Joseph Bruchac's HIDDEN ROOTS

Update on Sep 30 2023: I (Debbie Reese) no longer recommend Bruchac's work. For details see Is Joseph Bruchac truly Abenaki?

[Note: This review is by Beverly Slapin of Oyate. I am grateful to her for sending me her reviews. Early in my graduate work, I read Through Indian Eyes: The Native Perspective in Books for Children, edited by Slapin and Seale. It marked an important moment in my work. In the field of children's literature, it is a touchstone, and its sequel A Broken Flute: The Native Perspective in Books for Children is equally important. As is clear to regular readers of my blog, I link to Oyate often, suggesting you order books like Hidden Roots from there. I would not do that if Oyate was a for-profit bookseller. Oyate is a not-for-profit organization that is doing very important and necessary work on a shoestring. ---Debbie]

______________________________________

Bruchac, Joseph (Abenaki), Hidden Roots. Scholastic Press, 2004. 136 pages, grades 5-up

Living with his family in a tiny town in upstate New York, 11-year-old Sonny is surrounded by secrets. His parents live in solitude, and so does he. Questions are forbidden, and silence is enforced by his father, who explodes into violence without warning. His only friend is Uncle Louis, who comes around mostly after Sonny’s father has left for work. The old man is tied to the land in ways that Sonny is just beginning to know. As they walk in the woods together, make camp and do a lot of listening, Uncle Louis shows Sonny the relationship among all things. “Is it all right, us praying like Indians that way?” Sonny asks. “Long as no one sees us,” Louis answers.

Taking place in the early 1960s, Hidden Roots is rooted in the Vermont Eugenics Program that began some thirty years before and left the Abenaki people, for generations, “hiding in plain sight.”

Slowly, Sonny begins to understand how a Jewish librarian’s parents’ secret saved her life and how Indians had to pretend they weren’t Indian: “Sometimes people jes have to do the hardest things for their children,” Louis says. The hardest things, such as giving your children away so they can survive.

When Louis can no longer contribute to the silence and shame, Sonny begins to understand the “whys” of having to leave your home in the middle of the night, having secrets hanging heavily in the air, having to keep your head down and not bring attention to yourself, having to watch your father’s self-hatred turn to violence, having been told your grandfather is your “uncle” because he still lives in the Indian way. And Sonny begins to come to know that roots—even hidden roots—run deep.

Hidden Roots is for all those Indian families whose lives were interrupted by the eugenicists and for all the elderly mothers who still whisper to their adult daughters, “You better get your hair cut, or everybody’ll know you’re an Indian.” For all those who see their lives in this story, and for all those who never knew and now bear the responsibility to bring about change.

In a poem called “Rez Kid” (in Above the Line, West End Press, 2003), Joe Bruchac writes,

…hidden roots still give you strength.

There will always be another day.

The wind will always remember our name.

No matter how many roads they build,

the earth under our feet is our mother.

Joe Bruchac has written an honest, truth-telling story that may well be the most important book this prolific writer has ever produced. Thank you, Joe. You have done a good thing.

—Beverly Slapin

Joseph Bruchac's HIDDEN ROOTS back in print!

Update on Sep 30 2023: I (Debbie Reese) no longer recommend Bruchac's work. For details see Is Joseph Bruchac truly Abenaki?

Sharing terrific news today!

After much back and forth over if/when/how Joseph Bruchac's award-winning Hidden Roots would be back in print, I can---today---tell you where to get it!

Some back story....   

Hidden Roots is about a forced sterilization program in Vermont that sought to "breed better Vermonters" by sterilizing Native peoples of that state. These programs were in other states, too. Bruchac's book is about the Abenaki people in Vermont, many of whom literally hid their identities to avoid being sterilized. Nancy L. Gallagher's Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State is an excellent work of non-fiction about the eugenics project in Vermont (not marketed as a book for children but definitely can be used with high school students).

Hidden Roots was---and is---an important book. I featured it in a Google Search Story I put together in the summer of 2010. In 2006, it was the first recipient of the American Indian Library Association's Youth Literature Award, in the Young Adult category.

But, Scholastic opted to let it go out of print. I was disappointed to hear that news, especially since Scholastic continues to books about Thanksgiving that are questionable for their bias and stereotyping.

