Showing posts sorted by relevance for query cheyenne again. Sort by date Show all posts
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Saturday, October 16, 2010

Jean Craighead George's THE BUFFALO ARE BACK

I received an inquiry about Jean Craighead George's The Buffalo Are Back (Dutton, 2010) and will share my observations and analysis as I turn each page of the not-paginated picture book. The paintings are by Wendell Minor. I've included some of the illustrations.

Based on my analysis, I do not recommend The Buffalo Are Back.

In this analysis, I am focusing primarily on the Native imagery/representations in the book. My descriptions and summary text are in regular font; my comments are in italics. Note: In the analysis I use the word "gutter," which is the term used to describe the space where the pages are bound together. Pages to the left and to the right meet together, in the gutter.

I hope this analysis helps parents, teachers, librarians, book reviewers, writers, illustrators, and editors see books from the vantage point of a Native educator who is interested in books that accurately portray American Indians and Indigenous Nations and peoples around the globe.

Among the criteria I have in mind when analyzing a book are the following:
  1. Does the author/illustrator specify a tribal nation?
  2. What is the time period?
  3. Is the history accurate?
  4. How does the author/illustrator present gender?
  5. Does the author's word choice indicate bias against Native peoples?

Let's begin!

The front cover (shown above)
On the left side of the cover is a buffalo head in profile. To its right is a buffalo calf. They're in some tall grass. Perched atop one of the tall blades of grass is a lark. All are looking to the right. This orientation invites us to open the book.

Title page
The calf is standing, alone, in the center of the page. Beneath it are two prairie dogs standing upright as prairie dogs often do.

First double-paged spread

Left of gutter: Acknowledgement from Wendell Minor, the illustrator.

Right of gutter: Jean Craighead George dedicates the book "To Cyd and Carol Ann, who praise the diversity of the earth and the return of the buffalo. Minor dedicates it "To Jean, in celebration of her fifty years of writing wonderful books that teach children the wonders of nature." The page includes a profile of the calf's head.

Second double-page spread
Left of gutter: same illustration as shown on the cover

Right of gutter: Three prairie dogs face left, looking toward the calf. The text reads:
In a time long ago, an orange buffalo calf was born. [...] On that day in the mid-1800s seventy-five million buffalo roamed in North America. In little more than fifty years, there would be almost none.

What happened? The answer is a story of the American Indians, the buffalo, and the grass.
Craighead George tells us that the book is set in 1850 or thereabouts. She tells us there were millions of buffalo, but that there would soon be almost none. She poses a 'what happened' question and answers her question with "...a story of the American Indians, the buffalo, and the grass." As I read her answer to that question, I think to myself "What? No mention of Americans or the U.S. government who were largely responsible for that dramatic change?"

Third double-page spread
Left of gutter: The page is titled "The American Indians." In the first paragraph, Craighead George says that on the day the calf was born, the air was smoky because "The Indians who lived on the plains were setting the grasses ablaze, as they had for thousands of years." I like that she said they had been there for thousands of years. I would have liked her to specify a tribal nation instead of saying "Indians." For example, she could have said "The Plains Indians were setting the grasses ablaze..." and that would have been ok, but, it would have been better if she had said "Northern Plains" or "Southern Plains" or even better if she'd specified a tribe. 

Right of gutter: Minor depicts the prairie on fire. The Indians Craighead George refers to are shown in the distance, some with a hand raised. In that hand is a flame. One Indian is on horseback. In the background is a structure that I take to be a grass lodge like those used by the Wichitas (Southern Plains tribe). Minor's illustration of the grass lodge tells me that he's depicting the southern plains. The illustration, in this case, is tribally specific, but not the accompanying text.

Fourth double-page spread
Left of gutter (see illustration to the right): A hunter, who I learn from the facing page, is a "white fur hunter." He is looking out over a herd of buffalo (the illustration spills over to the right side of the gutter).

Right of gutter: The page is titled "The Buffalo." The first paragraph reads:
In the mid 1800s, change came to the plains. First it was white fur hunters. They stacked the beautiful buffalo hides in pointed canoes and sold them east for profit. Then the American explorers came, who shot many animals for fun. Buffalo made good targets for the hunters because they are big and often stand still.
In fact, change came to the plains much earlier than the mid 1800s. Anthony Hendry of the Hudson's Bay Company, for example, was there in the 1750s. 


I wonder why Craighead George uses "white" to describe fur traders and "American" to describe explorers? 

Lewis and Clark--explorers--set out on their expedition in 1804, which is before the period Craighead George is referring to (mid 1800s). Her timeline is wrong. Change came long before the mid 1800s. 
  • In The People: A History of Native America by Edmunds, Hoxie, and Salisbury (published in 2007 by Houghton Mifflin, p. 198), the authors state that during the 1780s, the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikara's)--they're Plains tribes--were devastated by smallpox. Their population went from 16,000 to 6,100. And in 1837, a steamboat of the American Fur Company that had several passengers aboard who had smallpox landed at a Mandan village. Another epidemic ensued, and the Three Affiliated Tribes population declined again, to 2,300. 
  • According to information on the website of the Three Affiliated Tribes, in 1825, the U.S. government negotiated treaties with the Teton, Yankton, and Yanktonai Dakota as well as the Cheyenne, Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, treaties through which the tribes agreed not to trade with anyone but American citizens.
In short, the history is far more complicated than Craighead George suggests with her "In the mid-1800s, change came to the plains."

