Susan Currie's The Mask That Sang was released on September 6, 2016, from Second Story Press. She dedicates the book to her "birth aunt, Bev Huzzard, who handed me the gift of my own identity."
That dedication--referencing a birth aunt and identity--prompted me to visit Currie's biography at the Second Story website. There, I read that:
Susan is an adopted person who made contact with a birth aunt a few years ago and subsequently learned about her Cayuga heritage. The Mask That Sang grew out of the experience of discovering those roots, and of learning that her grandmother attended residential school.
On goodreads "Ask the Author" page, Currie writes that:
My most recent book, "The Mask That Sang," was inspired by my own experience of learning that I was Haudenosaunee. Because I was adopted, I did not know about my roots until I went searching for answers, and made contact with a birth aunt. She shared with me about my Cayuga heritage. It changed my life!
And on
her website, Currie writes that:
An important part of my history has to do with the fact that I am adopted. I have had a wonderful upbringing with my parents, Jean and Martin, and with my two brothers, David and Mike. As an adult I felt I wanted to know more about my own unique history. Following some detective work, I made contact with my amazing birth aunt, Bev (my birth mother, Louise, had passed away). She then provided me with the great gift of my own personal history. I was astonished and thrilled to learn about my own Haudenosaunee background. I am of Cayuga descent. My grandmother, Marjorie Hill, grew up at Six Nations and attended residential school in Brantford.
My heart aches for all the Native people who were taken from their parents and communities when they were infants or children. We don't know the details of Currie's adoption. She may not have been part of that forceful removal. We do know, however, that the governments of the United States and Canada were determined to turn Native people into White people. These governments were determined to undermine our nations and our sovereignty. Some government programs, like the boarding schools (residential schools in Canada) are becoming known.
There were other efforts, too, by which Native children were taken from their communities. Adoption and child welfare service is one by which thousands of Native children were removed from their homes. In Canada, newspapers report on the Sixties Scoop, a term used to refer to the adoption of First Nations and Métis children in Canada, from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. The reports include interviews with adults who are being reunited with their families. The accounts are searing. In
Indigenous Writes, Chelsea Vowell writes that (p. 88):
When these people want to learn more about their culture, they have to wade through so many inaccuracies that it can feel impossible at times to reconnect.
As Currie's biography indicates, she was adopted and only recently became aware of her Cayuga heritage and that her grandmother was in residential school. As I read her book, I had empathy for Cass (her main character) and the struggle she was going through, but I also feel that the parts of the story about the mask sound very much like ones written by people who aren't Native.
Here's the synopsis for the book:
Cass and her mom have always stood on their own against the world. Then Cass learns she had a grandmother, one who was never part of her life, one who has just died and left her and her mother the first house they could call their own. But with it comes more questions than answers: Why is her Mom so determined not to live there? Why was this relative kept so secret? And what is the unusual mask, forgotten in a drawer, trying to tell her? Strange dreams, strange voices, and strange incidents all lead Cass closer to solving the mystery and making connections she never dreamed she had.
Remember:
The Mask That Sang is inspired by what Currie learned as an adult.
Currie said that she found out about her identity through research. Cass, however, finds out because of a mask she finds in a dresser drawer in a home that is left to her and her mom by her grandmother, who has passed away. That grandmother is likely based on Currie's own grandmother, the one who went to residential school. In
The Mask That Sang, we learn that Cass's mother was abandoned by her own mother, and she ended up in the foster care system (p. 10):
My mother abandoned me as a baby, she gave me up to Children's Aid and never tried to find me. I've been in over twenty foster homes, and I've lived at about as many addresses since.
It makes me wonder if Currie herself was abandoned by her birth mother. Currie's grandmother, at residential school, would not have been able to maintain her Cayuga ways of being. She may have lost touch with the Cayuga community. From Currie's website, we know she gave birth to Currie's mother (she is deceased) and two other children. When Currie found that birth aunt, Bev, she began learning about her Cayuga heritage from her, but I wonder what Bev's sources are? Did she reconnect with the Six Nations community? Did she relearn ways of being Cayuga?
I pose that question because of what I've read about the ways that the Haudenosaunee peoples (this includes the nations in the US and Canada) treat the masks. Back in 1991, in their
I is not for Indian bibliography, Naomi Caldwell Wood and Lisa Mitten, president and secretary of the American Indian Library Association wrote about Welwyn Wilton Katz's
False Face. They said:
"Katz conjures up a ridiculously evil power that is supposed to inhabit the false face mask and alter the personalities of characters who attempt to possess the mask. This personalities of characters who attempt to possess the mask. This goes beyond the wild fantasies of a creative author. False face masks are an integral part of traditional Iroquois religion practised today on the very reserve that Katz describes so well. Her description of the mask as an absolute evil amounts to religious intolerance and goes far in fostering the conception of native, non-Christian religions as savage pagan rituals. A very harmful book."
Currie does that, too. In
The Mask That Sang, Cass enters the house that had belonged to her grandmother. When she goes inside she hears "a mischievous purr" (p. 23) that becomes a hum and then a song as she nears the dresser where the mask is. It seems that the song she hears tells her that she won't be lonely anymore.
When she finally opens the drawer and unwraps the mask, she screams. Mr. Gregor, a neighbor they've just met, tells them it is a false face. Cass's mom says it is an ugly face, and Mr. Gregor replies that it is an Iroquois healing mask and that there's a large Aboriginal population in their new neighborhood. He asks if they're Aboriginal and they say no, because at this point in the story, they don't know they're Native. Cass thinks, though, that she somehow feels like she recognizes the mask.
That night at bedtime, Cass opens the drawer and looks the mask in the eye, telling it that she thinks she likes it, but "let's not go too far" (p. 37). The voices in the mask sing to her:
Too late, the voice seemed to sing, filled with satisfaction at their own funny selves, pleased with the mischief they had played while hiding and being found. Now they had a new playmate, and they darted around Cass as if they were strings binding her. But friendly strings, friendlier than what waited tomorrow.
"Tomorrow" is a reference to Cass's first day of school. She's dreading it because at previous schools, she's been bullied. As she drifts off to sleep, the mask's earlier message of her not being alone, is chanting as she falls asleep and into a dream where she and others are trapped in a school "like animals" who are "being groomed for something" and who are not "free creatures anymore, because free meant wild" (p. 40). She wakes, realizing the mask is singing to the children in her dream, comforting them. They were also telling Cass to go to school, and to be brave, chanting and "looping about Cass like an incantation."
As the story continues, the voices speak to her at key moments. They tell her to stick up for Degan Hill, a Cayuga boy she meets at school. She does, and the two become friends. He tells her about his aunt, who is a healer and has dreams. He tells her that dreams, spirits, and healing are part of their traditional ways. She tells him about the mask and he tells her that his aunt says they're tricky, that they move stuff, turn lights on and off, and that the masks can go either good or bad. She takes him to her house to show it to him but it is gone. Her mother has pawned it to get money to buy a computer.
The story, from there, is about recovering the mask. Cass continues to have dreams, and, Cass and Degan use the dreams to find the mask. At one point, Cass is feeling sorry for herself and tells her mother that her life would have been better if Cass had never been born. She feels intense rage, brought on by the mask. It music is now "deadly and dangerous" (p. 120). Her dreams also include the children she saw in the first dream. One night, she sees them, trapped by fire.
The ways that Currie is writing about the masks feels wrong. Turning lights on and off? That sounds more like a poltergeist story, and the use of some words, like incantation, puts the masks--as presented by Currie--into an inappropriate framework of Eurocentric magic and supernatural stories. It reminds me of what I saw in
Shadows Cast By Stars. That author, Catherine Knutsson, is similar to Currie in this way: both came to know their Native heritage as adults. Knutsson's book has paranormal qualities to, it, too that feel inappropriate. I saw similar problems with dreams in Tara White's
Where I Belong.
I really want to read stories from people like Currie and Knuttson and White, who come to know their heritage, later in life, but for me, they lose their potential and value when they sound just like the stories that White people write. Their stories can inform readers about racist programs and histories, but when those stories enter this magical and mystical thread, they misinform and even denigrate the very people their stories are about.
On goodreads, Currie writes that she's working on another book:
I am beginning to work on a new story exploring the residential school experience. At present, it is starting to shape into a bit of a time travel story in which two parallel events are occurring - in one timeline, we follow a young girl in residential school who is fighting to hang onto her culture, and in the other, we follow a young girl in the foster care system who is searching for her missing mother. How these two timelines come together, and how the girls become friends, is tied up in visions and magic and the power of traditions....
Seeing "magic" there points, again, to a framework that I think is Eurocentric. I do think a time travel story that explores these two different periods of time would be one I'd want to read but I hope that Currie picks up a copy of
Love Beyond Space, Body, and Time to see how other Native writers write that sort of storyline. That book is exquisite. It isn't for children. Older teens, yes. The full title is
Love Beyond Space, Body, and Time: An LGBT and Two-Spirit Anthology. I've not yet reviewed it for AICL, but did a
Storify on it a few days ago. In fact, anyone who wants to write Native characters ought to read that book. I highly recommend it.
In sum: I do not recommend Susan Currie's
The Mask That Sang.
Back in January of 2016, I read the ARC of Nancy Bo Flood's Soldier Sister, Fly Home. I did not recommend it. I'm back today, with a review of the electronic copy of the book.
In the prologue, we learn that the protagonist, Teshina, is a 13-year-old "half Navajo" and that she looks White. Her sister, Gaby, who is six years older than she is, looks "like a woman warrior with gorgeous long hair." That information foreshadows a recurring theme in Flood's book, which is indicated by the first part of the book's description:
Thirteen-year-old Tess is having a hard enough time understanding what it means to be part white and part Navajo...
Later in the story, we learn that Tess's dad is White, a Vietnam vet, and welcome at ceremonies. Flood is White. To tell this story, the publisher's website says that she
"draws thoughtfully on her experience living for fifteen years in the Navajo Nation."As I read and compare the ARC I had in January with the electronic copy I have now, I see that Flood made some changes, maybe some that are based on my review in January. I noted, for example, her use of the word "ceremony" several times to describe the memorial Teshina (Tess) was going to attend for Lori Piestewa. A "ceremony" and a "memorial" are really different, so I'm glad Flood made those changes in the story.
As the story opens, we learn that Tess is upset that her older sister, Gaby, enlisted in the army. Gaby had a future. She wanted to go to med school. Because she was a track star, she was planning on athletic scholarships to cover costs to go to college. But--she got thrown off her horse and broke her ankle. No more running, no more athletic scholarship, no college. She decides to enlist in the army.
The thing is... in real life? Navajo Nation has scholarship monies. She could have applied for them. In the story, though, we're told that she didn't learn to read until junior high school, so maybe her grades aren't very good enough to apply for, say, the
Chief Manuelito scholarship. But we also know that she wants to go to med school, which suggests she's doing well in the sciences. A small point, perhaps, to someone who doesn't know about scholarship monies that tribes have set up, but they're important.
In chapter four, Gaby is back home for a visit. When she comes into the house (Tess lives in a modern home; next to it is her grandparents hogan, where they live), Tess notices that she no longer has her gorgeous long black hair. Tess wants to hug her but waits as Gaby greets their grandparents, and then when Gaby hugs their mom, Tess sees her crying (Kindle location 258-259):
It scared me. Mom never cried like that. Tears at Lori’s memorial, but not many. Mom was always so Navajo about not showing much emotion.
A moving scene? Maybe, but I read that bit about Navajo people not showing emotion as the stereotypical stoic Indian. It might sound good to readers who aren't Native, or aren't Navajo, but I ran that line by Navajo friends... Suffice it to say that they had pointed and amused responses to it.
Later, in her room, she waits for Gaby to come upstairs. She remembers times when she'd comb Gaby's hair, that Gaby had said she'd never cut it, and how different it is from her own "boring brown" hair. Gaby tells Tess that she's being deployed to Iraq. Tess is upset and they argue, with Tess asking Gaby if she wants to be a war hero, dead or alive. Gaby shakes her head, saying she doesn't want that, but that (Kindle location 385-386):
“I’m trying to figure it out, Tess, how to be me. Navajo? White? What’s me?"
Because Gaby is being deployed to Iraq, her family decides to have a ceremony for her before she leaves, in two days. In chapter six, the two girls argue again. Tess says (Kindle Locations 553-554):
"Why did you sign up in the first place? Trying to be a war hero? Trying to be Navajo?"
I am Navajo, Tess. Same as you!"
"Wrong! We're mixed bloods, half-breeds. Misfits. Kids at school remind me every day."
I've told you, Tess--ignore them. They'll stop."
"It doesn't work that way for me. You're the gorgeous Navajo princess. I'm the kid who looks like a mixed-up mutt."
The chapter ends with the fight over and Tess promising she'll take care of Gaby's horse. In return, Gaby promises to come home from Iraq, safe.
The title for chapter seven is "protection ceremony" (lower case is the style used throughout the book). Tess's dad is outside chopping and stacking wood in exactly the way the medicine man told him to do it. She remembers other ceremonies, when people would sit cross legged with their backs against the walls of the hogan, facing the medicine man who sat in the center, "the place of honor." Tess tells us a few details of the ceremonies she's been to. I don't recount such things in my reviews because tribal nations generally protect those ceremonies from outsiders. I respect their decisions to keep such things private.
Tess is in the kitchen for awhile but then goes outside with her grandpa who recounts how he felt the night before his brother left for war. He didn't go to his brother's ceremony. He tells her that he was scared, and then says (Kindle Location 626-627):
"I even thought that maybe I wasn't a real Indian. Maybe not a real brother."
There again, we have an identity question. In this case, it is a Navajo man thinking that his being scared might mean he couldn't be Indian. I guess he thinks he's supposed to be fearless. But that--like the Navajo mom who doesn't show emotion--is another stereotypical depiction.
Tess helps him butcher a lamb for the stews they'll serve at the ceremony but then she does what her grandfather did: she doesn't go to her sister's ceremony. Instead she watches from a high place near the hogan, falls asleep, wakes at dawn, and waits outside the hogan for Gaby to come out. They visit a bit more before Gaby has to leave for Phoenix. The two girls text each other. Tess sends Gaby a poem:
Ten little Indian
girls
grew up.
One became a doctor,
two work in Phoenix,
three went to college,
two got married,
one was a
warrior.
And the last
little Indian,
a soldier-girl Indian,
ran, ran, ran, all the way,
all the way
home.
Obviously with that poem, Flood has the 13 year old character riffing off of the racist rhyme, Ten Little Indians, but why? Is it an attempt, by Flood, to recast that horrid rhyme? Is it necessary to do that? Is it necessary, for this story?
The school year ends, and Tess is home from her boarding school in Flagstaff. She didn't like being there, where the White students taunted her, calling her names like "Pokeyhontas." She goes into town with Shima (her grandmother), where a little white girl named Rebecca yells out "Look, a real Indian!" and points at Tess's grandmother, who answers Rebecca's question and agrees to have her photo taken. Rebecca is with Megan, one of the girls in Tess's school. After their brief conversation, Tess's grandmother shakes hands with Rebecca and tells her (Kindle Location 868):
“Now we both walk in beauty, in harmony.”