Myself and colleagues began a writing campaign to Scholastic, asking them to give Bruchac rights to publish the book himself.  I don't know how successful our letters were, but Scholastic did give Bruchac the rights, and the book is now available at Lulu for $9.95.


Are you a bookseller who wants multiple copies of Hidden Roots?

In an email to me, Joe said bookstores and other retailers can be multiple copies at the standard 40% discount by

1) emailing nudatlog@earthlink.net or,

2) by faxing a purchase order to (518) 583-9741.

For those of you who do not know about Hidden Roots, I'm republishing (below) a previous post about the book, originally published here on American Indians in Children's Literature on September 16, 2010. It includes information about small revisions to the original book (note: the post below has been edited for clarity on Aug 31 2014). 

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Thursday, September 16, 2010


Joseph Bruchac's HIDDEN ROOTS

A few weeks ago, I featured Joseph Bruchac's Hidden Roots in a Google Search Story I put together. Then I started hearing from people that it is out of print. I checked with Joe, and yes, it did go out of print. Scholastic was the publisher.

Those of you who have not read the book may not know what form I'm talking about. I'm not worried about spoilers here. I'm much more interested in telling you about the book and why you should order it.

Hidden Roots is about sterilization of Native people. The book is set in 1954 in New York. When the story begins, Sonny (the sixth-grade protagonist; his legal name is Howard Camp) doesn't know that he's Abenaki. He thinks he is white. He's growing up like other kids. By that I mean he watches cowboy and Indian films at the theater and picks up a lot of stereotypical information about Indians. His mother has taught him to sleep lightly, lest someone sneak up on him. Ironically, he imagines Indians sneaking up on him.

Called Sonny by his mother, father, and the man he's called Uncle Louis since he was a baby, he learns towards the end of the book that Uncle Louis is actually his grandfather. Sonny learns that he is Abenaki, and that his parents and many other Abenaki's have been hiding that identity in order to protect themselves from being sterilized. He learns this towards the end of the book when Uncle Louis shows him a yellowed paper that he carries in his wallet. Here's that part of the book.

It was some kind of printed-out form, like you get from a doctor's office. I could tell that because of what the first lines said. Most of it had been printed up, but the names and the dates on the paper that had been filled in were all written in ink.

We, Harmon P. Wilcox and Frederick Daniels Murtaugh, physicians and surgeons legally qualified to practice in the State of Vermont, hereby certify that on the 12th day of March 1932, we examined Sophia Lester, a resident of Highgate, Vermont, and decided:

(1). That she is an idiot feebleminded insane person and likely (Strike out inappropriate words) to procreate imbecile feebleminded insane persons if not sexually sterilized; (Strike out inappropriate words)
(2). That the health and physical condition of such person will not be injured by the operation of vasectomy salpingectomy; (Strike out inappropriate word)
(3). That the welfare of such person and the public will be improved if such person is sterilized;
(4). That such person is not of sufficient intelligence to understand that she cannot beget children after such operation is performed.

Signed in duplicate this 12th day of March, 1932,
     Harmon P. Wilcox
     Frederick Daniels Murtaugh

Sonny asks Uncle Louis who Sophia Lester was, and learns that she was Uncle Louis's wife, and that both are Indian. He also learns that Uncle Louis is actually his grandfather, and that his grandmother died as a result of the sterilization. To protect their daughter--Sonny's mom--from being sterilized, Uncle Louis had given her to a white family to raise.

In his Author's Note, Bruchac writes that Vermont was one of thirty-one states in the United States that enacted legislation to sterilize the "feeble-minded." The note also says that Abenaki's weren't the sole target of this law. The poor and those who were different from most Vermonters were also targets. Bruchac refers to Nancy Gallagher's Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State, published in 1999. You can get her book, or, look at a website she's helped develop at the University of Vermont: Vermont Eugenics: A Documentary History.

Hidden Roots is a very important book. 

We ought to teach children all of America's 

history, not just the part that 

makes its history look good. 

It wasn't all good.  

__________________________

Further information:

There are several research articles coming out of American Indian Studies about the sterilization of Native women that took place as late as the 1970s.