The second paragraph (still on the fourth double-page spread) of "The Buffalo" reads:
But it was settlers from the East and the American government that killed almost all of the buffalo herds. After the Civil War, the government bought huge tracts of land from the Indians. They forced many Indians to go to reservations and sold the land to settlers. Families from Europe and the East Coast rushed west to settle the rich black prairie land.
Yes, it was settlers and the U.S. government that killed most of the herds. 

In her second sentence, Craighead George says the government bought huge tracts of land from the Indians after the Civil War. The Civil War took place from 1861 to 1865. I wonder if she's talking about the Dawes Act of 1887? Through that act, Native Nations lost land, but not due to the government buying the land from them. Rather, it was a legal move by the U.S. government to break up the integrity and community values/orientation of the tribes as Nations by allotting individuals plots of land that they would own. Such ownership, the hope was, would assimilate them into becoming white American citizens. The "surplus" land would be sold to settlers.


And "forced to go to reservations" is not quite right either---at least not at that time period. Native Nations were forcibly moved from their homelands in the East and South to what was then-called Indian Territory, but that happened in the early 1800s, not after the Civil War. Returning again to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation website, there is information about the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which says that through the treaty, several tribes established boundaries for what became their reservations. That was in 1851, before the Civil War. Maybe that's what Craighead George is thinking about. 


This all might seem a bit picky to, perhaps, a mainstream reader, but it definitely matters to, say, someone in a tribal nation whose history includes close relationships with buffaloes. 

Craighead George's repeated use of "Indians" is confusing to me, a Pueblo Indian woman, trying to understand what she's talking about. When she uses the word "Indians," is she talking about specific individuals or does her "Indians" refer to Native Nations? And, her last sentence in the paragraph says "Families from Europe and the East Coast...." ---- She doesn't use "families" to talk about Indian people in her book. As such, she unintentionally affirms a pervasive representation of "Indian" meaning Indian men who are too-often shown without wives, children, mothers, fathers, families, etc. 
 
Fifth double-page spread:
Left of gutter: The illustration is an Indian man in profile (shown here on right). He's facing towards the facing page, on which are shown tipis and a staff on which there is a buffalo skull. One half of the skull has red dots; the other half has blue dots. There are two feathers affixed to the pole, above the skull.

Here's the kicker:  Unlike the white fur hunter on the previous page, this Indian man is see-through. You can see through his torso to the prairie grasses behind him. Why did Minor do that? 


Because his name is included in the text on the facing page, I think this illustration is supposed to be Sitting Bull.

Right of gutter: Remember, the words on the previous page said that families from the East Coast were rushing in to settle on the prairie. The text on this page reads:
But there was trouble on the plains. The government broke its treaties with the Indians. So the Indians fought back and won several battles against the United States Army. Then the government saw another way to defeat the Indians. Soldiers and settlers were encouraged to shoot every buffalo they saw, or drive whole herds over cliffs. Without the buffalo for food, shelter, and clothing, the Indians could not survive on the plains. 
Yes, there was trouble. I like that she uses "battles" and that she doesn't use "massacre" or "uprising." It was, in fact, war. But I wish she had said "The United States government broke its treaties with the Native Nations (or Native governments)." That small change would be far more accurate. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has an insightful article in which she talks about words and what they mean, with respect to the wars between Native Nations and the the United States. It is called "The Lewis and Clark Story, the Captive Narrative, and the Pitfalls of Indian History." It is in Wicazo Sa Review, Volume 19.1. If you'd like a copy send me an email and I'll send it to you.


In Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of how the West was Lost, Colin G. Calloway writes that the U.S. Army and professional hide hunters (sportsmen) worked together to kill buffalo. At this point, I'm not sure where Craighead George will go with her "Indians could not survive" sentence.

Her next paragraph reads:
Said the great Sioux Chief Sitting Bull, who defeated General George A. Custer at the battle of Little Big Horn: "A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell--a death-wind for my people."

And, the settlers soon discovered, a death-wind for the prairie.
Finally! Craighead George names a specific tribal nation but I wish she had been even more specific, using "Hunkpapa Lakota" instead of "Sioux".... Seeing Sioux, though, makes me wonder if all along, the tribal nation she's thinking of when she says "Indians" is the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota (Sioux).  If so, then I think I am right in guessing that it is Sitting Bull that Minor portrayed earlier in the book, but again, why did he present him as a see-through image? It reminds me of the illustrations in Susan Jeffers' Brother Eagle Sister Sky (see discussion of that book in "Pitfalls and Possibilities," an article Jean Mendoza and I did a few years ago).

Sixth Double-page Spread
Left of the gutter: The page is titled "The Grass." The first paragraph reads:
With the death of the buffalo, the Indian Wars were over. The settlers faced a new fight--the battle of the grasses. Over the eons the prairie grasses had adapted to the Great Plains' frequent droughts by growing tough roots to hold in moisture. These roots were wide and deep and held the rich soil in place. The buffalo's sharp hooves, and the Indians' prairie firs, had helped keep the grasses healthy. But the new settlers did not understand the importance of the grass.
From there Craighead George moves on to talk about ranchers, cowboys, settlers, farmers, steel plows, steam tractors, wheat, corn, soybeans... 