As Tess and her grandmother go inside the trading post, Tess looks at her grandmother and thinks that she is as real as Indians can be, but wonders about herself. The two are there to sell a rug. Her grandmother is well known for her rugs. Does that, Tess wonders, maker her a real Indian?
As her grandmother and Mr. Snow, the owner of the trading post barter, in Navajo, Tess continues to wonder about what makes someone "a real Indian." She didn't go to her sister's ceremony, and she doesn't weave rugs or speak much Navajo. Mr. Snow speaks Navajo, but he's clearly not Navajo. She thinks about her grandfather who was a Code Talker, but he didn't go to his brother's ceremony and that made him wonder about his Native identity, too. Tess watches her grandma and Mr. Snow shake hands (Kindle Location 896):
Mr. Snow extended his hand. They had agreed on a price. Grandma shook it once, gently, the Navajo way, like a real Indian.
There may be protocols for the way that a Navajo woman would shake hands with a White man--or any man--but the use of "real Indian" here is jarring. It suggests there is a way that all Indians shake hands.
Tess and her grandmother leave the trading post. Outside, they talk about the interaction with Rebecca. Her grandma reminds her that pointing is rude "especially if you are a real Indian: and then tells her that (Kindle Location 905):
"When someone looks down on you, listen and learn. Walk with them.”
Though her grandmother is laughing about the encounter, she's also sounding (to me) like the wise old Indian giving advice. Tess is surprised, when next they go to a coffee shop and her grandma orders a latte and then walks to a computer in the coffee shop (Kindle Locations 917-920):
I couldn’t believe what she did next. Sitting in front of the computer, wearing her velvet skirt, satin blouse, turquoise jewelry, and green sneakers, my real Indian shimá sání logged onto the internet as if she’d been doing it all her life. “Got mail,” she announced. If I had been holding a cup of coffee, I’d have dropped it.
I get what Flood is trying to do, but this is kind of awkward. I think she means to make the point that Native people use the Internet. That scene might work if it was Rebecca (the white girl) making that observation, but it doesn't seem right, for Tess. I can imagine a Native kid being surprised at their grandma's technology skills... which makes the scene plausible, but here, it isn't working, for me, and it may be because it is a White writer doing this scene.
Grandma checks her email and has one, from Gaby. It opens with this:
Yá’át’ééh, Greetings, Hello Shimá Sání.
That, too, strikes me as awkward. Native kids who speak their language and send email to their grandparents aren't likely to use a greeting in their own language, followed by, in this case, the word "Greetings" and "Hello." I might use a Tewa greeting followed by its translation in English, if I was talking to a White person, but to another Tewa speaker... that would be silly.
Later in the story, Tess goes with her grandmother to sheep camp. There, on a shelf, is a book of poems by Emily Dickenson. Tess pulls it off the shelf and sees that one page has been marked. Her grandmother asks her to read it aloud. Before she gets to the end, her grandmother joins her and they recite the last stanza together. She tells Tess it is a good poem and that (Kindle Location 1354-1357):
When I was in school, I thought, I am Navajo, I should not read that poem. It was written by a white woman. She could speak of death. We do not. But I read and reread that poem.” Shimá reached for the book. “Do you sometimes feel like that?”
“Like what?”
“The Navajo and white fight inside you?”
Tess tells her about being called an apple "red on the outside, white in the middle" by the kids on the "Rez" (Flood uses a capital letter for R in rez) and "Indian princess, heap-big squaw" in school. She doesn't feel like she fits in with either group and asks her grandmother if it was like that when she went to school. Her grandmother tells her she was in boarding school. She tells Tess what it was like, and that she left without her diploma. When she got home, her parents saw how angry she was and arranged a Blessingway ceremony for her. The medicine man greeted her in English, which made her angry all over again. The medicine man told her that her Navajo and English fight, but that the ceremony will bring them together, and that both will be able to walk in her, with beauty.
Then, Tessa's grandma talks about Becca, the little girl, and what Becca saw (Kindle Location 1387-1389):
“She did not see me, Tess. She saw a real Indian grandma with real Indian jewelry. She did not see this woman who loves her sheep, her stubborn goats, and a strong hot latte, who reads Emily Dickinson and sends letters to Iraq on the internet. Becca’s eyes did not see these things.”
That passage gives me pause, because in a way, it feels to me like Flood herself is Becca. Becca is the white gaze. She is so interested in real Indians. Flood--through her character--is so invested in figuring out what a real Indian is. I'll be thinking about how this passage offers some parallel to what Flood is trying to do with her writing of Navajo stories.
A few days later, Tess's grandma gives her some moccasins for an upcoming ceremony. The description feels off to me ("white doeskin with suede bottoms"). Several times, Tess dreams about Yé’ii, and as noted earlier, several times she talks about ceremony.
All of this makes me uneasy, as does the many times when Tess, her sister, or her grandmother talk about how it isn't very Navajo to talk about death--and then do it anyway. It seems to me that in this story about a young girl wrestling with her half Navajo/half White identity, Flood is giving the world characters who flaunt Navajo teachings.
The last line in the story is "All has become beauty again." For Tess, I suppose that is so, but using that 'beauty' reference to Navajo teachings bothers me. Those five words capture so much of what I find wrong with the book. Laden with ceremony and stereotypes.... it doesn't work, for me.
In the Acknowledgements, Flood writes that Navajo elders and educators have reviewed the manuscript to ensure that her portrayals of culture and language are authentic, accurate, and sensitive. She goes on to say "Any inaccuracies are my own." I don't know what to make of that. If those elders found it to be authentic, accurate, and sensitive, why does she need the "any inaccuracies are my own" at all? She goes on to say that she lived and taught on the Navajo Nation for 15 years and that the story was inspired by her incredible Navajo students. She talks about all the things she did for them. I think she tells us all this so that we think she is a good person, helping Navajo youth. She doesn't have to do that. I believe we can all assume that she means well. Putting all that, and her desire to honor Lori Piestewa in the Acknowledgements isn't necessary.
Today (September 1, 2016) I learned that Flood received a $2,000 award from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) for this book. That is disappointing. In the Acknowledgements, she writes that the award is the Work-in-Progress multicultural one, which makes me all the more disappointed.
I think of all the Native writers who SCBWI ought to be helping and wish one of them had been the recipient of this award. Writing about identity is hard. I don't think Flood pulled it off. I'd much prefer to read something by a Navajo writer, wouldn't you?
To sum up: I do not recommend Nancy Bo Flood's
Soldier Sister, Fly Home, published by Charlesbridge in 2016. If you're on Facebook, you maybe interested in
comments there to my questions.
Back in January of 2016, I read the ARC of Nancy Bo Flood's Soldier Sister, Fly Home. I did not recommend it. I'm back today, with a review of the electronic copy of the book.
In the prologue, we learn that the protagonist, Teshina, is a 13-year-old "half Navajo" and that she looks White. Her sister, Gaby, who is six years older than she is, looks "like a woman warrior with gorgeous long hair." That information foreshadows a recurring theme in Flood's book, which is indicated by the first part of the book's description:
Thirteen-year-old Tess is having a hard enough time understanding what it means to be part white and part Navajo...
Later in the story, we learn that Tess's dad is White, a Vietnam vet, and welcome at ceremonies. Flood is White. To tell this story, the publisher's website says that she
"draws thoughtfully on her experience living for fifteen years in the Navajo Nation."As I read and compare the ARC I had in January with the electronic copy I have now, I see that Flood made some changes, maybe some that are based on my review in January. I noted, for example, her use of the word "ceremony" several times to describe the memorial Teshina (Tess) was going to attend for Lori Piestewa. A "ceremony" and a "memorial" are really different, so I'm glad Flood made those changes in the story.
As the story opens, we learn that Tess is upset that her older sister, Gaby, enlisted in the army. Gaby had a future. She wanted to go to med school. Because she was a track star, she was planning on athletic scholarships to cover costs to go to college. But--she got thrown off her horse and broke her ankle. No more running, no more athletic scholarship, no college. She decides to enlist in the army.
The thing is... in real life? Navajo Nation has scholarship monies. She could have applied for them. In the story, though, we're told that she didn't learn to read until junior high school, so maybe her grades aren't very good enough to apply for, say, the
Chief Manuelito scholarship. But we also know that she wants to go to med school, which suggests she's doing well in the sciences. A small point, perhaps, to someone who doesn't know about scholarship monies that tribes have set up, but they're important.
In chapter four, Gaby is back home for a visit. When she comes into the house (Tess lives in a modern home; next to it is her grandparents hogan, where they live), Tess notices that she no longer has her gorgeous long black hair. Tess wants to hug her but waits as Gaby greets their grandparents, and then when Gaby hugs their mom, Tess sees her crying (Kindle location 258-259):
It scared me. Mom never cried like that. Tears at Lori’s memorial, but not many. Mom was always so Navajo about not showing much emotion.
A moving scene? Maybe, but I read that bit about Navajo people not showing emotion as the stereotypical stoic Indian. It might sound good to readers who aren't Native, or aren't Navajo, but I ran that line by Navajo friends... Suffice it to say that they had pointed and amused responses to it.
Later, in her room, she waits for Gaby to come upstairs. She remembers times when she'd comb Gaby's hair, that Gaby had said she'd never cut it, and how different it is from her own "boring brown" hair. Gaby tells Tess that she's being deployed to Iraq. Tess is upset and they argue, with Tess asking Gaby if she wants to be a war hero, dead or alive. Gaby shakes her head, saying she doesn't want that, but that (Kindle location 385-386):
“I’m trying to figure it out, Tess, how to be me. Navajo? White? What’s me?"
Because Gaby is being deployed to Iraq, her family decides to have a ceremony for her before she leaves, in two days. In chapter six, the two girls argue again. Tess says (Kindle Locations 553-554):
"Why did you sign up in the first place? Trying to be a war hero? Trying to be Navajo?"
I am Navajo, Tess. Same as you!"
"Wrong! We're mixed bloods, half-breeds. Misfits. Kids at school remind me every day."
I've told you, Tess--ignore them. They'll stop."
"It doesn't work that way for me. You're the gorgeous Navajo princess. I'm the kid who looks like a mixed-up mutt."
The chapter ends with the fight over and Tess promising she'll take care of Gaby's horse. In return, Gaby promises to come home from Iraq, safe.
The title for chapter seven is "protection ceremony" (lower case is the style used throughout the book). Tess's dad is outside chopping and stacking wood in exactly the way the medicine man told him to do it. She remembers other ceremonies, when people would sit cross legged with their backs against the walls of the hogan, facing the medicine man who sat in the center, "the place of honor." Tess tells us a few details of the ceremonies she's been to. I don't recount such things in my reviews because tribal nations generally protect those ceremonies from outsiders. I respect their decisions to keep such things private.
Tess is in the kitchen for awhile but then goes outside with her grandpa who recounts how he felt the night before his brother left for war. He didn't go to his brother's ceremony. He tells her that he was scared, and then says (Kindle Location 626-627):
"I even thought that maybe I wasn't a real Indian. Maybe not a real brother."
There again, we have an identity question. In this case, it is a Navajo man thinking that his being scared might mean he couldn't be Indian. I guess he thinks he's supposed to be fearless. But that--like the Navajo mom who doesn't show emotion--is another stereotypical depiction.
Tess helps him butcher a lamb for the stews they'll serve at the ceremony but then she does what her grandfather did: she doesn't go to her sister's ceremony. Instead she watches from a high place near the hogan, falls asleep, wakes at dawn, and waits outside the hogan for Gaby to come out. They visit a bit more before Gaby has to leave for Phoenix. The two girls text each other. Tess sends Gaby a poem:
Ten little Indian
girls
grew up.
One became a doctor,
two work in Phoenix,
three went to college,
two got married,
one was a
warrior.
And the last
little Indian,
a soldier-girl Indian,
ran, ran, ran, all the way,
all the way
home.
Obviously with that poem, Flood has the 13 year old character riffing off of the racist rhyme, Ten Little Indians, but why? Is it an attempt, by Flood, to recast that horrid rhyme? Is it necessary to do that? Is it necessary, for this story?
The school year ends, and Tess is home from her boarding school in Flagstaff. She didn't like being there, where the White students taunted her, calling her names like "Pokeyhontas." She goes into town with Shima (her grandmother), where a little white girl named Rebecca yells out "Look, a real Indian!" and points at Tess's grandmother, who answers Rebecca's question and agrees to have her photo taken. Rebecca is with Megan, one of the girls in Tess's school. After their brief conversation, Tess's grandmother shakes hands with Rebecca and tells her (Kindle Location 868):
“Now we both walk in beauty, in harmony.”
As Tess and her grandmother go inside the trading post, Tess looks at her grandmother and thinks that she is as real as Indians can be, but wonders about herself. The two are there to sell a rug. Her grandmother is well known for her rugs. Does that, Tess wonders, maker her a real Indian?
As her grandmother and Mr. Snow, the owner of the trading post barter, in Navajo, Tess continues to wonder about what makes someone "a real Indian." She didn't go to her sister's ceremony, and she doesn't weave rugs or speak much Navajo. Mr. Snow speaks Navajo, but he's clearly not Navajo. She thinks about her grandfather who was a Code Talker, but he didn't go to his brother's ceremony and that made him wonder about his Native identity, too. Tess watches her grandma and Mr. Snow shake hands (Kindle Location 896):
Mr. Snow extended his hand. They had agreed on a price. Grandma shook it once, gently, the Navajo way, like a real Indian.
There may be protocols for the way that a Navajo woman would shake hands with a White man--or any man--but the use of "real Indian" here is jarring. It suggests there is a way that all Indians shake hands.
Tess and her grandmother leave the trading post. Outside, they talk about the interaction with Rebecca. Her grandma reminds her that pointing is rude "especially if you are a real Indian: and then tells her that (Kindle Location 905):
"When someone looks down on you, listen and learn. Walk with them.”
Though her grandmother is laughing about the encounter, she's also sounding (to me) like the wise old Indian giving advice. Tess is surprised, when next they go to a coffee shop and her grandma orders a latte and then walks to a computer in the coffee shop (Kindle Locations 917-920):
I couldn’t believe what she did next. Sitting in front of the computer, wearing her velvet skirt, satin blouse, turquoise jewelry, and green sneakers, my real Indian shimá sání logged onto the internet as if she’d been doing it all her life. “Got mail,” she announced. If I had been holding a cup of coffee, I’d have dropped it.
I get what Flood is trying to do, but this is kind of awkward. I think she means to make the point that Native people use the Internet. That scene might work if it was Rebecca (the white girl) making that observation, but it doesn't seem right, for Tess. I can imagine a Native kid being surprised at their grandma's technology skills... which makes the scene plausible, but here, it isn't working, for me, and it may be because it is a White writer doing this scene.
Grandma checks her email and has one, from Gaby. It opens with this:
Yá’át’ééh, Greetings, Hello Shimá Sání.
That, too, strikes me as awkward. Native kids who speak their language and send email to their grandparents aren't likely to use a greeting in their own language, followed by, in this case, the word "Greetings" and "Hello." I might use a Tewa greeting followed by its translation in English, if I was talking to a White person, but to another Tewa speaker... that would be silly.