"The Lost Generation: American Indian women and sterilization abuse" by Myla Vicenti Carpio was published in 2004 in Social Justice (send me an email if you'd like a copy of the article). She opens the article by quoting from a Native America Calling radio show about sterilization:

I had been sterilized at the age of eleven, at the IHS [Indian Health Service] hospital here in the 1950s. I got married in the 1960s and I went to the doctor and he told me that I had a partial hysterectomy. [When I was a child] they were giving us vaccinations and mine got infected and a nurse came and gave me some kind of shot so I wouldn't hurt. When I woke up my stomach was hurting and I was bleeding (Woman speaking on radio show, "Native America Calling," 2002).

"The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women" by Jane Lawrence, published in American Indian Quarterly in 2000. The first two paragraphs describe the experiences of a woman and her husband, and, two fifteen year old girls who went into the hospital for appendectomies and follows that with an overview of the Indian Health Service and its development over time. Because Native women began to come forward saying they had been sterilized, the Government Accounting Office conducted an investigation and found that

IHS performed twenty-three sterilizations on women under the age of twenty-one between July 1, 1973 and April 30, 1974, and thirteen more between April 30, 1974 and March 30, 1976. The doctors at the IHS hospitals didn't understand the regulations, and, the doctors under contract for IHS weren't required to follow the regulations.

In "The Continuing Struggle Against Genocide: Indigenous Women's Reproductive Rights," D. Marie Ralstin-Lewis writes that Congress authorized sterilization of the poor in 1970 through the Family Planning Act. In 1974, she writes that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW):

circulated pamphlets among Indian communities extolling the benefits of sterilization. One, called "Plan Your Family," contains a cartoon depiction of Indians "before" and "after" sterilization. The Indians before sterilization appear sad and downtrodden. The couple has ten little Indian children and only one horse, implying they are poor because they have too many mouths to feed. In contrast, the Indian couple in the "after" picture is happy; they have one child and many [ten] horses."

She also documents that DepoProvera and Norplant were used on Native women, the majority of whom were mentally retarded, in the early 1970s. Neither drug was approved by the FDA at that time, and wouldn't be available for widespread use until the 1990s. Her article is in Wicazo Sa Review, Spring 2005, pp. 71-95.

Scholastic, Joseph Bruchac, and the out-of-print status of HIDDEN ROOTS

Update on Sep 30 2023: I (Debbie Reese) no longer recommend Bruchac's work. For details see Is Joseph Bruchac truly Abenaki?

A few weeks ago, I posted news that Joseph Bruchac was going to bring his out-of-print Hidden Roots back into publication by publishing it with his own press.

Earlier today I learned from him that Scholastic will not revert rights to him so that he can reprint Hidden Roots. He was told that Scholastic will continue to make it available to the school market through book clubs, but that means you and I can't get it (unless we have access to a school book club and the book is actually listed in the new catalog each month.)

From Joe, I also learned that his previously positive relationship with Scholastic has changed drastically. This happened when the editor he worked with for years left Scholastic. Since then, Scholastic has been slow to respond to his questions and has not kept him informed of the status of his books as had been done in the past. He was not told, for example, that Hidden Roots or Geronimo were out of print and that Scholastic has no plans to reprint them.

How to make sense of this, I wonder... 

Were those two books not money-makers for Scholastic? Scholastic is, after all, a business that wants to be profitable, and, it wants books that will sell.  So.... what does Scholastic offer in the way of books about American Indians? Or books written by American Indians?

I went to their site and searched. I found these books when I searched on "Native American."


The Journal of Jesse Smoke, A Cherokee Boy. Hmm... No author listed on the website. I dug around and found out the author's name: Joseph Bruchac! The Journal of Jesse Smoke is in the "My Name is America" series of historical journals that Scholastic has been publishing for several years now.  It was preceded by the "Dear America" series of historical diaries that featured female protagonists. (The "My Name is America" series is historical fiction journals featuring male protagonists.) Anyway, when the Dear America series first got started, Scholastic did not include the author's name prominently on the books. Many readers thought they were actual diaries. The reading community wasn't happy with being misled that way, and so, Scholastic started adding author's names to the book spine (not sure about the covers).  I guess they didn't think it necessary to do that on the website? Or, did they revert back to the misleading style of packaging the books? I haven't read The Journal of Jesse Smoke.

A Single Shard, by Linda Sue Park. I don't think there is anything in it about American Indians. I don't know why it came back in the search.