Seventh Double-page Spread
Left of the gutter: Craighead George begins by talking about crops that flourish and railroads that take the harvest to market. She says "Now not one orange buffalo wobbled to its feet." She says the larks are gone, prairie dogs are silent, and that "Without the buffalo, without the grasses, and without the Indians to care for them, the prairie was in danger." She goes on to talk about drought and grasshoppers. On the right is a very cool painting of farmers using switches to beat the grasshoppers. Her phrase, "without the Indians" gives me pause. What happened to them? Her last mention of them is that without the buffalo, the Indians "could not survive." On this page she says "without the Indians" --- Does she mean to tell us that they did not survive?

Eighth Double-page Spread
A terrific Minor illustration spans the two pages, showing dust clouds billowing and a barren land, made that way by farmers. The text explains that buffalo hooves played a role in the health of the land.

Ninth Double-page Spread
Here, Minor shows farmers and townspeople leaving the barren land.  One line reads:
In just over fifty years, it [the "great plow up"] had destroyed the buffalo, the protective prairie grasses, and the Indians who had cared for both." 
Does she really meant to say that the "great plow up" destroyed the Indians? And what does "destroyed" Indians mean? What does a child (the audience for her book) understand by what she says? 

Tenth Double-page Spread
Left of the gutter: The page is titled "The Prairie Comeback." The page is about President Roosevelt and that he wanted to save the buffalo. He sent scouts out to look for them. The scouts found nothing. Then, a naturalist named W. T. Hornaday, "looked and looked and would not give up." Following a tip from "a Crow Indian" Hornaday found three hundred buffalo in a meadow in Montana. A small illustration inset on the page shows a man on a horse looking down a hill at a herd of buffalo.

With her reference to "a Crow Indian" Craighead George tells us that she knows that not all the Indians were destroyed. As a writer, I think she could have been more clear in earlier pages. I think the man on the horse is Hornaday.   

Right of gutter: Minor's illustration is of Roosevelt standing in front of a buffalo herd.

Eleventh Double-page Spread
Left of gutter: A buffalo calf fills the page. Below and spilling across the gutter is a herd.


Right of gutter: The text is:
There had been seventy-five million buffalo on the plains. Now there were three hundred left in the wild. People who understood the land, led by Hornaday, knew the buffalo had to be saved. The president helped.

Roosevelt established the National Bison Range in Montana and made it illegal to shoot buffalo. Over the years, more land was set aside in western states for the great grazing herds, which were beginning to grow.
Curious to know more about the Hornaday and comeback of the buffalo, I checked out a couple of books. None of the ones I got are on the list of sources on the last page of the The Buffalo Are Back. The note above the three books listed says they are among the sources used by the artist. I wonder if Craighead George used them, too? If not, what did she use?


One of the books I got is The Extermination of the Buffalo, by William T. Hornaday. It is a fascinating book. Reading it, I see that there is a lot more to Hornaday than Craighead George included on the ninth and tenth double-page spreads. In her text, he sounds like a heroic figure. Reading his own words, though, I see that he, himself, actively hunted buffalo. I didn't find, in his own book, anything that says he found "three hundred buffalo in a meadow in Montana" as Craighead George says on the previous page of her book.

In 1886, Hornaday was the "chief taxidermist of the National Museum." He determined that the museum did not have an acceptable buffalo "specimen" in its holdings, and he was afraid that the remaining buffaloes would be killed before the museum was able to get one. So, an expedition was put together, and on May 6th, off they went to the northwest, looking for buffaloes. Sometime after May 20 they found a calf. Ten days after finding the calf, they found two bulls. They killed one and the other got away. The one they killed was in "unkept and 'seedy' appearance. They decided that the "skin was not in condition to mount" so took "only the skeleton, entire, and the skin of the head and neck." They decided to stop looking until August when the buffaloes would be finished with the shedding of their hair. They returned to Washington with several hides and skulls, and--the baby calf they found (more about that later). 


They returned to the "hunt" in the northwest in September. He does say "hunt" again and again, and they do, in fact, kill many buffaloes to serve as specimens. He includes a map with dots to mark locations where they killed buffalo. Here's one of his accounts (p. 537):
McNaney killed a fine old bull and a beautiful two year old, or "spike" bull, out of this herd, while I managed to kill a cow and another large old bull, making four for that day, all told. This herd of fourteen head was the largest that we saw during the entire hunt.
At one point he writes (p. 540):
About 4 miles from our late camp we came suddenly upon a fine old solitary bull, feeding in a hollow between two high and precipitous ridges. After a short but sharp chase I succeeded in getting a fair shot at him, and killed him with a ball which broke his left humerus and passed into his lungs. He was the only large bull killed on the entire trip with a single shot. He proved to be a very fine specimen, measuring 5 feet 6 inches in height at the shoulders.
Language he uses to describe their hunting indicates he loved the hunting. When he kills another "truly magnificent specimen," he says (p. 542):
I was delighted with our remarkably good fortune in securing such a prize, for, owing to the rapidity with which we the large buffaloes are being found and killed off these days, I had not hoped to capture a really old individual.
The live calf the expedition took to Washington was kept in a pen. It became quite popular, and in 1887, Hornaday proposed a "Department of Living Animals" at the Smithsonian. As director of the department, he proceeded to develop a captive herd.  


