Big News about Hoffman's AMAZING GRACE

Eds. note (10/2/2015): See update at bottom. It appears the change is only to the U.S. edition. 

In a comment to his post about weeding books, Roger Sutton said that Horn Book just received the 25th anniversary edition of Amazing Grace and that the page on which Grace is shown playing Indian is gone (she's pretending to be Longfellow's Hiawatha). Here's his comment:

This is the illustration he's talking about. It was in the original version of the book, published by Dial in 1991. The author is Mary Hoffman; the illustrator is Caroline Binch:

For those who don't know the book, the main character is a girl named Grace who wants to be Peter Pan in the play her class is going to do. Other kids tell her she can't be Peter because she's a girl and he's a boy, and, that she's Black and he's White. Stung--as any kid would be--she imagines herself in all kinds of roles, including Hiawatha. That she's "by the shining Big-Sea-Water" tells us she is imagining herself as the Hiawatha of Longfellow's imagination (there was, in fact, a real person named Hiawatha).

But see how Grace "plays" Hiawatha? In a stereotypical way. She sits cross legged, torso bare, arms crossed and raised up (I don't know why so many statues show Indians with arms crossed and lifted off the chest that way), barefoot, with a painted face and stoic look.

Amazing Grace came out in 1991. In 1992, a person from whom I've learned a great deal, wrote about it. That person: Ginny Moore Kruse. In her article "No Single Season: Multicultural Literature for All Children, published in Wilson Library Bulletin 66 30-3, she wrote:

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, an accurate portrayals are skewed for everyone else.

This change is big news in children's literature. I'm grateful to Roger for sharing it. But let's return to his words. Roger suggested that the absence of Grace/Hiawatha in the new edition is the result of "public shaming."

Its absence can be seen as the result of public shaming---but it also be seen as a a step forward in what we give to children.

Might we say it is gone because its author, illustrator, and publisher decided that the self-esteem of Native children matters? And, maybe, they decided that having it in there was a disservice to non-Native readers, too, skewing what they know about Native peoples? Maybe they just decided it was dated, and in an effort to market the book to today's readers, that page would hurt sales.

Today, I wish I was near Ginny's hometown. I'd call her and see if she wanted to join me for a cup of tea. I'm sure it'd be a delightful conversation.


Updated on October 2, 2015 at 9:23 AM

Librarian Allie Jane Bruce wrote to tell me about a review of Amazing Grace at the UK website, Mirrors, Windows, and Doors. Based on what I read in the review, there are two versions of the 25th anniversary edition of Amazing Grace. The one Roger Sutton has is the US edition. The one in the UK remains unchanged. Here's an excerpt of the UK review:

The double-page that shows Grace as Hiawatha and then as ‘Mowgli in the back garden jungle’ does, however, need to be held up as a reminder that breadth of experience through reading is important for young children: whilst Grace’s story highlights a can-do attitude and the notion that you can be whatever you want to be because of what you do not what you are, the stereotypes that have been passed down through some of these classic stories can only be broken by ensuring that children read contemporary stories set within the cultures they represent.  There is still too much of a dislocation in the UK between dressing up in a feathered headdress with a painted face and awareness of how that sits within contemporary Native American culture.

I guess that the people involved in the 25th anniversary edition think it is ok to let kids in the UK have that page. Obviously, I disagree.

This, however, is familiar. In 2010, a British production of Peter Pan was slated for Canada. Changes were made to it in an effort to be sensitive to First Nations people. Given the debased depictions of Native peoples in kids books imported from the UK to the US, I think it is wrong to leave that page in Amazing Grace. Worse than wrong, actually. It is a disservice to the children whose stereotypical ideas of Native people are affirmed by that page, and a disservice to those who learn that image for the first time, when they read Amazing Grace. 

Intersections: Alice Walker, playing Indian, and real Indians

Searching for information about Bill Wahpepah, a Kickapoo and Sauk and Fox man who worked at the Native American Survival School in the Bay Area in the 1970s, I found myself reading Alice Walker's blog post "The First Time I Saw Dennis Banks: Ojibwa Warrior Introduction." I learned that Alice Walker was involved with the American Indian Movement:

Many years later, after moving to the West Coast, I became involved in the American Indian Movement: Reading poetry with John Trudell, hosting fund raisers with Nilak Butler, Bill Wahpepah and his sculptor wife, Carol. Celebrating Un-Thanksgiving Day at Alcatraz Island, praying-in on top of Black Mesa in Arizona, and joining demonstrations and vigils for Native American rights whenever I could. However it wasn’t until a decade had passed that I once again saw Dennis. This time handcuffed, on trial for a list of crimes designated by the court, having voluntarily returned to face sentencing after leading the FBI on a chase that lasted eleven years.

Go to her blog and read the entire essay. There, she talks about her mother's grandmother, Tallulah, who was African and Cherokee. Clicking around her blog, I ended up at her website, Alice Walker's Garden, where I read her biography. This jumped out at me:

The most shaping experience of Walker’s childhood and adolescence occurred in 1952 when she was eight years old. Playing cowboys and Indians with her older brothers Curtis and Bobby, Curtis shot accidentally Walker in the eye with a BB gun. To avoid punishment, the brothers concocted a fiction and pressured their sister to accept it. The physical result was that Walker lost the sight in her right eye.

That incident played a major role in her writing. Not the playing Indian part, but the effect of agreeing to hide what happened. Read the entire biographical essay, too. She doesn't say more about Indians or playing Indian there. Maybe she does elsewhere. I'm not trying to interpret it in any way, good or bad, because I don't know her work. It just strikes me, on this July day, the ways that peoples lives intersect, how they touch each other.

Unexpected intersections: Thanksgiving and Karen Russell's SWAMPLANDIA!

Earlier this week a reader wrote to ask me about Karen Russell's Swamplandia! Not familiar with it, I read reviews and learned that it is the story of a not-Native family who uses Native names to pass as Native people who run an alligator-wrestling theme park. I've got a copy on order so I can read it.

Here's what I know so far (reading from the "look inside" option at Amazon):

Swamplandia! is the name of the theme park. It is run by the "Bigtree clan of alligator wrestlers." The star of their show is Hilola Bigtree. She is described as being "brown-skinned" and muscular. She's married to "Chief Bigtree" and their children are Kiwi (a boy), Osceola (a girl) and the protagonist, Ava. In the billboard promoting the theme park, the family is shown gathered round an alligator. On page five, Ava tells us that they:

"are wearing Indian costumes on loan from our Bigtree Gift Shop: buckskin vests, cloth headbands, great blue heron feathers, great white heron feathers, chubby beads hanging off our foreheads and our hair in braids, gator "fang" necklaces.

The text continues:

Although there was not a drop of Seminole or Miccosukee blood in us, the Chief always costumed us in tribal apparel for the photographs he took. He said we were "our own Indians." Our mother had a toast-brown complexion that a tourist could maybe squint and ball Indian--and Kiwi, Grandpa Sawtooth, and I could hold our sun.

Osceola, we learn, is "snowy white" and that getting her ready for the photos required that she be "colored in with drugstore blusher." Later we learn of Ossie's boyfriend (Ossie is short for Osceola), Louis Thanksgiving.

I'm guessing you can see why I ordered the book. The family, calling itself Bigtree, is posing as Indians. They're playing Indian. Ava tells us so. It isn't something that is hidden from readers, but I'm guessing the visitors at the theme park have no idea the Bigtree family is not Native.

Identity and race seem to figure prominently in the book. On page 166, we learn that when he was 14, Kiwi (Ava's older brother) declared:

"I'm a Not-Bigtree. A Not-Indian. A Not Seminole. A Not Miccosukee."

We're given that information because in that part of the story, Kiwi is keenly aware that he is white and in the minority of his mostly not-white class of students in a GED class. On page 191, we learn about Seminoles ghosts who "haunt" the swamps, and, that Ava's father (Chief Bigtree) envied

...the "real" Indians... in a filial and loving way...