The Starving Time: Elizabeth's Jamestown Colony Diary. As with Jesse Smoke, no author's name is provided on the website, but the author's name (Patricia Hermes) IS on the cover.  I haven't read it, but given its setting, I'm guessing Elizabeth had some run-ins with Indians... 


Greetings from the Fifty States: How They Got Their Names, by Sheila Keenan and Selina Alko. This book was probably scooped up in the search because a lot of states' names are Native words.

The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses, by Paul Goble. Originally published by Simon & Schuster. This won the Caldecott when it came out in 1979. Goble is not Native, but has published a great many books about American Indians. Some---especially his Iktomi stories---have been met with strong objections from Elizabeth Cook-Lyn and Doris Seale. I've got to look into The Girl Who Loved Wild Horses. From everything I can find (online), there is no mention of a tribe. This is a generic "Native American" story. And, on the Scholastic website, on the Discussion Guide, one suggestion is to "Have the class leaf through the book's illustrations to find symbols that they readily associate with Native Americans (e.g., arrows, feathers as hair ornaments, tipis, men with long, braided hair, etc.). Wow! Children can, in fact, associate all those things with "Native Americans"----but if the kids come to think (as many do) that all Indians live in tipis, then, that exercise is a problem, and, it points to the problems with a generic "Native American" story...

Dear America: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple, by Kathryn Lasky. I haven't read this book, but maybe I should! The description on the Scholastic page says that the protagonist wants "more than anything" to meet and befriend a Native American...  And then "Her wish comes true when she meets Squanto..."

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. Native story, Native writer, award-winning book.

The First Thanksgiving, by Garnet Jackson. This looks like one of those wonderful (not) stories that doesn't name the tribes (Wampanoag, for example) who encountered the Pilgrims. Instead, it is "Native Americans" and Pilgrims...

If You Were at the First Thanksgiving, by Anna Kamma. Based on description provided, it's the same-old-same-old lovely (not) story...

Saving the Buffalo, by Albert Marrin. His previous books about American Indians were a mess.

Of all those, I'd order two (Jesse Smoke and Diary) if I was interested in Native stories by Native writers.

But consider how many Pilgrim/Indian stories are in this set! And, how many non-Native writers presenting---explicitly and implicitly---outsider perspectives on Native Americans! It really seems to me that Scholastic ought to bring Hidden Roots and Geronimo back into print. I'm guessing, though, that they're catering to the public, that they are after the dollars that those Thanksgiving stories bring into their coffers...

Come on, Scholastic!  Bring Hidden Roots back into print! Or, give Bruchac the rights to do it! The book is discussed in several children's literature textbooks. It won the award given by the American Indian Library Association!

I'm going to write to Scholastic and ask why they aren't going to keep it in print. They've got an online form to use, if you're interested in writing as well.

Joseph Bruchac's HIDDEN ROOTS

Update on Sep 30 2023: I (Debbie Reese) no longer recommend Bruchac's work. For details see Is Joseph Bruchac truly Abenaki?

A few weeks ago, I featured Joseph Bruchac's Hidden Roots in a Google Search Story I put together. Then I started hearing from people that it is out of print. I checked with Joe, and yes, it did go out of print. Scholastic was the publisher.

Joe, however, was able to get rights to it, and he's bringing it out through his own press, Bowman Books. It'll have a new cover and he's worked on a better presentation of the form that appears on page 112-113 of the hardcover edition with the tree on the front. (Update, September 19, 2010: This is on hold for now...)


Those of you who have not read the book may not know what form I'm talking about. I'm not worried about spoilers here. I'm much more interested in telling you about the book and why you should order it as soon as its ready (I'll let you know as soon as I get the word from Joe.)

The form says (for ease of sharing it below, I'm leaving out the lines on the page that say "Strike out inappropriate words"):

We, Harmon P. Wilcox and Frederick Daniels Murtaugh, physicians and surgeons legally qualified to practice in the State of Vermont, hereby certify that on the 12th day of March 1932, we examined Sophia Lester, a resident of Highgate, Vermont, and decided:
(1). That she is an idiot feebleminded insane person and likely to procreate imbecile feebleminded insane persons if not sexually sterilized.
(2). That the health and physical condition of such person will not be injured by the operation of vasectomy salpingectomy;
(3). That the welfare of such person and the public will be improved if such person is sterilized;
(4). That such person is not of sufficient intelligence to understand that she cannot beget children after such operation is performed.