Later in the story, Tess goes with her grandmother to sheep camp. There, on a shelf, is a book of poems by Emily Dickenson. Tess pulls it off the shelf and sees that one page has been marked. Her grandmother asks her to read it aloud. Before she gets to the end, her grandmother joins her and they recite the last stanza together. She tells Tess it is a good poem and that (Kindle Location 1354-1357):
When I was in school, I thought, I am Navajo, I should not read that poem. It was written by a white woman. She could speak of death. We do not. But I read and reread that poem.” Shimá reached for the book. “Do you sometimes feel like that?”
“Like what?”
“The Navajo and white fight inside you?”
Tess tells her about being called an apple "red on the outside, white in the middle" by the kids on the "Rez" (Flood uses a capital letter for R in rez) and "Indian princess, heap-big squaw" in school. She doesn't feel like she fits in with either group and asks her grandmother if it was like that when she went to school. Her grandmother tells her she was in boarding school. She tells Tess what it was like, and that she left without her diploma. When she got home, her parents saw how angry she was and arranged a Blessingway ceremony for her. The medicine man greeted her in English, which made her angry all over again. The medicine man told her that her Navajo and English fight, but that the ceremony will bring them together, and that both will be able to walk in her, with beauty.
Then, Tessa's grandma talks about Becca, the little girl, and what Becca saw (Kindle Location 1387-1389):
“She did not see me, Tess. She saw a real Indian grandma with real Indian jewelry. She did not see this woman who loves her sheep, her stubborn goats, and a strong hot latte, who reads Emily Dickinson and sends letters to Iraq on the internet. Becca’s eyes did not see these things.”
That passage gives me pause, because in a way, it feels to me like Flood herself is Becca. Becca is the white gaze. She is so interested in real Indians. Flood--through her character--is so invested in figuring out what a real Indian is. I'll be thinking about how this passage offers some parallel to what Flood is trying to do with her writing of Navajo stories.
A few days later, Tess's grandma gives her some moccasins for an upcoming ceremony. The description feels off to me ("white doeskin with suede bottoms"). Several times, Tess dreams about Yé’ii, and as noted earlier, several times she talks about ceremony.
All of this makes me uneasy, as does the many times when Tess, her sister, or her grandmother talk about how it isn't very Navajo to talk about death--and then do it anyway. It seems to me that in this story about a young girl wrestling with her half Navajo/half White identity, Flood is giving the world characters who flaunt Navajo teachings.
The last line in the story is "All has become beauty again." For Tess, I suppose that is so, but using that 'beauty' reference to Navajo teachings bothers me. Those five words capture so much of what I find wrong with the book. Laden with ceremony and stereotypes.... it doesn't work, for me.
In the Acknowledgements, Flood writes that Navajo elders and educators have reviewed the manuscript to ensure that her portrayals of culture and language are authentic, accurate, and sensitive. She goes on to say "Any inaccuracies are my own." I don't know what to make of that. If those elders found it to be authentic, accurate, and sensitive, why does she need the "any inaccuracies are my own" at all? She goes on to say that she lived and taught on the Navajo Nation for 15 years and that the story was inspired by her incredible Navajo students. She talks about all the things she did for them. I think she tells us all this so that we think she is a good person, helping Navajo youth. She doesn't have to do that. I believe we can all assume that she means well. Putting all that, and her desire to honor Lori Piestewa in the Acknowledgements isn't necessary.
Today (September 1, 2016) I learned that Flood received a $2,000 award from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) for this book. That is disappointing. In the Acknowledgements, she writes that the award is the Work-in-Progress multicultural one, which makes me all the more disappointed.
I think of all the Native writers who SCBWI ought to be helping and wish one of them had been the recipient of this award. Writing about identity is hard. I don't think Flood pulled it off. I'd much prefer to read something by a Navajo writer, wouldn't you?
To sum up: I do not recommend Nancy Bo Flood's
Soldier Sister, Fly Home, published by Charlesbridge in 2016.
Right now, in my social media networks, private and public conversations are taking place. People are--to put it mildly--objecting to what Michaela MacColl has written in The Lost Ones. It purports to be a story about two Native children who ended up at Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and is told from the perspective of the girl, Casita.
MacColl's book is due out in October of 2016 from Calkins Creek, which is an imprint of Highlights. It is in their "Hidden Histories" series, which begs a question. Who is this history "hidden" from? The Lost Ones is being marketed as one in which MacColl (she isn't Native) and her publisher, are doing A Good Thing. They are Saving Native People and our history from being hidden.
I wonder, though, is MacColl the right person to write and tell this story? The two children in the book were real children. Does MacColl have what she needs to tell this very delicate story, with the integrity the children deserve?
My short answer is no. The promotional language for the book echoes what I found in the story, too. With The Lost Ones, we have a story about Good White People Doing Good Things for Native Kids. Yuck.
The Author's Note
People may argue that MacColl did her homework. In the Author's Note, she says that she reached out to "Richard Gonzales, Vice Chairman of the Lipan Band of Texas." He met with her and in that meeting, suggested she talk with Daniel Romero, who is "Chairman of the Lipan Band of Texas."
Sounds legit, right? Here's the thing, reviewers and editors, and writers, too! It can be very hard to determine if your sources are ok.
I wonder if MacColl knows, for example, that this "Lipan Band of Texas" is not recognized by the federal government, or the State of Texas, either. The one recognized by the State of Texas is the Lipan Tribe of Texas. See the difference? The first says "Band" and the second says "Tribe." Does that matter? I think so. I may return to that later.
For now, let's read more in the Author's Note.
In the first paragraph in the section titled "Lipan Apache or Ndé," MacColl writes that she uses Ndé in the story rather than Apache, because Ndé is what Casita would have used. That's right, but as I read the story, I saw one instance after another in which MacColl's outsider status was glaring. Using Ndé instead of Apache is an easy "fix" in a manuscript. All one needs to do is use those nifty word processing features that let you replace one word with another, in one fell swoop. I don't think MacColl did that, but when I read Casita thinking of Changing Woman as a goddess, I can't help but see MacColl's use of Ndé as superficial. Here's why.
MacColl uses an outsider word ("occupied") when she says, on page 236, that "Lipan Apache occupied southeastern Texas and northern Mexico." How does a people (in this case, Apaches) "occupy" their own homeland?
In the next paragraph, she writes that the Lipans conducted raids and often killed Texas settlers. She tells us that they "caused an estimated $48,000,000 worth of property damage (measured in today's dollars)" over a ten year period (p. 237). Most people reading this paragraph will be taken aback by that $48,000,000 of property damage. Sympathies will be with the White settlers. Where, I wonder, is her estimate of what the Lipans lost?
MacColl tells us that she's veered from the historical record as follows:
- Casita and her little brother, Jack, were taken captive in 1877, but there's no record of it, so she uses details from an 1873 event in which the 4th Calvary went into Mexico, destroyed several villages, and took 40 captives.
- Casita and Jack were taken in by "a military man and his wife, Lt. Charles and Mollie Smith" (p. 239) who traveled from base to base during the three years they had Casita and Jack with them, but for the story she chose to tell, MacColl kept the Smith's (and Casita and Jack) at Fort Clark.
- Because so little is known about Mollie Smith, MacColl created her as a Quaker interested in social justice, and writes that in her story "Mollie takes in two Indian children, despite the disapproval of her military husband, to prove the Quaker theory that the Indians can be tamed with kindness" (p. 239).
Quite honestly--I blanched when I read "tamed with kindness." This is in the Author's Note, where MacColl could discredit the "tamed with kindness" theory (I haven't looked it up), but she didn't. She lets it stand. The back cover tells us the book will be promoted at educational and library conferences, which means they plan to pitch it as something teachers can use to teach kids about these two children. As written, the note suggests that Native peoples needed to be tamed.
One could argue that the story itself is more important than the dates of when the children were captured, but would we make that argument about, say, a fictional work about Abraham Lincoln? I think not. And though the Author's Note tells us what MacColl did in writing the story, the language throughout the Note and the story itself, are ones that affirm and confirm a White perspective on Native peoples. In the note, MacColl wonders if Casita ever got to "perform" her "Changing Woman dance." Her use of "perform" is wrong. Our rituals are not performances. We wouldn't say that a girl performed her First Holy Communion, right? It is the same thing.
The StoryI finished reading
The Lost Ones last night. As I read, I stuck tabs on pages. My copy has a lot of tags in it, see? I ran out of tabs, or you'd see more. (The different colored tabs mean nothing.)
Some of the tabs point to the places where the text reads "Changing Woman Goddess" or "the Goddess." One of them points to a part where Casita thinks "It seemed impossible that any ritual could really give someone as ordinary as herself magical powers" (p. 21). Because she is captured, Casita doesn't go through the ceremony. It is a recurring plot point in the story and is where the story ends, too, when Casita is at Carlisle. In the final chapter, a Lakota girl named Eyota is sick. The Lipan kids decide they can replicate the Changing Woman ceremony so that Casita can heal Eyota. The ceremony is described, in detail. That, I assume, is why the promotional material characterizes the story as one in which Casita tries to hold on to her Lipan Apache traditions. But there are problems with all of this! Neither "goddess" or "magical power" are appropriate! Remember in the author note, MacColl wrote about using Ndé because that is what Casita would use? I seriously doubt that Casita or her mother would use "goddess" or "magical power" and I strongly believe that the Lipan Apache people, today, would not be okay with the description of the ceremony. See, for example, a
proclamation issued by the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas that speaks specifically to ceremonies being done by the Lipan Apache Band.
On page 27 when Casita's village is being attacked and she sees her mom standing defiantly with an axe, Casita "hollered a war cry" and "felt a thrill of pride; this was what it was to be Ndé!" MacColl, thru Casita, tells readers that fighting is what being Ndé is about?! That is definitely an outsider characterization!
On page 38, Casita "asked Usen, the chief of all the spirits, to bless this place" (the burnt village and bodies of her mother and others who were killed in the attack). I've never seen "chief of all spirits" used by Native people...
I could say a lot more about the book, but will stop. It is deeply flawed.
The book includes a two-page Afterword from Daniel Castro Romero. I wonder if he read the entire manuscript? Is he ok with the story that MacColl created? Did he think it okay, for example, for her to create Ndé women who use the word "goddess"? I hope not. But, as noted above, he's the Chairman of the Lipan Band, which is doing the ceremonies that the Lipan Tribe's proclamation is about. I think that MacColl was on a slippery slope from the very start. She wanted to do something good but there was far too much potential for this story to fail. And, for me, it did.
Back in 2014, I began to receive emails from Aaron Carapella, asking me to promote his Tribal Nations Maps. I took a look and found problems with it. Carapella saw my review and sent me a revision to that portion of the map. But--it still has problems. Because Carapella launched a go-fund-me page to solicit funds to distribute the maps to schools, I'm back with this 2nd look at his map.
In 2014, Carapella posted links in many places, including the Native American and American Indian Issues group on Facebook. It immediately drew a great deal of conversation. Many people looked at the maps and found problems. Carapella was resistant to their comments. Some are speakers of their own languages and told him he'd made errors in how he represented their specific nations, but he told them that he knew the right names, and that they were wrong. That discussion is gone. (If you're on Facebook, you know that you can delete one of your posts and the entire thread of comments will be deleted, too.)
This is what Carapella said when he launched his project in 2014:This map presents every documented, known Native American tribe that was here in pre-contact time, before the arrival of Europeans. All of the tribal nations documented here are in their original locations before the European Invasion affected their movement and displacement. Most of the names of tribes are in their own language, and are not the names given to them either by the invading Europeans or even other tribes. For example, we correctly use the name Numinu for what most Americans would call the Comanche Nation. The Sioux are referred to here in their own language as the Lakota. Unfortunately, many of the tribes here are indeed listed by their given name. Their original names were lost in the War against the Indians which left many tribes numberless, or forced remnant bands to amalgamate into larger, stronger tribes. We seek here to honor those hundreds of tribal nations who existed in their respective territories for millennia unscathed until the encroachment of Europeans. This is a tribute to all of those forgotten tribes whose names had been lost to the wind, but who live in the hearts and minds of modern-day Native Americans who managed to survive the largest full-scale holocaust in Man's history. We also honor the Indigenous Nations of this land by giving them ownership of their own names for themselves.
That paragraph has since been revised. Currently on his website, Carapella states:Here you will find the most comprehensive maps of pre-contact and at-contact Native North America to date. These maps use Tribal Nation’s original indigenous names for themselves, and show where Tribes were just before contact with outsiders . The intent of these maps is to instill pride in Native peoples and to be used as teaching tools from a Native perspective. These maps are part of my Tribal Nations Map series-which cover the Nations indigenous to the “United States,”, “Canada”, "Mexico" , "Central America", "South America" and “Alaska." Your purchase supports multiple upcoming maps. I credit the many hundreds of Cultural directors, elders, educators and linguists that have helped me centralize these names onto one visual display.
In my review in 2014, I focused on the Pueblo Indian Nations portion of the map. I'm doing that again, because that portion of the map, like the description of the project, has been revised. This review is arranged based on what Carapella said the maps would do.
Carapella said that his map would show Native Nations and where they were located pre-contact with Europeans. Sounds good, right? But--I'm asking you to look and think critically about that goal. Right now there are over 200 federally recognized nations in the US (not counting Alaska). There were a lot more, pre-contact. How, I wondered, was Carapella going to show the locations of those 200+ federally recognized nations in the hundreds and thousands of years prior to contact, or "at contact"? We didn't all come into contact with Europeans at the same time.
Let's hone in on an example.
The place my nation (Nambé O-Ween-Gé) is at right now is where we've been since the early part of the 14th century. If you go back further in time, we were somewhere else. I'm talking about places like Bandelier, Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon... (you might know those places as where the "Anasazi" people lived, but they are now--correctly--identified as ancestral homes of today's Pueblo Indians). On his map, Carapella chose to show us at our current locations, which is fine, but that decision points to a difficulty in the framework for the project. How do you convey thousands of nations in thousands of locations over thousands of years on a single map? How do you tell students which point in time a location on a map represents? That isn't unimportant data. It is vitally important.
Second, Carapella said that his maps would include nations that he called "numberless" which, he tells us, means ones that no longer exist. How, I wondered in 2014, would his map distinguish between those "numberless" ones and those that are currently recognized as sovereign nations?
As a Pueblo Indian woman enrolled at Nambe, I know there are nineteen sovereign Pueblo Indian nations in New Mexico right now. There were more, pre-contact. I know the names of some of them. I think it is important to know about them, but it is also important to know they aren't among the nineteen sovereign nations who have nation-to-nation negotiations--today--with the US government. Children in New Mexico should know the names of the nineteen Pueblo Indian nations, and all children should learn about us as we are, today, rather than the tragic and romantic content they learn that confines us to the past. This map shows the nineteen Pueblo Indian nations of New Mexico:
When I reviewed the Pueblo portion of his map in 2014, Carapella read my review and wrote to me to say he'd revise it. Last year, he sent me a screen capture of revisions he'd made. He asked me to update my review, but the revisions are just as bad as the original, so, I didn't revisit my older review.
Here's the screen cap he sent me. It has way more than nineteen. The first map didn't have all of those on there. That makes this one "more comprehensive" but also more confusing!
Here, I have inserted arrows to show you the "numberless" ones that aren't part of the nineteen:
In some instances, Carapella has made a different kind of error. He correctly lists A:shiwi (Zuni) but beside it he also lists Matsaki, Hawiku, and Halona, but they're villages that are part of A:shiwi. In my earlier review, I wrote that my own village ought to be listed as Nambé O-Ween-Gé, and pointed him to our tribal seal. But as you see above, he chose to use "Nambe Owingeh" instead.
