Editors note: Among the email I receive are ones from teachers who found a review on AICL helpful to their work with students. In this case, the teacher wrote to me about David Arnold's Mosquitoland. The email I received from "K" was interesting enough that I invited them to write it up for AICL's readers. Here's what K submitted.
__________
“White people!” I think to myself, about myself, channelling one
of my student’s (head-shaking) refrains. I can see his friendly-mocking face
and his shaking head as I read Dr. Debbie Reese’s post about her analysis of
David Arnold’s Mosquitoland and her subsequent exchange with the author
via Twitter. Sigh.
As a white woman from an upper-middle class upbringing, I try to
be very conscious of my white and socioeconomic privilege. I spend countless
hours trying to choose books that provide both reflections and windows to my
diverse students. Looking back on how much of my own studies were focused on
white, European male authors, I know that that impacted me as a woman and
regardless of how great these great works are, I know that they are not they only
examples of greatness and many include dubious content.
And yet, despite my own attempted awareness, I fell into my own
trap of privilege, into a reading that I had the luxury of experiencing because
I am “white people.” Having read and admittedly enjoyed Mosquitoland a
few years ago, I recently found myself needing a book to start a conversation
with my students about mental health struggles. I had been somewhat bothered by
the protagonist’s casual dismissal of pharmacological treatments but thought
that that, in and of itself (which problematic), could be a good conversation
starter as non-examples often are. Many of my students have very entrenched
views on certain medications and I thought that the book could give us a
framework for those valuable discussions.
While I found Mim’s flippant and self-serving treatment of her
heritage less than ideal, I did see it as being characteristic of a teenager. I
did not initially tie the “war paint” to that heritage but rather while reading
too quickly thought about it as a female putting on makeup to face the (male)
world (again demonstrating the privilege of my lens). Nor did it occur to me to
factcheck the various references to cultural sayings and proverbs--I thought
that was why authors had editors...and Google. When the starter curriculum I
purchased turned me on to Dr. Reese’s article about the book and the
controversy, I was appalled at my errors in judgement. I clearly owed all of my
students, Native American or otherwise, an apology, but more than that, I owed
them the truth.
They got to see me make a mistake and own up to it. We discussed
the importance of this in and of itself. As we continued reading, I pointed to
these and other problematic points, which in turn seemed to give them
permission to call out the author on other things:
“Walt seems more Autistic than Down Syndrome.”
“Is Caleb really schizophrenic or does he have multiple personalities?”
“Yeah, if you meet a white person who says they’re Native, they're probably Cherokee.”
My Native students are primarily Paiute and Shoshone. The
ones who made this last comment explained that what they meant was not white
people claiming (à la Mim) to be Native American, but rather Native people who
have more Caucasian features (i.e. blue eyes and/or blond hair). But none of
them being Cherokee they’d had no clue about the misappropriated proverbs
either. Thankfully, I was able to share Dr. Reese’s article “David Arnold’s
Cherokee protagonist in MOSQUITOLAND” (March 07, 2015) with them, then we
progressed to the Twitter exchange, compared Dr. Reese’s resume with that of
David Arnold, discussed credibility and citing your sources, spent a period
troubleshooting Arnold’s repeated fall-back to Mim’s “Cherokee” heritage and
what alternatives he could have used (like, why not make her heritage Celtic?).
We read an article about Elizabeth Warren’s similar claim to Cherokee heritage
and the controversy it caused during her bid for Senate. We read about
“Americans,” the current exhibit at the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
dealing with the troubled history of the prominent use of Native American
imagery in the U.S. since its inception. My students questioned and
engaged with the problems of the story and the real life application but they
did reflect that if they had been Cherokee, they would have felt hurt and
offended by the misrepresentations in the novel. Where, we wondered, does an
author’s responsibility to be accurate lie? Largely, my Native American
students shrugged off the white author’s use of a character’s “Nativeness” as a
plot tool. I worry that this is what they are used to seeing in literature.
Thanks to Dr. Reese, what could have been an ignorant passing on
of ignorance was instead a lesson for the whole class, myself included. We all
got more out of the unit for the non-example Mosquitoland provided. All
of my students learned about not only the complicated struggles surrounding
mental illness, but also about how the Cherokee tribes determine enrollment and
why; the history of using Native American imagery to represent “America” while
the government disenfranchises those same indigenous populations; the problem
of using another culture in one’s writing, especially when the history between
those cultures is so fraught; and to question authority, whether it be an
author, a teacher, or anyone who says something wrong or problematic,
especially if you know better.