Craighead George, correctly, gives credit to both, Roosevelt and Hornaday, for actions they took but she completely omits all the work that Native people were also doing in that same time period, and she doesn't give us a complete picture of Hornaday's activity as a buffalo hunter. 

Ken Zontek's Buffalo Nation: American Indian Efforts to Restore the Bison (2007, University of Nebraska Press) provides a great deal of information about the work of Native people who sought to restore the bison. For example, Zontek writes of a herd of 300 developed and cared for in the 1890s by Michael Pablo whose mother was Blackfeet.


Twelfth Double-page Spread
Left side of gutter: Craighead George describes government efforts to save the prairie by planting crops in curves instead of straight lines, planting trees with deep roots to break the wind, and, planting grass between corn to hold the soil in place.

Right side of gutter: Minor's illustration of a farmer on his tractor spreads across the double-page spread.

Thirteenth Double-page Spread
Left of gutter: Craighead George writes that one day, a young girl walked into her Kansas house carrying a six-foot blade of grass. Her dad asks her where she got it, and that it is buffalo grass that he thought was extinct. She tells him she got it in the schoolyard.

Right of gutter: Minor's illustration is of a school house on the prairie. The clothing on the children in the yard suggests a more recent time period.

Fourteenth Double-page Spread
Left of gutter: Craighead George describes the search for native grasses (bluestem, gamma, bunch, and buffalo grass). She says people raised the grasses and sowed the seeds on abandoned farms and grasslands. She says the Tall Grass Prairie Preserve was established in Kansas, and that 300 buffalo were released into that preserve.

Right of gutter: Minor's illustration is of a prairie and in the distance, a buffalo herd.

I think Craighead George made a mistake about the preserve. The one in Kansas does not have buffalo. There is one in Oklahoma with buffalo. On the Nature Conservancy website and on the Oklahoma Prairie Country website is information about the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. Both sites say that in 1993, the Nature Conservancy donated 300 bison for the preserve and that the herd is at its target herd of approximately 2500. 

Fifteenth Double-page Spread
Left of gutter: The text reads:
One morning not too long ago, a young man just out of graduate school galloped his horse across the Prairie Preserve, counting buffalo for the buffalo census. Suddenly he reined in his horse. An orange calf wobbled to his feet and blinked.

Welcome, little calf," the Wichita Indian youth called. "You are America's two hundred thousand and eighty-first buffalo."

A lark flew to the top of a six-foot blade of grass and sang as sweetly as a panpipe. The buffalo are back.
Craighead George tells us the man is Wichita. (Note: I searched on "Wichita Nation" to see if they have a herd, and the first hits the search returned are to Indian Guides programs. The Indian Guides program, while admirable for its goal of having families do activities together, makes a mess of things as they choose an Indian tribal name and engage in stereotypical activities.) I tried again, searching on "Wichita Tribe" and the first hit was, in fact, a link to the website of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, whose offices are in Anadarko, Oklahoma. They do not have a buffalo herd, but the Wichita guy may work for one of the tribes that does, or, he may work at the preserve.


I am glad Craighead George ended her book with the Wichita man, but I wish she had done more with the work Native Nations are doing today.  The Inter-Tribal Bison Cooperative, established in 1990, includes over 50 different tribes who now maintain herds on their lands. Their website refers to Roosevelt and conservationists (they don't mention Hornaday) but like Craighead George, they don't refer to Native efforts in the 1890s. I will send them a quick note recommending they add that info. 

Minor's website includes reviews of the book. School Library Journal says it is "a must have for most libraries" and Horn Book calls it compelling. 

I understand why it got positive reviews, but, it is one of the many books that---when the lens is focused on the way the book represents American Indians---it falls far short of being a book that I can recommend. I think Craighead George tried hard to approach the book with an interest in being unbiased. I say that because of some of her word choices (battle instead of massacre) and I think it is terrific to see that awareness in an author's work--but bias is there nonetheless in the heroic way Hornaday is portrayed, in the ghost-like portrayal of Sitting Bull, and in the "no Indians" portrayals of people who obviously weren't dead and gone. 

In the end, authors have to do both: be fair, and, be accurate. I think her research---or the researcher who helped her---failed because the dates are off, which makes the related information problematic. I think Craighead George's editor failed her, too. He/she could have caught the problems with time periods.


I'll be thinking about the book for a while. I invite your thoughts, too, on what I've said here, and the book itself if you've got a copy.

Friday, December 13, 2019

Recommended: SPOTTED TAIL by David Heska Wanbli Weiden

Nineteenth-century Sicangu Lakota leader Spotted Tail (Sinte Gleska) is the subject of a new biography for middle grades, by David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Spotted Tail, Reycraft Books, 2019). Spotted Tail was highly influential, but is generally less well-known than other Plains leaders of his time such as Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.

The book's four sections or chapters -- Early Years, Warrior, Family Life, and The Chief -- are followed by two pages that explain some Lakota customs, and 2 pages appropriately titled "A Short History of the Lakota People." (It's very short.)