I wonder if there are any Seminole characters in the book? I'll let you know when I get the book. It got rave reviews. RAVE reviews. At the Amazon page, there are blurbs from everyone from Stephen King to the reviewer for Oprah's magazine. I don't see any comments at all about the fact that the family is playing Indian. If they were playing Black, would that be noted?

Two of my recent reviews are about Thanksgiving picture books: The Berenstain Bears Give Thanks, and, Jon Scieszka's Trucksgiving. (Note: A reader wrote to chastise me for having a myopic viewpoint, saying there are more important things to worry about. In a response to that sort of criticism, I've written 'why it matters' as part of the "ABOUT AICL" page.)

Given those two reviews, I've been doing a bit of reading about Thanksgiving and how it is taught. I came across "On Education: Pilgrims, No Thanks in Mohawk County," a terrific article published in the New York Times on November 26, 2003.  (If the link doesn't work, send me an email and I'll send it to you directly.)

In the article, a 6th grade boy says that Thanksgiving is his favorite holiday. That boys name leaped out at me because I've been reading and thinking about Swamplandia! The child's name? Gage Bigtree. He goes to school at St. Regis Mohawk Elementary, a public school near the Canadian border where all 450 students in the school are Mohawk. Here's an excerpt from the article:

It is a fine balance, teaching American history at a public school so different from the mainstream, a place where so much American history is taken personally and negatively. These are young children, and while their teachers -- many themselves Mohawk -- do not want them to be naïve about history, they do not want them embittered, either.

And so a fair amount of time is spent focusing, not on what the Pilgrims did, but on the richness of the Indians' own culture and history. When Mrs. King and Carole Ross attended this school as children in the 1950's and 1960's, students were barred from speaking Mohawk; today, the two women work full time teaching the Mohawk language to every child.

Students learn that centuries before the Europeans arrived and held the ''first Thanksgiving,'' the Mohawks were celebrating nine Thanksgivings a year, commemorating the first running of the sugar maple sap; the first thunder (and warming) of spring; the first strawberries; and the great harvest -- the ninth Thanksgiving and the one that coincided with the Europeans' Plymouth celebration.

This week, each class, from kindergarten to sixth grade, went over the Thanksgiving Address, recited at the start of all ceremonies and played each morning at dawn on the Mohawk Reserve radio station, CKON. They give thanks for the earth, the plants, the fish, the waters, the birds, the nighttime and daytime suns. In first grade, Mrs. King had them name all the types of water they could give thanks for, from bottled water to the St. Lawrence. At Gage's Thanksgiving celebration, his family will recite the address together. ''If we make one mistake -- like my sister messing up, we have to start all over,'' he said.

So. Lots of interesting intersections this week... Thanksgiving, names, playing Indian, real Indians. All of it in the world of children, young adults, their books, and their education. 

"Chief Read Heap Much"

I'm doing some research on Caldecott Medal books that include images of American Indians. Today I'm looking at The Rooster Crows: A Book of American Rhymes and Jingles by Maud and Miska Petersham. Published in 1946, there's one rhyme in it that shows a kid wearing an Indian headdress. I came across an article from the September 29th, 1947 issue of Life magazine...

On page 140 is "Feathers for Reading." The subtitle is "To win Indian headdress, children of an Iowa town wade through a record number of books." The program started when the librarian, Mary Woodward, ran a contest to get kids to read. For each book a child read, they'd get a turkey feather from Woodward. The article highlights Leo, the kid who read the most books and therefore has the most feathers for his headdress. He read 136 books in 1947, and had read 157 the summer before...  That's Leo on the right. The caption for the photo is "His summer's reading, piled on the grass, towers over Leo, although he is 4 feet 4 inches tall. His dangling champion's headdress gives him the right to the title, "Chief Read Heap Much." All these honors are beginning to pall on Leo, however. He is tired of competition and the necessity of always picking out thin books. "Next year I'm going to read thick ones," says Leo.  I wonder how he got that name, "Chief Read Heap Much"? Did he choose it? Did the librarian choose it? Maybe the person who wrote the article?!




And here's Leo reading one of those thin books. The book is Mei Li, by Thomas Handforth. I haven't read Mei Li but am surprised to learn it won the Caldecott in 1939 to serendipitously run into another Caldecott winning book. (Edits due to KT Horning's question in comments.)  I'm wondering if there are critical essays on it? I think Cai may have written about it.  I'm including the photograph here for colleagues studying representations of Chinese in children's picture books.

Leo isn't playing Indian in these photographs, nor does the article say he or any of the other children do that. It was, however, quite the thing-to-do back then...  Philip Deloria's Playing Indian (1998) is a good source for information about playing Indian.

Healing for Democracy 2012, and, Images that Heal and those that Hurt

[Editor's Note: A chronological list of AICL's coverage of the shut-down of the Mexican American Studies classes at Tucson Unified School District is here.]

_____________________________________


This week, I'll be in New Orleans at the Healing for Democracy 2012 meetings, sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's America Healing initiative. Here's the opening paragraph from their webpage:

In 2010, we launched the America Healing initiative, to support programs that promote racial healing and address racial inequity, with the goal to ensure that all children in America have an equitable and promising future.

As I read those words earlier today, my thoughts turned to news and images that have been in my mind the last couple of weeks. I'm disappointed (again), that people continue to defend playing Indian as harmless fun. When I wrote about Ladybug Girl dressed like an Indian, several people objected to my critique. And when I heard about Swamplandia! being on the short list for the Pulitzer, I shook my head in dismay. I did an in-depth study of it here on AICL in January (see Day One with Russell's Swamplandia! and Day Two with Russell's Swamplania! and Day Three with Karen Russell's Swamplandia!). 

Society seems determined to inflict hurt through illustrations in picture books (like Ladybug Girl) and through images generated when you read about the playing-Indian family at the heart of a young adult novel (Swamplandia!). When Native children are inundated with this imagery, they are denied the promising future the America Healing initiative is committed to.

This morning, I read Betsy Bird's post at School Library Journal. There, she short lists Cradle Me, a beautiful board book that features American Indian babies. The book and Betsy's decision to promote it...  Therein lies the promise of racial healing and an equitable and promising future.

Here's the images, side by side. On the left is the healing image, one of a Native baby just starting out in the world. On the right is what that Native baby will have to contend with... People who insist on "playing Indian" and defend it as "harmless fun" or "honoring" American Indians...

What will your choice be? Heal? or Hurt?

Dorothy Kunhardt's BRAVE MR. BUCKINGHAM

Dorothy Kunhardt's Pat the Bunny is a classic. Published in 1940 by Simon & Schuster, I'd be willing to bet it is one of those books that has never gone out of print. We got it for our daughter when she was a baby and read it lots of times.

In early June, I learned that Dorothy Kunhardt also did Brave Mr. Buckingham a book that Emily Temple of Flavorwire listed in "10 of the Most Terrifying Children's Books From Around The World."

Note: 5:30 PM CST, June 14---Brave Mr. Buckingham is an OLD book published in 1935. It isn't new, and it is hard to find.


"Terrifying" is right! 

 Here's the cover:

And here's a page from inside the book:

Doesn't that illustration just creep you out?! Temple wrote:

As a child, I knew her best as the craziest mothereffer on the planet.   Mr. Buckingham is a Native American gentleman who just can’t win.  He puts his FOOT NEXT TO A BUZZSAW because it gives him “a nice tickly feeling.”  Bam!  Bye-bye, foot.  He goes to the aquarium to visit the fish, jumps in and BAM!  A fish eats the other foot.  You know.  Like they do.

