Year 2014 at American Indians in Children's Literature

I launched American Indians in Children's Literature in 2006. This is the first time I'm doing a recap of any given year. I started it in 2014, thinking I could post it in time for the end of 2014/start of 2015 when everyone is doing year end reflections, but it took far longer than I anticipated. I hope you enjoy it. It isn't comprehensive. I did over 100 posts in 2014. Here are some high and low points that stood out to me.

I always welcome your comments and emails. I make typos--and am always grateful to those of you who write to tell me about them. I fix 'em, thanks to you!

January

Travers in the Indian jewelry she wore all the time

Saving Mr. Banks came out in theaters. Reading a response to the movie prompted me to write Travers (author of Mary Poppins): "I lived with the Indians..." Do read that post! From the background on Travers to the side-by-side comparisons I did of the first edition and the revised edition without the racist images and text... Well... lots of fascinating info!

Always looking for young adult books set in the present day, and when I find them, hoping they'll be good... Among its many problems, Liz Fichera has Native characters being saved by white ones. Not necessarily a bad thing, but definitely a story line that we see far too often.  Hooked is on my not recommended list. It got a thumbs down, too, from Naomi Bishop, of the American Indian Library Association.

Brian Floca replied to my review of Locomotive. That post was one of AICL's most-read pages for 2014.

Though Mary Pope Osborne's Magic Tree House series is much-loved, I found many problems with Thanksgiving on Thursday. She found a new way to misrepresent Squanto in her book (it was published in 2002, but AICL looks at old and new books).

In other media, I learned about murals at post offices. It was interesting to see the differences in murals of Native peoples done by Native artists versus the stereotypical ones done by white artists.

My post about John Green's use of sarcasm regarding Native peoples generated a lot of discussion in the comments to it but also on Facebook. This sarcasm is in The Fault in Our Stars. 

I read--and recommended--The Giant Bear: An Inuit Folktale. It has a teacher's guide, too! Check it out.

I was thrilled to learn that Eric Gansworth's If I Ever Get Out of Here was chosen as one of YALSA's Best Fiction for Young Adults for 2014.

And, the American Indian Library Association announced the winners of its Youth Literature awards!

February

I was nervous about being interviewed for a CNN story about young adult literature. As I thought about that interview, I wrote about several books for young adults, noting that librarians and teachers must not let Alexie's young adult novel be "the single story" they read/share about Native peoples.

Tim Tingle's How I Became a Ghost and Eric Gansworth's If I Ever Get Out of Here were selected for discussion at CCBC-Net. The discussion was quite intense! The post includes a link to CCBC-Net. (By the way, CCBC won't be hosting their listserv anymore. I'll miss it.) If you're in a bookstore, these are the covers of their books:

I was pleased to see Laurie Halse Anderson's treatment of Native content in her The Impossible Knife of Memory. 

March 

In my review of Tim Tingle's How I Became a Ghost, I took special delight in his use of "Choctaw Nation" in the chapter heading for his opening chapter.

I had a rather long back-and-forth with Rosanne Parry over problems I found in her Written In Stone. I grew weary of that back-and-forth. It is unfinished. In the summary (above) for January, I noted how white characters save Native ones in Hooked. Parry is a white writer with good intentions, but has blinders to issues in how she went about her story. She asked me for input but then rebutted that input. It is similar to what Lynn Reid Banks did, and what Ann Rinaldi did (invite but reject input from Native scholar).

I did an analysis of books by/about American Indians sent to the Cooperative Center for Children's Books at Wisconsin in 2013. No surprise to see that most books by major publishers were by not-Native writers and that they had a lot of stereotyping and errors, while books by small publishers were by Native writers, and they were definitely far better in quality!

With so much interest in Rush Limbaugh's books for children, I decided I best take a look at the first one. It was just like listening to his show. No surprise there, but important to list its problems, especially since he went on to be named author of the year by the Children's Book Council.

It was a year in which Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington pro football team, preyed on tribes as he looked for Native people to endorse his use of a racist name for his team. My post on March 25 was about the foundation he set up for that preying activity.

April

For over a hundred years, Native people have spoken against misrepresentations of Native people. These things matter. Our youth struggle in school. They're inundated with misrepresentations in their books and other places, too, like with mascots. I looked at some of the data on graduation rates and linked it to stereotyping.

In February, I wrote about being interviewed by CNN. The story was uploaded in April (if the link to he CNN page doesn't work, send me an email and I'll send you a pdf).

I am thrilled to be part of an article that pointed to the work of excellent writers like Matt de la Pena, Sharon Draper, Walter Dean Myers, Cindy Pon, Malinda Lo, Sherman Alexie, Eric Gansworth, Cynthia Leitich Smith, and Debby Dahl Edwardson, and, a key person in the book publishing world, Cheryl Klein. Do read the article.




I read--and loved--Chukfi Rabbit's Big, Bad Bellyache by Greg Rodgers. He incorporated Choctaw words into the story. As you scroll down to December, you'll see the cover of Greg's book, and a photo of him, too. Sadly, he passed away in December.

April marks the month when the We Need Diverse Books campaign was taking form. It isn't the first time that a group of people took action to decenter the whiteness of literature. This time--with the demographic make-up of the US about to shift from white majority--could mean whiteness does, in fact, get decentered. My first post about the campaign was uploaded on April 28.

May

In the middle of May I participated in a twitter chat about the We Need Diverse Books campaign. I advocated for books by Native writers and was (as usual) challenged for that advocacy. The outcome was a post about that advocacy that included a photo gallery of Native writers and illustrators who have done books for children or young adults. I later turned that post into a page that is now in my menu bar above (beneath AICL's logo) that I am steadily adding to periodically.

I read a delightful picture book: Hungry Johnny by Cheryl Minnema and Wesley Ballinger! Though it features Ojibwe people, it is a lot like Pueblo gatherings, where elders take center stage.

