What I've found in Debbie Reese's blogs is a profound sense of indignation and anger about the way Indians are portrayed in children's lit. The first question is are Indians even portrayed at all? In a lot of books she finds (Babar's World Tour, for example) American Indians are not shown as still living today. We are shown the evidence they left behind, but they have marched into the pages of history.
If there are American Indians in a story, they're often stereotyped or inaccurate representations. In one example, Apache:Girl Warrior, the author even asserts she didn't do that much research to insure accuracy. Rather, she paints a picture of the Apaches as a doomed culture, one that is inevitably going to fall beneath the tide of history.
I am amazed that this level of racism still exists today. Babar's World Tour was published in 2005. That is a sign that we need to think long and hard about how we are exposing our students to American Indians in our classrooms. I liked that Dr. Reese had suggestions for research that can help us be discerning consumers of the information that is available to us.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I concur, this racism is disgusting, especially when it starts in children's literature. From an early age, children are reading books that make them believe all Indians are the same. You can find caterpillars who have deeper character than American Indians in children's lit. Hopefully, we'll start seeing more authors like Alexie who can really improve the portrayal of Indians in children's literature.
ReplyDeleteThis is a post from one of your peers that wouldn't post for some reason:
ReplyDeleteWhat you're talking about really reminds me of my experience with Indians as a child. Every year in elementary school we would do a unit on them, where we had this little chart and picked a tribe and wrote down what they ate, wore, lived in, etc. It was almost like studying some new type of animal. We didn't get a feel for their being human, and certainly didn’t feel like they were still around.
Even in 8th grade when we did American history, and talked about the Indians and the Trail of Tears and all of that, it was still all in a historical context. Indians were always something that belonged to the past. I agree that this is something that ought to be address in classrooms. We spend so much time learning about how African Americans are still struggling, so why aren't we exposed to the same information about Native Americans?
~ Haley