American Indians or Stereotypes of American Indians in HUCKLEBERRY FINN

Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer has stereotypes of American Indians in it. Tom Sawyer also has an Indian character who Twain calls "Injun Joe." On January 10, 2011 I wrote an extensive review of Tom Sawyer.

Today I'm taking a few minutes to note occurrences of "Indian" and "Injun" and "powwow" in Huckleberry Finn. Page numbers below are from the copy I read in Google Books. As you'll see, I'm not doing much analysis. This is more of an index of Indian/Injun for others who have read the book and are revisiting it, focusing on those two words.



 On page 17, Huck talks of how he and Tom would go to the cave and "powwow" over what they had done. Twain is using "powwow" to mean "talk about."

On page 20, the text reads that Huck

got an old tin lamp and an iron ring, and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it warn't no use, none of the genies come.

Sweat like an Injun? As compared to who? I wonder if "sweat like an Injun" was a common saying then?


On page 60, Jim is reminding Huck that he (Huck) said he wouldn't tell on Jim for running away. Huck says in reply:

I said I wouldn't, and I'll stick to it. Honest Injun, I will. People would call me a low-down Abolitionist and despise me for keeping mum, but that don't make no difference.

Injun is a slur, and "Honest Injun" Interesting that in a passage where we sympathize with Huck for his anti-slavery stance. On one hand, Twain is doing a good thing. With the other, he's poking at American Indians. I imagine someone arguing that he didn't know that he was denigrating Indians. What do you think?

On page 131, the text reads:

There was a yell at us, and a jingling of bells to stop the engines, a powwow of cussing, and whistling of steam--and as Jim went overboard on one side and I on the other, she came smashing straight through the raft.

"She" is another boat. I think Twain uses "powwow" here to mean "lot of people." He uses "powwow" again on page 166, where he writes "then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her powwow shut off and leave the river still again..." In that use, I think he means noise generated by the boat itself.

On page 196, the text reads:

Boggs comes a-tearing along on his horse, whopping and yelling like an Injun, and singing out: "Cler the track, thar. I'm on the waw-path, and the price uv coffins is a-gwyne to raise." 

Boggs, we learn, is drunk, and that he is "the best-natured-est old fool in Arkansaw--never hurt nobody, drunk nor sober." In that scene, Boggs, "on the waw-path" is out to kill a lot of people. He draws on stereotypical ideas about Indians, but he would never hurt anyone. Does Twain mean for us to believe that Indians aren't hurt by those words? Course, he probably didn't think that a Native person would read at all.

On page 241, Joanna and Huck are talking with each other. She wonders if Huck has been telling her the truth:

"Honest injun, now, hain't you been telling me a lot of lies?"
"Honest injun," says I.
"None of it at all?"
"None of it at all. Not a lie in it," says I. 

Beverly Clark, a colleague in children's literature, has a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature, wherein she traces the first use of "Honest Injun" to Twain's Tom Sawyer, published in 1876. The phrase is still used, as demonstrated by former GOP chair Steele. It appears again in Huckleberry Finn on page 312.

On page 251, Twain writes that the undertaker "glided along, and the powwow and racket getting more and more outrageous all the time..."  Again, it seems to me he's using it to indicate talking.

On page 280, "there was a rattling powwow" --- It could be noise or people talking.

On page 372, Tom and Huck are scheming to help Jim. Tom writes a letter, signing it from "Unknown Friend" that says that:

a desprate gang of cutthroats from over in the Indian Territory going to steal your runaway nigger to-night, and they have been trying to scare you so as you will stay in the house and not bother them.

The letter says that Unknown Friend is one of the cutthroats but that he's "got religgion" and wants to quit the gang. Historically, there were cutthroat gangs in Indian Territory. Many were tried in the courtroom of Isaac Parker, the man who came to be known as "the Hanging Judge."

On page 379, the text reads:

They'd had all the dogs shut up, so they wouldn't scare off the robbers; but by this time somebody had let them loose, and here they come, making powwow enough for a million; but they was our dogs; so we stopped in our tracks till they catched up...

As seen in earlier pages, Twain is using it to mean noise.

