New book: SIMON J. ORTIZ: A POETIC LEGACY OF INDIGENOUS CONTINUANCE

Today's post is about a new book, Simon J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance. I bought a copy last week...

Daughter Liz and I spent most of the last week in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) annual meeting. Next year's meeting will be in Tucson, Arizona. Anyone that has anything to do with the creation, publication, or distribution of literature by/about American Indians should consider attending this meeting. The insights gained in a few short days will go a long way towards improving the quality of literature for children.

When I'm at Native meetings and conferences, I'm somewhat embarrassed at most of the children's books by/about American Indians that are published. In child lit land, people embrace bogus stuff that would never fly in a college Native lit course. In child lit land, crap (yes, I'm irate today) like Touching Spirit Bear flies off the shelves. Amongst those who study Native literature, it's equivalent for adult readers is the target of much laughter and derision. It is not taken seriously as "Native" literature and it isn't taught as Native literature.

But over in child lit land, there is a clamor for the sequel to Touching Spirit Bear. Like I said, it is embarrassing. And indefensible, too.

It has got to get better.

It can get better if people in child lit land take some time to read Native scholarship, and attend Native conferences and meetings.

At last year's NAISA meeting in Athens, Georgia, my dear friend Evelina Zuni Lucero (Isleta/Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo) introduced me to Simon Ortiz. Through our conversation, I volunteered to write a chapter for a book Evelina was co-editing. That book is Simon J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance. Most of the contributors to the volume were at NAISA, giving papers. The contributors (tribal affiliations are in parens) are:

Elizabeth Ammons
Elizabeth Archuleta (Yaqui)
Esther Belin (Dine)
Jeff Berglund
Kimberly Blaeser (Chippewa)
Gregory Cajete (Tewa)
Sophia Cantave
David Dunaway
Roger Dunsmore
Lawrence Evers
Gwen Westerman Griffin (Sisston Wahpeton Dakota Oyate)
Joy Harjo (Mvskoke)
Geary Hobson (Cherokee, Arkansas Quapaw)
David L. Moore
Debbie Reese (Nambe Pueblo)
Kimberly Roppolo (Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek)
Ralph Salisbury (Cherokee)
Kathryn W. Shanley (Assiniboine)
Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo)
Sean Kicummah Teuton (Cherokee)
Laura Tohe (Dine)
Robert Warrior (Osage)

Hopefully, you have Joy Harjo's The Good Luck Cat on your shelves, along with Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller or Ceremony. Do you have a copy of Like a Hurricane: The American Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, co-written by Robert Warrior? Remember the poem about basal readers that I posted here some time back? That was Laura Tohe's poem. These four people are among the most read and most influential Native writers, and they are in the volume because Ortiz's work meant something to their own growth.

In his 1981 essay in MELUS, Ortiz says that we (Native people) creatively used foreign (European) ritual, ideas, material, and language (English) on our own terms. In Reinventing the Enemy's Language, Joy Harjo writes:

When our lands were colonized the language of the colonizer was forced on us. It was when we began to create with this new language that we named it ours, made it usefully tough and beautiful (p. 23-24).

That is what Simon J. Ortiz: A Poetic Legacy of Indigenous Continuance is about. Using language for continuance. Get a copy, read it, think, read it again, and think about what you write (if you're a writer), what you publish (if you're a publisher), what you review (if you're a reviewer), and what you buy for your children, your library, your school.

Read Simon Ortiz's essays, stories, poetry, and children's books. Spend some time immersed in this reality, not the fantasy where Indians are romantic or tragic figures of the past. Do this, and books for children will get better.

[Update, 9:49 AM, May 27] : Next year's meeting of NAISA will be in Tucson, AZ, not Tempe. Thanks to commenter, Matthew, for catching the error. I also linked to the association's webpage.]

We saw AVATAR...

We saw Avatar a few days before Christmas. Using my cell phone, I thought I'd take a few notes as I watched the film, sending the notes as brief text messages to my email account. There was so much wrong that I quit after a few minutes. My txts are in bold. In parenthesis are my off-the-cuff response.

arrows in tires
(Modern day covered wagons!!)


sig weaver (anthro) wears bead necklace.
(She's the Indian lover. I guess Cameron never read Deloria or listened to Westerman's "Here Come the Anthros")

indigenous school provided by humans

(Hearing that part made me think that Cameron HAS read some history and DOES know a little... )

na'vi are called savages

(no surprise)

their homeland most hostile environment known to man.

(the wild west)

braids and tail. 