Third, Carapella said his map would provide the names the nations used for themselves, rather than the ones outsiders used for them. That, too, is ambitious for many reasons. How did he find out those names? He tells us he made phone calls and visited people, but he doesn't name any names. His credit is a blanket one which tells us nothing. Because of our nation-to-nation relationship with the U.S. government, you can find a list of the 567 nations, which includes, superceded names (in parenthesis). It would be interesting for librarians/teachers to download that pdf and do some comparisons. How do the nations request they be listed? Does that match with what Carapella did?
As critical users of information, one of the things we do--and teach students to do--is to ask about the sources for information we're given. Carapella doesn't name his sources for the map, but he provides a "Resource List of Books/Movies/Websites" that he recommends. It, however, has The Education of Little Tree on it. That's a huge problem! That book has been soundly discredited for its content and because its author was faking an identity ("Forrest Carter" is actually Asa Carter--speechwriter for George Wallace--and a member of the KKK, too). In short? The revisions to Aaron Carapella's Tribal Nations map of North America are not an improvement. The map is still flawed and, as such, I do not recommend it.
John Smelcer's Stealing Indians is due out in August of this year (2016) from Leapfrog Press. Having read it, I'll start by saying that I do not recommend it.
Scholars who study boarding schools for Native children report that there was a wide range of experiences at the schools. Those who write about it take care in what they say about the schools. Today, they touch our lives, through the stories we hear from our elders, or from our own experiences in them, or from what we lost because of them.
Here's the opening preface to Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences, published in 2006, edited by Cliffford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc (Kindle Locations 30-36):
The American Indian boarding school experience left an indelible mark on the history of the United States and Canada, and only recently have we tried to understand the significance of the schools in the lives of students, teachers, administrators, and Indian communities. Perhaps we have waited so long for this scholarly examination because of the difficulties involved in addressing the dramatic impact of the boarding schools on the lives of so many people. For some American Indian students, the pain they suffered inhibits our intrusion into their lives. For other students, their boarding school days were filled with fond memories, sometimes mixed with melancholy, sometimes with humor. Understanding the many and varied levels of the boarding school experience is a complex business. No single interpretation of this experience exists today or ever will. Native American students and their parents viewed the schools in many different ways. Oral and written accounts by Indian students and non-Indians involved at the schools are extremely diverse. Historian Tsianina Lomawaima recently wrote to the editors that "part of that message, importantly, has been that the schools were not monolithically destructive or successful in their assimilative goals, but the harsh reality is-for some people, they were."
A key point in that excerpt is the diversity of experience. Given their long history and existence today, how could it be otherwise? Some were in Canada, some were in the U.S. There were/are "off reservation" boarding schools, and there were/are day schools on reservations, too. When they were in elementary school, my parents went to the day school on their respective reservations. Then they went to Santa Fe Indian School, where they met in the 1950s. Because of the stories they told me and the reading I've done, I know experiences varied widely by time and place.
Children in the US are not generally taught about the schools. Because some teachers use children's books to bring history into the classroom, it is crucial that the information conveyed in those books be accurate.
As noted above, I cannot recommend Smelcer's
Stealing Indians.
As my notes show, accuracy is an issue. Another is the lack of specificity of the character's respective nations. As regular readers of AICL know, I think it is important that writers be tribally specific (telling readers a character's tribal nation, within the story or in an Author's Note) because that specificity increases knowledge that can push back on the monolithic or stereotypical imagery that is far too prevalent in today's society.
Here's the synopsis for
Stealing Indians:
Four Indian teenagers are kidnapped from different regions, their lives immutably changed by an institution designed to eradicate their identity. And no matter what their home, their stories are representative of every story, every stolen life. So far from home, without family to protect them, only their friendship helps them endure. This is a work of fiction. Every word is true.
Smelcer's book is set in the 1950s and is located in the United States. Below are my notes and comments as I read his book:
CHAPTER ONE is about the four teenagers and how they were taken from their homes.
Lucy Secondchief is 13 years old. She's thinking about her father, who's been dead for four years. Specifically, she's thinking about the day of his burial, when some people brought food to their house, but others came to collect old debts. The latter took two rifles, a stack of lumber, the entire sled dog team, and the sled, too. That night, the sky was filled with the northern lights, which Lucy has been taught to fear because they are "a bad omen" and "a malevolent force that comes down to carry people away" (p. 18). Rather than stay inside she walks into a field. The lights drop down and surround her. People in the village watch in disbelief. Dogs howl and cower. Lucy starts to laugh aloud.
Debbie's comments: What is Lucy's tribal affiliation? We aren't told. Because of the northern lights and the sled dog/team, we can assume she's meant to be Alaskan Native, but which one? There are over 200. Amongst them, there are over 20 different languages. And of course, a diversity with regard to how they view the northern lights. Do some think they're a malevolent force? Maybe so, but it isn't likely they all feel that way. Lack of tribal specificity, then, has consequences for additional information we're given.One day, a "tall-roofed black car" pulled into Lucy's driveway. Two men get out of it, approach Lucy's mother, and hand her a paper. Lucy's mother can't read, but (p. 22):
[S]he knew what the document said. Every Indian parent knew what it said. All across the country, Indian families were given the same piece of paper, which proclaimed the end to families. The paper was the law. It was the government's authority to steal Indian children from their families and send them far from their homes and villages. The law was for the sake of the children, a ticket to a better life free from the burdens of poverty and ignorance. The paper was the law that sent them to Kansas, Oregon, the Dakotas, California, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania--anywhere far enough away so that they would forget what it means to be Indian.
The men grab Lucy, drag her to the car, push her into the backseat and close the door. There are no door handles on the inside.
My comments: I've found nothing about tall-roofed black cars that were used to pick up and remove Native children from their homes. As far as I am able to determine (via print/electronic sources or through emails with colleagues in Native studies/law), there was no law like that. The boarding schools were designed to wipe out Native identity in students but there was no law written down on a piece of paper that was handed to families in the 1950s. I have not found evidence of such papers prior to the 1950s either. I did find something specific to removing Native children from their homes without the consent of their parents, guardians or next of kin, dated June 21, 1906, but it is about reform school, not boarding school:25 USC § 302. Indian Reform School; rules and regulations; consent of parents to placing youth in reform school
The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, under the direction of the Secretary of the Interior, is authorized and directed to select and designate some one of the schools or other institution herein specifically provided for as an “Indian Reform School”, and to make all needful rules and regulations for its conduct, and the placing of Indian youth therein: Provided, That the appropriation for collection and transportation, and so forth, of pupils, and the specific appropriation for such school so selected shall be available for its support and maintenance: Provided further, That the consent of parents, guardians, or next of kin shall not be required to place Indian youth in said school.
Many coercive measures were used to get parents to send their children to the schools. It is possible that two men in Alaska were using a paper like that, but it isn't plausible. It is more dramatic to present these removals with that piece of paper, but that isn't accurate, and is information that would have to be unlearned at some point. There's no reason, in my view, to add to the body of misinformation that already exists. Simon Lone Fight is 14 years old. He lives in an "arid desert" (p. 22) of canyons, arroyos, buttes, and mesas. His parents were killed when he was 13. He is passed from "one cramped house of poverty to another" (p. 24). One of those homes is with his grandparents. One day, Simon sees a "black, high-roofed automobile" (p. 25) arriving at their house. Hiding behind the outhouse, Simon watches two white men get out of the car, briefcase in hand, and approach his grandfather. They argue, and then go into the house. Simon, a runner, takes off. That happens three more times that month. One day, his grandparents offer him ice cream if he'll go to town with them and help them sell hay. Instead of going into town, however, they pull off at the train station. Simon thinks they're going to load the hay onto a train. The train arrives, and Simon doesn't hear or see the black car. The two white men grab him. His grandfather watches and tells him "You must go to school. It's the law." He is put on the train.
My comments: There's that "law" again. As noted above, I have found no evidence of a law or piece of paper presented to parents. Use of "one cramped house of poverty to another" sounds like an outsider's observations rather than those of Simon or his relatives, and the way Simon was taken doesn't ring true. Noah Boyscout is also 14 years old. He's out hunting in a snowy landscape. Uneasy when he sees something in the distance, "the young Indian" (p. 28) checks to see how many bullets he has. As he heads home he thinks about how, as a "half-breed" he's an outcast and that he feels more at home in the forest with animals than he does with people. His mother isn't Native and doesn't like the stories he tells her of his interactions with animals: a fox lets him pet it, and a baby moose lays its head on his hip and naps, and he speaks raven and grouse. The thing he saw in the distance turns out to be one of several wolves who are pursuing him. He is afraid of them, ponders shooting them, but figures out that they're really after the dead rabbits he has in his pack. He throws the rabbits at them and makes his way on home to their cabin where there's a "tall black car" (p. 33) in the driveway. When he goes inside, a man in a black business suit and hat greets him. His mother starts crying and runs to the bedroom. There are photographs and papers on the table. The man tells Noah he has to go away, to a school for Indian boys and girls. The story jumps to the next character, Elijah.
My comments: I think the snowy landscape and Noah's parka and snowshoes place him in Alaska, but as with Lucy, we aren't given a specific tribe. The use of "the young Indian" tells us he's Native but I find that phrase jarring. It objectifies him and sounds more like an outsider's description than an insider voice. There's that tall black car again and reference to papers, one of which I assume is that "law" that Lucy's and Simon's parents are talking about. The story immediately moves to the next character.Elijah High Horse is with his cousin, Johnny Big Jim. They're in the woods, camping. With his hunting rifle Elijah shoots at a deer that Johnny can't see. Both are 14. "They were Indians" (p. 35). Time spent in the woods was sacred, "a time to be what their grandfathers had been long ago" (p. 35). The next day they visit their grandfather. Elijah tells him about the deer that Johnny couldn't see, and his grandfather, "an old chief" (p. 37), tells him that when he was a baby being baptized, his nose started bleeding when the holy water touched him. They knew, by that bleeding nose, that Elijah would be a shaman one day, if he was strong enough not to be used up by spirits he would eventually start to see. Later, "the two young Indians" (p. 39) sit by a fire, and Elijah tells Johnny he's also seen a white buffalo. A week later, Elijah's dad drives him to the train station, hands him a suitcase and a paper bag with fried chicken, a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, and two apples (p. 39):
Johnny was there to say goodbye. He wasn't going. The government had already taken two of his older brothers and a sister. He was allowed to stay. Not all Indian children were taken from their homes. That would have been unnecessary and, practically speaking, impossible. Neither the available room nor the funding would allow it. The government's goal could be achieved by taking only some, similar to the way the government didn't draft every young man from large families into military service during the war against the Nazis and the Japanese, over for only a few years.
Johnny waves goodbye, his father shuffles off, and "The young Indian" (p. 40) got on the train.
My comments: Again, we don't know what Elijah's tribal nation is, but the mention of the white buffalo suggests he's Lakota. That part about his nose bleeding sounds more like a horror movie than anything else. Elijah, in Christian stories, was a prophet. It strikes me as odd that this boy's family would name this infant--who they believe will be a "shaman"--by the name of a prophet whose holy water causes that nosebleed. And that part about Johnny being able to stay strikes me as an inconsistency. Remember--according to this "law," everyone has to go. Here, now, we have a different scenario. Does that "law" delineate exceptions for a 4th child in any given family?CHAPTER TWO is about the four teens and their experiences on their way to Wellington (fictitious name of the boarding school).
Lucy. After many hours on a narrow, winding highway, the car Lucy is in arrives at a diner where she has french fries, and then a few hours later they arrive at a bus station where she is given a bus ticket. She rubs the red welts on her wrists, but we don't know why those welts are there. She's told that the bus driver will know where she has to get off. She has nothing other than the clothes she is wearing (no jacket). In the morning when she re-boards the bus after a stop, there's a new rider on the bus: Noah.
My comments: In the "Questions for Discussion" at the end of the book, item #4 is about a pair of handcuffs at the museum at Haskell Indian Nations University. I assume the author meant to include a passage about Lucy being handcuffed, hence the red welts, but it isn't there.
Noah. Noah invites Lucy to sit with him. He offers her an apple. The bus travels hundreds of miles, south. They tell each other about their families. Late that day the driver tells them they have to get on another bus. They can sit and wait for it, but "the Indians" (p. 46) are tired of sitting and walk around the town. A pack of mongrel dogs come out of an abandoned warehouse and run at them. Lucy is afraid but Noah kneels, holds out a hand, and speaks to them. They drop to their bellies and let Noah pet them. After awhile he stands, points to the warehouse, and tells them to go home. The dogs go off, behind the building. "The two young Indians" (p. 47) return to the station, board their next bus and ride all night and much of the next day.
Simon. On the train, Simon heads northeast, knowing it will take two days to get to the town named on his ticket. With no food, he's hungry but "The Indian" (p. 49) goes to the dining car and grabs leftover food from empty tables. The next morning he sees "an Indian boy" (p. 50) has gotten on the train, too. It is Elijah, who leans toward Simon and asks his name.
Elijah. Elijah and Simon start to talk and learn they're going to the same place. Neither remembers the name of the school but talk about the photographs they saw of the iron arched gateway. Simon learns that Elijah had been on the train for a day and a half longer than he had and he's hungry because he's eaten up all the food his dad had given him. Together they go to the dining car, grab some leftovers, eat and that night, play card games. The next morning the train stops in a large city where they learn they will change trains. They have time before the next train arrives so the two set off to look around. Elijah ("the amazed Indian" p. 53) imagines people who work in the offices. Looking at the people milling about reminds him of salmon.
My comments:Noah's powers are handy but I view them as stereotypical in the one-with-nature-and-animals way that Native peoples are often depicted. But, my guess is that most of the American reading public will think "cool" when they read how he handles those dogs. As you see, I'm noting some of the places where "the Indian" or "the Indians" is used. I think it distances the reader from the characters. Imagine those passages if the author just replaced all of them with "the kid" or "the kids." Recall that Elijah saw a white buffalo, and so I thought he was, perhaps, Lakota. But now he's talking about salmon and being on the train longer than Simon, which suggests he's of one of the tribes on the northwest coast. Which is it? Is Elijah of a Plains tribe? Or a northwest coast tribe? Simon and Elijah. "The Indians" (p. 53) walk for blocks. "The amazed Indian" (Elijah) imagines all the people in the glassy office buildings they pass by. As they go, people hand them change (money), which they accept, thinking the city people are the friendliest ones in the world. They buy hot dogs and then go down some stairs to an underground train where they encounter four older boys who start to bully them. The oldest asks them if they're Mexicans and if they have any pesos. Elijah says "We're Indian!" One of the boys tries to grab Elijah's backpack. Elijah sees a vague image beside one of the boys. It is a man, holding an empty bottle in one hand and a belt in the other. Elijah tells that boy that he's going to end up like his dad, who drank too much and beat him. The boy is shaken by what Elijah says. Elijah and Simon fight the four boys. Afterwords, Elijah and Simon head back to the station and the chapter ends.
My comments: I can imagine these two boys being struck by what they see in a city, but the way their unfamiliarity is described seems a kind of mockery of their lack of familiarity with a city. And--again, the objectification of them is jarring.