This story of Spotted Tail's life opens with a description of his participation, as a boy, in a buffalo hunt. It ends with a brief account of his 1881 murder and its eventual repercussions for Indian law, and some paragraphs about his legacy.

In between, what stands out are Spotted Tail's efforts to understand and address the threat posed to his people, and to all Native peoples, by the ever-encroaching settler-colonizers. Weiden, who is Sicangu Lakota*,  shows how his subject's perspective changed with his experiences, from young Lakota fighter to prisoner of the US government to caring father to negotiator for his people. He even briefly sent some of his children to the Carlisle Indian boarding school. (When he discovered during a visit there just how the school was "educating" Native children, he took them home again.)

A real strength of the book is the way Weiden connects certain aspects of Spotted Tail's life with ongoing issues for Native people -- such as the Lakota people's efforts to keep/recover the Black Hills. The long-lasting legal and political implications are simply but clearly explained.

One of the Lakota customs Weiden explains is naming, specifically his Nation's customs around receiving a "spirit name." At first I winced on seeing that; too many non-Native people love the idea of "Indian names" and want to appropriate them! But a careful reading assured me that, unlike some authors who talk about naming practices, Weiden provides context and limits for Lakota naming. In the main text, he explains the circumstances of Spotted Tail's naming. In "Lakota Customs" at the end, he notes that many cultures give children spiritual or religious names, and explains that in Lakota culture, naming is often accompanied by a giveaway. Most importantly, in my opinion, he shows subtly that a Lakota spirit name is not something just anyone can get. That's a healthy perspective on the matter. He invites readers to consider whether they "like the idea of having two names" -- much better than inviting someone to choose their own "Indian spirit name."

The combined efforts of artists Jim Yellowhawk (Itazipco Band, Cheyenne River Sioux) and Pat Kinsella (White) -- especially the many dramatic 2-page spreads -- make Spotted Tail visually striking. Yellowhawk's ledger-style art and Kinsella's bright photos and montages provide imaginative windows on what life might have looked and felt like for Spotted Tail, in his time, while connecting readers to the present-day Lakota Country landscape.

Example of a 2-page mixed-media spread from Spotted Tail 
I'm not in a position to judge whether all Lakota readers will agree with the author's version of events surrounding the Grattan fight, during which Spotted Tail led Lakota fighters against US cavalry, earning honors from his nation and an order for his arrest from the government. Apparently more than one version is retold. Still, the author's account of those events and what happened after are likely to impress readers with Spotted Tail's courage, resourcefulness, and determination.

Discussion/reflection questions for readers are artfully incorporated into the illustrations, and interspersed throughout the book: "Do you think the government should apologize for terrible events that happened long ago?" "How would you feel if the government made you leave your home?" "What do you think it means to be wealthy?" The questions bring "added value" to the text, and adults who share or recommend the book may get good conversations started by asking young people to respond to them.

A few times when I was reading, it felt evident that Weiden is writing for a non-Lakota, non-Native audience -- for instance, he says, "If you are lucky enough to visit the Lakota Nation ..." But at no point did I have the feeling that he is "othering" anyone.

One wish for this and future biographies of historical Indigenous heroes:
Authors, please provide your sources. That allows your readers to follow your research trail, and become researchers themselves. [Edited 12/14/19 to add: Publishers, also take note -- help authors fit those sources into the finished work!]
[*Edited 2/25/2020 in response to a comment from Janessa: I apologize to the author and to readers for somehow omitting the fact that David Heska Wanbli Weiden is Sigangu Lakota. I have added it above. AICL remains committed to being clear about the tribal nation of Native book creators. Thanks for alerting us, Janessa.]

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Albert Marrin's YEARS OF DUST: THE STORY OF THE DUST BOWL

Over on Heavy Medal, a blog at School Library Journal, I posted my concerns with Richard Peck's new book, A Season of Gifts. In the course of discussing/defending the book, Jonathan Hunt (one of the blog hosts) referenced another book. That book was Albert Marrin's Years of Dust: The Story of the Dust Bowl. In A Season of Gifts, a preacher is given a box that may or may not have remains of a "Kickapoo Princess" inside. The preacher agrees to rebury the box and waxes poetically in his sermon. As you might imagine, I find the discussion of bones problematic from the get-go. I am working on an essay about that aspect of the book. 


In his post, Jonathan correctly describes the preacher's speech as hokey, sentimental, and, stereotypical in the way it situates Indians in nature. Then, he says, he came across another passage that was like that in Albert Marrin's Years of Dust. Jonathan quoted the passage, which I will quote here as well (it appears on the final page of Marrin's book, p. 122):


Chief Seattle, a leader of the Suqamish tribe, understood our place in nature.  In 1855, President Franklin Pierce offered to buy Suquamish lands in what is now the state of Washington.  Before accepting the president's terms, Seattle is said to have reminded the American envoys of some basic truths.  "Will you teach your children what we have taught our children?  That the earth is our mother?" the chief asked.  Then Seattle answered his own questions.  "What befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth . . . The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth . . . All things are connected like the blood which unites us all.  Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.  Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."


Then Jonathan tries to equate the fictional preacher in A Season of Gifts with a real person: Chief Seattle of the Suquamish Nation. He asks why it is not ok for Preacher Barnhart to use that sort of language, when, he says, it was ok for Seattle to use it. 