And, another delightful picture book I read in May is Sweetest Kulu by Celina Kalluk and Alexandria Neonakis.

And yet another delight that month was Arigon Starr's Super Indian comic!

One of the many dreadful books I read in 2014 is Julia Mary Gibson's Copper Magic. The stereotypical mystical Indian theme is front and center in this young adult novel, and, well, it is yet another awful book from a major publisher! It was also disheartening to see stereotypes in the popular Where's Waldo series.

June

First week of June, I wrote about the We Need Diverse Books campaign. I support what they're doing. The WNDB group did a presentation at Book Expo on May 31. My post was a compilation of tweets and photos coming from BEA.

I did an in-depth analysis of Katherine Kirkpatrick's Between Two Worlds. Like too many books from major publishers, it is replete with errors and stereotypes about Native people. Rubbing noses? Sheesh!  It is a great example of the work ahead of the We Need Diverse Books campaign.

Stereotypes like those Kirkpatrick used are one problem. Another is ambiguity. Paul Goble's much-acclaimed The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses doesn't specify a tribe. There is no one-size-fits-all for Native nations.

In the middle of the month I read two outstanding books. Both are tribally specific, both are the work of Native people. I highly recommend them: Donald F. Montileaux's Tasunka: A Lakota Horse Legend and Arigon Starr's Annumpa Luma--Code Talker.  Also in the middle of the month, Beverly Slapin sent me her review of Joseph Bruchac's Killer of Enemies. It won the Young Adult award from the American Indian Library Association.

Towards the end of the month, I wrote up a review of a "Native American Zodiac" that was circulating widely. One rule of thumb that'll help you know if something is worthwhile is to ask "is this tribally specific." With this zodiac, the easy answer is no. Yet, it is hugely popular, so I hope you'll read the critique and share it with others.

July

The month kicked of with a wonderful look at Tim Tingle's remarks at the American Library Association's conference. He won the American Indian Library Association's Youth Literature Award for How I Became A Ghost and was there to receive his award.

In the middle of the month, I wrote a bit about E. B. White. Did you notice the Native content in Stuart Little? Take a look.

A librarian wrote to ask me about Gary Paulsen's Mr. Tucket. I hadn't read it before. Her request prompted me to read it. I did a chapter-by-chapter analysis. Though Paulsen was tribally specific, he drew heavily on stereotypes.

August

Earlier in the year, a person at the Library of Congress asked if I could recommend a Native mystery writer that they could have at the National Book Festival. I asked colleagues in my Native network of scholars and writers, and was pointed to the work of Cherokee writer, Sara Sue Hoklotubbe. At the end of the month, I wrote about her Sadie Walela series.

As I was recovering from a broken ankle, I didn't do much blogging at all, but I did read Hoklotubbe's books. I like them very much! I'm glad she was able to be at the National Book Festival. In the days following her reading, I thoroughly enjoyed the photos and stories she shared about the experience on her Facebook page.

September

A very high point for the month was reading--and loving--Dreaming in Indian: Contemporary Native American Voices. 

I was glad to see it getting lot of positive buzz from mainstream journals, too. School Library Journal listed it as Best Book 2014 in the Nonfiction category. It is a terrific example of what we need to see lots of so the publishing industry moves away from what we get from Goble, Paulsen, Kirkpatrick, Gibson, Parry, Limbaugh, Osborne...

Speaking of Goble, I wrote about him, asking Was Paul Goble adopted into the Yakima and Sioux tribes?

I put out a call for books for early readers. A learned that Jack Prelutsky's It's Thanksgiving had been redone in 2007, but that the stereotypical problems in the earlier book (published in 1982) were unchanged.

I read The Education of Little Tree. I knew it was deeply problematic, but didn't know just how bad it is. I was surprised at some of its content. Cherokee "mating dances"?! Reading that part, I shook my head. So much wrong with it, and yet, it circulates and sells, and sadly--informs readers and writers, too.

Maybe its power in misinforming people is evident in publication of books like Heather Sappenfield's The View From Who I Was. The author meant well--they always do--but the Native community is quite irate over what she did in her book. I did a careful read of it and shared it with her and her editor. Some changes were made as a result... Instead of "costume" she used "regalia" but those are easy changes and don't get at the foundational problems with the book.

There are problems in Bouwman's The Remarkable and Very True Story of Lucy and Snowcap (Two Lions, 2012) and Bow's Sorrow's Knot (Arthur A. Levine Books, 2013). Lots of writers love the "mystical" Indian. There's a lot of that in Nordgren's Anung's Journey (Light Messages Publishing, 2014),  too.

Looking back, it was a tough month. I also wrestled with Neal Shusterman over his Unwind series. He read my review and responded with a comment. Later in the year I wrote more about his books.

October 

High points first!

Carol Lindstrom's Girls Dance Boys Fiddle is terrific. Published in 2013, it is from a small press in Canada called Pemmican Publications.

From another small publisher, Native Northwest, we got the gorgeous and bilingual counting book, We All Count: A Book of Numbers by Julie Flett.

At the other end of the publishing continuum is Sebastian Robertson's picture book biography about his dad, Robbie Robertson. Way cool.

The low points are two picture books by big publishers that diss Native people. They are As An Oak Tree Grows by Brian Karas (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014) and Thomas Jefferson: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Everything by Maira Kalman (Penguin, 2014).

Over in the UK, The Guardian worked with Seven Stories Press on a diversity initiative that includes Amazing Grace and Apache: Girl Warrior. Both stereotype Native people and ought not be on a list of diverse books.

In contrast to those low points is K. V. Flynn's On The Move. Flynn isn't Native but it is obvious he did his homework to write On The Move. His characters are from specific tribes and they're well developed, too.

I ended the month with a look at Virginia Stroud's Doesn't Fall Off His Horse. Published in 1994 by Dial Books, it is excellent and now available in ebook.