The pattern continues as Mr. B’s curiosity (or general lack of awareness) gets the better of him:  he loses an arm to a gardener, gets sliced in two by a passing truck (while sunbathing, natch), and so on.  After each and every accident, he smiles and says, “That didn’t hurt!”  And in the end, when Brave Mr. Buckingham is nothing but a severed head–wearing a crudely drawn cartoon headdress because Ms. Kunhardt was not just a sadist but an enemy of cultural competence–still he is feeling just fine, thank you.

I'd love to have more info on this book! What was Kunhardt thinking? Why did she pick an Indian?! I've got lots of questions. The book is titled Brave Mr. Buckingham. Is Mr. Buckingham a British gent? A British gent playing Indian?   

Apparently, the story is one meant to prove to Billy that it won't hurt to pull on his loose front tooth. Such an odd way to persuade him, don't you think? 

The Kirkus review in 1935 was:

This doesn't measure up to her earlier books, Junket is Nice, etc. But on the sale of those, this will be in demand. A picture story book with a moral -- the story of the Indian who lost first a leg, then an arm, then another leg, and so on until nothing but his head was left, and who still said ""That didn't hurt"".

It looks like there's a copy of the book in the University of Illinois Rare Books library. I'm going to request to see it!

Update, 3:34, June 14, 2012
In Mary-Lou Weisman's Intensive Care: A Family Love Story is some of the text of Brave Mr. Buckingham (note: I don't know what Weisman's book is about):

"Once there was an Indian named brave Mr. Buckingham. He was called brave Mr. Buckingham because he was very, very, very brave, and no matter how frightfully terrible an accident was that happened to him, brave Mr. Buckingham just smiled a brave smile and he said, 'That didn't hurt!'"

"One day Mr. Buckingham was playing a blindfold game, and he held his foot up to see if he could guess what it was that made such a nice tickly feeling like air blowing... all of a sudden he felt another feeling, only not tickly, and it was his foot being cut off."

"But brave Mr. Buckingham smiled a brave smile and he said "That didn't hurt."

"One day Mr. Buckingham went to the aquarium because he wanted to find if fishes can tell time, and he jumped in with a quite large fish and he asked, "What time does my watch say?" And the fish said, "Dinner time!" and he bit Mr. Buckingham's foot right off and ate it. But brave Mr. Buckingham smiled a brave smile, and he said 'That didn't hurt!'"

Weisman goes on:

Page of page, picture by picture, limb by limb, "That didn't hurt" by "That didn't hurt," brave Mr. Buckingham loses his parts. While he is trimming the hollylocks, the pincers slip and pinch off one of of his arms. A kitchen accident burns brave Mr. Buckingham's leg off, right to the top of the thigh. A saw, carelessly thrown from an airplane, saws Mr. Buckingham's hand off. Finally, one day when a handless, footless, armless, legless Mr. Buckingham is taking a sunbath in the middle of the road, a truck comes along and slices his body off.

On the last page there's nothing left of brave Mr. Buckingham except a head. Just a head, a neatly severed head, set on a kitchen table. He is wearing a headband with eight jaunty feathers. His lips smile. His eyes twinkle merrily. A little girl stands nearby, spooking large ripe strawberries into his mouth.

"And that was the very last terrible accident that brave Mr. Buckingham ever had. After that he lived happily, happily ever after, and whenever he was hungry, his dear little granddaughter would help Mr. Buckingham to eat a big plateful of beautiful red strawberries, because strawberries were brave Mr. Buckingham's favorite thing. And brave Mr. Buckingham was so used to saying, "That didn't hurt," that as soon as he had eaten the last beautiful strawberry, he smiled a very, very brave smile, and he said, 'That didn't hurt!'"

Update, Saturday, June 16, 2012

Published by Harcourt, Brace and Company in New York in 1935, the story is about six year old Billy Buckingham. Time magazine had this to say about it (3/25/1935, Volume 25, Issue 12):

A toy Indian made of Nugg could always say, in spite of calamities, "THAT DIDN'T HURT." Nonsense with a moral for children (and adults) by the author of Junket is Nice.

The copy of Brave Mr. Buckingham that I requested was ready for me yesterday (Friday) at the University of Illinois Rare Books Library. What follows are excerpts and my thoughts so far (my thoughts are in italics).
Billy, the protagonist, has a loose tooth but won't let anybody tie a string around it to pull it out because "Billy was not a very brave boy and cried every time something hurt him." One day, it was very loose:

Billy was playing Indian that day. He had some feathers on his head and they must have been feathers from a very big kind of bird--maybe an eagle or maybe a turkey. Billy had a string of beads around his neck and he had bare feet, like Indians' bare feet. He was seeing how fast he could climb a tree and look around to find out if there was anybody coming, because Indians are very fast at climbing trees and finding out if there is anybody coming.

Debbie's thoughts:
Playing Indian has been popular in the United States for hundreds of years. In Playing Indian, Philip Deloria provides an in-depth analysis of the activity. He starts with colonists dressed in Indian disguises (no feathers or facepaint, by the way) at the Boston Tea Party and moves on through things like the Society of Red Men (founded in 1812) and current day scouting programs. 

What did Kunhardt know about American Indians? In 1930 when the book was published, she was living in New York and had gone to school at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. In her book, she gives us a barefoot Indian who climbs trees very fast. When and where did that barefoot-Indian image start? Interestingly, the former mascot at the University of Illinois went barefoot. And Indians who can climb trees fast is a new one (to me)...

Billy is sitting on a branch in the tree. His mother pleads with him about pulling the loose tooth. This makes Billy cry, but his Uncle Alexander (who always has stories and is just at that moment returning from the store) is surprised Billy is crying and says "Why, Billy, what are you crying about. Have you had an accident? You sound as if you had had a terrible accident."

Billy's mother explains that Billy is "silly to cry" over the tooth and that it would be "very wonderful" if Billy would let her pull the tooth and have Billy smile a brave smile and say "That didn't hurt." That prompts Uncle Alexander to tell Billy that a loose tooth being pulled out isn't a bad accident, and that some people have "terrible, awful, frightful accidents." Then he says "I know a good story. It is a very funny story and it is about an Indian who had lots and lots of terrible accidents. But every time he was just as brave as brave could be."

Billy asks for the story, and Uncle Alexander tells him "...after you hear this funny story you will be brave too--you will be just like the Indian in the stor--you will be as brave as brave can be. This is a story that makes people brave."

And so, Uncle Alexander starts:

Once there was an Indian named brave Mr. Buckingham. His real name was Singing Moon Walking Fox Laughing Water Sitting Bull in the Forest, but everybody called him Mr. Buckingham because Singing Moon Walking Fox Laughing Water Sitting Bull in the Forest was such a nuisance to say. He was called brave Mr. Buckingham because he was very, very, very brave.

Debbie's thoughts
 In constructing that "real" name, Kunhardt is being pretty derisive. Obviously she thought it was funny. I trust most readers of AICL know that Sitting Bull was a leader of great significance. Adding "in the forest" to his name is not funny at all. I wondered about the other names Kunhardt strung together. "Singing Moon," might be from Ralph Hubbard's Queer Person published in 1930 by Doubleday. In Hubbard's ridiculous story (I haven't read it; I'm looking at the information in Gillespie and Naden's Newbery Companion) Singing Moon is a character.  

Mr. Buckingham, Uncle Alexander goes on, had terrible accidents because he was foolish and didn't seem able to stop himself from doing foolish things. He did them again and again. But no matter what happened, he just smiled a brave smile and said "THAT DIDN'T HURT!"

Before launching into the story of all these accidents, Uncle Alexander explains that Mr. Buckingham is not made out of

blood and bones and things like most people. He was made out of NUGG, and NUGG is a kind of stuff that is a little bit like clay and a little bit like iron and a little bit like wood and a little bit like rubber and a little bit like blotting paper. But Mr. Buckingham didn't mind at all being made out of NUGG, he was so used to it, and even when he was a little baby Indian he had been made out of NUGG. And the fact is that being made out of blood and bones and things instead of NUGG would have made Mr. Buckingham feel very queer, but since Mr. Buckingham was lucky enough to be made out of NUGG he didn't feel queer at all, he only felt brave--he felt very, very brave.