Chapters 3-13
I provided a close read of chapters one and two, where we meet the characters. There are flaws in the ways these characters are depicted which has bearing on the story. Once they arrive at the school, the four will meet other students. One talks about his journey. It struck me as odd (p. 62): "I was in the bottom of a ship for two days. It was dark and they didn't let us out, neither. It was like we was cows or something. They just herded us in and closed the door." Where, I wonder, did that ship originate?!
On page 69 Elijah sees "English Only" posters on the wall. To my knowledge, there weren't posters like that in the schools in the 1950s. Indeed, significant changes took place from the 1930s through mid 1950s. Under the direction of John Collier (appointed as Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933 by President Roosevelt), there was a shift to make the curriculum reflect Native life and instill pride in a Native identity. In My Mother's House
by Ann Nolan Clark, illustrated by Velino Herrera, is one of the outcomes of that shift. With various Native illustrators, Clark wrote several books like In My Mother's House between 1940 and 1951. Some of them were published in a Native language. Here's the cover of Little Man's Family,
published in 1953. See the words beneath the English title? That is Dine (Navajo). It appears on every page. It seems unlikely then, that there would be "English Only" posters on the walls of the school.
On page 112, Simon and another boy speak Navajo to each other. Their conversation is overheard and Simon ends up being locked in an old maintenance building. It is a dramatic scene. Simon is led to the back of the poorly lit room where he's handcuffed to a pipe and left to sit on the concrete floor for several days. That scene sounds a lot like what happened in the schools in earlier times. In particular, it reminds me of a scene from a documentary about Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Again, though, it doesn't ring true for the 1950s. There are other plot points that I also find problematic.
I think I'll stop here, saying again, I do not recommend Stealing Indians.
It has problems of stereotyping, lack of tribal specificity, and problems with accuracy with respect to boarding schools of the time period in which the story is set.
Given the depth and breadth of inaccurate depictions of Native people--past and present--in textbooks, movies, TV shows, and children's books, I firmly believe that the experiences Native people lived through must be presented with integrity and accuracy. Over-dramatizing what happened is a disservice to their experiences. __________
For further reading:
Previous posts on John SmelcerJohn Smelcer, Indian by Proxy
I love word play. Lane Smith's book is getting a lot of love for its word play, but I'm tagging his book as Not Recommended.
Here's the cover of his new book, There Is a Tribe of Kids. The blue creature to the left is meant to be a young mountain goat, or, a kid (that is the term for a baby goat). We follow the child on the right as we read There Is a TRIBE of KIDS. That child is a kid, too, of course, which tells us that Smith is doing some word play in the book. See the two sticks coming out of the child's head? See the stance the child is in? That child is playing at being a goat kid.
Note that two words in the book title are in capital letters. They go together. That's a pattern that Smith uses throughout the book, and as a former elementary school teacher, it is kind of detail that I'd love to point out to kids.
BUT.
Smith's error is using the word TRIBE on the final pages of the book, to refer to children who are playing, adorned in various ways with leaves. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Let's go back to the opening pages.
On the title page the child is with three kids (goats) as an adult goat looks down on them from atop a rock. On the next page, the three kids climb the rock, leaving the child alone. The child stands upright and walks away from the rock, discarding the horns.
Beneath that illustration are the words "There WAS a TRIBE of KIDS." The three kids the child was with are part of a tribe (tribe is another word for herd), but since they've left him behind, Smith uses the past tense (was).
Beneath that sentence is an illustration of the child looking across the page at a penguin. The child is shown in the same pose the penguin is in. On the next page the child is shown in the same pose as four penguins (see the illustration to the right). As we saw with the goats, the penguins leave (they go into the water and the child follows), and the text is "There was a COLONY of PENGUINS."
In the water, the child is in the midst of jellyfish. In a series of illustrations, we see the child's leaf shirt float up and then into a balloon shape, which are the shapes of jellyfish as they swim.
That's the pattern of the book. The child is with a group of some kind, and while with that group, the child's leaf clothing or body positioning emulates that group.
On some pages, the child is just shown with the group. On one page, the child sits atop a whale. A raven picks the child up off the whale's back and flies with other ravens; the raven opens its beak and for an instant the child is flying but then drops to the ground and lands on a pile of boulders. The child plays on the boulders (holding his body like one), falls headfirst into some flowering plants, and when the child is upright again, the child has leaf arms and leaf ears and a flower atop its head. The child finds elephants and then, those leaf ears are like elephant ears.
As we get to the end of the story, the child is near the ocean, which has a bed of clams. The child uses one as a bed. In the morning the child wakes, alone, abandons the leaf shirt and follows a trail of shells and finds "a TRIBE of KIDS" playing beneath and on the branches of a massive tree. There are 28 children. What are they playing? They've all got leaves on, in some way.
Here are the ones with a leaf/leaves on their heads. Coupled with the word TRIBE on that page, it looks to me like they're dressed up to play Indian. They aren't doing anything active.
But, writer Rosanne Parry disagrees with Sam, and with me, too, but she didn't reference me at her post,
A Tribe of Book Reviewers. My guess is that she thinks her blog post title is clever. It isn't. She thinks that Sam Bloom (see his review at Reading While White) should have
"been willing to look a little deeper, beyond just the immediate Oh no! we are insulting Native Americans again, as we have done so often in the past."
When I read that line in italics, I was incensed. She's being quite dismissive of criticism of stereotyping, bias, appropriation---all those things that white writers, including her, have done. A few years ago, I reviewed Parry's
Written In Stone. There's a lot wrong with that book. She wrote to me privately to talk about my review, but I preferred the conversation to be public so that others could follow and learn from it. Many did. Parry did not. Indeed, Parry's resistance was remarkable. She was so sure that she was right to make up traditional Native stories, and right to make up petroglyphs and assign them meaning, and right to write that story because the Native kids she taught--she told us--wanted her to write a story about them. Sheesh! White savior to the rescue!
Parry had a lot more to say about Smith's
There Is a Tribe of Kids...
She acknowledged that tribe is a loaded word, but says that she:
"didn't immediately make the leap to Native American tribes because there are no tribes in North America who dress in garments made of leaves. Plant fibers woven into cloth, yes. Dance costumes made of pale yellow grasses, yes. But broad-leafed green plans arranged around the body as a short cloak? No."
Are you rolling your eyes? Are you flipping out at her use of "costumes"? You should be. She likes to talk about the Native kids she taught in Washington. Does she think they wore costumes?! There's more. She read through the book and
"didn't see a single reference, even an oblique one, to a Native American tribe or any tribal activity of North America. No hunting, no fishing, no fires, no tomahawks, no archery, no totem poles, no teepees, no drums, no horses, no canoes."
Again: are you rolling your eyes? Or, maybe, grinding your teeth? Or laughing at how stupid this all sounds? Or---are you reading it and thinking she's making good points? All those reactions are possible, given the widespread ignorance out there about Native people! Some get it, while others are oblivious. Parry goes on, telling us the way the kids are playing is more like the Green Man,
"an ancient mythological figure associated with the Celtic tribes."
Oh! The kids are playing Green Man. Not Indian! (I'm being sarcastic). Parry isn't done yet, though... She tells us that the children playing on those final pages are of different colored skin tones, making the book:
"one of the most racially inclusive books on our bookstore shelves this year. Not only that, it's a racially inclusive book that isn't about slavery or civil rights or westward expansion, which often cast Black and Native American characters as victims."
Oh, yay (again, I'm being sarcastic). Then she tells us that the kids are:
"arranging shells, playing ball, swinging, sliding, climbing, dancing, running, hiding, napping"
and that none of those actions are
"a mockery of Native Americans. If they were wearing fringed buckskins or button blankets or powwow dance costumes or had painted faces or were brandishing bows and arrows, that would be an entirely different story."
Oh. I see. (More sarcasm from me; I can't not be sarcastic about her words, and this is the fourth or fifth time I'm reading them!) There's that use of costume again. From a white woman who professes love for the Native kids she taught. She tells us that what she sees in Smith's illustrations are depictions of how kids play, and asks
"Who are we to shame them by saying this is playing Indian?"
Shame. That word is getting used a lot in children's literature discussions last year and this one, too. Us Native and people of color are being mean, shaming writers and now--Parry tells us--the way that kids play.
Sigh. Yes, some of the kids are sliding. And some are playing ball, etc. But look at the illustrations I shared above. What are we to make of them? They're not active in any way. They're just there, wearing their leaf feathers, holding staffs, standing, sitting, jewelry dangling from neck/wrist/ears... What about them?
Parry offers workshops on how to get things right. If you're a writer, avoid her. I wish I could say she's clueless, but I think she is being deliberately obtuse. She'll lead you to think your problematic story of appropriation is ok. It won't be.
I acknowledge that I'm clearly incensed with her and I anticipate lot of people coming to her defense. Parry and others (as Sam Bloom noted,
There Is a Tribe of Kids is getting starred reviews) don't see--and refuse to see--the problems in the book. That's where we are in 2016.
Several weeks ago, I was tagged in a Twitter conversation about William Grill's The Wolves of Currumpaw. The title rang a bell but I've not been able to recall why. Since then, I've had a chance to spend time with Grill's book.
Here's the synopsis:
The Wolves of Currumpaw is a beautifully illustrated modern re-telling of Ernest Thompson Seton's epic wilderness drama Lobo, the King of Currumpaw, originally published in 1898. Set in the dying days of the old west, Seton's drama unfolds in the vast planes of New Mexico, at a time when man's relationship with nature was often marked by exploitations and misunderstanding. This is the first graphic adaptation of a massively influential piece of writing by one of the men who went on to form the Boy Scouts of America.
The picture book is due out in the U.S. on July 12, 2016 from Flying Eye Books in London. It came out there in May. As the synopsis indicates, it is about Ernest Thompson Seton (founder of the Boy Scouts of America) and a wolf.
However, when I started to read the book, I was taken aback at two things: the illustrations of Native peoples, and, the absence of them from the text itself.
The first words of the book set its time and place: "The Old West, New Mexico, 1862."
The illustration shows an empty expanse of trees and in the distance, some mountains. New Mexico became a territory of the United States in 1848. By 1851, there were over 1000 US soldiers in the territory.
Later in
The Wolves of Currumpaw, we learn that the story itself is set in Clayton, New Mexico, which is located in the northeast corner of the state. That means it was in the area of the country that was the homelands for Plains tribes like the Comanches, Cheyennes, or Kiowas.
The first full sentence in
The Wolves of Currumpaw is on page 5:
Half a million wolves once roamed freely across North America, but with the arrival of European settlers the habitats of the animals began to change.
On the facing page, the text is:
These were the dying days of the old west and the fate of wolves was sealed in it.
See? No mention of Native peoples for whom that area was their homelands. How convenient. Most people, by default, use "settlers" to describe those people. That word is seen, by some, as neutral. Others use "invaders" or "occupiers" or "squatters" to call our attention to the political and imperialism that was going on.
Reading the illustrations on page 5, however, the story is a troubling mix of inaccuracy, stereotyping, and a deeply disturbing image of what is meant to be an Native man on his knees, arms raised as if praying or pleading, in front of three soldiers who have their guns aimed at him. Here's the full page:
Numbering the images left to right, row by row, here's the story I discern and my thoughts on that story, too:
1. The US flag is shown as moving from the East Coast across to the West Coast. That's a graphic depiction of Manifest Destiny. I think white people were using the Santa Fe Trail to move to New Mexico. One problem with that depiction of the movement of white people is that it obscures history and the actual movements of Europeans into the southwest. The Spanish invaders were in the southwest long before the 1800s.
2. A white man in a red coat, and his child, are scoping out the land, deciding where to put their house. We don't know where that house is located, specifically. Somewhere near Clayton, New Mexico, but where? And what is the history of that particular land and who it belonged to at that moment in time? Since this book is, ultimately, about wolves, I guess we're not expected to ask those questions. That is not what the book is about, I imagine people saying. Those who put forth that response think I, and others who raise such questions, have "an agenda" as if they, themselves, don't! They do. Their push back is evidence of their agenda.
3. The white man's home is finished.
4. A white man in a black coat, shaking hands with an Indian man. Why? Did they, just at that moment in the story, meet?! Are they saying hello to each other? We don't know. Because we don't have enough information, I'm using "Indian" to describe the man. If Grill was being tribally specific, he might have told us the man's tribal nation. But again--this book is not about Indians, so, to Grill and those who read it as such, I'm probably asking an annoying question.
5. An Indian man on horse, hunting buffalo.
6. White men with rifles, killing many buffalo.
7. White men proud of how many buffalo they have killed.
The illustration of the man standing on a huge pile of buffalo skulls is based on a famous photograph dated 1892. Here they are, side by side. On the left is the
original photograph, housed in the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public Library. A handwritten note on back says "C.D. 1892 Glueworks, office foot of 1st St., works at Rougeville, Mich."
The handwritten note on back is 1892; Grill's book is set 30 years earlier in a different state. Does it matter? Yes! The wholesale slaughter of buffalo is one of the darkest moments in US history. Consider, for example, what General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote in 1868 to General Sheridan:
"[A]s long as Buffalo are up on the Republican the Indians will go there. I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all. Until the Buffalo and consequent[ly] Indians are out [from between] the Roads we will have collisions and trouble" (Smits, 1994).
Grill's use of the photograph is apparently a set-up for the next image...
8. An Indian man points to buffalo skulls on the ground. We can interpret that to mean he's giving the white man heck for his role in the slaughters. Without a doubt, Native peoples objected to what white people did, but Grill's telling of history is a wreck. What happens in the next few illustrations is deeply disturbing.
9. White men build fence right through Indian tipis. The Indian man appears to be saying "stop" to the white man.
10. The white man and the Indian man fight.
11. The Indian man, on his knees, appears to either pray or plead with three U.S. soldiers as they level their rifles at him.
12. Indians being led away.
It is hard for me to come up with words to describe #11. I wonder how Grill came up with that particular illustration? What did he read? Why did he think an illustration like that ought to be part of the story he tells? Did his editor ask him about it? What did he say? It is, of course, a brutally violent image. And while that sort of thing did happen, historically, it does strike me as the sort of thing that most people would deem as being inappropriate for seven year old readers (the book is marked as being for children aged 7 - 14 years). But it isn't noted in the review from
Publisher's Weekly or from
Kirkus either. Did they notice it?
And that last image, of the Indians, being taken away by armed men on horses. That marks the end of Native peoples in Grill's book. The sentence at top of the next (facing) page is:
These were the dying days of the old west and the fate of wolves was sealed in it.
No mention of Native peoples in that sentence, and no reference to Native peoples in the set of illustrations below that sentence either. From there, the story moves to how the white people's livestock is being killed by wolves, and so, the wolves are killed.
In the next dated section (1893) the story shifts to a legendary wolf. There's a reference in the text there:
Old Lobo, or the King, as the natives called him, was the great leader of a notorious pack of grey wolves.
On the next page, Grill gives us names for the wolves (Lobo, Grey Wolf, and Blanca) and white people (Seton, LaLoche, Tannery, and Calone). But, no tribal or personal names.
