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One morning, earlier this month, while we had our morning coffee and caught up on news (using our laptops), my husband told me that Garth Nix had been on the Hugo Awards that had taken place the night before.

Nix is one of our favorite authors. As a family, we read Sabriel aloud on car trips, and did the same with Lireal and Abhorsen.  This summer, we listened to the Keys to the Kingdom series in audio book.

I looked up the Hugo Awards website and found Nix's remarks. I was quite surprised to read his first sentence:

First of all, let me acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this convention centre is built, the Kulin Nations - and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

The remark itself wasn't unfamiliar to me. I hear it when I go to conferences in American Indian Studies, or, to gatherings of Native people. Quite often, a Native person will begin their paper or speech with that acknowledgment. What surprised me was that the someone in this case is Garth Nix (he's not indigenous) and that he was delivering the remarks at a a major non-Native gathering.

I recalled that somewhere I'd read (and wished I had noted it) that Garth Nix knows the ins and outs of using indigenous stories. So, I asked colleagues on child_lit (an international children's literature listserv) and learned that it is fairly common for speaker's to preface remarks with that acknowledgment.  And, colleagues pointed me to a place where I could read more about Nix and his views on indigenous stories (thanks, Charlie and Judith!).

In his collection of short stories, Across the Wall, Nix writes (p. 140-141):

"The Hill" was written for an interesting international publishing scheme, in which a bunch of publishing houses in Europe and Allen & Unwin in Australia decided to simultaneously publish the same collection of short stories in English and four European languages, with the theme of the new millennium.

I was one of the two Australian writers invited to participate, and I wrote "The Hill" in an attempt to try to tell an overtly Australian story---something I'm not known for, since nearly all of my work is set in imagined worlds. This proved to be somewhat problematical, particularly when in the first drafts of "The Hill," I made the major characters part Aboriginal and tried to interweave a backstory involving Aboriginal myth and beliefs about land. I knew this would be difficult to pull off, but I didn't expect my Australian publisher's reaction, which was basically that, as a white Australian, I simply couldn't use either Aboriginal characters or Aboriginal myth. My initially simplistic attitude was that, as a fantasy writer, I should be able to draw on anything from everywhere for inspiration; that I could mine any history, myth, or religion.

After some discussions with both the publisher and an Aboriginal author, I realized that the issue was more complex, and that many Aboriginal people would feel that I was not inspired by their myth but was appropriating something valuable, one of the few things of value that hadn't been taken over in the process of colonization. It would be particularly hurtful because, as an Australian, I should know that some Aboriginal people would consider this yet another theft.

So the fantasy element of "The Hill," inspired by some Aboriginal myths, was removed and I rewrote it in a more straightforward way. However, given the constraints of the multilingual publishing schedule, and some misunderstanding along the way,

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I've spent the last week engaging in an online conversation on a site called Through the Tollbooth. There, like on American Indians in Children's Literature, I push writers to think about appropriation. Some people understand what I mean, others do not. It may be a failing in the way I say things. Debby Edwardson, one of the hosts of that week-long conversation, has some closing thoughts that I am sending you to read. She understands issues of appropriation, stereotyping, power, retellings of stories...  And, she did a terrific job of laying them out for her fellow writers on the Tollbooth site.

Here's an excerpt:

Debbie Reese said, “There are some things that I think non-Native writers ought to stay away from: religion, spirituality, worship.”

She also said something very provocative: “Most Native writers don't even put that in their books. Why do non-Native writers feel the need to do it?”

The question you, as a non-Native writer, should ask yourself is this: why don’t Native writers put overt references to Native religion, spirituality and worship in their books? Take a minute to think about it. This is important.

Okay. Time's up. Let’s be totally honest here. We all know that if we as writers are, say, Christian, it is not okay to preach in our books, not even obliquely. It’s not even okay to mention religion except in passing, very casually, in a nondenominational sort of way. Unless of course it’s a problem novel in which religion is the problem. These are the rules and we all know that if we don’t follow the rules we will not sell our books, except maybe to Christian niche publishers.

In fact, what Debbie said about Native writers not writing about their religious beliefs is also true for most Christian writers—writers like Katherine Patterson, for example, or Madeline L’Engle. They do not take us into their inner sanctuary of their own spiritual world. CS Lewis has been soundly criticized for sliding his Christianity in sideways.

See what I mean? Go over and read the rest of what she said. And, if you're inclined, read over posts going back to November 9th.

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I get a lot of questions about Paul Goble. Are his books accurate? Reliable? I have not studied them myself, but can refer you to the works of two Native women: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and Doris Seale.

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is a Crow Creek Sioux poet, novelist, and scholar and she is one of the founding editors of Wicazo Sa, one of the leading journals in American Indian Studies. In her essay "American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian Story" Cook-Lynn writes (p. 117-118):

A transplanted Englishman, Paul Goble, who lived in the Black Hills of South Dakota for a time and married a woman from Sturgis, South Dakota, with whom he has a child, has been the most intrepid explorer of this genre [children's stories about Indians] in recent times. He has taken Iktomi (or Unktomi) stories, the star stories, and the creation myths of the Sioux, a vast body of philosophical and spiritual knowledge about the universe, to fashion twenty or more storybooks for children ages 3 to 14 which he, himself, has illustrated in a European aesthetic and style. Now living in Minnesota, he has successfully used several people as "informants," including a popular hoop dancer, Kevin Locke, who lives on one of the South Dakota Indian reservations. It is no wonder, when Native cultural philosophy and religion are used to entertain and inform white American children, that the idea of "Indian Intellectualism" in America is dismissed.
[...]
Goble takes his place not alongside, but a step ahead of those other white writers of children's stories who, knowingly or not, have long trivialized the rather sophisticated notions the Lakotas have held about the universe for thousands of years.
[...]
[C]onsidering the vast ignorance the average person has concerning native intellectualism, the non-Lakota speaking Englishman's interpretation of the native Lakota/Dakota world-view and spirituality through the lens of his own language and art is, at the very least, arrogant.