The illustration for the page shows Mr. Buckingham as a baby in a high chair. Wearing a headdress with feathers that would be the same height as the baby if he stood upright.

Debbie's thoughts:
What do you think? Is Mr. Buckingham brave? Or just stupid?! Course, Mr. Buckingham is not a real person. He's made out of NUGG. Was that some sort of a modeling clay in the 30s?

Mr. Buckingham's first accident is when he is trying to catch bees and keep them in a bottle so they won't sting anyone. He isn't watching where he's going, and falls into a deep hole with pointy rocks at the bottom. His ear is cut off. The two pages show him falling headfirst into the hole, and the second one shows him standing there, smiling, with his ear at his feet, and saying "THAT DIDN'T HURT!" Along with the headdress, he wears what must Kunhardt's version of a loin cloth, except that it looks more like a grass skirt.


Debbie's thoughts:
And, truth be told, it doesn't cover his crotch. A mischievous kid could add some anatomy to this! (I'd show you the photos if I could, but I signed the standard rare-books-agreements in which you promise not to publish the photos.)

The second accident is when Mr. Buckingham wonders if fish can tell time. He jumps into an aquarium and shows his watch to a large fish. He asks the fish what time it is, but the fish bites off his foot and eats it. Mr. Buckinham smiles and says 'THAT DIDN'T HURT!"

In the third accident, Mr. Buckingham is going to cut off the top flowers of a hollyhock. He's shown on stilts. One foot rests on a stilt and the other just leg (which is missing from knee on down) is just hanging there. The tool (pincers) he uses is the same size as he is. He squeezes it shut using one hand and his mouth. When he opens his mouth to say "There, THAT'S DONE!" the pincers bounce down and pinch off his arm. The next page shows him standing on one foot, looking down at his right arm at his feet (and saying "THAT DIDN'T HURT!").

In the fourth accident, Mr. Buckingham is playing a blindfold game. He is shown in blindfold. He wonders what is making the nice tickly feeling on his face so, standing on the cut-off leg, he holds the other leg up to see if he can guess what kind of machine it is. "...all of a sudden he felt another feeling, only not tickly, and it was his foot being cut off." On the next page, he is shown standing on stumps, looking down at his foot and saying 'THAT DIDN'T HURT!"

Accident number five is when he's cooking. He decides it would be fun to cook in the dark and stands on the hot stove, reaching up to turn off the light. His leg goes down into one of the holes (this is a wood stove) and into the fire and is burned up. He is shown standing on one stump, with just a bit of his burned leg showing beneath his loin cloth. Or skirt.

The sixth accident is when he's out in a field and sees an airplane in the sky. A man is fixing the wing with a saw. Mr. Buckingham shouts out "boo" to tease the man. He drops the saw and it falls down, cutting off Mr. Buckingham's hand. Standing on his stump, he looks down at his hand, smiles, and says "THAT DIDN'T HURT!"

Debbie's thoughts:
Can you imagine being Kunhardt, coming up with ways to have his limbs cut off?! 

In accident number seven, Mr. Buckingham is riding a horse on a merry-go-round. A friend in top hat, coat and tails, comes along and says he can shoot the horses tail off, even though the horse is going up and down and up and down. He misses, and shoots off Mr. Buckingham's remaining arm. As before, the next page shows him with the dismembered body part, and he's smiling saying "THAT DIDN'T HURT!"

At this point, all he has left is a torso and one leg that ends at his knee. In accident eight, he's shown riding a sled (the hill is so long it takes him two weeks), and to avoid crashing into a flagpole at the bottom, he drags his leg in the snow. That leg is worn off, and he bumps gently into the flagpole, which breaks off his ear (Kunhardt says 'broken off'). On the next page, an armless, legless, and earless Mr. Buckingham says "THAT DIDN'T HURT!"

The ninth accident is when Mr. Buckingham decides to sunbathe in the middle of the road. A truck comes along. The driver thinks someone has put a log in the road as a joke, and runs right over it. This slices Mr. Buckingham's body off. All that's left now, is an earless head in a headdress. After that he lives "happily, happily ever after"and whenever he was hungry, his granddaughter would feed him strawberries. In the illustration, his head in headdress is on a table. His granddaughter is shown standing beside it, feeding him the strawberries. She's wearing a headdress, too, but her skin is a very light pink, not the bright red of his. And she is wearing a dress and red shoes. When he finishes eating the strawberries, he says "THAT DIDN'T HURT" because he is so used to saying it.


Debbie's thoughts:
I'm curious as to why Kunhardt made the granddaughter White. The drawing of the granddaughter (shown above) is in sharp contrast to the drawing of Mr. Buckingham. Kunhardt took more care in drawing her, Billy's mother, Uncle Alexander, and Mr. Buckingham's friend. The two characters shown consistently in crude fashion (like what you'd see in a coloring book) are Billy and Mr. Buckingham. 

That concludes Uncle Alexander's story. Billy's mother comes back with a string. Billy is ready now, to have his tooth pulled. His mother pulls it.  Billy "smiled a brave smile, and he said "That's didn't hurt!" His mother says

"Well, Alexander, this is a nice surprise for me. You said you could make Billy brave with your funny story and you really did. Oh, I am so pleased, now Billy is just as brave as a real Indian."

She gives him a gift of strawberries and the book ends with a drawing of Billy minus the loose tooth and in large letters, 'THAT DIDN'T HURT!"

By counting the stamped date-due on the due-date slip still in the book, I see it circulated 56 times.

I'm currently waiting for a copy of The Dreaming Game: A Portrait of a Passionate Life. It is a biography of Kunhardt, written by her son, Philip. In 1990, he wrote "The Original Touchy Feely: 'Pat the Bunny' Turns 50" for the New York Times Book Review. His article was published on December 23, 1990. In it, he wrote that his mother slept very little and had

many obsessions stirring her heart" including "interest in anything old, in every animal in the world, in Indians, in medicine, in photographs, in Abraham Lincoln, in slaves, in spiritualism, in subways, in freaks, in crime, in death, in love--the list went on and on.

I hope I'll learn a bit more about her that might help me understand this book. 

Curious George and his... tomahawk

Over 2000 libraries have H. A. Rey's Curious George Learns the Alphabet on their shelves.  The book was first published in 1963 by Houghton Mifflin. Here's the bottom of the 't' page:

With that foot in the air, I think it is fair to say that George is doing what he (Rey, really) thinks is some kind of Indian dance. Regular readers of AICL know that I find this sort of play problematic because it immediately lapses into stereotyping.

As noted above, the book was first published in 1963. But, it has been published again and again... most recently (I think), in 2013, with a set of flashcards. That year (2013) was the 50th anniversary of the book, hence, a special 50th Anniversary edition. The local library doesn't have it. I wonder if the 't' page was revised? Do you have that version on your shelf? If yes, I hope you'll take a look and let me know.


Update: Thursday, July 9, 2015

A librarian at the Homewood Library sent me a photo of the 't' page. Here are the two pages, side-by-side:

In 1963, George was using that tomahawk and his tepee to play Indian. In 2013, we don't know how he is using it. He takes it with him outside. Readers are invited to fill in the gap as they imagine what George does with that tomahawk once he gets outside.

I'm glad the revisions were done. I would love to have access to the conversations that took place about the page and how it ought to be changed, and I'd love to know how children fill in that gap.

Here's some things that might cause a child to imagine George playing Indian with that tomahawk:

• The child attended/attends a summer camp or event that invites kids to play at being Indian.
• The child attended/attends a birthday parties where playing Indian is the theme.
• The child goes to sports events where the mascot is meant to be an Indian.
• The child chooses an Indian costume for Halloween.