November

November is always a stressful month for two reasons. For several years now, the President of the US has designated it as a month dedicated to Native peoples. Because it is also the month that the US celebrates Thanksgiving, things get awfully skewed to a romantic narrative that misinforms and miseducates children about America and American Indians. It is also a month in which I'm asked to do guest posts and lectures.

In preparation for a television interview that would be televised later in the month on CUNY TV, I wrote up Some Thoughts about Native Americans and Thanksgiving. I pointed to some of my favorite books.

Here's info about the Twitter chat I did for We Need Diverse Books. It was storified by the WNDB team. WNDB team member Miranda Paul interviewed me over at Rate Your Story, which is a site designed to help writers and the WNDB team asked me to do a Tumblr post, which I titled Why I Support WNDB.

Beverly Slapin contributed two items: a great review of Kim Shuck's Rabbit Stories and with Kim, a satirical piece, How to Write a Dystopian Young Adult Novel (or short story) with Native Characters for Fun and Profit.

A perfect reference book for the month is David Treuer's Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians But Were Afraid to Ask. Packed with solid info you can use to enrich your own ability to discern the good from the not-so-good (or just plain awful).

Treuer's book is one that I wish writers who incorporate or feature Native content would read. During a WNDB twitter chat on diversity, Francesca Lia Block's name came up. I tweeted the links to my posts on the problems in her books. To my surprise, she was online, too, and apologized. I was thrilled but then someone else suggested I read her Teen Spirit. I did, and its got problems, too. It seemed to me that her apology was kind of shallow, then. Maybe if she'd said, in her apology, that Teen Spirit had the same kinds of problems, the apology would be more meaningful. Maybe writers just do not criticize their own books. Ever. I'm trying to think of an example. If you have one, let me know!

A high point of the month was taping a segment for CUNY's Independent Sources. It aired around Thanksgiving. I love the images they prepared for it--using books I recommend--and the video itself is pretty good, too.

Two other high points: reading Cynthia Leitich Smith's Feral Curse and Roy Boney's We Speak In Secret. I highly recommend both.

And--big sigh--there was a lot of activity related to Peter Pan. It was on television as a life performance. I have two posts about it. "True Blood Brothers" includes a link to the earlier one.

December

Outside of trade books, there are those in basal series. I rarely see them, but should figure out how to do more about them. Starting in November, Native parents in Alaska started writing to me about four books in the McGraw Hill "Reading Wonders" series. Goodness! Some dreadful items there. The outcome of meetings with parents was that the superintendent decided to withdraw the four books.

Back in trade books, I read and do not recommend Nick Lake's There Will Be Lies or Neal Shusterman's Unwholly or Unsouled.  These are from major publishing houses with a lot of heft. A lot of problematic content, in other words, getting pushed out and added to the too-high-pile of misinformation about Native peoples.

On the plus side, I finished the month with reviews of Tim Tingle's House of Purple Cedar and Erika Wurth's Crazy Horse's Girlfriend. 

I highly recommend Tingle's book (Note from Debbie: Due to questions during 2021 regarding this author's claims to being Native, I am no longer recommending anything by Erika Wurth.) both of those books for young adults. And--a rare event on AICL--I recommended a nonfiction book for children. I need to do more on nonfiction! A Children's Guide to Arctic Birds is terrific.

Just before Christmas, the Native community across the country was shocked and saddened to learn that Choctaw writer, Greg Rodgers, had passed away.  His first picture book came out in 2014. A delightful story, we were looking forward to his career as a writer.

I looked over everything I'd read over the year and put together AICL's Best Books of 2014 list. It has 17 books on it. Most--but not all--are by Native writers.

As I post this recap of 2014, we're well into 2015. I'm grateful to those of you who read and share AICL's posts and glad for every comment I get. Keep sending me email! Your emails direct a lot of what I do here.

And remember! All the work I do is with young people in mind. I respect writers and the work they do, but the people closest to my heart are those who read your work. When it has problems, I'll note it because those finely crafted words writers give to children can inspire them, but they can also hurt them. And when those words are well done, I'll celebrate what you do. I'll share it with moms and their kids. Like my niece and her daughter. This is who we're all here for.

Presidential Proclamation: National Native American Heritage Month, 2012

The White House Press Secretary released President Obama's Presidential Proclamation, designating November as National Native American Heritage Month, 2012. Below is a screen capture of the webpage with the proclamation, followed by the text of the proclamation.

NATIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN HERITAGE MONTH, 2012

- - - - - - -

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

As the first people to live on the land we all cherish, American Indians and Alaska Natives have profoundly shaped our country's character and our cultural heritage. Today, Native Americans are leaders in every aspect of our society -- from the classroom, to the boardroom, to the battlefield. This month, we celebrate and honor the many ways American Indians and Alaska Natives have enriched our Nation, and we renew our commitment to respecting each tribe's identity while ensuring equal opportunity to pursue the American dream.

In paying tribute to Native American achievements, we must also acknowledge the parts of our shared history that have been marred by violence and tragic mistreatment. For centuries, Native Americans faced cruelty, injustice, and broken promises. As we work together to forge a brighter future, we cannot shy away from the difficult aspects of our past. That is why, in 2009, I signed a bipartisan resolution that finally recognized the sad and painful chapters in our shared history. My Administration remains dedicated to writing a new chapter in that history by strengthening our government-to-government relationship with tribal nations while enhancing tribal sovereignty and tribal self-determination.

Because we know that the best ideas for tribal nations come from within, my Administration has continued to engage tribal leaders in developing an agenda that respects their expertise on matters affecting American Indians and Alaska Natives. In collaboration with tribal nations, we are making critical investments to improve health and education services, create jobs, and strengthen tribal economies. In July, I was proud to sign the Helping Expedite and Advance Responsible Tribal Homeownership (HEARTH) Act into law, which will enhance tribal control over the leasing of Indian lands. Last December, I signed an Executive Order to expand educational opportunities for Native American students. It aims to preserve Native languages, cultures, and histories while offering a competitive education that prepares young people to succeed in college and careers. And under the Tribal Law and Order Act and the Safe Indian Communities initiative, we are continuing to work with tribes to build safer communities. My Administration also supports the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Many longstanding Native American legal claims against the United States have been resolved, which will help accelerate the restoration of trust in our relationships with tribal nations. The settlements that came out of these claims -- including the historic Cobell and Keepseagle settlements, as well as more than 50 settlements in cases alleging Federal mismanagement of tribal trust funds and resources -- will put an end to decades of litigation and help drive economic development in tribal communities in the years to come.

