Jodi Rave: Misrepresentations tarnish true history

 3 comment(s)  
 E-mail Story
 Print Story
  Share

 digg it!
 Facebook
 del.icio.us
Seed Newsvine
Fark It
Reddit

Text Size: 

Tools Sponsor

Book reviewers, award committees, teachers, parents, librarians, educators, bibliophiles and all others ought to think twice before buying or promoting Native-themed literature aimed at children.

Just because a book is endorsed by institutions such as the Chicago Tribune, School Library Journal or Booklist or the authors are Newberry or Caldecott winners doesn’t mean the judges or writers understand anything about cultural authenticity or historical accuracy.

It goes to the old adage: Write about what you know about.

As November kicks off National American Indian Heritage Month, it’s a safe guess that books about Natives will be widely circulated. And a number of these books will be read because someone, somewhere, praised the book, gave it an award, added it to a recommended reading list and helped it become a best-seller.

But, it’s time to let the real experts step forward.

“We read about 200 books before we find one good one,” said Beverly Slapin, a book reviewer at Oyate, a nonprofit Indian education organization based in Berkeley, Calif. “After we read them and throw them against a wall, we have to pick them up and review them.”

Slapin said about “99 percent” of children’s literature books with Native themes “are absolutely horrible,” a wrenching conclusion for an organization that promotes truthful and honest representations of Native people.

Debbie Reese, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign assistant professor, also reviews Natives in children’s literature. Both the Oyate reviewers and Reese offer recommended book lists. Their suggestions can be found at these Web sites: http://www.oyate.org/aboutus.html or http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com.

Meanwhile, Slapin and Doris Seale wrote their own book, “A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children,” a 463-page review of some of the best and worst children’s books.

Here are some of the reviewed culprits:

Paul Goble, a Caldecott winner and author of some 30 books, is obviously aware of the contempt he has inspired among Native people. In his 1994 book, “Iktomi and the Buzzard,” he jabs at detractors through one of his Native characters. “Hi, kids! I’m Iktomi and proud of it! Don’t read this book. That white guy Paul Goble is stealing my stories and making money off them. This book is ethnically insensitive material about me; it’s racial epithets just bring me into contempt, ridicule and disrepute. …”

Unfortunately, the American Library Association has been using Goble’s work this year to promote American Indian Heritage Month.

As for the classroom favorite on Christopher Columbus, Jane Yolen’s “Encounter” is a popular choice for library shelves. But the author misses the mark on colonization. And, ultimately, the victim is at fault. “The book makes it seem as if the Taino readily acquiesced, sheeplike. The record shows otherwise,” said reviewer Jean Paine Mendoza, who recommends an alternative book, “A Coyote Columbus Story” by Thomas King.

The reviewers in “A Broken Flute” do more than simply give books a thumbs up or thumbs down. In several reviews, they meticulously pinpoint careless writing.

The 1999 publication “My Heart is on the Ground: The Diary of Nannie Little Rose, A Sioux Girl” by Ann Rinaldi is supposed to be a story about a young girl’s experience at the Pennsylvania Carlisle Indian School in 1880.

This children’s book is based on a fictional diary, but the book’s publishers lead one to believe the “Dear America,” series is real: “Today’s most distinguished authors lend their voices and talents to these moving narratives presented in an intimate diary format with each book extensively researched and inspired by real letters and diaries of the time.”

Rinaldi’s book is rife with historical inaccuracies and lacks cultural authenticity. It does little, if nothing, to shed light on the physical, mental and spiritual abuses heaped upon Native children.

The Oyate reviewers offer these comments: Native boarding schools represent “a legacy of hopelessness and despair, of alcoholism and other substance abuse, suicide, dysfunctional parenting, an open, gaping, century-long wound that will take many more years for the Indian communities all over the U.S. and Canada to heal. Yet the only ‘bad’ characters in this book are Indian people.”

Schools across the country followed the Carlisle model.

This nations’ education system stripped generations of Native students from a cultural identity.

Educators need to give it back.

They can start by getting reputable books into the hands of children.

Jodi Rave can be reached at (800) 366-7186 or at jodi.rave@lee.net.