Full Text Article: Examining Multicultural Picture Books for the Early Childhood Classroom

One of the best articles I worked on is "Examining Multicultural Picture Books for the Early Childhood Classroom: Possibilities and Pitfalls." It was published by Early Childhood Research and Practice, an on-line journal that publishes its articles in English and Spanish. As the journal title suggests, the articles in the journal are about working with young children. Our article has been republished in several edited volumes about early childhood education.

The article is by my dear friend, Jean Mendoza, and myself. The first portion of the article provides background info on children's literature and education of young children. Later in the article, we discuss some popular books and authors, including:

Brother Eagle Sister Sky, by Susan Jeffers

Arrow to the Sun, by Gerald McDermott

Knots on a Counting Rope, by Bill Martin and John Archambault

A Day's Work, by Eve Bunting, illustrated by Ronald Himler

A Gift from Papa Diego, by Benjamin Alire Saenz, illustrated by Geronimo Garcia

Jingle Dancer, by Cynthia Leitich Smith, illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu.

It is a meaty article, packed with good information for anyone interested in children's books and education.

In March of this year, I submitted an article for publication, in which I said that most books about American Indians are set in the past, not present. The reviewer questioned my statement, suggesting that there has been a lot of change in recent decades, and that my statement was outdated.

To see if my perception was accurate, I went to the Children's Literature Comprehensive Database, which includes over 1,200,000 records and over 220,000 reviews from 34 different sources such as KIRKUS, HORN BOOK GUIDE, and Booklist. I searched the database, using the terms "American Indians" and "Native Americans" and I limited the search to works of fiction published in 2000. My search returned 42 titles; seven are set in the present day; the remaining 36 are historical fiction.

I don't know what the data looks like for fiction overall. Generally speaking, are more works of historical fiction published than works of realistic or modern fiction? Is it at this same ratio (7:36)? What about works of fiction about other US minorities? If I did the search using African Americans as my search term, what would I find?

If readers of the blog know of articles that include these statistics, please let us know.

More on Duncan's SEASON OF THE TWO-HEART

Hurray! I figured out how to add links to my page, in the space beneath my profile.

I finished the Duncan book Season of the Two Heart and didn't like it any better than when I posted about it earlier this week. Lots of problems in language, bias, tone.

The book is no longer in print, but my search of WorldCat at UIUC indicates that 189 libraries in Illinois own the book. Curious, I called a few of them to see when the book last circulated. At the Cissna Park library (I apologize for not providing more info about where (in Illinois) these libraries are located), their copy went out once since they added it in 1992. The head librarian said it would likely be weeded out. At the Crestwood Library, the book went out once, in 2000. At the Harvey library, it went out 7 times in 2004. And at our local public library (Urbana Free Library), it last went out in July of 2003.

So, people are still reading it. I wonder what they think about its negative representations of American Indians... Are the perceptions they have before reading it affirmed? Or are they jolted by the book?

A reader, Diana, wrote to say she working on a paper and finds the material on the blog useful. I wanted to post links to some of my on-line writing about American Indians in children's books, but can't figure out how to do it. I'll get it figured out eventually, but in the meantime, here's some of the articles:

“Teaching Young Children about Native Americans,” by Debbie Reese, ERIC Digest, EDO-PS-96-3, May 1996.
http://ceep.crc.uiuc.edu/eecearchive/digests/1996/reese96.html

“Fiction Posing as Truth: A Critical Review of Ann Rinaldi’s My Heart is on the Ground: The diary of Nannie Little Rose, a Sioux Girl, by Marlene Atleo, Naomi Caldwell, Barbara Landis, Jean Mendoza, Deborah Miranda, Debbie Reese, LaVera Rose, Beverly Slapin, and Cynthia Smith, in Rethinking Schools Online, Volume 13, No. 4, Summer 1999.
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/13_04/review.shtml

“Authenticity and Sensitivity: Goals for writing and reviewing books with Native American themes,” by Debbie Reese, in School Library Journal.Com, 12-2-1999.
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=63


“Examining Multicultural Picture Books for the Early Childhood Classroom:
Possibilities and Pitfalls,” by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese, in Early Childhoood Research and Practice, Fall 2001, Volume 3, Number 2.
http://ecrp.uiuc.edu/v3n2/mendoza.html

“Native Americans Today,” by Debbie Reese, at ReadWriteThink, on-line lesson plans sponsored by International Reading Association, National Council of Teachers of English.
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=63

Lois Duncan's SEASON OF THE TWO-HEART

News first: Sherman Alexie is working on a young adult novel. It will be published (scheduled for release in 2007) by Little Brown, and is titled The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. if you are unfamiliar with his work, take a look at his website: http://www.shermanalexie.com.

I'm reading an old book by Lois Duncan, titled Season of the Two-Heart, published in 1964 by Dodd, Mead. I ordered it from a used book seller because it is about a Pueblo Indian girl who leaves her reservation to spend her senior year in Albuquerque to attend public school. She lives there with a white family. In return for room and board, she will take care of the two younger children (boys) and other chores (housekeeping and maybe some cooking).

There's some pretty outrageous passages. Duncan was trying to write a story about a girl in conflict who wants to leave her home for the white world. To do that, Duncan had to make Pueblo life unattractive and unappealing, and for readers, she had to create sympathy and support for the girl's decision. Here's one example:

"The nurse gave me some medicine," Natachu had said, "in a bottle. She says I am to put it on my head and on the heads of the babies. She says it will keep the little bugs from biting us."