Signed in duplicate this 12th day of March, 1932,
     Harmon P. Wilcox
     Frederick Daniels Murtaugh

Who is Sophie Lester? She is the grandmother of the boy at the center of Hidden Roots. He's a sixth grader named Howard Camp. Called Sonny by his mother, father, and the man he's called Uncle Louis since he was a baby, he learns towards the end of the book that Uncle Louis is actually his grandfather, and, he learns that his grandmother was sterilized...  Sonny learns that he is Abenaki, and that his parents and many other Abenaki's have been hiding that identity in order to protect themselves from being sterilized. 

The book is set in 1954 in New York. When the story begins, Sonny doesn't know that he's Abenaki. He's growing up like other kids. By that I mean he watches cowboy and Indian films at the theater and picks up a lot of stereotypical information about Indians. His mother has taught him to sleep lightly, lest someone sneak up on him. Ironically, he imagines Indians sneaking up on him.

I was telling someone about these eugenics programs a few days ago, and he didn't know about them. I'm quite certain very few Americans know about it either.

In his Author's Note, Bruchac writes that Vermont was one of thirty-one states in the United States that enacted legislation to sterilize the "feeble-minded." The note also says that Abenaki's weren't the sole target of this law. The poor and those who were different from most Vermonters were also targets. Bruchac refers to Nancy Gallagher's Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State, published in 1999. You can get her book, or, look at a website she's helped develop at the University of Vermont: Vermont Eugenics: A Documentary History.

Hidden Roots is a very important book and I look forward to it being back in print.
__________________________
Further information:

There are several research articles coming out of American Indian Studies about the sterilization of Native women that took place as late as the 1970s.

"The Lost Generation: American Indian women and sterilization abuse" by Myla Vicenti Carpio was published in 2004 in Social Justice.  It is available, in full, online here.  Take time to read her entire article.

"The Sterilization of Native American Women" by Jane Lawrence, published in American Indian Quarterly in 2000. The first two paragraphs describe the experiences of a woman and her husband, and, two fifteen year old girls who went into the hospital for appendectomies and follows that with an overview of the Indian Health Service and its development over time. Because Native women began to come forward saying they had been sterilized, the Government Accounting Office conducted an investigation and found that

IHS performed twenty-three sterilizations on women under the age of twenty-one between July 1, 1973 and April 30, 1974, and thirteen more between April 30, 1974 and March 30, 1976. The doctors at the IHS hospitals didn't understand the regulations, and, the doctors under contract for IHS weren't required to follow the regulations.

In "The Continuing Struggle Against Genocide: Indigenous Women's Reproductive Rights," D. Marie Ralstin-Lewis writes that Congress authorized sterilization of the poor in 1970 through the Family Planning Act. In 1974, she writes that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW):

circulated pamphlets among Indian communities extolling the benefits of sterilization. One, called "Plan Your Family," contains a cartoon depiction of Indians "before" and "after" sterilization. The Indians before sterilization appear sad and downtrodden. The couple has ten little Indian children and only one horse, implying they are poor because they have too many mouths to feed. In contrast, the Indian couple in the "after" picture is happy; they have one child and many [ten] horses."

She also documents that DepoProvera and Norplant were used on Native women, the majority of them were mentally retarded, in the early 1970s. Neither drug was approved by the FDA at that time, and wouldn't be available for widespread use until the 1990s. Her article is in Wicazo Sa Review, Spring 2005, pp. 71-95.

Eighth Graders Analyze SIGN OF THE BEAVER

[Note: This essay submitted by Karen, a classroom teacher, in response to my post (on March 17th) about using Caddie Woodlawn to teach about stereotypes.]

My students and I have done critical analysis much like this, years ago with Sign of the Beaver, and more recently with a history textbook's chapter on the Civil War. I was working with 8th graders in a Title I pull-out language arts and social studies class when we analyzed Sign of the Beaver. The history text analysis was done with my fifth/sixth grade class last year. We also think critically about historical events, looking at them from the perspectives of ordinary people affected by the decisions of those in power.