(Drawing from lots of "other" there, collapsing them all into na'vi... )

flute and drum music

(Of course!)

they're (na'vi)  watching us

(Just like the Indians in Little House on the Prairie!!!)

riders on horses

(Plains Indians!!)

the riders whoop 

(Classic Western)

A lot of people say that the special effects make the movie enjoyable. A lot of people wave away problems with the story because of the special effects. Those defenses are given again and again in response to critiques of children's books. A lot---a WHOLE LOT---of people defend Brother Eagle Sister Sky because taking care of the environment is more important than Indian stereotypes. Same thing with Touching Spirit Bear. The "good" it does for students who are bullies is more important than its misrepresentations of American Indians.

Support of books like Brother Eagle, Sister Sky and Touching Spirit Bear plays a role in the embrace of films like Avatar.  In my view, we're all kidding ourselves. None of it is worth defending.

---------
UPDATE. Monday, January 4, 2010

This post has generated a lot of email to me, mostly from people who share my view of the film. In some, people are surprised that this sort of thing is still happening. I think some of those individuals are not close readers of film or children's and young adult literature. AVATAR is only one film of the last two months that has given viewers Indian stereotypes. Here's others:

BLIND SIDE---I did not see the film. I saw the trailer, though, and in it, Sandra Bullock and her husband (that's a guess) and her little boy are in their car. The child is in the backseat, wearing a headdress. I can only imagine why. If anyone has seen it, let me know!

THE PROMISE---Betty White's character is out in the woods "dancing" and chanting. This movie mostly takes place in Alaska.

INGLORIOUS BASTARDS---Lots of references to "Indian" methods of killing. And of course, scalping was a big piece of the story.

Set two: Links to Oyate's BOOKS TO AVOID pages

A few years ago, Oyate removed its Books to Avoid page. A great many people miss that page and write to me asking if I saved those reviews. I didn't--but they aren't gone forever! They're available on the Wayback Machine.

In order to fit within the 200 character limit on "Labels" (the labels are on the right and serve as an index of what is in the post itself), I am creating several pages of the links, arranging them alphabetically. This post includes M through T.

I'm also going to save a pdf of each one, just in case the Wayback Machine goes down.

Marrin, Albert, Sitting Bull and His World and additional comments
Martin, Bill and John Archambault, Knots on a Counting Rope 
Mikaelsen, Ben. Touching Spirit Bear
Rylant, Cynthia. Long Night Moon 
Speare, Elizabeth George. Sign of the Beaver
Taylor, C.J., Peace Walker: The Legend of Hiawatha and Tekanawita
Turner, Ann. The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow: The Diary of Sarah Nita, a Navajo Girl

See also:
Set 1
Set 3

Debbie--have you seen SWIFT ARROW by Josephine Cunnington Edwards?

Some time back, a reader wrote to ask if I had read Swift Arrow by Josephine Cunnington Edwards. It was published in 1997 by a publisher I was unfamiliar with: "TEACH Services." On their website is a page about their history. A paragraph from there:

On January 1, 1984, a small home in Harrisville, New Hampshire, became the maiden office of TEACH Services, Inc. The mission of the newly formed publishing company was to encourage and strengthen individuals around the world through the distribution of books that point readers to Christ. 

I see, there, that the author was a missionary to Africa. And here's a description of the book: 

Colored leaves, red, yellow, and brown, fluttered past George as he rode behind Woonsak in the long string of Indians and ponies. They were riding north and moving quickly. So many Indians moved along the path that George, who rode near the front of the line, could not see the end when he turned around to look. The farther they went, the more unhappy George became. For with every step, Neko (his faithful pony) took him farther and farther from his home and from Ma and Pa. Even the fluttering leaves seemed like little hands waving good-bye all the day long. So begins chapter seven of this beloved classic by Josephine Cunnington Edwards. George, a young pioneer boy is captured by Indians and raised as the son of a mighty chief. He spends his time learning the ways of these native Americans, and yearning for the day that he might find a way to return to his loving family.

The TEACH website offers a preview of the book. That same preview is available in Google Books. Historical fiction often has biased and anti-Indigenous words, so I sometimes do a search (that's an option in Google Books) on a particular word to see how it is used in the book. In Swift Arrow, I found:

"squaw" -- 20 times

"squaws" -- 18 times

"paleface" -- 13 times

"brave" (as word for male) -- 12 times

"papoose" -- 11 times

"redskins" -- 4 times

"firewater" -- 3 times

"savages" -- 2 times 

I also looked for the word "dance" to see how it is used. Classic and award-winning books often include deeply offensive depictions of what they call Indian dance/dancing. In Swift Arrow, George watches "several warriors" jump into the middle of a circle and begin "a strange dance" where they leap into the air, and howl. Then, "several more braves" jumped into the circle. As George goes to sleep, he listens to the "howling" and thinks about this "savage life." You see that sort of description in Little House on the Prairie, and Sign of the Beaver, and Touching Spirit Bear. 