When I read Jonathan's words and the excerpt he quoted, I chuckled to myself, thinking that Marrin had done sloppy research, quoting---not Seattle---but Ted Perry, the person who wrote a version of Seattle's speech for use in a made-for-TV movie in the 1970s. And, I wondered how Jonathan could equate a fictional character with a leader of an American Indian Nation.


Among my comments to his post, I said "oops!" and then something snarky about white-guy-Marrin quoting white-guy-Perry. Maybe I should not do that sort of snarky writing. I know it rubs some people the wrong way. 


I could say, instead, non-Native-Marrin quoting non-Native-Perry...  Or maybe I should say sloppy-researcher-Marrin quoting fiction-as-fact...  Or maybe I shouldn't say anything like that at all. My point is, what are your sources???!!! What is the bias in those sources??? Are you using sources critically???



But setting my rant aside for now...

Jonathan said he'd check into Marrin's source for that speech and let us know. I was surprised (and not) to learn that Marrin's source was....  Al Gore's book, Earth in the Balance! Oops again!!! Now, we have this:


Non-Native-Marrin quoting Non-Native-Gore quoting Non-Native-Perry.


I decided it was time to get Marrin's book, and, Gore's too, and take a look at both books. 


The cover of Marrin's book includes, across the top, "Recipient of the 2008 National Endowment for Humanities Medal."  An impressive accomplishment for Marrin. His Sitting Bull and his World won the 2001 Carter G. Woodson Book Award and the 2000 Boston Globe Horn Book Award for Non-Fiction. I wish the selection committees had been able to read Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin's review of the book...  They probably wouldn't have chosen Sitting Bull and his World for either award! Do read the review... once you do, you'll be a bit embarrassed that you or anyone would think the book was worthy of the label "nonfiction."



Back to Years of Dust...  As I flip through it, I love the images on the pages. Photographs, posters, newspaper clippings. Good stuff! Or some of it is...  Some of it is not so good....



Looking right now at page 11 in the section titled "The Great Plains World." there's a sidebar titled "The Buffalo and the Indian." The second sentence is:
 "These hunters [Lakota and Cheyenne] ate buffalo meat at every meal, several pounds at a time." 
Several pounds of buffalo meat at every meal? Really? That'd be one big hamburger! (Want a laugh? Watch Sesame Street's Grover the Waiter in "Big Hamburger.")


The illustration at the bottom of the sidebar is a reproduction of a 1901 painting by Charles Schreyvogel titled "Doomed." It shows an Indian man on horseback, wearing a feathered warbonnet, lance held high, about to plunge it into a buffalo. 

Who was Schreyvogel? I read a little about him in an article called "Racism, Nationalism, and Nostalgia in Cowboy Art" by J. Gray Sweeney, published in Oxford Art Journal in Vol. 15, No. 1, 1992. Here's what Sweeney wrote (p. 72):


The third painter revered by the modern cowboy artists of today is Charles Schreyvogel. Schreyvogel painted about one hundred works in the years from 1900 to his death in 1912, and although he visited the West briefly, his work was executed entirely in his studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, where he frequently posed his 'manly' German-American compatriots on the tin roof of his apartment overlooking New York City. One of his sources of information about Native Americans derived from sketching actors in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Shows. [...] It seems perfectly comprehensible how such representations of war-like Indians would have met the cultural expectations of Schreyvogel's urban audience in New York City around 1910 whose only knowledge of Native Americans was from dime novels and wild west shows. As such the image is disturbingly indicative of the cultural mind-set of the last half of the nineteenth century that approved genocide. One critic of the day put it this way: Schreyvogel is more than a historian of the Indian. He is giving us an invaluable record of those parlous days of the Western frontier when a handful of brave men blazed the path for civilization and extended the boundaries of empire for a growing nation.


Ouch! Ouch! And OUCH again!!! Nineteenth century? Ironically, the date of the painting is almost 100 years ago....  Why did Marrin choose that art?! Probably because it reflects what he knows! Sweeney closes the article by discussing how popular this art has become for collectors, and, as subject matter for scholarly studies of its ideology. That scholarship is attacked, as Sweeney says (p. 79):


[R]ecent attacks by conservative critics make it abundantly apparent that the supporters of western art are willing to do everything in their power to protect the cherished fantasy of America's 'winning of the West' promoted in this art. 


Moving along in Years of Dust, I come across another winner in terms of source...  At the bottom of page 14, Marrin quotes from Laura Ingalls WIlder's On the Banks of Plum Creek, where she writes about grasshoppers on the Great Plains. Would you be ok with students in your classroom citing Wilder as though what she provided was a work of non-fiction?


It is interesting to me that in the text---not the illustrations or photographs or sidebars---Marrin does not mention American Indians. When he starts talking about buffalo on page 12, he says 

The lord of the Great Plains was the American bison, or buffalo. When the first Europeans reached the New World, some 40 to 60 million buffalo roamed the region in their endless search for pasture.


And on the next page, he talks about Laura Ingalls Wilder. His final paragraph in that section says (p. 16):

The Great Plains, then, was (and is) a harsh land. Despite the hardships, Americans still saw the plains as a place of opportunity. A place where, through hard work and good luck, they could buld a better future. And so, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, settlers flocked to the rolling grasslands west of the Mississippi. Unfortunately, the arrival of settlers would change the delicate ecology of the plains.