The one piece that I found essential to have in place before analysis of Sign of the Beaver was a thorough grounding in culturally authentic literature. Living and teaching in southern Vermont, most of my students are white. Before my students can think critically about stereotypes in literature, they need to see literature that's positive and authentic. That's equally true for the very few students who have strong Native ties or are black or Asian as for the white students.

Having said that, I think the analysis of specific chapters and passages in Sign of the Beaver was also successful because, as you suggest, we didn't read it as a novel or as literature, we just read those passages, largely comparing the ways in which Attean's speech, his grandfather's speech and that of Matt are described. The students, given to me to teach because they'd been unengaged in the "regular ed" classrooms, were vocal and articulate in their responses to Speare's depiction of Attean's speech as grunts. I can still hear their voices, 18 years later, as they "talked back" to Speare.

I don't do this more often for a couple of reasons: -first, with only so much time, I do want to make sure my students get that authentic literature. I'm reading Hidden Roots right now to my class. -second, even in snippets, literature is so powerful and can be so powerfully painful. When most of the kids are white, the possibilities of pain for others are so much greater, as my own sons (we're a multiwhateverish background family, black, white, Mi'kmaq, and mystery genes) have let me know. Thinking critically about historical events and about texts somehow doesn't hurt as much as the literature can.

2010: Best Books Recommended for Middle School

If I was starting a library in a middle school, these are the first ten books I'd buy.  In reading these books, students would be reading stories Native writers create about Native people and places.  The books I list here include fiction, historical fiction, and poetry. 

• Bruchac, Joseph. Hidden Roots. Update on Sep 30 2023: I (Debbie Reese) no longer recommend Bruchac's work. For details see Is Joseph Bruchac truly Abenaki?
• Carvell, Marlene. Who Will Tell My Brother?
• Dorris, Michael. Sees Behind Trees.
• Erdrich, Louise. The Birchbark House
• Loyie, Larry. As Long as the Rivers Flow: A Last Summer before Residential School
• Ortiz, Simon. The People Shall Continue
• Smith, Cynthia Leitich. Indian Shoes
• Smith, Cynthia Leitich. Rain Is Not My Indian Name
• Sneve, Virginia Driving Hawk. High Elk's Treasure
• Sterling, Shirley. My Name is Seepeetza

For annotations, see my Native Voices article in School Library Journal.

Update: Jan 7, 2012
Though she is not Native, Debby Dahl Edwardson has lived her adult life with her husband in his Inupiaq village in Alaska. Her commitment to Native lives and story is not abstract or romantic. Add her book, My Name is Not Easy to this list of must-have books for middle grade students.

See also:
Top Ten Books Recommended for High School
Top Ten Books Recommended for Elementary School

Download a pdf with all three lists:
Selecting Children's and Young Adult Literature about American Indians

"E99.P85, Or: The Case of Pocahontas in the Library"

Thaddeus Andracki is one of the most outstanding people I came to know at the University of Illinois when I taught there. As an undergrad, he took my Politics of Children's Literature course and is now in Library School there.

Thaddeus publishes a blog called I'll get there. It'll be worth the trip. I like looking at the bookshelf that is the background for his blog. I especially like seeing Joseph Bruchac's Hidden Roots there. I think it is one of the most important books around.

Yesterday, Thaddeus posted "E99.P85, Or: The Case of Pocahontas in the Library." Read this excerpt, and then go read his entire post. And, then, bookmark or follow his blog. He is a librarian-in-training, but he's already someone we can all learn from.

Disney’s Pocahontas was assigned a main entry of E99.P85. For those who don’t have LoC call numbers memorized (which I’m assuming is most people), E is the broad heading for American History. Numbers in the range around E90 are specifically American Indian History, and E99 is for Biography of American Indians. The P85 specifies further the person the biography is about.

Pocahontas was being classified as a historically accurate documentary.

I’d like to think this was some sort of mistake. But according to OCLC Classify, there are 1242 holdings of this film classified under this call number in libraries that submit data to OCLC. Pocahontas was deliberately assigned a call number such that it could pose as Native history.

I doubt I need to convince you that this film does not accurately represent the history of the woman who was Matoaka, but just in case, here’s a statement from the Powhatan Renape Nation, as well as information from multiple other sources. What I’m concerned about is the carelessness that librarians have taken in curating information about people.