What would your child, or the children in your library, imagine?

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.  

Halloween Costumes

With Halloween approaching, a lot of people---teachers, parents, students, children---are thinking about what they will "be" this year.

Costume shops down the street and on-line include all manner of apparel for those who want to be an "Indian Brave" or a "Sassy Squaw." It is interesting to study the photographs of the models in these costumes...

Some little boys and little girls smile at the camera, others stand with arms crossed, and still others hold one hand up in that goofy and classic "how" pose.

The women stand seductively.

I saw one that especially troubled me... It is for a little girl, it is the "Indian Princess" costume, and the selling line is "Every chiefs little dream."

The men? They stand tense, ready to spring, with tomahawk raised and a threatening scowl on their faces.

The ways in which these models are posed tell us a lot about what people think about American Indians. We are taught to think these ways from our earliest years. Images on television, and in children's books, and in the market place.... they all play a role in what Americans think they know about American Indians. Below is a post I made to the blog last year about Halloween.

I hope that you will think carefully about choosing a costume this year, and that you will choose not to dress like an "Indian."
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Friday, October 13, 2006

"An Indian?" in Clifford's Halloween

Across the country, kids know who Clifford the Big Red Dog is. A long-time favorite in a series of picture books by Norman Bridwell, even more kids are meeting Clifford by way of his television program, broadcast on PBS.

In the book Clifford's Halloween, Emily Elizabeth is trying to figure out what Clifford will be for Halloween. One option is an Indian. That page shows him in a large multi-colored feathered headdress, with what Bridwell must have intended to be a peace pipe in his mouth.

Many books about Halloween have illustrations of kids dressed up as Indians, and due to society's embrace of things-Indian and playing Indian, we don't give it a second thought.

Let’s pause for a moment, though, and think about this seemingly innocent act of dressing up as an Indian for Halloween.

What else do kids dress up as at Halloween? I don’t mean animals or superheroes, but people-costumes. They can be policemen, firefighters, cowboys, doctors, nurses, pilots, astronauts, baseball players, cheerleaders, soldiers, football players, princesses, belly dancers…. All these are occupations or positions one can, in fact, be at some point, with the proper training.

Now---what about an Indian? You can’t train to be an Indian. You can’t become one. It is something you are born into.

Does that distinction matter? A lot of people would say “No. It’s all in good fun, no harm done.” So you help your child apply his/her “war paint” and put on feathers and other items that complete the costume. Can you imagine yourself painting the child’s face so he/she could be a black person? A minstrel performer, or perhaps a slave, or even Martin Luther King? I’m guessing a parent wouldn’t do that. That parent would know it was wrong. (Doing it in another context----a school play, for example, is a different context.)

Another question to consider: What sort of Indian are we encouraging children to be when we endorse an Indian costume, and what does it teach them? Are they savage Indians, the ones who, according to history books, were murderous, bloodthirsty killers? Or are they the tragic ones, heroic, last-stand, looking into the sunset, riding away despondent over loss?

In either case, the costume they wear is stereotypical. And—savage or heroic—both place Native peoples in the past, not the present, reinforcing the idea that we are an extinct people.

If the book you select for a Halloween read-aloud in storytime has characters that dress up as Indians, turn that illustration into a teachable moment with your students. And, if you’re the parent of a child who wants to dress up as an Indian, talk with your child about that choice and what it means.

In choosing NOT to think about this, are you, unwittingly, fostering the development of stereotypes?
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Playing Indian in Victoria Kann's PINKALICIOUS: THANKSGIVING HELPER

Will we ever get to the point in time where creators of children's books stop showing kids playing Indian at Thanksgiving?!

Here's the cover of Pinkalicious: Thanksgiving Helper. In the story, Pinkalicious invites her brother to "pretend it's the first Thanksgiving." She puts on a pink feather and will be Princess Pink Feather (cue moans, groans, and lots of eye rolling). I guess Kann and her publisher and all the people who buy and read/review the book do not know that playing Indian--or Indian princess--is stereotyping of the worst kind, because it seems harmless and innocent and, to quote some of the reviews "cute!". It isn't harmless or innocent or cute. It is stereotyping and ought not be happening in a book published in 2014 by HarperFestival.

Pinkalicious: Thanksgiving Helper is not recommended.

Dorothy Kunhardt and Garth Williams' ROGER MOUSE'S WISH

Editor's Update, 6:30 PM on April 10, 2013: Mary sent me text and scans of three pages of Roger Mouse's Wish. I've inserted that material. Thanks, Mary!

________________________________

Earlier today (April 10, 2013), reader Mary C. wrote to tell me about Roger Mouse's Wish. It is a Tiny Golden Book. I'm going to add these tiny books to my "find out more..." list! I'm pretty sure that I've seen them. Tiny is right... they measure 3 inches by 2 inches.

According to James Fox at the Simmons blog, all the books were written by Dorothy Kunhardt and illustrated by Garth Williams, and published around 1948. Here's the back and front cover for Roger Mouse's Wish:

Due to limits on how much of a text someone can use without getting permission of the publisher, I'm telling you what the book is about (based on what Mary sent me) and including a few excerpts. There are three characters: Roger Mouse, Mr. Mouse (his father) and Mrs. Mouse (his mother).

One day, Roger Mouse asks his mother for a blanket. He spreads it on a card table in their living room. He crawls under the card table and then hears his mother tell his father that she remembers how much fun she had playing house. Roger replies:

I'm not playing house," said Roger's voice. "I'm an Indian. This is my tepee."

The next day is Roger's birthday. There's a birthday cake for him. Mr. Mouse tells him to make a wish, and Mrs. Mouse tells him not to tell anyone what he wished for because it might not come true. Roger makes his wish and blows out the candles, and Mr. Mouse tells him there's a present for him "in front of his tepee." Here's that page:

The present, he exclaims is an "Indian suit!" He's quite happy and tries it on:

Wearing his Indian suit, he asks his father if he can tell his wish. His dad thinks it won't hurt, so he does:

As you can see, his wish was for an Indian suit.

That was a popular wish around that time...

Leo Politi, author of the flawed, award winning Song of the Swallows also wanted an Indian suit. He got one, too, as described in his 1951 book, Little Leo: 

Lot of playing Indian going around then... and years before then... and sadly, in the years since then, too!

Kunhardt is the author of Pat the Bunny and a gross book called Brave Mr. Buckingham, in which a guy dresses up like an Indian, and page by page, loses body parts until all that's left is his head. In a headdress. Williams did the illustrations for a whole slew of books including the Indians in Little House on the Prairie. 

I've looked and looked but can't find any illustrations of the inside of Roger Mouse's Wish. If you have a copy, please let me know! I'd like to know more about the story and see more of the illustrations. Thanks!

A great big thanks, Mary, for letting me know about the book, and then for taking time to type out the text and scan those pages! By the way, Mary wrote to me in response to an update to my post about the stereotypes in Little Golden Books. If you want to see them, here's the link: Stereotypes in Little Golden Books.

More on Indian Costumes at Halloween

In the comments section for "Cowboys and Indians and Tacos and Tequila," a mother who identified herself as a "Caring and Concerned but Decidely UN-PC-Mom" defended her decision to support her daughter's wish to be an Indian at Halloween.

Jean Mendoza, my friend, colleague, and co-author, submitted a reply to Un-PC-Mom. I think these two comments are important and should be read by all (not all visitors to the blog read the comments), so I'm posting both comments here. Directly below is the comment from Un-PC-Mom (her comments were not broken into paragraphs), and below it is Jean's reply to her.