The one mention American Indians get in this section is the sidebar. In the text itself, the indigenous people of the Great Plains don't get any attention at all. Marrin talks about Europeans, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and, Americans, but, not Indians.



Course, that changes in the next section, "Conquering the Great Plains."



Marrin starts by talking about Daniel Boone, pioneers, Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark, and, an army officer who was mapping the land who said that the Plains were unfit for cultivation. Then Marrin says (p. 20)


Flat, treeless, and dry, the grasslands were fit only for wild beasts and nomadic Indians. 


Marrin sounds like Laura Ingalls Wilder in Little House on the Prairie! What does that say about the Wilder apologists who say "that's what they thought back then." Marrin isn't quoting the Army officer at that point. Those are Marrin's words.



Most people were only moving through the Plains, headed for the West Coast. But then after the Civil War, some decided they wanted to become cattle ranchers. To do that, they needed to get rid of the buffalo, which the Indians depended on for food. Here's what Marrin says (p. 22),


"Progress," as white people saw it, demanded that both the buffalo and the Indians should go.

Hence, the wholesale slaughter of buffalo began, followed by moving Indians onto reservations. Marrin's next section "The Coming of the Farmers" is a good example of bias in selection of information to include. He talks about the Homestead Act, how it offered public land to any citizen or immigrant intending to become a citizen.  Public land? Wait! What? How did that happen? I guess it doesn't matter. 

In this section, Marrin includes a sidebar titled "For Want of Rain" that is about the Anasazi. In the sidebar, Marrin writes (page 32): 

The drought drove the Anasazi away, but it is unclear where they went.

Let's see... when did Marrin's book come out? 2009??? What research did he do??? From Wikipedia to the online Encyclopedia Brittanica, I see something I've known for a long time.... the Anasazi are ancestors of the Pueblo people! (That's me. Pueblo person, Debbie Reese, enrolled at Nambe, established in its present location in 1200 AD). 

What do you think so far? I'm on page 32 of a book that 128 pages long. One fourth of the book, and, I think its kind of a mess. Worthy of a medal? I don't think so, and I'm not even at the part of the book that Jonathan Hunt quoted from! I'll flip to that page...


Oh but wait!!! As I flip pages, I spy with my little eye on page 55 and 56, some more Indians. On page 55 is a sidebar "The Hopi Snake Dance." Marrin provides a photograph of "a snake priest." The caption is a quote from Theodore Roosevelt. Teddy telling us about snake dances. I wonder what my Hopi friend, Matt Sakiestewa Gilbert, would think about this: 


These dances are prayers or invocations for rain, the crowning blessing in this dry land. The rain is adored and invoked both as male and female; the gentle steady downpour is the female, the storm with the lightning the male... The snakes, the brothers of men, as are all living things in the Hopi creed, are besought to tell the beings of the underworld man's need of water.


On page 56 is an 1899 photograph of a Hopi "snake priest with a snake in his mouth in the Hopi snake dance." Hmmmm...  Does Marrin know that those photographs are off limits? That the Hopi people disallowed photographs of their dances because those photographers did not understand what they were photographing and/or describing???


On page 102 is something rather intriguing about this famous photograph.




Taken by Dorothea Lange, it is known as "Migrant Mother." Lange was working for the Farm Security Administration, documenting the lives of Dust Bowl refugees. Lange described the woman as a hungry, desperate mother who told Lange that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the fields, and, birds her children killed. She has just sold the tires from their car to buy food. The photo was taken at a pea picker's labor camp in California.



But!!! Marrin tells us...


Forty years later, the two older children in Lange's photo remembered the incident differently. Their mother was FLorence Owens Means, a full-blooded Native American who had left Oklahoma ten years earlier, and so was no Dust Bowl refugee, as the photo suggests. The family had not been living on frozen peas and dead birds. Nor had Mrs. Thompson sold her tires. Her husband had taken the car for repairs, and she had moved to the pea camp from another camp. Before leaving, she had left word for her husband to come to the new location. She looked worried in the picture because she was not sure he got the message.


Lange, the children recalled, had promised not to publish the photo, but had done exactly that. It appeared on March 10, 1936, in the San Francisco News, agove First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt's weekly "My Day" column. Thompson saw the picture and felt betrayed. For the rest of her life, she resented Lange's use of her image for publicity. Thompson was an active woman, who had helped organize farmworkers' unions. "She was a very strong woman," said daughter Katherine, seen in the photo of her mother's right shoulder. "She was a leader. I think that's one of the reasons she resented the photo--because it didn't show her in that light. (5) "What upsets us is that people are making money out of our mother's pain," (6) said daughter Katherine. 


I did not know anything about that woman being Native... I'm going to have to look into that! I'll see what I find and follow up when I have more information.

Again, back to the reason I started this particular study...  The speech attributed to Seattle. Hunt quoted Marrin who cited Gore who doesn't cite anybody. 


Here's what Gore wrote on page 259:


Native American religions, for instance, offer a rich tapestry of ideas about our relationship to the earth. One of the most moving and frequently quoted explanations was attributed to Chief Seattle in 1855, when President Franklin Pierce stated that he would buy the land of Chief Seattle's tribe. The power of his response has survived numerous translations and retellings:



How can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people...