In partnership with tribal nations, my Administration has addressed injustices and built new avenues of opportunity for American Indians and Alaska Natives. As we celebrate National Native American Heritage Month, let us move forward in the spirit of mutual understanding and mutual trust, confident that our challenges can be met and that our shared future is bright.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim November 2012 as National Native American Heritage Month. I call upon all Americans to commemorate this month with appropriate programs and activities, and to celebrate November 23, 2012, as Native American Heritage Day.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this first day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand twelve, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-seventh.

BARACK OBAMA

American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving

Available in a pdf from the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving. Ten pages in length, it begins with:

Each November educators across the country teach their students about the First Thanksgiving, a quintessentially American holiday. They try to give students an accurate picture of what happened in Plymouth in 1621 and explain how that event fits into American history. Unfortunately, many teaching materials give an incomplete, if not inaccurate, portrayal of the first Thanksgiving, particularly of the event's Native American participants.

Most texts and supplementary materials portray Native Americans at the gathering as supporting players. They are depicted as nameless, faceless, generic "Indians" who merely shared a meal with the intrepid Pilgrims.

The pamphlet is designed for use in 4th through 8th grade classrooms. It is divided in sections:

• Environment: Understanding the Natural World
• Community: Group Identity in Culture
• Encounters: Effects on Cultures
• Sharing: New Perspectives Year-Round

Each section includes several photographs as well as "Ideas for the Classroom." As I read through it, I was struck by the verb tense.

"Native peoples were and continue to be..."
"The Inupiaq people of Alaska are..."
"The whalers are..."
The Yakama continue to celebrate..."

Download American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving and study it as you prepare for the upcoming month (November).

DO spend time at the Education pages of NMAI. The NMAI staff is working hard at developing materials for teachers.

And, order and use these children's books, too! Here's some:

1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving, by Margaret M. Bruchac (Abenaki) and Catherine Grace O'Neill. 
Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message, by Jake Swamp (Mohawk).

And, read books to your students that portray American Indian children of the present day. There's some terrific picture books you can use. Among my favorites are:

The Good Luck Cat, by Joy Harjo 
Less than Half, More than Whole, by Michael and Kathleen Lacapa
Muskrat Will be Swimming, by Cheryl Savageau 
Jingle Dancer, by Cynthia Leitich Smith 
What's the Most Beautiful Thing You Know about Horses, by Richard Van Camp

Last year, School Library Journal published a list of 30 recommended books: "Native Voices." I introduced and link to the article here.

And if you want to see other things I've written about Thanksgiving, look to the left of this page, scroll down to the section called POSTS ABOUT THANKSGIVING.

Ginny Moore Kruse's 1992 article on Multicultural Literature

This morning I'm re-reading, Ginny Moore Kruse's 1992 article "No Single Season: Multicultural Literature for All Children" (published in Wilson Library Bulletin, volume 66) Here's what Ginny wrote (the article does not include the illustration I've added here):

A well-known picture book provides one example of a typical blunder. Amazing Grace, by British book creators Mary Hoffman and Caroline Binch (U.S. edition: Dial, 1991), involves the indomitable Grace, a black child missing two front teeth but full of spunk and the capacity to dream. Grace loves stories, and she plays out the stories she's read or been told. Overall Amazing Grace is a welcome story about the power of story in an exuberant contemporary girl's daily imaginative play, about the appeal of the classics, and about self-esteem. Grace pretends to be people recognizable to some readers as from British, European, American, and African history and literature--people such as Joan of Arc, Anansi the Spider, Mowgli, and...Hiawatha. Are the book's multiple themes so welcome that the act of "playing Indian" escaped comment by most U.S. reviewers...that critics relaxed their standards for evaluation? No, such images recur so frequently that when they do, nobody notices. Well, almost nobody but the children who in real life are Indian.

Claiming that only American Indian children are apt to notice "playing Indian," "sitting Indian style," or picture book animals "dressed up" like American Indians does not excuse the basic mistake. Self-esteem is decreased for the affected peoples, and accurate portrayals are skewed for everyone else.

Well said, Ginny! Here's another terrific excerpt about how librarians can broaden the knowledge base of their patrons:

Perceiving the value of a book from several perspectives and for more than one audience, purpose, or use has long been a strength of good reviewers, perceptive children's librarians, and experienced school library media specialists. Kathleen Horning spoke of the day-to-day benefits of her firsthand knowledge of multicultural literature at the Association for Library Service to Children Preconference, "The Many Faces in Children's Books," held prior to the 1991 American Library Association Annual Conference. A children's librarian at the Madison (Wisconsin) Public Library, Horning told how Bernelda Wheeler's picture book Where Did You Get Your Moccasins? (Pemmican Press, 1986) has library and general user potential beyond its unique cultural content. She suggests the title when adults or children ask for a book with a school setting, or a story about a grandparent, or for information on "where something comes from," or books on clothing. If Horning had pigeonholed the book as one for use only when American Indian materials are needed, readers requesting her advisory services would lose a multifaceted book.

November is approaching, and given its designation as "Native American Month" teachers and librarians will be sharing American Indian stories with children. I encourage teachers, librarians, and parents to heed what Horning said.  

