"Circle the wagons" will come out of next printings of Robin Benway's FAR FROM THE TREE

Robin Benaway's Far from the Tree, published in 2017 by HarperTeen/HarperCollins, won the 2017 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. The story itself, as the description shows, has nothing to do with Native people:

Being the middle child has its ups and downs.

But for Grace, an only child who was adopted at birth, discovering that she is a middle child is a different ride altogether. After putting her own baby up for adoption, she goes looking for her biological family, including—

Maya, her loudmouthed younger bio sister, who has a lot to say about their newfound family ties. Having grown up the snarky brunette in a house full of chipper redheads, she’s quick to search for traces of herself among these not-quite-strangers. And when her adopted family’s long-buried problems begin to explode to the surface, Maya can’t help but wonder where exactly it is that she belongs. 

And Joaquin, their stoic older bio brother, who has no interest in bonding over their shared biological mother. After seventeen years in the foster care system, he’s learned that there are no heroes, and secrets and fears are best kept close to the vest, where they can’t hurt anyone but him.

Don't miss this moving novel that addresses such important topics as adoption, teen pregnancy, and foster care.

Yesterday (Dec 19, 2017) I was tagged (in Twitter), by @bookishadvocate* about a phrase in the book. Benway was tagged, too. Here's the tweet:

Pg 263 in this NBA winner contains the microaggressive phrase "circle the wagons." @RobinBenway & @harperteen need to remove it in future publications. If they're already addressing this, great! If not, fix it please. Great story, but that phrase...yikes. @debreese - read it yet?

*With permission, I'm adding this note: Bookishadvocate is Emily Patterson Visness, a middle grade teacher. She blogs at The Bookish Advocate.

Shortly after that tweet went out, Benway responded (text on left; screen cap of tweet on right):

"Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention. I just looked up the phrase and had absolutely no idea of its racist origins. I apologize for the offense and will talk to Harper tomorrow about removing it from future printings. Again, thank you for letting me know."



Then--today (Dec 20, 2017), Benway tweeted again, responding to @bookishadvocate, saying:

Thank you so much for sharing it with your students! I just spoke with Harper and the phrase is being removed from future printings. 

I haven't read Far from the Tree but because I keep track of revisions like this, I did this quick post about it. If you are an author who makes a similar change, even if the content is not specific to Native peoples, let me know!

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Update: AICL maintains a page of phrases like this one, with information on their history that explain why they are ones you might want to stop using.

Recommended: Wild Eggs: A Tale of Arctic Egg Collecting

by Suzie Napayok-Short (Inuk). illustrated by Jonathan Wright

Publisher: Inhabit Media, 2015
Review by Jean Mendoza

Wild Eggs: A Tale of Arctic Egg Collecting opens with a little girl stepping off a bush plane, holding a stuffed polar bear. Akuluk and her mother have come from Yellowknife to a remote part of Nunavut. She is about to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. She’s apprehensive, and thinks she'd rather visit her cousin in Montreal. But her mother says that her grandparents have “much to show her” and that she will “learn lots of new things.” Indeed, Akuluk’s first days with her grandparents are packed with things that are new to her, and yet very old – traditions of her family’s people.

The book is apparently intended for children ages 5 – 8. It’s full of information, from Inuktitut words (pronunciation guide in the back of the book) to details like duck-skin mittens and traditional ways of egg-gathering on remote Arctic islands. It's all woven into Akuluk’s experience, as her mother and grandparents (mainly her grandfather) explain things to her during the course of their normal activities. The characters are more than just conduits for information, though – they are warm, kind, and attuned to each other. Suzie Napayok-Short is from the community she writes about, and it shows. She also spent many years as an Inuktitut translator and interpreter in Canada, and in a sense Wild Eggs interprets some traditions for both the protagonist and the child who hears or reads the book. 

Wild Eggs could be just right for a child in Akuluk’s situation, growing up away from her family’s home culture. I think any child can also learn from and appreciate Akuluk’s experiences. The only problem I can foresee is that the word count is higher than is typical for read-alouds for that age group. For an adult sharing the book, that might mean taking care to call attention to what’s in the illustrations. Or, with some of Napayok-Short’s descriptions, the adult might want to invite children to close their eyes and picture the scene, such as this one:

“Suddenly there were black and white and brown wings everywhere, birds cawing and crowing, almost filling the sky with their colors. Once in a while, Akuluk saw a king eider with its beautiful emerald green head and bright orange beak.”