On page 388, farmers and their wives are talking about "niggers" who:

stole that shirt right off o' the line! and as for that sheet they made the rag ladder out of, ther' ain't no telling how many times they didn't steal that; and flour, and candle, and candlesticks, and spoons, and the old warming pan, and most a thousand things that I disremember now, and my new calico dress; and me and Silas and my Sid and tom on the constant watch day and night, as I was a-telling you, and not a one of us could catch hide nor hair nor sight nor sound of them; and here at the last minute, lo and behold you, they slides right in under our noses and fools us, and not only fools us, but the Injun Territory robbers too, and actuly gets away with that nigger safe and sound, and that with sixteen men and twenty-two dogs right on their very heels at that very time!

In the letter (on page 372), Twain had Tom write "Indian Territory" but in the dialogue, the character says "Injun" instead.

I'll say briefly that most, if not all of Twain's use of Injun/Indian/powwow are examples of racially inflected language.

Boarding school video available: SHI-SHI-ETKO

Several times on American Indians in Children's Literature, I've written about Nicola Campbell's outstanding picture book about a little girl going to boarding school, Shi-shi-etko.  An award-winning book, Shi-shi-etko was made into an award-winning short film that is available from Moving Images Distribution for $40.

As you'll see, there are English subtitles in the film. Throughout the film, the language you hear is Halq'emalem, which is the language of the Sto:lo people of the Sto:lo Nation in British Columbia.  Across the US and Canada, Native Nations are using films like Shi-shi-etko, and newer technologies (the Internet and Apple products) to teach their languages. Through First Voices, there is an iPod and iPad app for Halq'emalem, available at no charge through iTunes.  Preview the Halq'emalem app here. 

Here's the trailer:






I highly recommend that you order a copy of Campbell's Shi-shi-etko today, and order the video, too.


CM Magazine review of Shi-shi-etko

Ryan Red Corn and Sterlin Harjo's SMILING INDIANS

People in the children's literature world love to use photographs taken by Edward S. Curtis. They believe his photos to be authentic portrayals of Native life. They're invariably reproduced in a sepia tone, which adds to their perceived authenticity.

The thing is, they aren't authentic. They're staged, and in many instances, he used props, too. If an individual didn't have "Indian" things, Curtis provided them. That isn't a good thing... The props were not specific to the tribe of the person in the picture. There's a little bit of info about the authenticity of Curtis's work on the website for the Hearst Museum. Some years back, I read Christopher M. Lyman's The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis, published in 1982 by Pantheon. The Library of Congress includes Lyman's book on its page about Curtis. The annotation says:

Lyman critiques Curtis's pictorialist, romantic, and idealized images of Native people because they obscure a drearier, more desperate reality. Curtis is also criticized for editing "modern" elements, such as alarm clocks and automobiles, from the views and for his use of props and costumes. Lyman exposes various misrepresentations in Curtis's depictions, as well as in other photographers' work of indigenous people, with many photographic examples.

It is that imagery that Ryan Red Corn and Sterlin Harjo address with their video, Smiling Indians, below. 



If you're an author, or an editor in a publishing house, and you're thinking about using Curtis's photos, think again. Do you want to contribute to the misinformation captured in his photos? Of course, I hope your answer is a resounding "No!"

Seale and Slapin's A BROKEN FLUTE available in ebook

Seale and Slapin's A Broken Flute: The Native Perspective in Books for Children is available in ebook. I've got two print copies that I hunt for when I need to check on a review. Yesterday I figured out it is available as an ebook that I won't have to hunt for each time I want to use it! I paid $30 for this highly recommended resource.

I got it through Google. (For those who don't know, you can search the web using Google's "Books" option. They have a lot of books available that way.)

Ann Turner's note in FATHER OF LIES

Three Turtles and Their Pet Librarian posted a review of Ann Turner's Father of Lies. The book is about the Salem witch trials. In their review (dated Feb 24, 2011), they feature an excerpt from an author's note in the book:

The opinions about Native Americans expressed in this novel only reflect the historical record and not this author's beliefs. They are important to understanding this period. In Chapters Nineteen and Twenty-Seven, some of the responses in the witch trials are taken directly from the historical transcripts of the trials."