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Comment from "Caring and Concerned by Decidely UN-PC-Mom"

OK, I get that you don't want people to be insensitive to the Native American Culture. However, I do believe that children should be allowed to feel what they feel and want to be what they want to be. My daughter wants to be an "Indian." This is interesting because one of her best friends is actually Indian, from India. Different to that, she is fascinated by the Native American Dress and calls it Indian. We, as a family, are not disparaging of any ethnicity and she is immersed in many cultures, living here in New York City. We are middle class people who work hard for a living, and yet we do go to a private school. That school is not for profit and is of a developmental philosophy. We pay far less than the "privelaged class" of NYC, but we consider ourselves lucky to have found our cool school. One thing I find interesting about your blog is that it does not allow that historically, Native American Indians had a certain dress and look, and why is that not OK to observe as a costume? People dress as Marie Antoinette, don't they? People dress as Vampires. The point is, people dress as things that they find intriguing and actually might want to learn more about. I am very sorry if you find it offensive, but honestly, I find it an opportunity to talk organically with my child about what she finds interesting and then that opens the door to what is there academically. She certainly means no offense, being 6, and I, most certainly do not either. In this day and age, when so little is actually taught correctly about native american indians, I find it a great "in" to talk about everything with my daughter. I am sorry if it offends your sensibilities, but then, that is something for you to deal with. At the end of the day, do you want people to be insinserely NOT talking about Native America Indians, or do you want them to learn, by hook or by crook, what is real?

Signed,
A caring, concerned, but decidedly UN-PC Mom
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And here is Jean's reply:

Response to Un-PC-Mom in New York

I appreciate your participating in a conversation that you probably didn’t expect to encounter when trying to find information about Indian “costumes”. I’ve read your post a couple of times & think you may have misread Debbie’s work. I don’t see Debbie saying that supporting children’s mistaken ideas about Native Americans “offends sensibilities”. Instead, she is inviting you and the rest of the world to consider why you would want to continue to support a child’s mistaken ideas about other people – or about anything, for that matter.

You (un-PC Mom) said: historically, Native people had “a certain dress and look”. In fact, you probably know that there were/are HUNDREDS of ways of “dressing and looking”, historically, depending on one’s culture, gender, age & experience, time period, etc. You probably have yet to see a culturally authentic, historically accurate “Indian costume” for kids sold anywhere. The ones available (even the patterns sold for those who sew) are a hodge-podge of Hollywood Indian stereotyping and foolishness.

I’m wondering what resources you and your daughter would use to find information about “Indian” ways of dressing and looking? Without the most accurate resources and careful choices, the result is likely to be a pseudo-historical mélange of styles and inaccuracies that will add to her misinformation about what it means to be Indian, in either the historical or contemporary sense. Even if the costume is 100% authentic/accurate, you still run into the problem of allowing your child to think that "playing Indian" is somehow on a par with pretending to be a vampire or Marie Antoinette, which it isn't.

If your daughter’s wearing an Indian “costume” is “an opportunity to talk organically” with her, which then “opens the door to what is there academically” – where will you look for materials that won’t add to the misinformation she already has? Debbie has suggested Oyate; so do I. A lot of non-Native people are uncomfortable when they look at Oyate for the first time. The perspective is very different from that of the dominant culture. It can be painful to come face-to-face with the fact that much mainstream “knowledge” about indigenous people is actually false, inaccurate, even stupid. Good books by Native people are an excellent antidote for the misinformation that dominates popular culture.

"Mom", you mention that your child’s school is “developmental”. Many schools with that approach also implement an anti-bias approach to diversity. You might want to ask the principal and the teachers whether they use the anti-bias curriculum, and then check out the materials, yourself. One tenet is that it’s educationally and ethically appropriate to proactively support children’s authentic understandings of cultures, groups, and lives other than their own. That means challenging or doing away with activities that keep the misunderstandings alive. Anti-bias curriculum materials are available from the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Maybe a question to ask is, “If there were Native children in my daughter’s school, would I be caringly, proudly ‘un-PC’ and let her dress that way for Hallowe’en? Or would I make a point of being sure that she did nothing that reflects my/her ignorance about someone else’s history and culture?”
If the answer is, “That would be something for THEM to deal with; let her dress as she likes” – then what does that show her about how to get along with other people? “Let them eat cake?” “It doesn’t matter what I don’t know, as long as I don’t MEAN to offend?”

I should probably identify myself: I'm white, married to a kind, intelligent and talented tribally enrolled Muscogee Creek man; we have 4 wonderful children and (yay!!) four amazingly wise and beautiful grandchildren. I've known Debbie for about 12 years and am honored to have worked with her from time to time.

Angela Shelf Medearis's DANCING WITH THE INDIANS

Angela Shelf Medearis's Dancing with the Indians was picked up by Reading Rainbow and turned into a video. The story has so much potential to enrich our understandings of American Indian and African American relationships in the 1800s and early 1900s.

The author is Angela Shelf Medearis. In a note in the back of the book she writes that her great-grandfather escaped from slavery in 1862 and ended up in "Okehema, Oklahoma" where she says he was accepted as a member of the Seminole tribe. He married a Seminole woman and they had a son. Their marriage did not last, and he moved near Oklahoma City and married an African American woman in 1909 or thereabouts. Twice a year, he would take his family of nine children to Okehema for a week-long powwow.

I taught at Riverside Indian School in Oklahoma, and, my colleagues there (I'm thinking of the Native teachers) spoke of going to Okemah. According to the Okemah website, the town was established in 1902 and named after a Kickapoo chief. Given the date (1902) it likely is not the town that Medearis great grandfather went to.

I can't find any place named Okehema, but in a certain sense, that doesn't mean anything. Not all small towns, much less small Native towns and communities, are on maps, or in books, histories, etc.

There are, as Medearis says in her note, Seminole's in Oklahoma. Through Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, they were removed there from Florida between 1838 and 1842 where they set up several towns and schools for their children. They are now known as the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. Some Seminoles remained in Florida, and are known as the Seminole Tribe of Florida. Do visit the Florida website and read its history pages.

The story of Medearis's great-grandfather and his life with the Seminoles is an important one. There is much to be studied and learned about the lives of African Americans and American Indians. From adoption stories like the one Medearis tells, to the American Indian tribes who owned slaves, we have a lot to learn.

It is because we know so little that I am so disappointed in Dancing with the Indians. The last line in her note says "The text for Dancing with the Indians was inspired by my ancestor's experience." I think, then, the book offers us an important story, but that story is ruined by the stereotypical imagery and factual errors in Medearis's writing and Byrd's illustrations. It is a bit complicated... perhaps by Medearis's knowledge of her own African American cultural traditions.

Take, for example, the page where Medearis writes:

Our wagon nears the camp.
Drums pound and move our feet.
Soon everyone is swaying
to the tom-tom beat.

Tom-tom is a drum, but it is not a phrase used by American Indians. It is, however, used to describe East Indian, Asian, and African drums. Of course, it is a common phrase, and East Indians, Asians, and African and African Americans all probably have their own words for it, in their own languages. Just as we, American Indians, use the English word "drum" but have our own tribally-specific words for drum. Nonetheless, if you go onto the Internet, you'll see a lot of sites that say that a tom-tom is an American Indian drum. There are lot of sites with instructions for making a tom-tom, and from what I've seen, they are tied to American Indians, not any of the other groups that actually make and use tom-toms. Those sites are incorrect. American Indians do not use the word "tom-tom".