The text is full of sensory details, and the illustrations do justice to the author’s descriptive language. Artist Jonathan Wright’s bio in the book is vague, so I looked him up. Turns out he’s married to Inuk documentary-maker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril. He did artwork and animation for her film “Angry Inuk,” which looks at the ways Arctic indigenous people have been affected by protests against seal hunting. Wright doesn’t claim to be Indigenous. But his illustrations for Wild Eggs suggest that he’s deeply familiar with the people, landscape, weather, and creatures of the area where the story takes place. Some of the illustrations are playful, such as the 2-page spread (pp. 6-7) of Arctic hares scattering as a taxi speeds past them, throwing gravel, Akuluk’s amazed face pressed to the back window. Other pages express beauty– check out the spread on pp. 16-17. On one side, three silhouetted figures bounce across the tundra on a big ATV. Opposite them, a caribou watches, indistinct but commanding, while a large dark bird (crow or raven) flies overhead. Sorry about the poor photo quality, but I hope you get a sense of how it works:

The detail and use of color are striking throughout the book. (On his blog, Wright says he used Intuos to illustrate Wild Eggs but has since switched to another platform he much prefers.) 

I wanted to see and hear more of Anaana, Akuluk’s grandmother. Ataata, the grandfather, is a distinctive character, but the grandmother says little and her facial features are always partial, shadowed or blurred. Maybe the world needs another book about Akuluk – one about lessons from her Anaana.

Some extra-textual thoughts: The hunting practices of Indigenous communities in that region (including killing of marine mammals) have been the subject of protests by people concerned about the long-range survival of bird and animal species. Some might object to a book that portrays humans taking wild eggs for food, even though, as Ataata explains, traditional egg-collecting is done carefully with the survival of the bird species always in mind. Also, the traditional clothes Akuluk is given are made of animal skins – which may bother those with a particular perspective on the relationship between humans and animals.

Adults sharing the book should familiarize themselves with the issues involved. By that I mean not just the perspectives of middle-class folks in the lower 48 states who “hunt” in the supermarket aisles and (rightfully) object to maltreatment of livestock, or who cut out meat altogether. I mean also the perspectives of people who traditionally relied, and still rely, on wild foods, fur, and skins for survival. The palaugaaq, bannock bread, that Anaana serves on Akuluk’s first night has been “traditional” only since the introduction of flour after the European invasion of North America. But wild eggs helped sustain generation after generation of Arctic Indigenous peoples. So did the Arctic mammals, some of which face existential threat from decades of the greed and wastefulness of non-Indigenous commercial hunting. Plus habitat reduction and anthropogenic climate change. (I'm not neutral on this.) People wishing to protect threatened or endangered species have often tried to halt even the traditional practices that keep specific Indigenous cultures going, which has those Indigenous communities deeply troubled. They've been cast as the bad guys (and sometimes -- ridiculously -- as ignorant of their own impact!), hardly their role through the millennia in the fragile ecosystems they call home.

In other words, sharing Wild Eggs with children could lead to interesting discussions about Inuktitut words, about eggs, about grandparents and what they have to teach us. Or it could mean navigating emotionally-charged conversations about topics like food sovereignty, ethical practices in human relationships with other species, and the future of animals and Indigenous cultures and the planet on which all of us must somehow co-exist.

In any case, I recommend sharing it, thoughtfully, with children, be they in Nunavut, Nebraska, or New Mexico. There's lots to think about.

Not recommended: STOLEN WORDS by Melanie Florence

I picked up Melanie Florence's Stolen Words with a bit of trepidation because her previous picture book, Missing Nimama, was so troubling. It, and her novel, The Missing, felt off. (Here's my post about them.)

At the time, I couldn't put my finger on why her books were unsettling. Some time after reading the two books, there was a writing contest in Canada. Florence supplied the prompt for it. When I read the prompt, I understood why I had so much trouble with those two books. Rather than holding people with care, she seemed to be using people who had been through traumatic loss as subjects for her writing. Some might say that she's a good writer and that she writes in compelling ways, but rather than moved, I felt manipulated.