Jane Haladay's essay on BEARSTONE by Will Hobbs

Earlier this week, I said I'd be posting a review essay of Will Hobbs' Bearstone. The essay is by friend and colleague, Jane Haladay, an Assistant Professor in American Indian Studies. I am grateful to her for giving it to me. As readers in children's literature know, Will Hobbs is one of the writers who has written a lot of books with Native content. Though I've got a few pages of notes on his Kokopelli's Flute, I've not yet posted my thoughts on it. Suffice it to say (as you'll see when you read Jane's essay), I find it lacking.

____________________________________________

Desecrations and Desires:

White Male Fantasy in Will Hobbs’ Bearstone

Jane Haladay, Ph.D.

The University of North Carolina at Pembroke

January was coming to a close, which meant the stressful holiday season, thankfully, would finally be over. The joyful event of watching President Barrack Obama formally take office last week had also come and gone, and it was now time to get back to the business of untangling some serious problems under the leadership of an intelligent, articulate diplomat who, at one point in his Inaugural Address, invoked Scripture to emphasize that “the time has come to set aside childish things.” Fallen Catholic that I am, I still had to say “Amen” to that.

The President obviously wasn’t talking about children’s literature, but to make a leap from the President’s words to literature for children and young adults, it struck me that the time has come not only to set aside literature that contains destructive stereotypical representations of Native peoples, but for all of us to become more vocal about it. People still may or may not listen, but we will at least be aware that we haven’t sat idly by, allowing ongoing generations of ignorant educators and accepting students to continue perpetuating violence in the ways American Indians are represented in children’s and YA lit.

This point was driven home to me a few months earlier, when I groggily clicked open the following email as I sipped my morning coffee:

Dr. Halladay,

I am an eighth grade English teacher. In November my students and I will be reading a novel (BEARSTONE by Will Hobbs) that touches on Ute Indian mythology, stories, etc. I am writing in the hope that you might be able to come speak to my students about American Indian myths and folklore, religion and burial practices, etc. I plan to teach the novel between November 12 and 24. If you can't come, if you know of another member of the department or even a student who might like to speak to my students, please let me know and I will take care of the details here. Thanks for your consdderation [sic].

I looked at my calendar: October 31. Sure enough, Native American Heritage Month was in the wind, the time when many K-12 educators seem to remember Indian peoples for the first and only time during the school year, for better and for worse. Yes, there are plenty of excellent teachers out there doing good work, and there are still plenty who don’t know anything about American Indians and don’t want their fantasies corrected. As it turned out, my exchange with after receiving her email proved to fall in the second category.

While I was tempted to delete this email based on the bad mechanics and the misspelling of my name alone (remember, I hadn’t had my coffee yet), I did not. Thinking this could be another one of those “teachable moments” that we educators are supposed to embrace, urged me instead to respond.

But first, I did two things. Since I had never heard of this book nor its author, I looked up Bearstone on Oyate.com and, not finding it there, on amazon.com. Then I emailed Dr. Debbie Reese, a Native scholar whose research interest is children’s literature for Native American children and youth. The descriptions I read on amazon.com were troubling. For example, eighth grader Bobby Anderson notes that, “This book really put the fact that being alone is not a good idea into perspective,” while someone identifying her or himself as “A Kid’s Review” alerts us that “Cloyd [Bearstone’s protagonist] is a person that likes to keep thing to himself. He can sometime get really mad that he decides to run away [sic].”

While these descriptions were not especially helpful in allowing me a cursory understanding of what this book was about, one, written by “Roger L. Bagula” (someone possibly over the age of twelve) was extremely telling: “A half Ute, half Navajo is wild and alone. School has failed and his relatives are failing him. He just in time finds an old man to father him. It is a rough story and the boy who calls himself lone bear because of a blue stone he found in a burial cave of the ancient ones. A story of redemption and friendship that grows to love. Very well written and with mining and hunting, besides horses and ranching.” Clearly, there’s a whole lot going on in Bearstone, especially, it seemed, under the heading of taming the wild in a variety of forms.

When Dr. Reese emailed me back about this 154-page novel, which was published in 1989, she confirmed the sense I was already getting about Bearstone’s author. “Hobbs makes a good living writing crap, getting guest speaking gigs at conferences, etc. I haven't read the book you've asked about, but KOKOPELLI'S FLUTE is crap.” Unsurprisingly, it turns out that Bearstone, too, is crap.

Meanwhile, I had written to the local teacher to inform her that my speaking to her students about “American Indian myths and folklore, religion and burial practices, etc.” wasn’t going to happen, if indeed I came to speak to her students. But maybe we could work something else out? I wrote:

Thank you so much for your invitation to visit your class. I could probably visit to discuss some of the topics you're interested in, but I would like to read BEARSTONE first, and speak with you about it, before setting a date. I have never heard of this book, which doesn't necessarily mean anything (there are plenty of books I've never heard of), but after reading a description about it online, I have some questions. Have you taught this book before? What do you think of it, and how do students respond? As a teacher of Native American literature (by which I mean, literature written by American Indian authors), I'm always suspicious of literature written by non-Natives that represents Native characters as ‘wild’ or ‘troubled,’ and who – as seems to be true for the boy in BEARSTONE – are ultimately ‘humanized’ by white characters. As I said, I haven't read the book yet, so this is my initial and admittedly superficial response.

If I visit your class, I might raise some of these issues about the text (also in regard to the controversies around writing about sacred objects, burial practices, etc. that you mentioned), if I see these as problematic after I read the novel. In other words, I would probably not give a presentation on Native stories and cultural practices detached from the politics of writing about them. If you're comfortable with that possibility, then let's talk.

This wasn’t exactly the presentation she had hoped for, I guess, since her next reply was less than enthusiastic about the approach I was suggesting. Her thorough response to my email was the longest in our approximately week-long exchange, and she hoped to convince me, it seemed, of why Hobbs book was a good one for any middle school student:

I have taught this book previously and found that the students really connected with Cloyd, the protagonist, as someone of their own age who is searching for identity much as they are. I don't see so much that the boy in the story is ‘rescued’ by anyone. He's a kid with problems like so many other kids have. No one attempts to change him or his cultural beliefs. During the course of the story, he is accepted as he is and given the freedom to explore who he is, make his own choices and mistakes, deal with the consequences of his choices, and learn about the value of love and friendship.

