Native American and Alaska Native History Month

Yes, when people talk about Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s work, and she talks about books being windows and mirrors, and sliding doors for children to be able to, not just see themselves, but to see their peers in the world around them.

What I am very conscious of is whoever is the subject, whether that’s in my fiction work, like At the Mountain’s Base, which is a 111-word poem about a family waiting for their family member who is a female pilot in battle to come home. Or non-fiction — the Mary Golda Ross biography Classified, or We Are Grateful, or We Are Still Here — I’m looking to center who is depicted in that story, and making sure that I am providing as authentic a representation as I know how to.

And that’s not just me as the person, that’s also consulting with other people, and other sources. As I’m always saying, bookmaking is a team sport. And so I am one person in the team, I am not the leader of the team, I am literally one person, and a lot of times I feel like I’m the information gatherer, the fact gatherer. I’m going to kind of put things together and organize it, but then other people are going to take parts of it and run with it. 

If that book is about Cherokee people, then I want whoever opens that up to feel like they see themselves. 

And knowing that we all have experiences and things, but there are a lot, there are commonalities, right? My hope is that there is also universality in what I’m talking about and so that others will be able to not just learn something about a person, or an experience, or an event that they may not know about, but they are able to tie that to their own lives. And so I think about Indian No More that my late friend Charlene Willing McManis wrote, and I finished and got published.

That book is looking at a young child who is forced to move in the late-50s from her tribe’s reservation in Northwest, what is now Northwest Oregon to Los Angeles. The majority of children in this country, because we’re such a mobile society, have had experience with moving, even if it’s just in the same town, right? But they may have ended up in a different school. Somehow their life has been disrupted. 

And many children, especially once you start socializing outside of your house, have experiences with meeting other people who don’t do the same thing as you or things that you don’t even know are cultural practices that you have, other people may think very different things or receive very different messages about the things that your family does. And so then you start hearing that feedback and it’s wild. [chuckles] You know, as a child to think like, ‘What? Where did you get that?’ 

Like I say, there are universal themes in all the books and things that kids can relate to, but I’m always centering who is depicted in that book and making sure that their full humanity is relevant and centered, and the focus on the page because that’s what has been missing. And when you see yourself depicted, as I did as a child, like I say, with the shell of characters and very gross stereotypes, you disassociate from that because you’re like, ‘This is not anything I recognize.’ How could you think this is what Indians are, or Cherokee people, or any tribe?

Nothing, of course, from my childhood ever addressed that we were sovereign nations. That our nations have existed for tens of thousands of years. Tthe Native Nations have always been here, and so that’s something else that I want to help children understand because that’s not been part of what we’ve ever talked about in this country, and yet it’s a reality from before it ever started and certainly since then.

Our history tends to be like, ‘okay, 1492 is where we’re going to start,’ and then there’s like a brief paragraph prior to that about the Bering Strait. Now thankfully science has finally caught up to our stories and what we have always known; that theory has been debunked in the last five years. But I was like, ‘We already knew that.’ You know? We’ve known about having thousands of Native Nations from the Arctic to Antarctica on this huge continent.

And their trade networks, and the fact that they got in boats and went across the sea to other places. I mean, people have been moving and doing things forever, and yet that’s not the story that children hear. So I really focus on centering that in my work. 

I would read Beverly Cleary and I enjoyed those books. Ramona’s having her adventures and I felt like I had adventures when I was a kid, and they weren’t anything exciting, but hers weren’t either, they were just kind of everyday things. 

And then I would read books like Judy Blume’s books about these kids in a high-rise apartment in New York City, and that was just bizarre to me because when I went up an elevator in a building with twenty-some floors my brother was getting an allergy shot at the doctor. It’s like nobody lived in that building, people worked there, but I couldn’t fathom that this child had no yard. You know, it was a completely different reality for me. 

I loved Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder: Hear My Cry, which of course was set long before I was born, but it was a very moving portrayal. But many books, like I say, would be entertaining like that, but again, nothing that related to my upbringing. Now, of course, Where the Red Fern Grows and The Summer of the Monkeys are written by a Cherokee author Wilson Rawls, those aren’t centered though in Cherokee culture. I mean, they are set in Northeastern Oklahoma, so it was like their geography kind of landscape was familiar. 