With that as background, I am here today with my thoughts on Stolen Words. 

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Imagine. That's what writers do. They imagine a place, a time, and the people of that place and time.

It is very hard to do well, especially when the writer is crossing into a place and time that is not their own, where every word they write is drawn from that imagining.

On her website, Melanie Florence writes that she's Cree/Scottish. She also writes that she never had the chance to talk with her grandfather about his Cree heritage and that Stolen Words is about a relationship she imagines she had been able to have with him. In other words, she didn't grow up as a Cree person. She didn't grow up in a Cree community. Without a tangible connection to Cree people, the risk that we have a story that is more like something a Scottish person would write, is very high.

Stolen Words opens with a seven-year-old girl skipping and dancing on her way home from school. She is holding a dream catcher that "she had made from odds and ends. Bits of strings. Plastic beads. And brightly colored feathers." Apparently that was a craft project at school. Why, I wonder, were they making dream catchers at school?

As she walks home with her grandfather, she asks him how to say grandfather in Cree. He doesn't remember how to say it, he tells her, sadly. "I lost my words" he says. She asks "how do you lose words" to which he replies that "they took them away." Her subsequent questions build on the answer her grandfather gives to the previous one. Slowly we read that he was at a residential school. Their words, he says, were taken to the same place he and other children were taken away from home and from their mothers. When asked who took them away, he replies that it was "men and women dressed in black" who locked their words away and punished them if they used those words. The illustration for this part of the story shows a group of children. Thin ribbon like streams flow from their open mouths and take shape in the form of a raven that is being captured in a bird cage by a priest:

Source: https://goo.gl/MSvs2R

I was describing that scene to Jean Mendoza. She said it sounds a lot like the scene in Disney's The Little Mermaid when Ursula takes Ariel's voice from her. Jean's right! It is a lot like that--and therein I come to my greatest concerns with Stolen Words. It is more like a fairy tale than a story about what happened to Native children in the residential schools.

After that, we see the little girl's grandfather in tears. She touches his "weathered" face and tries to wipe away his sadness. She gives him the dream catcher and says she hopes it will help him find his words again, but in fact, it is she who helps him--which dovetails nicely with the fairy tale treatment of the brutal realities of the schools.

The next day when he meets her after school, she's got a worn paperback in hand. She greets him with "Tanisi, nimosom" and tells him that she found his words in a book titled Introduction to Cree that was in her school library. There may, in fact, be a locally published Introduction to Cree somewhere, but I was surprised by this page in the story. It is plausible that such a book would be in the school library, but it feels like a pretty big stretch. We're in fairy tale land, again.

Turning the "much-loved pages" her grandfather finds the word for granddaughter and whispers it. Kind of magical, isn't it? Florence writes that "The word felt familiar in his mouth." The word felt like his home and like his mother.

Pretty words, for sure, that mightily pull on heart strings. In the next illustration he is holding the book to a page where there's a bird cage like the one we saw above. This time, though, ravens are flying out of the cage and a few pages later, we have a happy fairy tale ending, with the two walking together.

Need I say that I intensely dislike Stolen Words? The words and the art exploit readers and turn something that was very painful and genocidal into a fairy tale. For the most part, Florence's storytelling is working on White readers. It is getting starred reviews that it does not deserve. I find this book much like A Fine Dessert with its happy slaves hiding in a cupboard.

Stolen Words by Melanie Florence is much like 

A Fine Dessert with its happy slaves hiding in a cupboard. 

For another critical look at Stolen Words, see Ann Clare Le Zotte's twitter thread on November 22, 2017.

As citizens of the US and Canada learn about the boarding and residential schools that were designed to 'kill the Indian and save the man' we need stories that do justice to the experiences of the children who were in those schools. Because of growing awareness of the schools, we will see writers use them as a topic. That is fine but they must be done with care and respect. Melanie Florence doesn't give us that care or respect. She's given us a fairy tale. The characters aren't real. There was, and is, no magical happy ending. We all deserve better than that, and I implore writers, editors, reviewers, and teachers to keep that in mind.

If I was clever I might come up with some way to critique her chosen title, too. Overall the book feels like a theft, like she's robbed Native people who do not have to imagine--as she did--what this experience was like.

Published in 2017 by Second Story Press, I do not recommend Melanie Florence's Stolen Words.