During the study we discuss talismans, which is relative to the title. I focus on the character's growth and the rather significant changes in him from beginning to end. We discuss the relationship between the protagonist and the old man with whom he lives, which becomes one of mutual love and respect by story's end. The author develops themes of growth from adversity (‘the hurt you get over makes you stronger’) and the importance of understanding of one's heritage among others, and frankly I feel that the novel is very respectful of the protagonist's culture….

I am not a scholar of Native American literature; I teach kids who struggle with the issues this character struggles with. My concern is that they take away from this novel some hope that they are not alone, that the world is not out to get them, that literature is a place they can go for escape, but also a means for self-examination and understanding.

After reading this outpouring of her reasons for teaching Bearstone and her analysis of the text, I wondered a bit why she had contacted me in the first place. She seemed to have it all figured out, so why did she need me, “a scholar of Native American literature”? Oh yeah, I realized: to tell her about Ute burial practices and talismans! I would be useful in making more colorful those markers of “Indianness” this text offers up to students, without being able to discuss why the entire premise of the story about a “wild” Indian adolescent who is “straightened out” by a kindly white man is problematic from a Native perspective in the first place. Things seemed to be going from bad to worse pretty quickly.

Hey, I’m hip to the bildungsroman; I taught high school English for eight years before teaching college. I made it clear to the teacher that I have great appreciation for the difficulties middle and high school teachers face in finding meaningful literature that students will actually read and respond to. But is Bearstone a place where American Indian students can go “for escape,” or is it just another space where they are captured, stereotyped, and offended? Could the teacher really assess whether this novel is “very respectful of the protagonist's culture,” when her invitation to have me come and speak about Ute culture suggests she doesn’t really know much, if anything, about it?

The junior high school where she teachers caters to a 15% population of American Indian students; 51% are African American, 30% are white, 3% are “Hispanic,” and 1% are Asian. Robeson County, where the school is located, is the poorest county in the state and, as the home of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the county also has the highest population of American Indian people in the state. Forty-nine percent of the seventh and eighth graders attending this school are eligible for the free lunch program, a figure 10% higher than the North Carolina state average. During the 2006-2007 school year, this junior high did not make adequate yearly progress in student learning. A majority of the school’s 39 classroom teachers (59%) have fewer than ten years’ teaching experience, a figure that is 5% higher than the state average; also 5% higher than the state average is the teacher turnover rate: 29% to the state’s 24%. Obviously, then, this is a school where providing students with great novels to find “some hope that they are not alone, [and] that the world is not out to get them” is a really, really good idea.

Unfortunately, Bearstone is not such a novel. And you don’t need to be a Ute person nor a Ute scholar (neither of which I am) to understand that Bearstone is definitely not respectful of Ute culture.

Introducing Cloyd, the troubled protagonist of the novel, whom we first meet as he lies his way into an IHS hospital posing as a delivery boy, in hopes of tracking down the Navajo father who abandoned him and his mother when Cloyd was born. Cloyd’s Ute mother, meanwhile, has died giving birth to him. Cloyd has “run away from the Ute group home in Colorado and hitched all the way to Window Rock” (1) on a quest to finally meet his dad, only to discover that his father is a vegetable as a result of an auto accident four years ago. Cloyd, who is fourteen (8), has been seeking a father figure since he was born, but he’s disgusted by the reality of the man he finds: “What he saw terrified him. This wasn’t even a human being. It was more like a shriveled-up mummy attached to a bunch of tubes….How could this be his father? Was it even alive?” (2-3). Cloyd “threw the flowers in the trash” (4) that he had brought for his long-lost dad and departs, without so much as a backward glance. So ends Chapter 1.

If the tragic victimry of the first four pages doesn’t grab your attention, hold on: there’s a lot more to come. By page six, Cloyd is being driven by his white housemother to her white friend Walter Landis’s ranch in the high desert of Colorado, where she is taking Cloyd as a last resort because “[h]e failed all seven of his classes,” either because he won’t or doesn’t know how to do the work due to the four-year gap in his colonial education. “Four years!” Walter exclaims when the housemother tells him about this gap. “Where was he?” “Out in the canyons, herding his grandmother’s goats,” explains Cloyd’s housemother. “I think he’s at least half-wild” (8).

Hobbs offers not a hint of cultural awareness around traditional Indigenous education, or the fact that four years of living in his homelands herding his grandmother’s goats might have taught Cloyd a few things – including his Ute language – which can’t be found within the walls of the group home or the pages of books written in English. Unfortunately, Hobbs’ colonial fantasies of “wild” Indians is one of his least egregious depictions of Native life in Bearstone; at this point in the story, he’s just getting warmed up.

Will Hobbs’ worst assault on cultural sensitivity manifests in a deeply disturbing scene still early in the novel, during which Cloyd is ostensibly reconnecting with his Ute ancestral ways. Rebellious as usual, Cloyd has ditched his housemother to climb the sandstone cliffs behind Walter’s ranch before he has even had a chance to meet Walter. The red-and-white cliffs remind Cloyd of home, and he heads for them because he remembers his grandmother telling him that their people had originally lived in “Colorado, especially the mountains above Durango,” before gold-seeking white men “wanted them out of the way” and they moved to White Mesa (12). After Cloyd makes his harrowing climb up one of the high sandstone cliffs, he rests inside a cool cave. As he rests there, he notices an unusual looking object wedged into a crack in the cave. He then “shimmied into the dark, narrow crack until his hands closed on some kind of a bundle,” which he then takes into the dim light to examine (14).