They go on to note what Turner's note refers to:

Truthfully, there is very little mention of Native Americans at all in the book, and it comes in the form of comments you would expect from the townspeople of that time - (from an 'afflicted' girl) "I vow the Devil was tall, dark, and wicked looking, like our enemies the Indians, with an evil heart inside." 

I have several thoughts on Turner's note.

Ann Turner wrote a book in Scholastic's Dear America series. Titled The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow: The Diary of Sarah Nita, a Navajo Girl, New Mexico, 1864, it was soundly critiqued by Beverly Slapin in A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children (by the way, A Broken Flute is a key resource and is now available in ebook from Googlebooks). In that book, Turner tried--and failed--to write from the perspective of a Dine (Navajo) child. She also failed in her attempt to write from the perspective of Sitting Bull in her book Sitting Bull Remembers. Slapin's review of Sitting Bull Remembers is here.

I wonder if those critiques prompted Turner to include the note pointing out the opinions her character expresses are from a historical transcript and not her own creation? Either way, I think it is useful to include the note. It points readers to historical documents, and that's a good thing to do. My copy of the book hasn't arrived yet, but when I get it, I'll say more about the documents. I hope she provides titles of them elsewhere in her note or in a bibliography. I'd like to read that transcript. I did a quick search using "the Devil was talk, dark, and wicked looking" and didn't find anything.


That said, it is important to point out that the note itself says that the opinions reflect "the historical record." In fact, there is more than one historical record. Turner is referring to the historical record of the white people in Salem Village in Massachusetts in 1692. Her note would be far better if she said she is referring to "a historical record." There were, of course, many Native villages all through that area. I doubt that they would liken themselves to the Puritan's Devil. Their historical record, in other words, is not the same as the one of the white people in Salem Village. 
At her website, Ann Turner has a page about her young adult books. There, she's got a "Coming in 2009" section that says:

--Father of Lies ---a novel set in the time of the Salem Witch Trials, but with a difference: the heroine has s [sic] disorder which gives her an eye of truth into the lies of the village; HarperCollins, Fall, 2009.

Turner tells us that in Father of Lies, she is doing something different. As she said on her website, her heroine has an eye for truth into the lies told by people in the village. I guess the heroine doesn't have an eye for the truth about Native people...  Or maybe we're to believe that all the people in the village believed Indians had evil hearts. I suppose that is possible, but if Ann Turner is doing something different already, wouldn't it have been cool if her heroine could see through the village "truths" about Indians, too?

Toni Morrison: "racially inflected language"

I am rereading Joel Taxel's "Multicultural Literature and the Politics of Reaction" wherein he quotes Toni Morrison saying there is "no escape from racially inflected language." I hear that kind of language all the time. Many examples come to mind, such as "sit Indian style" or "off the reservation" or "Indian giver" or "on the warpath." Which ones come to your mind?

Joel's article is as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1997. He writes about the NRA and right wing talk radio.

One thing that needs doing, however, is a shift in categorizing American Indians as part of the "multicultural population" in the U.S. This is not meant as a criticism of Joel or anyone who studies children's lit. It is my effort to bring scholarship and writings of Native people into Children's literature. We are a minority and we are underrepresented but... Due to our status as sovereign nations, there is a legal and political dimension that sets us apart from other groups. I am working on an article about that difference.

"wild Indians" in Dickens' DAVID COPPERFIELD

On our road trip last weekend we listened to David Copperfield (audio book). I enjoyed it more than I expected, but noted Dickens' use of "wild Indians..."

In chapter 4, Murdstone, the sadistic man who married Davy's mother (Davy's father is dead), decides to punish Davy by beating him with a cane. To start, he grabs Davy in a headlock. Davy pleads with him, to no avail, and so, Davy bites him.  This makes matters worse. Murdstone decides Davy must be sent away to boarding school, and that he must wear a sign on his back that says "Take care of him. He bites." (p. 57)

In chapter 6, Davy is at the school. It is a break when the students are gone. He worries of what will happen to him when they return and read the sign, but a boy named Traddles arrives first. He is sympathetic towards Davy and introduces him to other students as they arrive, by pretending that Davy is a dog. Here's the passage (p. 61):

Some of them certainly did dance about me like wild Indians, and the greater part could not resist the temptation of pretending that I was a dog, and patting and smoothing me lest I should bite, and saying, "Lie down, sir!" and calling me Towzer.