Overall, we're meant to admire how smart Lobo is, and we're meant to be troubled by what Seton does in his effort to kill Lobo. It is gruesome in parts, and, his use of Lobo's mate (Blanca) as a lure is unsettling. In the end, Lobo dies in captivity. Again, I wonder about the book and its use with young children. The final chapter is about Seton's turning about. Full of regret he becomes a key figure in protecting wolves and other wildlife. In 1902, he founded the Woodcraft Indians.
I truly do not understand the thinking behind this story. It is gratuitous in its violence. If the point is to understand a man's turning point, do we really need page after page about the things he did to try to kill this wolf? Some of it is meant to tell us the wolf was cunning, but the bulk of
The Wolves of Currumpaw is about trying to capture that wolf.
That image of the three soldiers with rifles pointed at the Indian man... that, too, is gratuitous. The history is wrong, the story us needlessly violent, and as such, I can't recommend
The Wolves of Currumpaw. And I do not understand why
Publisher's Weekly gave it a starred review. This review feels ragged as I read and re-read it. I may be back to polish it, but my inability to get to a place where I feel it is ready to share is an indicator of how messed up it is.
Works Cited:
Smits, David D.
The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865-1883. In
The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol 25 #3, Autumn, 1994, pp. 312-338.
Cammie McGovern's Just My Luck is new this year (2016) from HarperCollins. A reader wrote to ask me about it, because Indian in the Cupboard is part of the story.
I started reading it two days ago and kept setting it aside. The main character is a 4th grader named Benny. His brother, George, is in 6th grade, and is "medium-functioning autistic" (p. 16). I hope Disability in Kidlit finds someone to review it. Some time back, I read their review of Anne Ursu's The Real Boy. I love that book. One thing that stood out in the review was that the story is told from the perspective of the autistic child, rather than from outsider's who gawk at him. There are pages in Just My Luck where it feels like someone is gawking at George.
I got to page 49 and paused. At that point in the story, Benny is with his older brother, Martin, who is on his first date with Lisa. They go into a Barnes & Noble, where Lisa asks Benny what he's reading (p. 49):
She said she knew it sounded childish but her favorite books were still the Little House on the Prairie series that she read when she was in Mr. Norris's class. "I just love them," she said."
Benny has a crush on Lisa, and so, he says he loves them, too. He's never read them, but their mother used to make them watch the TV show. Two weeks later when she's visiting their house, Benny pretends to be reading
Little House in the Big Woods. Lisa exclaims that it is her favorite book.
I wonder if McGovern read that book recently? In
Little House in the Big Woods, Pa tells the girls how he, as a young boy, would play that he was a mighty hunter stalking wild animals and Indians. Stalking Indians. Do you remember that part of that book? Do you know any other book for kids that has someone hunting another person or people?
I wanted to throw
Just My Luck across the room when I got to that part and I want to ask McGovern if she remembers that passage.
On page 64, Lisa tells Benny that Mr. Norris read
Indian in the Cupboard aloud to them when she was in his class and that he dressed up as characters, too. That was five years back. Benny is in Mr. Norris's class now and he's not done anything like that. Benny tells his mom that Mr. Norris wasn't reading
Indian in the Cupboard to them, so, his mom gets the book from the library and starts reading it aloud, doing the voices as she does (p. 72):
It turns out he's [Little Bear] not only alive, but he's a real person from history, an Iroquois who's fighting battles with the French and English. So Mom has to talk like him, which George loves because he doesn't talk very well. George keeps laughing until Mom tells him it isn't really funny. "In fact," she says, "it perpetuates a lot of negative stereotypes about Native Americans, which is probably why Mr. Norris isn't reading this book out loud to his class anymore."
Then she keeps on reading. She's decided, apparently, that she's going to perpetuate those stereotypes herself. That doesn't add up, does it? And it doesn't seem very caring of her to lay into George like she did, either. She's deliberately being an animated reader, which prompts a response from her autistic son, and she scolds him?! And keeps reading?!
Throughout the next chapters, Benny thinks about toys coming to life. He wants a cupboard so he can bring his Legos to life. Several times, he thinks about
Indian in the Cupboard as he develops the idea for how he'll use his Legos to make a movie. Later, they find out why Mr. Norris isn't doing the things he used to do. It isn't because he's recognized the problems in
Indian in the Cupboard. It is because he's got to take care of his own autistic son, and he's exhausted. He has no time or energy to do the things he used to do.
I don't like
Just My Luck. If Disability in Kidlit reviews it, I'll be back to point to their review. For now, the Native content alone is enough for me to say that I do not recommend
Just My Luck.
Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins is set on San Nicolas Island, a small island off the coast of Santa Barbara California. In the Author’s Note at the back of the book, O’Dell writes that “[t]he girl Robinson Crusoe whose story I have attempted to re-create actually lived alone upon this island from 1835 to 1853, and is known to history as The Lost Woman of San Nicolas” (p. 187). Because nobody could understand her language, her given name is not known. Named Juana Maria by the Mission priest who took her in at Santa Barbara Mission, she died six weeks after her rescue. To anthropologists, the people of the island are known as Nicoleños.
In his story, O’Dell changes Juana Maria’s status to a twelve-year old girl named Karana. As the story opens, Karana and her little brother Romo are digging roots when a ship arrives. On board is a Russian captain named Orlov who has come with forty of his (Aleut) men to hunt sea otter. Based on past experiences, Chief Chowig (Karana’s father) and Orlov have a tense discussion about what the Ghalas-at will receive in return for the otters that will be taken from the waters that abut the island. Months later when Orlov readies to leave without holding up his end of the bargain, a fight breaks out. Most of the men of Ghalas-at, including Chowig, are killed. Two years later, the survivors are rescued. After the rescue ship leaves the cove, Karana realizes Romo is not on board. She jumps ship to stay with him and wait for another rescue ship. Soon after, wild dogs kill Romo, and Karana is alone until her rescue.
Her years on the island make survival a central theme of the story. During that time, she builds several shelters, makes weapons that only men are supposed to make (according to tribal traditions), finds food, fights wild dogs, befriends a large dog that she thinks came to the island with the Russian ship and then when he dies, tames a wild dog that she thinks was fathered by the large dog. She survives an earthquake, a tsunami, and several harsh winter storms.
At the close of the story, she is leaving the island. Based on the text, she has been there at least four years. On page 162, the text reads that two years have passed since the Aleuts had been on the island. At that point, Karana stopped counting the passage of time. One spring, there is an earthquake. As she makes a new shelter, she sees a ship and at first, she hides from the two men who come ashore. She decides she wants to be with people again, and rushes down to the cove but the canoe is gone. Two years pass and a ship returns. This time, she doesn’t hide. When the ship leaves, she is on board with her dog and two caged birds.
A few words about Scott O’Dell
Born in Los Angeles, California in 1898, O’Dell died in 1989. He spent the first thirty years of his adult life working in Hollywood as a cameraman and writer. In 1920, a California newspaper misprinted Odell Gabriel Scott’s name as Scott O’Dell. Liking the misprint, Scott legally changed his name and from then on, was known as Scott O’Dell. In 1947, he became the book editor for the Los Angeles Daily News (Payment, 2006).
In addition to his writing, O’Dell spent time with his father on his orange grove ranch, where he visited ranches of Spanish families of the Pomona Valley and listened to their stories of the past. This led him to write three novels for adults, and a history of California.
In 1957, O’Dell published Country of the Sun: Southern California, An Informal History and Guide. Therein, he references Helen Hunt Jackson’s articles, published in 1882 in Century Magazine, about the mistreatment of the Cupeno Indians of California. He also references her novel, Ramona, published in 1884, saying her novel “had about the same impact as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Overnight, the country was aroused to the plight of the Southern California Indian” (p. 52). Country of the Sun includes two pages about “The Lost Woman of San Nicolas Island”.
O’Dell developed the story into a book-length manuscript and showed it to Maud Lovelace (author of the Betsy-Tacy books). She persuaded him “that it was a book for children, and a very good one” (Scott O’Dell, n.d.). Lovelace penned the biography for O’Dell when he won the Newbery Medal for Island of the Blue Dolphins. She concludes the biography with “Scott O’Dell’s life brought him naturally a knowledge of Indians, dogs, and the ocean; and he was born with an inability to keep from writing. So he gave us the moving legend of Karana” (p. 108).
In his acceptance speech, O’Dell referenced animal cruelty and forgiveness as themes that are present in his book. He also spoke at length of Antonio Garra, a Cupeno Indian man who, just before he was executed under bogus charges, said “I ask your pardon for all my offenses, and I pardon you in return” (O’Dell, p. 103). O’Dell went on to say that this man, of a peaceful tribe, is unknown to the world because he was peaceful rather than “like Geronimo” (p. 103). Karana, he said, belonged to a tribe like Garra’s. He concluded his speech saying that Karana, before her people were killed, lived in a world where “everything lived only to be exploited” but that she “made the change from that world” to “a new and more meaningful world” because she learned that “we each must be an island secure unto ourselves” where we “transgress our limits” in a “reverence for all life” (p. 104).
Acclaim and Critiques of Island of the Blue Dolphins
Island of the Blue Dolphins received glowing reviews and went on to win the Newbery Award. It was made into a movie in 1964 and has since been made into audio recordings several times. The National Council of Teachers of English listed it on its “Books for You” in 1972, 1976, and 1988. In 1976, the Children’s Literature Association named it one of the ten best American children’s books of the past 200 years (O’Dell, 1990). It is the subject of numerous amateur videos on YouTube and there are volumes of lesson plans written for teachers. Over the years, the cover has changed several times. As of this writing, it has 734 customer reviews on Amazon.com. Thirty-three readers gave it one star, while over 600 gave it four or five stars.
In 1990, Island of the Blue Dolphins was republished, with illustrations rendered by Ted Lewin, and an introduction by Zena Sutherland. A fiftieth anniversary edition was published in 2010, with a new introduction by Lois Lowry. She showers O’Dell’s novel with praise, noting that he “masterfully” brings the reader onto the island (O’Dell, 2010). In 2010, School Library Journal blogger Elizabeth Bird listed it as one of the Top 100 Children’s Novels (Reese, 2010). In 2010, the book was listed in second place on Amazon’s list of “Bestsellers in Children’s Native American Books” (Reese, 2010).
In the academic literature, Maher (1992) writes that Island of the Blue Dolphins is a “counterwestern” that gives “voice to the oppressed, to those who lost their lands and their cultures” (p. 216). Tarr (1997) disagrees with that assessment, asserting that the reader’s uncritical familiarity with stereotypical depictions of American Indians is the reason it has fared so well. Moreover, Tarr (2002) writes that the stoic characterization of Karana and her manner of speaking without contractions are stereotypical Hollywood Indian depictions rather than one that might be called authentic. Placing the novel in a social and historical context gives depth to Tarr’s statement and also explains why it is so popular.
Island of the Blue Dolphins in a Social and Historical Context
In the years preceding the publication of Island of the Blue Dolphins, America was enjoying the heyday of Hollywood Westerns that depicted savage Indians who terrorized settlers and captured their women, and heroic White men who courted Indian maidens and bemoaned the way Indians were treated by Whites. John Ford’s Stagecoach(1939) follows a stagecoach of travelers who must be mindful of Indian attacks. Broken Arrow (1950) featured Jimmy Stewart as a man in love with an Apache girl and who, out of love and sympathy, tries to help make peace between the Apaches and the U.S. troops. In The Searchers (1956), John Wayne plays the role of a man on the search for a White girl who had been abducted by Indians.
Some of the research that went into Country of the Sun reappears in Island.Presumably, O’Dell conducted his research during the 1950s. That decade was a devastating time for several American Indian nations, a time during which their identity as sovereign nations was again under government attack. It is useful to review how they came to be known as sovereign nations.
From the moments of their arrival on the continent now called North America, Europeans encountered well-ordered nations or tribes of Indigenous peoples, each with its own territories and forms of governance. Recognition of that nationhood is evident in the treaties European heads of state made with their counterparts amongst the 500+ sovereign Indigenous nations (Deloria and DeMallie, 1999). In the treaties, lands were ceded to the United States in return for federally provided health care, housing, and education. As time passed, various entities wanted to nullify the treaties, thereby discontinuing federal funding to tribes and making available lands held by tribes. Desire for land, coupled with the rampant corruption within the Bureau of Indian Affairs that had federal oversight for the tribes, led Congress to terminate its nation-to-nation relationship with the tribes through a policy outlined in House Concurrent Resolution 108 (Wilkinson and Biggs, 1977) that led to several public laws enacted by Congress, including the California Rancheria Termination Act (Public Law 85-671). Through the Termination period (1953-1962), over one hundred bands, communities, and rancherias (California Mission Indians) in California were terminated (Nies, 1996). Given his care to include mistreatment of California Indians in the 1800s, it is curious that O’Dell does not reference any of the Terminations in Country of the Sun.
Emma Hardacre’s Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island
As noted, Island of the Blue Dolphins is based on the life of Juana Maria. At the time of his research, the resources he had available to him about Juana Maria were newspaper accounts and articles about her. Emma Hardacre’s “The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island” was first published in Scribner’s Monthly in 1880, and then again in 1950 and 1973. Hardacre begins by noting that Robinson Crusoe is a work of fiction, whereas the story of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island was true. In Santa Barbara, people spoke less and less about the “widow, between twenty and thirty years of age” who leapt from the ship to be with her child who had accidentally been left behind (p. 75).
Years later, a Mission priest named Father Gonzales commissioned Thomas Jeffries to go to San Nicolas to see if she was still alive. Jeffries (p. 277):
found the remains of a curious hut, made of whales’ ribs planted in a circle, and so adjusted as to form the proper curve of a wigwam-shaped shelter. This he judged to have been formerly either the residence of the chief or a place of worship where sacrifices were offered. He had picked up several ollas, or vessels of stone, and one particularly handsome cup of clouded green serpentine.
More interesting to Jeffries was the abundance of sea otter. Soon after his return to the mainland, he returned to the island with George Nidiver and a crew of Indians on an otter hunt. For six weeks, they hunted seal and otter. Leaving the island, a sailor said he thought he saw a human figure calling to them, but the figure vanished.
On their third trip to hunt at the island, Nidiver saw a footprint and exclaimed that the woman was alive. The next day, Nidiver found a basket that contained “bone needles, thread made of sinews, shell fishhooks, ornaments, and a partially completed robe of birds’ plumage, made of small squares neatly matched and sewed together” (p. 279). In their search of the inland, they found “several circular, roofless inclosures [sic], made of woven brush. Near these shelters were poles, with dried meat hanging from elevated crosspieces” (p. 279). Not finding the woman, they determined the footprint was older than they thought, and some thought that she was probably dead. Fishing continued for several weeks. Nidiver believed she might be alive and hiding and decided to look until he found her or her remains.
A search was organized. They found the whale bone house, where “rushes were skillfully interlaced in the rib framework; an olla and old basket were near the door.” (p. 279). Climbing over slippery rocks, they found fresh footprints and followed them up a cliff. Brown, a fisherman, saw the woman in an enclosure and approached her. A pack of dogs growled at him but ran away when she uttered a cry that silenced them. She did not see Brown approaching. Hardacre reports that “the complexion of the woman was much fairer than the ordinary Indian, her personal appearance pleasing, features regular, her hair, thick and brown, falling about her shoulders in a tangled mat” (p. 280). She was anxiously watching the men below her dwelling. Brown signaled to the men that he had found her and that they should approach. When he spoke to her, she ran a few steps, then (p. 280):
instantly controlling herself, stood still, and addressed him in an unknown tongue. She seemed to be between forty and fifty years of age, in fine physical condition, erect, with a well-shaped neck and arms and unwrinkled face. She was dressed in a tunic-shaped garment made of birds’ plumage, low in the neck, sleeveless, and reaching to the ankle.