Unlike Will Hobbs, I will not describe the fictional contents of the infant burial bundle that Cloyd unwraps and inspects in detail. While I imagine Hobbs may have been pleased with the anthropological accuracy with which he describes the sacred objects and human remains in this bundle, it is extremely upsetting to read his description, to which I had a visceral response that made me want to push the book away from me. These details are even more troubling in that Native and other culturally aware readers are asked to believe that Cloyd would not have understood what he was holding before he opened it and, once he did open it, that he would proceed to behave as he does. Hobbs tells us that Cloyd’s grandmother had “talked about such things” and had given him advice about how to handle any burial objects Cloyd might one day come in contact with: “behave carefully, treat the buried one with the utmost respect, and don’t make any mistakes. The Ancient Ones are not people to be trifled with” (15).

It’s extremely difficult to understand why, then, having recalled his grandmother’s reasoned and important words, Cloyd would not only have unwrapped the burial bundle but would go one step further and steal a burial object he finds inside a piece of pottery that rests beside the bundle. When he extracts the pot from the crevice near the bundle, Cloyd’s first thought, after he “took in [the pot’s] beauty and wholeness” was that he had heard that such pots “were worth a thousand dollars unbroken” (15). Cloyd then makes an even more spectacular find: “a small blue stone about two inches long, worn smooth by long handling. Turquoise. Two eyes, a snout, and a humped back. A bear. Surely, a bear to accompany the infant on the long journey” (15).

Cloyd reflects on what his grandmother has told him about the significance of bears to the Ute people, and how “[i]f you could make a bear your personal guardian, you would be a strong man and lucky” (15). Cloyd needs some luck, obviously, so it’s only logical that he decides he needs the bearstone more than the departed infant Ancient One, right? Well sure, especially when you’re a fictional Indian boy whose thinking is being crafted by a white man. In Bearstone, Hobbs’ Indian fantasies won’t get anywhere without the Native protagonist buying into them, right down to ransacking one of his own ancestor’s graves and ruminating upon the expensive pottery and turquoise talismans to be found there. At this point, I was becoming downright queasy about the idea of the teacher wanting me to come to her class to discuss “American Indian myths and folklore, religion and burial practices, etc.,” as her interest at least in burial practices clearly originated in this scene, one that enacts the most violence upon Ute people in the entire short novel.

Cloyd’s story proceeds on pretty much along these problematic lines, with side trips for Cloyd to cut down an entire orchard full of Walter’s beloved peach trees in a fit of rage, trees that Walter’s deceased wife had brought from distant lands and nurtured on the ranch. Now thoroughly disgusted with Cloyd’s lack of response to his many attempts at kindnesses (dang those resistant Indians anyway!), Walter returns Cloyd to his grandmother’s home on the Ute Reservation, where Cloyd knows that “in the slickrock country, he could live wild and free” (63). Oh, did I forget to mention that by now Cloyd has given himself his own Indian name, Lone Bear?

When Cloyd is reunited with his apparently long-suffering grandmother, the one who has educated Cloyd in those Ute traditions he is still aware of, Hobbs does not bother naming her. It isn’t necessary, apparently, as she is merely another white male fantasy of the Indian earth-mother grandma who cooks, offers words of sage counsel to her grandson, and doesn’t bug him with silly questions. Hobbs describes Cloyd’s grandmother as “A Ute woman in the old style,…dark, earthy, and large, the mainstay of her diet being frybread” (64). Cloyd stays for one meal with his grandmother, but is all the while feeling so guilty about having chainsawed down the old white man’s peach trees that he leaves immediately after the meal to hitchhike back and ask for a second chance with Walter. And that’s the most we hear about Grandma for the remainder of the novel. Cloyd, it seems, has an easy time of putting his blood relatives and his entire community out of his mind when he has a chance to show a white rancher what he’s really worth.

Of course Walter takes Cloyd back (hooray!), and for the remainder of the novel, the two are up in the mountains where Walter is trying to revive his dream, with Cloyd’s help, of striking it rich in his dilapidated gold mine. One passage in this section contains perhaps the most direct critique of colonialism in the book, although it doesn’t make up for the rest of the nonsense and is really one more token nod by Hobbs to the tragic “demise” of Native culture at the hands of “conquering” whites. Cloyd recalls that his grandmother had told him that:

The uranium made you get sick and die early….She never said if gold made you sick. But then he remembered what she said about gold. It made people crazy and dishonest. First the white men promised the Utes they could keep the mountains forever, but that was before gold was discovered and miners came pouring in. The white men forgot all about their promise. The Utes were told to stay out of the mountains. They couldn’t roam around anymore and live in the old way. (91)

Even here, describing the lifeways of Ute people as “roaming around” to “live in the old way” evokes a sense of aimless and anachronistic drifting, rather than suggesting the sophisticated patterns of Ute land use that resulted in their traditional patterns of seasonal migration.

Bearstone is a frustrating book not only because of Will Hobbs’ white fantasies about Indian exoticism, or because of his offensive, stereotypical depictions of much of his subject matter. The book is also troublesome because it actually raises real issues that American Indian youth and their communities experience, but it does not offer any larger context to attempt achieving real understanding by a general readership as to why these issues exist. For example, during Cloyd’s one brief visit to his Grandmother, “Cloyd wanted to talk. He’d spoken no Ute in the last year, as the boys from the Colorado reservation no longer knew the language. Right away he found himself telling her about Walter…” (64). This passage does not clarify whether Cloyd is speaking English or Ute. Does being with Grandmother reinvigorate his fluent Ute, is Grandmother speaking English, or is Cloyd speaking English and Grandmother speaking Ute? It matters, but we don’t know. We know only that “the boys from the Colorado reservation no longer knew the language,” though we don’t know whether these boys are living at off-reservation boarding schools, at Cloyd’s group home, or if they are still on the reservation. At the same time, while the implication that Ute language has vanished with Cloyd’s generation alludes to the unfortunate reality of Southern Ute language’s endangered status among its tribal youth, it is not necessarily true that not speaking the language is the same as not knowing the language, or not understanding it. Hobbs does not help us understand these shadings around the crucial issue of Native languages, however, and so Ute language – and Cloyd’s diminishing use of it – are reduced to one more feature of Indian culture that, like roaming around to live in the old way, signals Indians and their ways as fading into the mists of time.