If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his firt breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.
Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth. 

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. 

One thing we know: Our God is also your God. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its Creator.

  
A few years ago, Jean Mendoza and I did some work on Brother Eagle Sister Sky, illustrated by Susan Jeffers. My copy of that book is at the office, so I can't do a line by line comparison of Gore's excerpt to the text in Brother Eagle...  

I will, however, point you to our analysis. It is in our article, Examining Multicultural Picture Books for the Early Childhood Classroom: Possibilities and Pitfalls, published in Early Childhood Research & Practice, Volume 3, #2, Fall, 2001.  In it, we talk about several children's picture books. Here's what we said about Brother Eagle, Sister Sky:


The text of Brother Eagle, Sister Sky has an interesting history. According to a 1993 memorandum from the Washington/Northwest Collections office of the Washington State Library (see Appendix I), at least four versions of the speech attributed to Seattle have appeared through history. In January of 1854, he spoke at length during negotiations involving the Suquamish, the Duwamish, and the U.S. government. Historians agree that the speech was translated into Chinook jargon "on the spot" since Seattle did not speak English. The first print version of what he said was not published until October 29, 1887, in a Seattle Sunday Star column by Dr. Henry A. Smith, a witness to the 1854 speech who had reconstructed and translated the speech from his notes. In the late 1960s, poet William Arrowsmith rewrote the speech in a somewhat more contemporary style, though it is still similar to Smith's version (Ellen Levesque, personal communication, September 29, 1993).
Later, Ted Perry created another version for "Home," a historical program about the northwest rain forest televised in 1971 (Jones & Sawhill, 1992). This version was constructed as if it were a letter to President Franklin Pierce, though "no such letter was ever written by or for Chief Seattle" (Ellen Levesque, personal communication, September 29, 1993). A shortened edition of the "letter" was exhibited at Expo '74 in Spokane, Washington.

At the end of Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, Susan Jeffers writes, "The origins of Chief Seattle's words are partly obscured by the mists of time." She mentions Smith's version and states that, like Joseph Campbell and unnamed others, she has adapted the message. Readers and listeners are left with the impression that the book offers perhaps an abridged version of the actual speech. The Suquamish tribe's Web site reproduces the 1854 1887 version, which addresses with great depth of feeling the state of Native-White relations in that place and time. In it, Seattle reluctantly, and perhaps with some anger, agrees that he and his people will move to a reservation, on the condition that they be able to visit their ancestors' graves without interference. Environmental responsibility does not appear to be the topic.



Take a look, too, at what Paul Chaat Smith wrote about the book. At the top of his page is a quote from Brother Eagle, Sister Sky that is a lot like what Gore quoted. Sigh. Big, big sigh. 


Sloppy research by Gore. Sloppy research by Marrin. Should Marrin's book be considered for any award, from anyone? I don't think so. If you have read Marrin's book, and want to weigh in on the discussion, head over to Team Nonfiction: The Second Wave.



I'll post there, letting readers there know that I've done this post.



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Update, 12:27 PM CST, December 7, 2009
Julia Good Fox directed me to a NY Review of Books essay about Dorothea Lange and the Migrant Mother photograph. Here's some of it, but do read the entire essay. Interesting!

In 1958 the hitherto nameless woman surfaced as Florence Thompson, author of an angry letter, written in amateur legalese, to the magazine U.S. Camera, which had recently republished Migrant Mother:
...It was called to My attention...request you Recall all the un-Sold Magazines...should the picture appear in Any magazine again I and my Three Daughters shall be Forced to Protect our rights...Remove the magazine from Circulation Without Due Permission...
Years later, Thompson's grandson, Roger Sprague, who maintains a Web site called migrantgrandson.com, described what he believed to be her version of the encounter with Lange:
Then a shiny new car (it was only two years old) pulled into the entrance, stopped some twenty yards in front of Florence and a well-dressed woman got out with a large camera. She started taking Florence's picture. With each picture the woman would step closer. Florence thought to herself, "Pay no mind. The woman thinks I'm quaint, and wants to take my picture." The woman took the last picture not four feet away then spoke to Florence: "Hello, I'm Dorothea Lange, I work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the plight of the migrant worker. The photos will never be published, I promise."
Some of these details ring false, and Sprague has his own interest in promoting a counternarrative, but the essence of the passage, with its insistence on the gulf of class and wealth between photographer and subject, sounds broadly right. "The woman thinks I'm quaint" might be the resentful observation of every goatherd, shepherd, and leech-gatherer faced with a well-heeled poet or documentarian on his or her turf.
It also emerged that Florence Thompson was not just a representative "Okie," as Lange had thought, but a Cherokee Indian, born on an Oklahoma reservation. So, in retrospect, Migrant Mother can be read as intertwining two "mythical cult-figures": that of the refugee sharecropper from the Dust Bowl (though Thompson had originally come to California with her first husband, a millworker, in 1924) and that of the Noble Red Man. There is a strikingly visible connection, however unnoticed by Lange, between her picture of Florence Thompson and Edward S. Curtis's elaborately staged sepia portraits of dignified Native American women in tribal regalia in his extensive collection The North American Indian (1900–1930), perhaps the single most ambitious—and contentious—work of American pastoral ever created by a visual artist.