She greeted the other men and then set about preparing a meal for them that consisted of roasted roots. Through gestures, they communicated that she was to go with them. She understood immediately and put her things in pack baskets.
On board their ship, Brown wanted to preserve her feather dress, and so made her a petticoat of ticking. He gave her a man’s cotton shirt and a neckerchief. She watched Brown closely as he sewed, and showed him how she used her bone needle to puncture the cloth and then put thread through the perforations. Through gestures, she told Brown of her years on the island, how she made fire “by rapidly rubbing a pointed stick along the groove of a flat stick until a spark was struck” and that she was careful not to let it go out, covering her home fire with ashes to preserve it. She ate fish, seals’ blubber, roots, and shellfish, and she used bird skins for clothing. Her main dwelling was a large cave on the north end of the island.
On arrival in Santa Barbara, people flocked to Nidiver’s home to see her. Through gestures, she told Nidiver’s wife that dogs had eaten her baby and how she grieved its loss. She also communicated her dread of being alone, her years of hope for rescue, and at last, resignation at being alone. Nidiver was unable to find anyone amongst the Indians in the Missions who could understand her language. They learned some of her words: “A hide she called to-co (to-kay); a man, nache (nah-chey); the sky, te-gua (tay-gwah); the body, pinche (pin-oo-chey)” (p. 283). She was so gentle and modest that some believed she was not an Indian, but “a person of distinction cast away by shipwreck” (p. 283). She got weaker and weaker and when she was near death, Nidiver’s wife asked Father Sanchez to baptize her. He did so, giving her the name Juana Maria. She was buried in a walled cemetery and the mission fathers “sent her feather robes to Rome. They were made of the satiny plumage of the green cormorant, the feathers pointing downward, and so skillfully matched as to seem one continuous sheen of changeful luster” (p. 284).
Academic Resources
The academic resources on the people of San Nicolas Island were scant at that time that O’Dell wrote Island of the Blue Dolphins. Archeological studies post-1960 have generated a richer body of materials. Pre-1960, O’Dell likely drew from resources he used when writing his history of California. These included Kroeber’s handbook. He reports that her speech (language) was “thoroughly unintelligible” to Chumash Indians in the area and to Indians from Santa Catalina Island as well (p. 634). Most dwellings, Kroeber wrote, “were reared on a frame of whale ribs and jaws, either covered with sea-lion hides or wattled with brush or rushes” (p. 634). Dugout canoes “may have been burned from drift logs” (p. 634). Seals, water birds, fish, and mollusks were the primary source of food, supplemented by roots. He concludes with “whether the toloache cult or the image form of mourning anniversary had reached the island must remain in abeyance; and as to society, there is total ignorance. Ghalas-at has been given as the name of the island. This is perhaps the native or the Chumash pronunciation of Gabrielino Haras-nga” (p. 635.)
O’Dell may have read a study published in an archeological journal in 1953. Meighan and Eberhart’s study stated that “ethnographically, almost nothing is known of the tribe” and that there was a “virtual absence of trade goods, in particular glass beads” (p. 109). They reference the possessions of the woman as follows: “a well made sinew rope 25 feet long and one-half inch in diameter, thought to have been used in snaring sleeping seals” and, “sinew fishing line; bone and abalone shell fishhooks; bone needles; bone knives, and a knife made of a piece of iron hoop stuck in a rough wooden handle” (p. 112). Items found on the island include mats and skirt fragments made of eel grass, grass skirts, woven bags, woven baskets, stone knives with wooden handles, a stone drill with a wooden handle, wooden knife handles, a wooden ladle, an arrow shaft, a wooden dark foreshaft with bone bars, a drill with wooden shaft and stone point, harpoon points, a great many mortars and pestles, steatite dishes and bowls, stone beads and pendants, bird and sea-lion claws used as pendants, stone ground spoons and ladles . Meighan and Eberhart report four Nicoleno words: “tokay (hide), nahchey (man), taygway (sky), and pinoochey (body). Bird bones were used to make beads, whistles, awls, and fishhooks. Fish and shellfish were the primary source of food, including abalone, rock scallops, mussels, limpets, and sea urchins.
Clearly, these two key sources say little was known about the people of Ghalas-at and the woman at the heart of O’Dell’s novel. And yet, he was able to write a novel of 186 pages. With this survey of the source material of that time, I turn to a close read of specific passages from the story.
A Close Read of Island of the Blue Dolphins
In the following table, the left column contains a selection of material from the story. In the right column are notes specific to the information in the left column. Some of the passages are not addressed in the Discussion following the table; they are retained in the table for further research.
Text | Notes |
“I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island” (p. 9) | “I” is Karana. On page 12, O’Dell tells us the name of the island: Ghalas-at. The Aleut’s are an Indigenous people from what came to be known as Alaska. During the time of the novel (1835), the Aleuts were enslaved by Russians and forced to hunt sea otters (Pullar, 1996). |
Karana describes Romo, her 6-year old brother: “He was small for one who had lived so many suns and moons” (p. 9) | Writers often use the cliché “many moons ago” when writing from an Indian point of view. Though it is obvious that people who do not speak English would have words in their language for sun or moon or the passage of time, the “many moons ago” idiom, inserted into the mind/mouth of any Native character obscures the diversity of language. |
When Romo sees the Aleut ship, he describes it as “a small cloud” (p. 10). | In Country of the Sun, O’Dell recounts a Cahuilla legend, “The Lost Spanish Galleon” (p. 147) that begins with Cahuilla men seeing a Spanish galleon and thinking it was a cloud. |
As Orlov comes ashore, “Half the men from our village stood at the water’s edge. The rest were concealed among the rocks at the foot of the trail, ready to attack the intruders should they prove unfriendly” (p. 12). | In Country of the Sun, when the Spanish galleon is sighted, O’Dell writes “The Cahuillas hid themselves behind rocks along the shore” and their chief “cautioned his people to remain hidden” (p. 148). |
When Captain Orlov comes ashore and begins negotiations with Karana’s father who is chief of the people at Ghalas-at, Karana is surprised that her father gives Orlov his seldom used and secret “real” name (Chowig) because “if people use your secret name it becomes worn out and loses its magic” (p. 13). | Look for: Names and their power. |
“Karana” is the protagonists’ secret name. Her common name is “Won-a-pa-lei” which means “The Girl with the Long Black Hair” (p. 13). | The translation does not make sense, given the likelihood that all the girls would have long black hair. |
The Aleuts come ashore, and Karana sees “a tall man with a yellow beard” (p. 12). | In Country of the Sun, Yuma Indians and a “bearded” Spanish captain come ashore (p. 148). |
The night Orlov arrives, her father “warned everyone in the village of Ghalas-at against visiting the camp. “The Aleuts come from a country far to the north,” he said. “Their ways are not ours nor is their language” (p. 17). | From O’Dell’s Country of the Sun: The night the Spanish came ashore, “Darkness fell and the Cahuillas went silently back to their village and held council far into the night. The older men, who had heard tales of Spanish greed and ferocity, were in favor of abandoning the village and taking the women and children into the mountains. But the younger men, proud of their heritage as warriors and jealous of it, prevailed” (p. 148). They lay plans for an attack. |
Each night, people in the tribe “counted the dead otter and thought of the beads and other things that each pelt meant” (p. 23).
Karana does not like the slaughter of the otters she regards as friends she would have fun watching as they played. “It was more fun than the thought of beads to wear around my neck” (p. 23). | This is O’Dell’s first mention of beads. Presumably, the negotiations that took place when Orlov landed included beads but this was not specified.
In Country of the Sun: The next morning, the Spanish gave each of the Indians “a handful of beaded trinkets” (p. 149).
The beads story works because it plays on the idea that Indians are not smart enough to know that their land and resources aren’t worth more than beads. Williams’ analysis of Dutch, Manhattan, beads is excellent. |
Karana’s father sends young men “to the beach to build a canoe from a log which had drifted in from the sea” (p. 24). | Kroeber: Canoes “may have been burned from drift logs” (p. 634). |
Orlov and his men prepare to leave without paying for the otter pelts. Chowig speaks to Orlov, who signals his men to bring a black chest to the island: “Captain Orlov raised the lid and pulled out several necklaces. There was little light in the sky, yet the beads sparkled as he turned them this way and that” (p. 27) | The archeological record (Kroeber/Meighan & Eberhart) does not list sparkly beads recovered on San Nicolas Island.
|
Items Karana has in a basket she carries onto the rescue ship: “three fine needles of whalebone, an awl for making holes, a good stone knife for scarping hides, two cooking pots, and a small box made from a shell with many earrings in it” (p. 42). | References to these items are in the historical record. |
Karana’s sister, Ulape, “had two boxes of earrings, for she was vainer than I, and when she put them into her basket, she drew a thin mark with blue clay across her nose and cheekbones. The mark meant that she was unmarried” (p. 42). | An assumption that Karana and her people had the same ideas of beauty (vanity) that O’Dell did. |
After she leaps off the boat and is back on shore, “The only thing that made me angry was that my beautiful skirt of yucca fibers, which I had worked on so long and carefully, was ruined” (p. 47). | An assumption that Karana and her people held the same ideas of beauty that O’Dell did. |
Romo declares that, as son of Chowig, he is now Chief of Ghalas-at. Karana replies that before he can be the chief, he must become a man: “As is the custom, therefore, I will have to whip you with a switch of nettles and then tie you to a red ant hill” (p. 51). | O’Dell’s likely source for this is Kroeber’s Handbook of the Indians of California, Volume 2. On page 672, he describes “The Ant Ordeal” that may have been part of the “Toloache Initiation” of Luiseno boys: “The boys were laid on ant hills, or put into a hole containing ants. More of the insects were shaken over them from baskets in which they had been gathered. The sting or bite of the large ant smarts intensely, and the ordeal was a severe one, and rather doubtfully ameliorated when at the conclusion the ants were whipped from the body by nettles.” |
Romo has “a strong of sea-elephant teeth which someone had left behind” (p. 50). | Meighan references sea-lion claws used as pendants. |
Karana needs weapons: “The laws of Ghalas-at forbade the making of weapons by women of the tribe, so I went out to search for any that might have been left behind” (p. 58.) | Future research |
Thinking the chest Orlov left may have an iron spearhead, Karana digs up the chest and finds it “filled with beads and bracelets and earrings of many colors” (p. 59). There are no spearheads in the chest. | Reference to beads draws on “primitive” (stupid) Indians who sold Manhattan for beads. |
Karana “wondered what would happen to me if I went against the law of our tribe which forbade the making of weapons by women—if I did not think of it at all and made those things which I must have to protect myself” (p. 61). | Future research on weaponry. |
“There was a legend among our people that the island had once been covered with tall trees. This was a long time ago, at the beginning of the world when Tumaiyowit and Mukat ruled. The two gods quarreled about many things. Tumaiyowit wished people to die. Mukat did not. Tumaiyowit angrily went down, down to another world under this world, taking his belongs with him, so people die because of him” (p. 82). | This story, from the Cupeno Indians, appears in Country of the Sun in “Revolt in the Mountains” as follows: “One of the most dramatic and current [myths of creation], as recounted by Salvador Cuevas, a Luiseno, has the world and everything in it created by the gods Tumaiyowit and Mukat. The gods quarreled and argued about their respective ages. They disagreed about many things. Tumaiyowit wished people to die. Mukat did not. Tumaiyowit went down, down to another world under this world, takig his belongings with him, so people die because he did” (p. 47). It is also in Kroeber’s Handbook, on page 692. |
Karana uses several words that she says are in her language: “Won-a-pa-lei” means “the girl with the long black hair” (p. 13) “sai-sai” is a kind of fish (p. 85) “rontu” means fox eyes (p. 105) “zalwit” means pelican (p. 107) “naip” means fish (p. 107) “gnapan” is a thick leaved plant (p. 115) “Mon-a-nee” means “Girl with the Large Eyes” (p. 160) “Rontu-Aru” means “son of Rontu” (p. 169) | None of these words are in Kroeber or Hardacre. |
Discussion
O’Dell had little to go on in creating the worldview of Karana and her people. To flesh out the story, he inserted his prior research on other California tribes, inserting their ways into the Nicoleno tribe, as though one peoples’ way of being was interchangeable with another. O’Dell wrote Island of the Blue Dolphins prior to the development of multicultural literature and the attention to specificity, so it may be appropriate not to judge him too harshly for doing it. He also drew from popular stereotypes and clichés of American Indians, including the stories in which American Indians traded their land for a string of beads. An American embrace of stereotypes and clichés led to—and guaranteed—the success of the novel.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is a lot like most books and media about American Indians that give the audience the kind of Indians that America loves to love (Shanley, 1997). O’Dell gave us both: the savage ones (the Aleuts), and the gentle ones (Karana’s people). In a spirit of generosity, it is possible to justify why his story met with such success but how do we justify an embrace of it in the present time, when we know so much more about accuracy and authenticity of representation? And why do even our leading scholars fail to step away from the book? For example, in her introduction to the illustrated version, Zena Sutherland conflated the story of Juana Maria with the fictional story of Karana. She incorrectly refers to the Lost Woman as Karana, instead of Juana Maria. She says that she was twelve years old (Juana Maria was a mother, not a child), and that Karana’s brother died on the island (Juana Maria’s child died). The real person is lost in the embrace of the fiction character, Karana. Is sentiment in the way?
Conclusion
There is a fascination, a nostalgia, and a yearning for the romantic Indian and all that “Indian” means to people who think the best life anyone could have is one of the Indian of yesteryear, living in the pristine wilderness, where the weight of the world is not on your shoulders, where you can breath clean air, and drink clean water.
This nostalgia also captures the imaginings of the perfect childhood, but neither one is—or was—real. As such, Island of the Blue Dolphins is a perfect example of a book at the center of the canon of sentiment (Stevenson, 1997). Indeed, the canon of sentiment “exists to preserve—to preserve the childhood of those adults who create that canon and to preserve the affection those adults feel for the books within it” (p. 113). A good many adults imagine the childhood O'Dell described and the survival that Karana experienced. We like to think we could survive, too, and a story like this one lets us see how that could happen.
Nonetheless, the story is lacking in its accuracy and suitability for informing children about American Indians. Will there come a time when there is a critical mass of gatekeepers rejecting works like this? I hope so. Sentiment is no excuse for ignorance.
References
Deloria, V. and DeMallie, R. J. Documents of American Indian Diplomacy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Hardacre, Emma. (1971). The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island. The California Indians: Source Book, edited by R. F. Heizer and M. A. Whipple. Berkeley: University of California Press, 272-281.
Kroeber, A.L. (1925). Handbook of the Indians of California. Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Lovelace, M. H. (1961). Scott O’Dell: Biographical note. The Horn Book Magazine, 37,
105-108.
Maher, S. N. (1992). Encountering others: The meeting of cultures in Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Sing Down the Moon. Children’s Literature in Education, 23(4), 215-227.