A significant difference in a tom-tom and an American Indian drum is how it is played. In the illustrations of Dancing with the Indians, the men are shown playing the drum with their hands. That is correct, IF they are playing tom-toms, but, in fact, these Seminole's would be playing drums, and using a drumstick, not their hands as shown here:

,

Prior to that page, Medearis tells us that the first dance they do at the camp is a Ribbon Dance. The text reads: "The women gather around. Shells on wrists and ankles make a tinkling sound." She doesn't say anything about the ribbons the women wear in their hair. It is the ribbons, however, that the illustrator chose to focus on. His illustration, however, is incorrect. He shows the women putting ribbons on their ankles, and holding them in their hands. That is not a correct portrayal of that dance:


I also doubt that the women dance in quite the way Byrd shows on the next page. Two of the women have lifted a foot nearly waist high, kicking it out to the left. I'm a bit confused, however, if the women are doing the Ribbon Dance, or if they've started doing the Rainbow Dance. There is no text that says they're doing a Rainbow Dance other than a "Soon the Rainbow Dance comes to a colorful end." That information is on a page that, interestingly, shows what looks like a Pueblo Indian drum, and, a drumstick. Neither of the two men by that drum are actually playing it. They are looking off into the distance at, I gather, the women doing the Rainbow Dance.

On the next page, "the rattlesnake dancing starts." The first illustration for it is the one I've shown above, where the men are playing the drum with their hands.

Medearis describes the rattlesnake dance, saying the dancers join hands, and then "twist and writhe and curl, the coils of a giant snake. The slithery animal glides into the smoky night."   I have to do more research on the Seminoles Ribbon, Rainbow, and Rattlesnake dances. On the dedication page, Medearis says that her great-uncle and aunt had to search through "sixty years of memories" to answer her questions and provide her with information for the book. That's a lot of years to sift through. Perhaps the names and descriptions of the actual dances they saw are lost in those sixty years. Then again, maybe the Seminole's do those dances, just as she describes them! If you're a Seminole, or, if you're seen these dances, please do submit a comment.

Turning, now to some of the text and illustration that is stereotypical. Medearis describes the dancers as "fiercely painted" and "reckless" and "fearless and untamed."  She says they "stamp and holler." All of those words capture the stereotypical savage Indian that in that stereotypical framework, roamed the land, terrifying the brave pioneers. The accompanying illustrations show a frightened child, drawing back from that "angry cavalcade" as shown:


On the next page, she says, they "sing of ancient battles gloriously fought and won, of shaggy buffalo, and brave deeds they have done."  Battles, definitely, but buffalo? Not likely. That illustration shows a man in Plains Indian style clothing, riding a horse, hunting buffalo with a bow and arrow.

This gathering Medearis writes about takes place at night. As dawn approaches, the Indians invite the visitors to "Dance the Indian Stomp Dance, join us one and all."  They "dip and stomp and sway" and the illustrations show them in very active poses, with legs kicking and arms thrown this way or that, hair caught in the intensity of their motions, bent way forward at the waist. But, none of that looks at all like the Stomp Dance I've seen.

In summary, it is a vitally important story, and we need that story, but not quite the way it is told or shown in this book, and that's too bad. Instead of this book, I suggest you take a look at Tim Tingle's Crossing Bok Chitto.

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To cite this page using MLA style:
Reese, Debbie. "Angela Shelf Medearis's Dancing with the Indians." American Indians in Children's Literature. Web. 14, Apr. 2010.

Please share the link to this page with your colleagues and others who work with children and books:
http://tinyurl.com/Dancing-Indians

(Thanks, Kristen C., for writing to ask me about this book. I've had notes on it for a long time, and your question prompted me to write up those notes and post this review essay.)
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Enid Blyton's SECRET SEVEN series

Update on June 18, 2021: Blyton's books are in the news because a site called "English Heritage" notes that people have, in the past, noted racism in her books. I can't figure out why this is in the news, now, but it seems to be related to Black Lives Matter. When I get more information, I'll be back to add it.  Back in 2015, I did a brief post on Blyton's "Red Indians." Today I am adding excerpts from Blyton's The Boy Next Door and this interior illustration from a 1951 reprint of the book (image found on the Enid Blyton website). Obviously, the illustration and the text are very stereotypical. 

Page 16:  When Betty, Robin, and Lucy hear that there's a boy next door, they peer over the fence into the yard to see if they can see him. They see a woman sleeping in a chair and then see the someone (the boy) creeping out of the hedge to the woman. Then, 

The Red Indian suddenly rose to his feet, gave an ear-splitting yell, ran round and round the chair in a very fierce manner, and then disappeared into the hedge again. The woman woke and sat up angrily.

Page 19-20: The three children plan to go next door and scare the boy next door. Lucy asks if Robin has a "Red Indian suit" that she can use. Robin tells her she can use her old one because she got a new one at Christmas. Then, she says 

"Really, you should be a Red Indian squaw, and not wear a proper brave's head-dress with heaps of feathers--but it won't matter for once."

Page 23: The children, wearing their Red Indian suits, lay on their tummies and wriggle along "as Red Indians do." Robin and Betty have played at this for years and frown at Lucy when she makes a stick crack under her:

"Sh!" whispered Robin. "Don't you know that Red Indians never make a sound, silly?"

Page 25-26: Kit (the boy next door) surprises them and ties them up, one by one, to trees:

"Now for a war dance!" he said, "and then maybe I'll try shooting a few arrows at you!" 

He proceeds to yell and whoop, angry that they're tied up but also admiring Kit because "he really did seem exactly like a real Red Indian."

Original post:

Enid Blyton's SECRET SEVEN series

posted on June 18, 2015

Enid Blyton popped up in my news media feed this morning because of an exhibit about her and her work that is on national tour in the UK. Somewhere in my reading about children's literature, I'd read something about her work being controversial. I rummaged around a bit and hit on the golliwogs in her stories. I poked around a bit more and found that she has characters who play Indian ("Red Indian" as it is called in the UK) in the Secret Seven series.

According to The Telegraph, the images of golliwogs and references to them have been "doctored" in books in which they appear. I doubt if the same is true for the playing Indian parts of her books. I ordered The Boy Next Door and will see if any changes have been made. Course, I won't know till it arrives just which edition I'll get!

For now, check out these three illustrations (credit for these images is to the Enid Blyton Society website).

Here's the cover of the 1944 edition. Illustrations for it are by A. E. Bestall:

From what I've gleaned about The Boy Next Door, Blyton's characters peer over the fence and see the kid next door dancing like a Red Indian. Since they play Red Indian, too, they decide to put on their Red Indian costumes and sneak up on that neighbor kid and scare him. So... here they are, sneaking up on him:

But something goes wrong:

When the book arrives, I'll share what I read. Old books, yes, but Blyton is a key figure in children's literature. As such, her work remains influential. In the meantime, head over to the page about this book. There's a lot more illustrations there, and some comments about the story, too. No mention, however, of the problems in a play Indian theme.

Day Two with Russell's SWAMPLANDIA

Editor's note: I finished reading Russell's book. I do not recommend it. I do not recommend playing Indian, in fact or fiction. 

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Yesterday I started reading Karen Russell's Swamplandia, writing up summaries and my comments for each chapter as I read. I'm picking it up again today. Before reading below, go read Day One with Russell's Swamplandia where I wrote about chapters one thru five.

Note 1: My comments on each chapter are indented and in bold text. Plain font is for summary.
Note 2: Don't read any further if you don't want to know what happens in the book. In other words, Note 2 is a spoiler alert.
Note 3: I'm reading the book in ebook format. I don't have reliable page numbers for excerpts I use below. At some point I'll get a hard copy and add page numbers.

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Chapter Six: Kiwi's Exile in the World of Darkness

Kiwi takes a job at the World of Darkness, which is the reason tourists have stopped going to Swamplandia. There, he meets some unusual people like the oblivious character, Leonard Harlblower. Kiwi thinks:

Even Chief Bigtree--an "indigenous swamp dweller" who was actually a white guy descended from a coal miner in small-town Ohio, a man who sat on lizards in a fathered headdress--even the Chief seemed like a genius of self-awareness next to this kid Leonard.

Debbie's comments:

In chapter six, Russell used "indigenous" but without quotation marks. Here, she uses them. Is this inconsistency in her writing, or is it a way for the different characters to show that self-awareness?