As the description above notes, George gets captured by Indians. When he arrives at the village, a few "squaws" pointed at him and "a few reached up dirty hands to touch his light face and run their fingers through his curly hair." There's a lot to say about that particular scene but I draw your attention to the word "dirty." It is also commonly used in historical fiction, as if being dirty is a way of life for Native people. It wasn't. 

As I look at reviews, etc., I see that their chief, "Big Wolf" plans to make George--who is now called Swift Arrow--his son and future chief of the tribe. That sort of thing is seen in many works of historical fiction. An authority figure (in this case "Big Wolf") is choosing a white captive for a significant role in the tribe. Those storylines are examples of white supremacy. Knowing that the author was a missionary, it does not surprise me that she created that particular plot. 

If I decide to order the book I'll be back with a more in-depth review but right now, I am confident in saying that I would not recommend it. I wish this book was an outlier but I think the questions I've received about it point to it being used more and more within politically conservative spaces. 

 

Jeff Berglund's response to "Desecrations and Desires: White Male Fantasy in Will Hobbs' BEARSTONE

Jeff Berglund, a friend and colleague at Northern Arizona University, wrote this essay in response to Jane Haladay’s essay, “Desecrations and Desires: White Male Fantasy in Will Hobbs’ Bearstone.” Jeff is an Associate Professor in the Department of English.

_________________________

Jeff Berglund's Response to Jane Haladay’s essay, “Desecrations and Desires: White Male Fantasy in Will Hobbs’ Bearstone"

I bring in young adult novels in all of my Native literature courses, particularly because many of my students are English Education majors, but also because it recalls for students so many of the previous renderings of Native peoples and cultures in books they read in junior high and high school, books like Bearstone, Touching Spirit Bear, Sign of the Beaver, Sing Down the Moon, and so forth.

Thanks, Jane, for doing (and recording) the real-world sort of work many of us are called to in our local communities. What I like about Jane's work is that it provides a model to all of us of how we might engage in these debates *and* set the terms of our participation.

So many teachers have basic questions and limited time and resources for doing ground-up investigations on their own. I ask my college students to consider donating copies of Birchbark House and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian so I can donate, on their behalf, reading sets (5-7 books) to schools. In paperback, these books are between $7-10 and give back barely $1-2 in sellback at the bookstore, so many students are willing to donate these.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of guest-lecturing in Jennifer Denetdale's graduate course at Dine College for Dine' educators. In the group of 15 students, all of whom are practicing teachers, not one, as a child, had read a book about the Navajo Long Walk. Two had seen the recent books by Dine' writers, but all were eager to find more. That's not surprising. What is surprising is that everyone had lots of basic questions: how do we figure out what books are the best quality? How can we trust authors to tell us the truth? Of course, Jennifer and I referred them to Debbie's blog, to Oyate, and we then proceeded to look at a number of books with evaluative criteria, such as those listed below in order to remind everyone that we all have to engage in the evaluative/comparative process of critical reading:

Questions to Consider When Purchasing New Books:

1. Does the author have a connection to Native peoples, communities, or is the author a member of a tribal culture? What stake does the writer have in the lives of indigenous children?
   
2. When was this book written? Does the author reflect his or her own time period and contemporary thinking about cultural and ethnic diversity?
3. Whose story is being told? Do the centering principles of the story reflect the diversity and complexity of this culture and honor this culture’s principles as a means of understanding history or traditions?
4. Are Native people represented as fully human—full of joy, wonder, wisdom, beauty, sorrow, pain, pleasure? Or, are they rendered as anthropological subjects, distanced from the contemporary world or assumed to be separate from all implied readers?
5. If different viewpoints could be represented, do the authors or illustrators make efforts to include these different ideas?
6. If stories are retellings of traditional narratives, is there information about how the author has come to the source information or come into a position to represent such information?

These are starting points that lead to pretty involved discussions.

[Note from Debbie: See my review of Jennifer Denetdale's nonfiction book on the Long Walk.]

Second Post: The POC Challenge

Near the end of my post About the POC Challenge, I wondered if people participating in the POC Challenge are reading critics of color. I posed the question because my research on children's books about American Indians shows that most reviewers do not have the expertise necessary to recognize flaws in the way that authors and illustrators portray American Indians.

This lack of knowledge means that some deeply flawed books get starred reviews, nominated for (and win) awards, and end up on "Best Books" lists. All of this praise means the book is purchased by more people, and the flaws are passed on to more and more readers. Hence, misconceptions and erroneous information flows into the child or young adult who reads the book, and they go on to select and read books whose images of Indians feels familiar to them.  It's a cyclical and burgeoning problem for all of us.

A handful of new and old books that have been discussed here on American Indians in Children's Literature demonstrate the depth and breadth of the problem. I note them below, but start looking around on this blog and you'll find many others.

Arrow to the Sun, by Gerald McDermott, won the Caldecott in 1978.

Bearstone, by Will Hobbs, a popular writer with many books about American Indians.  

Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech, won the Newbery in 1995.

Take a look at the lists of books discussed on this site (lists are by title and by label). There, you'll find Touching Spirit Bear, Sign of the Beaver, Twilight, Little House on the Prairie...

I thought, at first, that the books eligible for the Challenge were books written by people of color, but I see now that any book with a character of color is eligible, and, based on the book list being generated, the "color" is not limited to the four groups in the United States commonly labeled as "underrepresented" (American Indian, African American, Asian American, Latino/a American). To gain insight to those four populations and books about them, read Teaching Multicultural Literature in Grades K-8 and Using Multiethnic Literature in the K-8 Classroom. Both are edited by Violet J. Harris.

To focus specifically on American Indians, participants can read my site, but they can also read A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children edited by Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin.

In comments to my first post about the POC Challenge, Thomas Crisp referenced the GLBT challenge. He referenced the work of David Levithan's work on this body of literature, but look for articles by Crisp, too. I like a word Cynthia Leitich Smith used in her comment: Commitment.  I hope the bloggers participating in the challenge become committed to reading criticism, and applying that criticism to their reviews.

 

Syd Hoff's DANNY AND THE DINOSAUR

I imagine that most of you recognize the illustration above. It appears in Danny and the Dinosaur, an I Can Read book published in 1958:

Do you remember the illustration at top? Like many of you, I read Danny and the Dinosaur as a child. I don't recall if I paused at that illustration. Likely, I passed it over then, but as a person who studies images of Indians in children's literature, I notice it now and view it critically.

Watch the video embedded below. At the 3:35 mark, Frank Ettawageshik of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, talks about the placement of American Indians in museums, and what those placements teach children.



The University of Michigan took a lot of heat for their decision to remove the dioramas from their museum. How many of those people, I wonder, remember Danny's visit to the museum? How many of them got their introduction to Indians in museums from the much-loved Danny and the Dinosaur? Is Danny and the Dinosaur in your collection?

I invite you to consider removing it. Removing it?! Is that censorship? It might be, but, what if the book contains something that is inaccurate?

Look at the illustration. The words say "He saw Indians." But he didn't! He saw a shirtless man with a big nose wearing a headdress. What tribe might that man belong to? We don't know, and, the naked torso/feathered headdress/hooked nose constitute a stereotype.

Course, this IS an easy-reader, so we might think that for Syd Hoff to be tribally specific (name the tribe), it would overwhelm the child. Let's say Hoff said it was a Plains Indian. They wear headdresses like that, but what about the bare torso and the hooked nose? What if Hoff put accurate clothing on the man and did not draw the nose that way? His Indian would still be in a natural history museum, which makes it problematic in a different way...

The book's publication date is 1958. As such, it predates the development of what we now call multicultural literature. Would the book be published today? (Note on July 18, 20140, the answer is yes. Based on what I'm seeing in 2014, it would!) It is, of course, reprinted again and again. You can get it in hardcover, paperback, or in audiobook format.

Hoff sent his manuscript for his first children's book to Ursula Nordstrom. In Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (edited by Leonard Marcus), you can read her letter to Hoff (see page 103). Dated December 4, 1957, she asked him to revise it for the I Can Read series. Studying her letter, I gather that the text for the page above originally read that Danny wanted to "see how the world looked a long, long time ago." She deemed that line "unchildlike" and said that a child would probably want to see specific things. About that page (page 8 of his manuscript), Nordstrom wrote:

You could just say "He saw Indians. He saw bears. He saw..."

That suggestion is followed by this:

On Page 9: "He saw horses and wagons. He saw mummies. He saw cavemen. And he saw...(OK? Roman chariot and Egyptian mummies look too hard for a child who has just learned to read and is excited about reading.)

I find it fascinating to think about what Hoff may have written, and it would be terrific to see his original manuscript! Nordstrom didn't think "Roman" or "Egyptian" were ok. Indians, however, are ok. They wouldn't be "too hard for a child who has just learned to read and is excited about reading."

I hear something much like Nordstrom's words a lot when a favorite book is challenged. Again and again, people say "it gets unmotivated kids to read!" about books like Touching Spirit Bear. Or, they say that I am making a mountain out of a molehill and there are other, more important things, to worry about. I'm glad to point people to new research on the effects of stereotyping. And as before, I'm happy to send you Stephanie Fryberg's article "Of Warrior Chiefs and Indian Princesses: The Psychological Consequences of American Indian Mascots." (Or, you can download a pdf here.)  With the word 'mascots' in the title, you may think the article is irrelevant, but Fryberg is studying the effects of images that include Indian images used in mascots, but also in film and books. The 'Indian princess' in the title is Disney's Pocahontas.

Watch the video above, read Fryberg's article, and then, consider whether or not you'll leave Danny and the Dinosaur on your shelf.