There you see, Dickens using "wild Indians." Dickens using "dance about me" like "wild Indians." I'll have more to say about this... later.

American Indians and "Double Jeopardy!" (yeah, the game show)

The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) publishes a blog that is loaded with terrific information. In January, they uploaded a series of images and a video of an episode of Jeopardy. The reason? One of the categories was "National Museum of the American Indian."

The surprise (or maybe not a surprise) was that the contestants chose EVERY OTHER ITEM IN EVERY OTHER CATEGORY. Finally, they had no choice. They had to select an item in the "National Museum of the American Indian" category. Does that blow you away? Jeopardy contestants know a lot of stuff... But they avoided that category. Watch the video NMAI put together.



As you saw, the contestants did ok with the clues in the NMAI category. But they were definitely afraid to go there... 

Want to see more? Read "Double Jeopardy" at the NMAI site, and click around while there! You'll learn a lot.

Leo Politi's LITTLE LEO

As I worked on my review essay about Leo Politi's Song of the Swallows, I kept recalling that somewhere, I'd seen something about another book of his where someone is playing Indian.

A few minutes ago, I did a quick search and found it right away. The book is based on his childhood. Titled Little Leo, here's the cover:

It was published in 1951, three years after Song of the Swallows. I think I have it somewhere... A good friend sent it to me a few years ago. The image above is from Appleby Books, a source for collectible and rare books. Their description:

A story based on Leo Politi's own childhood. Little Leo loved watching the Indians in the movies and one day his father bought him his own wonderful Indian Chief suit. When little Leo and his family traveled to his father's village in Italy, all the children were enchanted with Leo's suit and wanted to be Indians too! 

It is fascinating to think of the Leo-Politi-the-man writing about primitive Indians in Song of the Swallows, knowing that Leo-Politi-the-boy played Indian!

"Teaching Children about American Indians" - U Wisconsin, Eau Claire

What are you doing on Friday, February 25th?

If you're in the Eau Claire area, I'm giving a lecture and workshop on "Teaching Children about American Indians." The lecture is from 10:30 to 11:30 and the workshop is from 1:00 to 3:00. Both will be in the Davies Center.

Reservations are required, but the events are free and open to the public. To register, contact Hannah Moen at moenhj@uwec.edu or 715-836-4565 by Feb. 18.

Indians in Leo Politi's SONG OF THE SWALLOWS

Among the Caldecott Medal books I studied for my presentation at the Children's Literature Symposium at Florida State University-Sarasota last week is Leo Politi's Song of the Swallows. It won the Caldecott in 1950.

Cover and publisher's synopsis:

Every summer, the swallows leave San Juan Capistrano and fly far away, to a peaceful green island — but they always come back in the spring, on St. Joseph's Day. Juan loves las golondrinas, and so does his friend, Julian, the gardener at the mission.

This year, Juan plants a garden in his own yard. There's nothing he wants more than for the swallows to nest there. And on St. Joseph's Day, his dream comes true.




Based on comments and reviews at Amazon, Library Thing, Goodreads and similar sites, readers respond positively to the story. In fact, the story of the swallows is something that I, too, could respond positively to, but I'm continually pulled out of the story by what I know about the history of the missions.

Below, my analysis is in italics. Summary and quotes from the book are in plain text.

On the first page we see Juan (shown on the cover) on his way to school. To get there he goes through the gardens at the Mission and stops to speak to Julian, the Mission's bell ringer. That conversation takes place in the garden, and is shown on the second double-paged spread in the book. Juan and Julian stand in front of a statue, looking up at it. Julian tells Juan "the story of the Mission" as follows:

"Long, long ago," Julian told him, "the good brothers of Saint Francis came to this country from across the sea. Father Junipero Serra and the brothers walked along the wild trail through the wilderness. With the help of the Indians they built many mission churches." 

