autobiography, and I imagine that is the case across the country. Perhaps the PBS film will get a conversation started again and it will get reshelved or deselected completely.

Here's the trailer:

Paul Chaat Smith on BROTHER EAGLE SISTER SKY and THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE

Paul Chaat Smith is an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma. He and Robert Warrior wrote Like a Hurricane, the Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. Published in 1996, it ought to be used in every high school class that looks at the Civil Rights Movement. Alcatraz was occupied by American Indians in the late 1960s. It inspired Native people to take action at sites across the country in the 70s.

I’ve recently found Smith’s website, Fear of a Red Planet. It includes Exile on Main Street, which is Smith’s cyberbook. I want to draw you attention to his essay,  “Home of the Brave.” In it, he talks about some of America’s favorite books, ones that masquerade as being by or about American Indians: Susan Jeffers’s Brother Eagle Sister Sky, and Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree. Here’s an excerpt from his essay:

Indians have been erased from the Master Narrative of this country, and replaced by the cartoon images that all of us know and most of us believe. At different times the narrative has said we didn't exist and the land was empty, then it was mostly empty and populated by fearsome savages, then populated by noble savages who couldn't get with the program, and on and on. Today the equation is Indian equals spiritualism and environmentalism. In twenty years it will probably be something else.

Visit his website. Read the entire essay. And, reconsider how you use Brother Eagle Sister Sky, or The Education of Little Tree.

Note: There is discussion of Brother Eagle Sister Sky in the article Jean Mendoza and I wrote for the journal, Early Childhood Research & Practice. The article is called "Examining Multicultural Picture Books for the Early Childhood Classroom: Possibilities and Pitfalls." It is listed under "ARTICLES" (right side of this page) or you can click here to get to it.