Chapter Seven: The Dredge Appears
With "the Chief" gone, Ava and Ossie take care of Swamplandia and their property. This includes cutting down melaleuca, an invasive tree:

Ossie was cutting the saplings down, and I was painting herbicide onto the stumps. We were tree warriors, I told Ossie. We had come to the Last Ditch for a massacre.

"This is a pretty boring massacre," said my sister. "When is lunch?"

Debbie's comments:

Playing savage Indians now?! Russell's writing has a good bit of humor in it, but this particular stereotype (bloodthirsty savage massacring Indian) is not in the least bit amusing. 

It is while they are out cutting down the saplings that Ava and Ossie find an old dredge. Ossie starts trying to communicate with its ghosts. She takes up with one in particular, named Louis Thanksgiving.

Chapter Eight: Kiwi's Debt Increases
Payday finally arrives and Kiwi finds out that things he thought were free (his uniform, food he eats while at work, and a room he stays in at the theme park) are not free. Instead of a check, he is given a bill.

Chapter Nine: The Dredgeman's Revelation
Ossie is in love with Louis, calling him her boyfriend. Ossie tells Ava his life story, from birth to death. He had friends in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC): "calm men, family men, bachelors, ex-preachers, hellions, white men, black men, the children of Indians and freed slaves"

Debbie's comments:

The CCC was a government work relief program that ran from 1933 to 1942.  Grandpa Sawtooth bought the island that would eventually have Swamplandia on it in 1932. That means the barge and work being done by its crew was done while he was there. I don't know if that matters later on in the story or not. 

I'm not sure that the CCC was integrated in a way that would have made it possible for Louis to work with black men, or with "children of Indians and freed slaves." I'm wondering why Russell used "children of Indians and freed slaves" instead of whatever word they were called in the 1930s.  I'm not sure that Louis would have worked alongside anyone who wasn't white. For the most part, the CCC wasn't integrated.

From his work on the CCC, Louis went to work on the dredge, but his friends chose not to go:

...the lone Indian on the crew, Euphon Tigertail, who had survived subhuman conditions while working on the Panama Canal, decided that he couldn't work in the swamp any longer. He'd been undone by miniscule foes, the chizzywinks, and the deer flies. "You sure you want to be a dredgeman for this outfit, Lou?" Euphon had whispered, both of them staring at the hulk of the dredge. 

Debbie's comments:
Hmmm...  I think this is the first time in the book that Russell provides us with words spoken by a Native character. Cool that it isn't stilted Indian-speak ("Um, that right, Kemosabe")!

Studying maps they found on the dredge, Ossie tells Ava that Louis has told her about a door to the underworld. Ava recognizes it as an Indian landmark called Eye of the Needle that is a day's hourney by airboat from their island. They had not been there, but their grandfather had:

Grandpa Sawtooth took a photograph of the Eye of the Needle passageway during his rambles in the forties: a gray channel cut between two twenty-acre islands made entirely of shells. These islands looked like twin boulders to me, or like one island that lived net to its echo. Two intricate skulls rising out of the river. They are hundreds or maybe even thousands of years old--the Calusa Indians constructed the mounds out of clay and every kind of local shell: oysters and conchs and whelks. The Calusa Indians were well established in our swamp when Ponce de Leon arrived in 1513, and they probably hugged the shoreline of Florida for hundreds of years before the European contact; by the late 1700s their tribe had disappeared, undone by Spanish warfare and enslavement, and by microbes: smallpox and measles. The Calusa shell mounds, these seashell archipelagos, had outlasted their architects by at least five hundred years. You can find them scattered throughout the Ten Thousand Islands; visitors will drag their kayaks up a shell mound's glittery shoes and picnic there. On the Gulf side a 150-acre shell mound supports a modern township. But the Eye of the Needle was a special landmark, known only to locals, and very remote.

Debbie's comments:

This is a history lesson! In a Google Everything search, the first hit was a social studies page that has much of the information Russell shares. Thankfully, Russell does not replicate the bias on that page (it presents the Calusa's as the aggressors in conflicts with the Spanish). A Google Videos search turned up an interesting documentary that dates one of the layers in a particular dig at 2000 years old. Ava, Ossie, and Kiwi are homeschooled but don't really study. In one place in the book, they worry at what grade level they'd be placed if they went to public school. That worry suggests the kids are not very well educated, so, the idea that Ava would know all this about the Calusa Indians kind of doesn't work.

On the third weekend without their father, Gus (he runs the ferry) comes to check on them. He finds Ava coloring, using "our Bigtree tribal colors: Indian red and heron blue."

Debbie's comments:
I'm curious about the time period for this story. Due to a way-cool effort by teachers, that "Indian red" crayon was retired in 1999 in response to teachers who felt that children wrongly perceived that color was intended to represent the skin color of American Indians. because children were using it on coloring sheets when they were coloring Indians. Crayola responded and changed the name to Chestnut. Below is a screenshot of the relevant part of their webpage. If the time setting for Swamplandia! is pre-1999, then it makes sense that the crayon is in the box that Ava is using. If it is post-1999, she could be using an old box. So--it is plausible and not necessarily a critique. More than anything, I suppose, I'm seizing Russell's use of "Indian red" as a teachable moment.  (In chapter nine, Ava watches the news and learns of the famine in Uganda. That was 1980, and again, in 2011.)

A few days later, Gus arrives with a letter for Ava. This one is from the Secretary to the President at the University of Loomis. It reads:

Thank you for your inquiry. I have done some research on your behalf; unfortunately no such Commission or Committee or alligator-wrestling competition has ever existed. You might visit the Miccosukee Indian Reservation to watch a live alligator show.

Ava tears the letter into bits.

Debbie's comment:
Hmm... Are we going to find out that the trophy is a fake? Part of the hype for the park?

The chapter ends with Ossie going into the dredge again to see Louis. Ava meets and befriends the Bird Man (he's a guy who travels around driving birds away from places they aren't wanted). When Ava returns there the next morning, the dredge is gone.

Chapter Ten: Kiwi Climbs the Ladder
Back at the World of Darkness theme park, Kiwi gets a new job as a life guard.

Chapter Eleven: Ava Goes to the Underworld
In a panic, Ava tells the Bird Man about Ossie and the missing dredge. Reluctantly, she also tells him about Louis, the ghost boyfriend. To her surprise, he believes in ghosts and knows where the Eye of the Needle is. He agrees to help Ava find Ossie.

Chapter Twelve: Kiwi Goes to Night School
Kiwi goes to the local community college to begin a GED class. When it is his turn, he introduces himself and tells his classmates he needs to help his dad get out of debt and wants to go to college. Students immediately start ridiculing him, calling him "white boy." He wishes he could tell them about the island:

...about Chief Bigtree's "Indian" lineage; how as a kid they'd put makeup and beads on him, festooned him with spoonbill feathers and reptilian claws; how at fourteen he'd declared: "I'm a Not-Bigtree. A Not-Indian. A Not-Seminole. A Not-Miccosukee." This category "white" gave him a whistling fear, a feeling not unlike agoraphobia.

Debbie's comments:

Recall in chapter two, Kiwi is frustrated when his dad tries to talk to them in a booming "chieftain" voice? Here, we learn that Kiwi didn't like playing Indian. Seems like he thought he had no culture, and being called white, or realizing that his identity is being ridiculed, scares him. 

Chapter Thirteen: Welcome to Stiltsville
Ava and the Bird Man stop at an abandoned village on stilts (Stiltsville) for the night.

Chapter Fourteen: The Drowning Chain
The drowning chain is a net used to rescue swimmers. At the end of the chapter, Kiwi (not using the drowning chain) rescues and revives a girl. Crowds gather round and take photos of him.

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That's it for Day 2 of Swamplandia!