As a non-Native scholar who writes about Natives subjects, I fault Hobbs for his conscious lack of complexity in depicting the story of a complex Native life. It is irresponsible for any author, but especially a non-Native author, to simply plop into his novel without at least minimal contextualization references to significant circumstances in Indian communities such as the decline of original languages; child abandonment; the foster care system; Native youth who experience cultural disconnection from tribal heritages; and relationships toward sacred materials and ancestral remains. All of these are in Bearstone, but as Hobbs depicts them they exist only to reinscribe whitestream notions of vanishing Indians and the titillating markers of their apparently stagnant cultures. For a general reader unfamiliar with American Indian historical issues and their contemporary legacies, Hobbs’ references sprinkled throughout the text suggest that he is an authority on Ute experience, and thus that this portrait of the two Ute characters he paints -- Cloyd and his grandmother – are the way Ute people must be.

I’m not sure my exchange with the teacher who emailed me accomplished anything. And while it certainly didn’t prove to be any kind of teachable moment for her or for her students, it was definitely instructive to me, as this essay makes clear. By the time I finished reading Bearstone, I was quite horrified that I had been willing to come speak about anything in connection with this book. She, in the meantime, had decided that, based on my first email, if I were going to talk about Native literature in general, the school might as well capitalize on my time and gather up the entire eighth grade to listen to my presentation. In an assembly. On a Friday. Hmm; hold on a minute here. But I wanted to be a good citizen, so I initially agreed to this proposal. Yet as the teacher and I corresponded about the details, and I thought more about my former days supervising assemblies as a high school teacher, the more dubious I grew about the value of making any kind of educational presentation to a crowd of eighth graders. (On a Friday.) Even the teacher emailed that while I could have two combined class periods for the assembly, shorter might be better because “the kids lose interest, which you no doubt know.” Yeah, I know; in fact, I was rapidly losing interest myself.

I wrote to her then about my concerns around Bearstone and suggested something that I honestly thought might help be more helpful for everyone – the teachers, their students, and me:

Having read the book has caused me to rethink the idea of presenting on Native literature to an assembly of 8th graders, and I have an alternative proposal. I feel your students would ultimately gain more real understanding about Native American literature from you and the other teachers with whom they already have established relationships, the people they trust and work with every day, not an outside speaker who shows up once to "tell" them about a topic and then leaves without much chance for follow-up or questions beyond the assembly period. It can be hard to get students really interested in certain topics this way, unless the presentation is fairly razzle-dazzle, which my topic does not lend itself to.

What I would like to offer instead is a workshop with teachers at your school who are interested in hearing about the issues involved with teaching American Indian literature, and texts that include Indian characters. I could offer some guidelines for sensitive text selections, some history on controversial issues, and some suggestions for texts that offer positive portrayals of Native peoples. In this way, teachers at your school could have a more sustained dialogue with their students about these issues when teaching certain texts now and in the future, having had a chance to consider the issues themselves in advance. It would also prevent me from possibly contradicting some of the things you will have discussed with your students about BEARSTONE prior to my presentation, when I mention inappropriate aspects of non-Native literature that includes Native characters. I have no desire to present information to your students that would make you or other teachers at your school feel uncomfortable about your approach to a text, and I have no wish to confuse students. But I do hope to clarify some issues so that future readings of BEARSTONE or any text you teach with Indian characters might be viewed with additional understandings of how a Native reader might perceive the literature.

But this was not what she wanted. The same day I wrote, she emailed me back a terse one-liner stating, “I need to discuss this possibility with our principal. I will let you know what we decide and get back to you as soon as possible.” She expressed no interest in the idea of a workshop, and I never heard from her again.

It’s too bad, though. I did want to try to negotiate something with her and her students. But I think, since she clearly enjoyed the story as Hobbs wrote it, that she preferred not to have her image of Hobbs’ novel intruded upon with a critique of its offensiveness to Native people, in the same way Hobbs preferred not to have his story intruded upon by the addition of cultural appropriateness and complexity regarding Native lives. This teacher was looking at Bearstone as an ultimately happy tale of cultural bridging, of an elderly white stand-in father who eventually soothes all the wounds of a “wild” Indian boy who is trying to figure out who he is. And, she was looking at a book that reinscribes white fantasies of “love conquers all,” where relationships with biological family, returning to one’s cultural community, and leaving Indigenous sacred objects in the places they were found are antiquated notions of a primitive past that block real progress in relations between the so-called “races,” in the spirit of “we’re all the same beneath the skin.” In Bearstone, Will Hobbs’ equation of Cloyd minus parents minus tribe minus homeland plus kindly white widower equals new family and new home is good enough for the teacher, and thus good enough for her students.

We were definitely looking at Bearstone differently. I was looking at a book I hoped would offer the junior high school students, Native and non, of rural Southeastern North Carolina a tale that both outlined and explained some of the reasons around the complexities of being a Native adolescent in the twentieth century; a story in which the way out of the troubled adolescence of one Native boy did not automatically require rescue by yet another incarnation of the Great White Father; a novel in which a young Ute man who was raised by his traditional grandmother would at least have known, despite having left his community for extended periods of time, that to steal a burial item from an infant ancestor was an unthinkable, egotistical breach.

The conclusion of Bearstone finds Cloyd happily living at Walter’s ranch full time, beaming with delight when a nursery truck arrives with a load of young peach trees that Cloyd has purchased as a surprise gift for Walter to replace the trees Cloyd chain-sawed in his earlier killing spree. All’s well that end’s well, right? Not exactly. In Will Hobbs’ creating such questionable young adult literature, and in twenty-first century educators perpetuating the violent messages of Bearstone without understanding the damages of those messages to Native and non-Native students, I wonder who it is who actually lives happily ever after.