For me, several of Julian's words leap out:

The "good brothers"
The "good brothers of Saint Francis" were Spanish missionaries who traveled to an area of the United States that became California. "Serra and the brothers" weren't the first ones to walk along that trail in 1776. In fact, they were there in a second attempt to set up a mission. The year before, the Indians rebelled and drove "the good brothers" out of the area, forcing the brothers to abandon their missionary work. Indian men in that area had, for several years, been fighting soldiers who raped their women. Edward D.  Castillo quotes Serra who, in 1773, wrote (emphasis mine):

In the morning, six or more soldiers would set out together, with or without the permission of the corporal, on horseback, and go to the far distant rancherias, even many leagues away. When both men and women at sight of them took to their heels--and this account comes from the father, who learned of it from the many declarations and complaints of the gentiles--the soldiers, clever as they are at lassoing cows and mules, would catch Indian women with their lassos to become prey for their unbridled lust. At times some Indian men would try to defend their wives, only to be shot down with bullets.

Castillo notes, too, that male and female children in the missions were victims of sexual assaults. His article is "Gender Status Decline, Resistance, and Accommodation among Female Neophytes in the Missions of California: A San Gabriel Case Study," published in 1994 in American Indian Culture and Research Journal. So... calling them "good brothers" is, for me, problematic. 


Father Junipero Serra
Serra is a controversial figure amongst American Indians, especially in California. In the 1930s, the process to have him canonized began.  In "Junipero Serra's Canonization and the Historical Record," historian James A. Sandos writes that in December of 1948 in Fresno a historian and two priests testified before an ecclesiastical court about Serra's record. (Note: Sandos article is in The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5, Dec 1988, pp. 1253-1269).

That, coincidentally, is the same year that Song of the Swallows was published. Sandos writes that, as "Father President" of the missions from 1769 to 1784 when he died, Serro "gave directions for his Indians to be whipped" (p. 254) when they failed to live according to church precepts. Sandos also states that Carey McWilliams wrote a popular history of California in which he said that the missions were like concentration camps. McWilliams' work was based on the work of a physiologist named Sherburne F. Cook at the University of California, Berkeley. 

The Catholic Church was, understandably, not happy with any of these publications and their efforts to see the missions from the point of view of Indians. I wonder if Politi followed any of that controversy?


"With the help of the Indians..."
What kind of help was it? By then, there were Indians who had become Catholics and did help build the churches, but the missions were constructed primarily through forced, unpaid labor, and not through the methods suggested by "help of the Indians." 

Still on that same double-paged spread are these words:

"The Missions were like little villages," Julian said. There the Indians learned to make shoes and harness, blankets and hats, tools and pottery--many of the things they needed in their daily life."

Does Politi mean for us to think that the Indians learned how to do all of that from the "good brothers" in the Mission? That they were shoeless and without blankets, hats, tools, and pottery before the "good brothers" arrived?! As Sandos writes, ideas about Indians as primitives had long been set aside by historians who knew that was not the case. 

Yet, Politi gave his readers primitive Indians and the Caldecott committee either agreed with his portrayal of them, or, didn't think it was important enough to sway them from selecting the book for the Caldecott Medal. 

In all honesty, it is hard for me to enjoy the story about the swallows. The content on the first pages gets in the way. I wonder how the book is used with children? Does anyone point to the inaccurate information at the beginning? Does anyone pause to wonder about the accuracy of that information? Do you?

There's more to say about Serra and Indians... In the 1980s, Rupert and Jeanette Costo published Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide in an effort to stop Serra from being canonized. It was filled with the writings, scholarship, and testimony of California Indians who did not think Serra was worthy of saint status. The pope ignored it and advanced Serra to beatification on December 11, 1987. 

Further reading:
"Retired Bishop Apologizes for Mistreating the Miwoks"
"California Indians Critique Lesson Plans on California Missions"


UPDATE, Feb 12, 2010
Leo Politi wrote Little Leo two years later. On the cover, Leo is in an "Indian chief suit."