It has not occurred to anyone, least of all Goble himself, to ask why it is that tribal writers, except in carefully managed instances, have chosen not to use these stories commercially. If one were to inquire about that, one would have to explore the moral and ethical dimensions of who owns bodies of knowledge and literature. That is a difficult exploration in a capitalistic democracy that suggests anything can be bought and sold. Many white American critics refuse to enter into this debate, believe Native American literature and knowledge cannot "belong" to any single group. A discussion of who "transmits" and who "produces" usually follows.

Cook-Lynn's essay is in Devon Mihesuah's Natives and Academics, published in 1998 by the University of Nebraska Press. She's written several books and essays, including a recent article in Indian Country Today about Ward Churchill, who, by the way, is not Native: Lessons of Churchill fiasco: Indian studies needs clear standards.

Doris Seale is Santee/Cree/Abenaki and a co-founder of Oyate. In 2001, she received the American Library Association's Equality Award for her life's work. The essay I'm excerpting from below appears in A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children, edited by Seale and Slapin. In the essay, Seale writes (p. 158-160):

In the beginning at least, there seemed to be some understanding, and some humility about the fact that he was venturing into a world that he could never more than partially comprehend.
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Whether Goble has reacted to an increasing insistence in the Native community that it is time for us to tell our own stories, or at the very least that they should be told accurately, or to criticism of himself specifically is unclear, but as a young friend put it, "Man, something happened to him!" His work has come with increasingly longer lists of references, mostly to ethnographic texts from the late 19th- and early 20th Centuries, as a sort of justification. Lately, Goble has been specializing in Iktomi stories--Iktomi, for those who may not know, being the Lakota "trickster" figure. The introductory material in these books, "About Iktomi," gives the impression that Goble has come to believe in his entitlement to do pretty much what he wants to with any of our stories, and that the result should be beyond criticism. In Iktomi Loses His Eyes, a "Note to the Reader" tells us that "there is no 'authentic' version of these stories. The only rule in telling them is to include certain basic themes."
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In the author's note to the Bison edition of Brave Eagle's Account of the Fetterman Fight (1992) Goble said this:

"I wrote the book for Indian children because I wanted them to know about and to feel proud of the courage of their ancestors. I have written all my books primarily with Indian children in mind..."

Assuming, apparently, along with many anthropologists, that we have so lost our traditions, cultures and histories that we must be taught them by a white person.

There is no reconciliation for us to the things that have been done to us, to the things that are believed about us, to the fact that, even now, there is nothing of ours that is not fair game. If some white person wants it, there is nothing precious or sacred enough not to be touched.

Is it necessary to say, in the 21st Century, that this is not right?

I am fairly certain that every elementary school and public library has at least one of Goble's books on the shelf, and I'm sure that they circulate pretty well.

I suggest to librarians, when one of them is torn or dirty, that you remove the book and NOT replace it. There are better choices, and readers in your libraries should have those books instead.

I know, I know.... As your eyes read over my words, you are thinking about the Library Bill of Rights, and free speech, and all of those things that America privileges.

Nonetheless, I encourage you to think about what Cook-Lynn and Seale wrote, and give this some thought.

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In my course at UIUC, students are reading children’s books about American Indians. They’re also reading reviews in mainstream journals, customer reviews at Amazon, and, reviews in A Broken Flute. Below is a response to the assignment, written by Rachel Moyer, posted to our class blog (it is private, not public). I post this today with permission of both women.

This frazzled post was inspired by a discussion I had with Rachel Storm after class this afternoon. She's always provocative so I want to give her her propers.

I think what a lot of people in class today acknowledged about the children's books they assessed is that the sacred stories depicted in them are wildly inaccurate. Some of them are blatantly incorrect while others subtly, subversively present misinformation. I've noticed that some people have wondered what the "real" or "authentic" sacred stories actually are, as opposed to the inaccurate ones we read about in books categorized by dominant culture as Indian folklore.

While I think other cultures and religions are fascinating, sometimes even intriguing, I don't understand why we (and here I use we meaning non-Native people) expect to have access to, let alone expect to understand other peoples' sacred creation stories. These are complicated, profoundly meaningful original stories (not myths or superstitions or fables, etc.) that we (as non-natives or as persons removed from that particular First Nation) would not be able to grasp unless they were simplified or translated or condensed - which are the very criticisms of why sacred stories as children's books do not usually work in an unproblematic way.

While I think it's understandable, even wonderful that many of us are curious about Native cultures and religions (plural!) - I certainly am - I think we also need to be respectful enough, humble enough to acknowledge that these sacred stories create and are emergent from languages and places and peoples that we do not necessarily know, meaning that we should not feel entitled to all of the complexities of the "real" story even when we've identified a mainstream book is problematic or inaccurate. We shouldn't need even more proof to demonstrate that these books are offensive or unfair.

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