And here's more in that thread:

"Medicine on your head!" Grandmother had been nearly beside herself with indignation. "First water and now medicine! Perhaps she would like you to cut off your head entirely! Medicine, indeed!"

"I've been using it for a couple of days now," Natachu had continued determinedly. "It works. My head hardly itches at all."

"Heads are supposed to itch," Grandmother had insisted. "It is the Great Spirit Himself who puts the little bugs there. If He did not wish us to have them. He would take them away Himself."

In the pages leading to this, the grandma (who is developed as a mean-spirited person who rules the family with an iron fist) objects to the indoor plumbing that was recently installed. She tells the family they are wasting water they'll need for drinking, and they should not use it on their faces and hands. Natachu has been washing her hair, and her grandmother says:

"See her hair; it is thinning already! All that water is washing the roots from her head."

I'm currently reading on page 37. The Boynton's (the family who takes her in) have a senior daughter named Laurie who resents having Natachu around. Laurie's character is developed as a popular, outgoing teenager who has all the latest clothes.

Duncan wrote this book 42 years ago. I wonder---do authors (like Duncan) go back and shudder when they read some of what they wrote? She, like any of us, is a product of our society. We are all socialized to think in certain ways about certain people, and whether we are aware of that socialization or not, it makes its way into what we say and do, often without our realizing it. Dirty Indians. That's what we have in Season of the Two-Heart.

Third post to the blog... I hope to post on a weekly basis, with news re children's books about American Indians, but also response(s) to emails I get from readers.

Larry Whitler posted the title of a book he wrote, called Oreo and Braun: XOB, The Full Circle Quest
and noted that some of the story is about a Native American man and his son and prejudice they experienced in 1886.

Larry---what tribe is the man? My blog is called "American Indians in Children's Literature." I use the global term "American Indians" because my discussions are on that topic, broadly speaking. However, I try to be specific when I discuss Native people or characters, if I have access to that information. For example, I do not say I am American Indian. Instead, I specifically say I am from Nambe Pueblo. This is important practice, as it gets across the idea that there are over 500 federally-recognized tribes in the United States. This specificity serves to counter the monolithic image of THE American Indian.

Also of interest regarding Larry's book... I don't know the book, but went over the the Amazon site to see what I could learn about it there. NOWHERE does it say that there is Native American content. Why is that? I pose that as a question to readers... Why do we, as a society, not see American Indians? Why are we (American Indians) glossed over, or viewed simply as part of the landscape, oftentimes not worth mentioning?

Even in Wilder's Little House on the Prairie, a lot of people omit reference to American Indians when they talk about that book. Why? In that book, in particular, there is a great deal of content about American Indians, specifically the Osage people. Look over the internet lesson plans. How many of those lesson plans have any mention of American Indians?

A bit of exciting news...

The Northern Arizona Book Festival has established the Michael Lacapa Spirit Prize. It will be awarded to an exceptional children's book, set in the southwest, published within the last two years. When a website with info is up, I'll post the link here.

I started this blog in May. This is my second post.

A reader asked (in comments to first post) if I know the work of Ani Rucki. I don't know Rucki's work.

It is the case that there's a boatload of children's books about American Indians out there. Kate Shanley, an enrolled Assiniboine woman from the Fort Peck reservation and professor of Native American Studies at the University of Montana-Missoula, has a terrific article in which she talks about "the Indians America loves to love." That love drives a lot of people to write what they think are stories about American Indians. Their stories, however, are based on pop culture and romantic/savage ideas about who we are. (Note: Shanley's article is called "The Indians America Loves to Love and Read," in AMERICAN INDIAN QUARTERLY, 1997, p. 675-702.)

I don't know anything about Rucki, but my experience has taught me that, chances are, any given children's book about American Indians has major flaws.

I've been studying and writing about children's books about American Indians since 1994 when I began work on my PhD. Prior to that, I taught elementary and middle school in New Mexico and Oklahoma. I am tribally enrolled at Nambe Pueblo, in northern New Mexico. I was raised there, and return home for the usual (weddings/funerals), but also for religious and spiritual gatherings.

As a schoolteacher, I taught my students about bias and stereotypes, about how books can be wrong. In graduate school, I honed my research and critical analysis skills. I've learned a great deal from others. Some key books include:

Slapin and Seale's THROUGH INDIAN EYES: THE NATIVE EXPERIENCE IN BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

Seale and Slapin's A BROKEN FLUTE: THE NATIVE EXPERIENCE IN BOOKS FOR CHILDREN

Kathleen Horning's COVER TO COVER

Betsy Hearne's two articles CITE THE SOURCE and RESPECT THE SOURCE

Below are some of the questions I have in my head whenever I sit down to analyze a Native story that is called a folktale. I invite conversation/discussion with readers of the blog about the questions.

When I consider a folktale, some things I look for are:

1) Is the person listed as the author listed as a "reteller"? That is, on the cover and/or on the title page, is the book "By Ani Rucki" or "Retold by Ani Rucki."

2) In the author's note, or in a source note, does Rucki say where she heard the story, or what source she found it in?

3) If Rucki provides info about her source, does she provide enough detail so that I could find the source if I wanted to?

4) In the author's note, does Rucki tell the reader the ways in which she changed/edited the story and why?

5) In a couple of reviews, there is mention that this is a Navajo folktale. How is that information provided in the book? Is it implied in the story itself or stated on the cover or title page?

I hope readers of the blog are interested in conversation about the questions I've listed above. My first post was a list of books, but my goal is for others to learn how to critically evaluate children's books about American Indians. With such skills, you own that knowledge and can carry and apply it with you wherever you go.