Meighan, C.W. and Eberhart, H. (1953). Archaeological resources of San Nicolas Island, California. American Antiquity, 19(2), 109-125.
Nies, J. (1996). Native American History. New York: Ballantine Books.
O’Dell, S. (1957). Country of the Sun: Southern California, An Informal History and Guide. New York: Thomas E. Crowell Company.
O’Dell, S. (1961). Acceptance paper. The Horn Book Magazine, 37, 99-104.
O’Dell, S. (1978). Island of the Blue Dolphins. Trumpet Club Edition. New York: Dell Publishing Co.
O’Dell, S. (1990). Island of the Blue Dolphins. With illustrations by Ted Lewin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Payment, S. (2006). Scott O’Dell. New York: Rosen Pub. Group.
Pullar, G. L. (1996). Alutiiq. Native America in the Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. Edited by Mary B. Davis.
0 Comments on A critical look at O'Dell's ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS as of 6/16/2016 10:06:00 AM
Kelly DiPucchio and Mary Lundquist's one little two little three little children arrived today. You may recall I wrote about it recently in my "Debbie--have you seen" series. Published by Balzer & Bray (an imprint of HarperCollins) in 2016, it is definitely going onto my not recommended list.
Based on the Kirkus review, I was wary of the book. Here's one page that the Kirkus review referenced:
And I concur with Kirkus's reviewer. Having that "snow-cozy" igloo and that "stick-cozy" _____ on the same page as a child playing with blocks is a misstep. Kirkus called that stick-cozy item a teepee and on Twitter I said tipi, but in retrospect, I was wrong to call it a tipi. It isn't a tipi. It is a THING. A toy. Just like the ones you see at department stores. In fact, I look at that "stick cozy" and think that Lundquist might have used one of the department store items as a model for her "stick-cozy." See?
Then, Lundquist put that "stick-cozy" over in the park, too, where everyone is playing. Why? So they can.... play Indian?! Course, I don't see anyone in feathers but it isn't a big leap to imagine kids doing that very thing.
DiPucchio's text is, the synopsis says, an "exuberant reinvention of the classic children's rhyme." An adult reading the book aloud can "sing" it using that "one little, two little, three little..." tune. You know which one it is.
The Kirkus reviewer wonders if this is meant to be a multicultural book. I think they're right. The families/couples shown on the pages include this one, which is great.
Overall, though, I think it is one of those books that throws Native peoples under the bus. It asks us to celebrate multiculturalism using a racist tune as we gaze at illustrations that infantilize a Native structure.
There's absolutely no reason for this. None. I do not recommend DiPucchio and Lundquists "exuberant reinvention" of the racist "One little two little three little Indians" rhyme and hope you reject it, too.
In the last couple of months, I've been reading a lot about the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). Prior to this study, I knew about it because ICWA is something most Native people know about.
Right now, though, I'm doing a scholarly study of it because ICWA is in Emily Henry's The Love that Split the World. Her depiction of ICWA is troubling.
Of late, I've asked friends and colleagues to send me titles of works in which a character is adopted or fostered out of their Native community. I'm compiling a list and have read several of the items. The majority are by Native writers, some of whom are writing of their own experience as children. The majority of items on my list are meant for adult readers.
Amongst the suggestions are a few books that aren't by Native writers. Tim Green's Unstoppable is one. Green is a former NFL defensive end. I read his book over the weekend and, for several reasons, I am marking it as not recommended. For one, the main character is Native, but we aren't told anything about his tribal nation or heritage. As the synopsis below indicates, he is adopted (twice, actually) but ICWA is not mentioned in the reviews or in Green's novel. I'll say more about that later. My guess is that Green and his editor and the people who reviewed Unstoppable had no idea there is a federal law about adoption of Native children.
Published by Harper as a middle grade novel, Unstoppable came out in 2012. Here's the synopsis:
If anyone understands the phrase "tough luck," it's Harrison. As a foster kid in a cruel home, he knows his dream of one day playing in the NFL is a longshot. Then Harrison is brought into a new home with kind, loving parents—his new dad is even a football coach. Harrison's big build and his incredible determination quickly make him a star running back on the junior high school team. On the field, he's practically unstoppable. But Harrison's good luck can't last forever. When a routine sports injury leads to a devastating diagnosis, it will take every ounce of Harrison's determination not to give up for good.
When Unstoppable opens, thirteen-year-old Harrison is living with Mr. and Mrs. Constable, as a foster child. Mr. Constable is a farmer who uses foster kids as laborers. He often whips them with his belt.
I begin with summary...
This foster home is the 4th one Harrison has been in. In his previous placements, he got in a lot of fights and was characterized as "an untamed and untamable beast" (p. 7). The fights he got into, though, were ones where he was defending himself or other vulnerable kids from bullies. That didn't matter, however, and he ended up with Mr. Constable, a man who was known as able to "cure even the hardest of bargains" (p. 7). When the story opens, Harrison has made Mr. Constable angry but he doesn't beat him as badly this time, because the next day, they are going to see the judge (p. 8):“Just got a call from the lawyer. Seems your momma’s got some funny notions again. Raised a ruckus at the county offices on Friday."
Constable's employee, Cyrus, tells Harrison (p. 9):"Your momma’s a tramp and a druggie. She cast you off like garbage, and once a woman does that there ain’t a judge in creation hands her back her kids, so don’t you get so smart.”
Harrison realizes that he's stronger than Cyrus now, and that he would win if he fought Cyrus next time he tried to beat him. While bathing that evening, he takes care to scrub his nails, behind his ears, and between his toes because he didn't want to look like, or smell like a farm boy when he sees the judge, and (p. 10):He might even see his own mother. Cyrus’s cruel words about her came back to him and his ears burned with shame and hate. Maybe that was why he had been ready to fight.
He goes to bed, feeling hopeful about the upcoming meeting with the judge. In the pages that follow, we are given a description of the town and the courthouse. This is farm country but we don't know what state. When they get to the courtroom, Harrison looks around for his mother. His case is called and we learn his last name is Johnson and that his mom's name is Melinda Johnson. She's not there, though. Mr. Constable mutters (p. 15):“All this fuss and she’s too drunk to show up.”
Realizing she's not there, Harrison's heart sinks. The judge asks Mr. Constable's lawyer for the adoption papers, reads them, and then says (p. 16):“Then,” the judge said, examining the papers, “given the trouble Ms. Johnson has caused in all this and her apparent lack of responsibility— as well as respect for this court, I might add— all leads me to believe that the best course of action for this young . . . boy is to make him the legal and permanent son of Mr. and Mrs. Brad Constable.”
Looking at Mr. Constable and his lawyer, Harrison has a sense of foreboding. The papers are signed, and then, there's a ruckus as someone forces open the courtroom doors. It is Harrison's mother. He feels his insides (p. 19-20):melt like butter in a hot pan.
His mother’s dark frizzy hair shot out from her head in all directions. She wore a long raincoat and Harrison didn’t know what else besides a dirty pair of fluffy pink slippers. He could see the red in her eyes from across the room and the heavy bags of exhaustion they carried beneath them.
Liquid pain pumped through his heart.
“That’s my baby!” Harrison’s mother screeched as the bailiff and a guard held her arms. “You can’t do that to my baby!”
“Order in this court!” The judge pounded and glared, but it had no effect. “Order, I said, or you’ll be in contempt!”
“Nooo!”
Tears welled up in Harrison’s eyes. He felt like a split stick of firewood, half shamed, half aching to hold her. He started toward his mother, but Mr. Constable’s big hand clamped down on the back of his neck so that the nerves tingled in his head.
The judge orders the bailiff to take her into custody for contempt. Mr. Constable and Harrison leave the courtroom. Outside, Harrison asks where his mother is, but Mr. Constable tells him that Mrs. Constable is his new mother. They return to the farm. Harrison thinks about all the other kids there, who have also been adopted by Mr. Constable (p. 22):While they didn’t seem to mind, Harrison had never—and would never—stop thinking of Melinda Johnson as his one and only true mother.
Later that day, Mr. Constable and Harrison get in an argument and then a fight. The outcome of the fight: Mr. Constable falls into a stall where a cow giving birth kicks, and kills him. Harrison runs away and is found by a kind woman named Mrs. Godfrey. She knows all about the brutal Constables. She takes him to a doctor, and then to a juvenile center. A few weeks pass. One day, Mrs. Godfrey tells him that his mother is gone. He thinks she's moved away, but Mrs. Godfrey tells him she passed (p. 28-29):Harrison didn’t cry. He just blinked at her and watched a tear roll down her nose and drop off the end of it, spattering onto the table where they sat.
“Was she sick?” he whispered, his eyes on the spattered drop.
“I think she was very sick, and very tired, and I think she’s in a place now where she’s at peace and watching you and loving you just like she always did.”
Harrison stared at the broken tear for a long time before he spoke. “Mr. Constable said she didn’t.”
“Harrison, most people in this world are good, but some are bad. Mr. Constable was a very bad man, and he was a liar. That’s all I can say about it.”
Then she tells him she has some good news. She has found him a new foster home, with her daughter Jennifer (who is a lawyer) and Coach (Jennifer's husband, who is an English teacher and a football coach). Harrison will call him Coach, like everyone else does (later, both ask him to call them dad and mom).
When Jennifer shows Harrison his bedroom, he sees a bookcase full of books. She pulls one out, by Louis L'Amour, and hands it to him (p. 33-34):“I think you’ll like this.” She handed him the book. “My brothers loved The Sacketts. It’s a family that comes to America when it was a new land.”
Coach is excited about Harrison's size and interest in playing football. His first day at his new school is difficult. Football practice is mixed, too, but Harrison is excited, nonetheless. The second day starts off badly, too. When a teacher threatens him with a ruler, he takes it from her and breaks it in half. She calls security and he ends up in the principals office. When the principal suggests that they should find a different school for Harrison, his foster mom says the teacher's threat may be a hate crime (p. 121):“Hate crime?” Mr. Fisk’s rosy cheeks turned pale green. “This boy isn’t a minority.”
Jennifer raised a single eyebrow. “Obviously you haven’t looked closely at his records. His maternal grandmother was a full-blooded Native American.
I finished the book but am not going further with summary. Harrison's identity as a Native person is not the emphasis of Green's book. Harrison is going to be diagnosed with cancer. That, essentially, is what Unstoppable is about. The diagnosis occurs on page 199 of the novel, which is 342 pages long.
And now, some interpretation...
Other than reading that he is big (strong), we don't get a physical description of Harrison. Because Mr. Fisk says "this boy isn't a minority" we can assume that he looks white.
But he's not white, as Jennifer said. When his mom comes into the courtroom, he describes her "dark frizzy hair." When Jennifer says his maternal grandmother is "full blooded Native American," he isn't surprised. That tells me he knows he is Native...
But what nation? Does Jennifer not know? She knows enough about racial justice to characterize the situation as a hate crime, but she--and her mother (Mrs. Godfrey, the social worker)--apparently don't know about ICWA, which, in real life, has bearing on placements of Native children.
In real life, someone like Mrs. Godfrey is required, by ICWA, to notify his nation. I'm assuming that the author (Tim Green) knew nothing about ICWA. I'm assuming most of you also know nothing about it. It doesn't matter one bit that his grandmother was "full blooded." His identity, described in fractions, is irrelevant. Each nation determines its citizenship. And when someone is a citizen of a nation, they're a citizen, period. If a woman is a US citizen, has a relationship with a citizen of France that results in pregnancy, and the baby is born in the US, that child is a citizen of the US. The woman might be White, or she might be African American, or Asian American... you get the picture. Skin color, or race, or ethnicity, or religion... none of that matters. She is a citizen of the United States, and her baby, born in the US is also a citizen of the US.
The Indian Child Welfare Act was passed in 1978. The Native American Rights Fund has a very useful document on its website, intended for educational and informational purposes. There, they write that ICWA:established minimum federal jurisdictional, procedural, and substantive standards aimed to achieve the dual purpose of protecting the right of an Indian child to live with an Indian family and to stabilize and foster continued tribal existence.
In Federal Indian Law, Matthew Fletcher (he's a Professor of Law at Michigan State University, and director of its Indigenous Law and Policy Center) provides a history of ICWA. In 1978, Congress enacted the Indian Child Welfare Act.
In the years prior to that, testimony from Native people was gathered. The conclusion based on that testimony: between 25 and 35 percent of all Native children, nationwide, had been removed from their families, and 90 percent of them had been placed in non-Native homes. It was characterized as a systematic, automatic, and across-the-board removal of Indian children from Indian families.
In the hearings, Fletcher writes (Kindle location 18416-18418):[W]itness after witness would testify to the automatic removal of Indian children, often without due process. Byler [Executive Director of the Association on American Indian Affairs] testified that at the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, state social workers believed that the reservation was, by definition, an unacceptable environment for children and would remove Indian children without providing services or even the barest investigation whatsoever.
Others testified that rather than step in and offer assistance to families that were struggling, state agencies would wait for the families to reach a crisis point and then step in, only to take the children from their homes.
That's exactly what I see happening in Unstoppable. Clearly, Harrison's mom was struggling. Was she receiving assistance she should have received? Given the characterization of Cyrus and Mr. Constable, we know they're racist and what they say about his mother is racist, but nowhere is any of that racist depiction of her challenged. With nobody countering it, are stereotypical ideas of Native people as dysfunctional affirmed? I think so, and, that is unacceptable.
If this was a real-life case, would her case be an example of a state agency stepping in and taking her child without due process? Certainly, Harrison did not receive due process in the courtroom when the evil Mr. Constable adopted him, but he didn't receive it when the kindly Coach and Jennifer adopted him, either. Again--I assume that Tim Green didn't know about ICWA when he wrote the book, and neither did his editor.
Is ignorance an excuse?
Some will say yes. Others will say it doesn't matter, because, after all, "its fiction."
I disagree. Ignorance is not an excuse, because ignorance about Native people is the norm. That norm is not acceptable. Writers, editors, reviewers... most are ignorant about who we are. Fiction has tremendous power to shape what we think and know. It need not feed ignorance. Indeed, when the audience is children or teens, it ought to be called out when it feeds ignorance.
Green's Unstoppable feeds ignorance. As such, I do not recommend it.
Indeed, Unstoppable does precisely what ICWA was meant to stop from happening. Harrison was adopted by a kind white family. But what book was he given to read, right away, in that white home? Louis L'Amour's Sackett's Land: A Novel. I excerpted that passage above. Remember what Jennifer said about the Sackett family as she handed it to him? "It’s a family that comes to America when it was a new land." Quite honestly, I find that passage grotesque. Books like that dismiss and undermine who we are as Native peoples. This wasn't "new land" to us. It was, and is, our homeland. Jennifer is, in my view, doing a version of "kill the Indian and save the man" and so is Tim Green.
Unstoppable and what happens in it are why ICWA matters. Why, I wonder, did Green make his main character Native? I'll be thinking about this book for awhile as I continue to develop my review of Emily Henry's book. Are there others out there, for children or young adults, that I should add to my list?
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Growing up (not in the USA), I always saw the Apache Indians mainly portrayed as ruthless and brutal in books, graphic novels and movies, without any real background information about their history. I learned much from your in-depth analysis, and especially from the references you provided, including your interaction with one of the book's creators. Thank you.