So, yeah, in terms of when I actually got to see myself in books, that didn’t happen until I was an adult, and it’s been much more recently. But the reason that I wrote We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga is because there wasn’t a picture book about contemporary Cherokee life and that disturbed me, everything was historical. Or biographies about prominent Cherokee people. 

I was like, okay, what about our everyday lives? I’ve had lots of feedback from Cherokee families and Cherokee children about the book, and they love it, and it’s a well-read and well-loved book in their house, but one woman she said, ‘You know, I just love that it’s a book about us doing the things that we do.’ I was like, ‘Yes! Right?’ 

I get asked quite often, ‘What books do I recommend? How do I know if I’m adding good books to my classroom library or school library or my public library? Which books are the best or okay?’ And what I tell people is the book is going to give you a lot of information. So, certainly, check that out, look at who’s written it, who has illustrated it, what does it say in the back matter? 

And then also, a lot is available on the web. Check out the creator’s websites, and see what they are representing about themselves. A lot of people will say, well, if they’re Native then, yes, that book is recommended, and that’s not necessarily always the case, it’s not always the case if someone is not Native that the book is awful or not well written. I think it’s a much higher hill to climb and to do it well, if you don’t have a lot of help from others. 

It can very easily come off as written for non-Native people. My criteria when I look at a book is, who has been centered and who is this book written for?

Second to that I look at what work has this person done? And people a lot of times will say, ‘Well, but if it’s fiction.’ And? If it’s fiction? I’m like there still is writing from a place of giving those Native characters their full humanity. And that is not the easiest work to do, but it’s necessary if you’re going to write a work that to me should be given to young people, you know? The majority of young people only get access to books because they’ve come from gatekeepers, whether that’s someone’s family, or a community member, or the librarian, or the teacher, you know?

Until they’re a teen, they generally are being taken to the public library. They are being given access to the school library at certain times or they are being told, ‘Yes, you can go and select a book in the classroom library.’ And all of those decisions then are also influenced by what that person puts in those libraries, right, in those collections. Similarly, with what a family brings into its home.

So until that child is a teen, they could have missed out on a lot of wonderful representations because that’s not what they’ve had exposure to. I always tell people, like Google is your best friend. You can find lots of lists that have been curated by people that tell you what are books that are well done, and the place that I always tell people to start is look at the American Indian Library Association’s website.

We Are Still Here! Native American Truths Everyone Should Know came to me early on. One of the things that I was very angry about as a first-generation college graduate is why am I just now learning the larger experience of Native Nations in this country? Like I am paying for an education and I’m learning this, I did not have this in K-12. 

Yes, I knew there were things that had happened to my tribe, the Cherokee Nation, but I was not aware of the fact that were many things that were systematic and were happening to many Native Nations simultaneously, like forced removal. One of the things we talk about in this country that people will associate with the Cherokee Tribe is the Trail of Tears. 

Well, many – okay, hundreds — of Native Nations have been forcibly removed. So there’s not just one forced removal, there are many. And we do a disservice to our young people. This is all history we need to know. I wanted badly to write this book, and I thought, ‘How am I going to do this as a picture book and who is going to publish this?’

And of course, the hardest part for me was I have a background in law and policy — what am I going to do with the vocabulary? 

I wanted one book that showed when we disappear from curriculum, which is generally after 1900 in all textbooks, what happened? We did not disappear, we are still here. You don’t see that. You don’t get to experience that, not in the classroom really or until very recently in mainstream media.

And I’m so grateful for Frané, because as much as I was struggling with the vocabulary to make it as accessible as possible for upper-elementary and beyond, I also wanted to make sure that the artwork came along. She was a perfect match in that because I feel like she took a very representative image in each of those topics, and there are 12 topics in the book that really helps you understand what I’m talking about. 

But it was also critical to have the timeline in the back. So for those students, if it’s being used in classroom use, or even families to talk about, okay, so relocation is happening in the 50s and 60s, and a lot of Native people are being moved by the federal government off of their lands, so it’s another removal, right? It’s voluntary, but who they’re moving are impoverished people from reservations to become impoverished people in the cities. 

The timeline in the back tells you all these other things that are going in that same timeframe, because again, what do we talk about in this country in terms of the 1950s? We’ll talk about the Civil Rights Movement, we’ll talk about the space race, we’ll talk about the Cold War, we don’t talk about that termination is happening and relocation is happening. 

My hope is that classrooms will take information, that families will take information, and begin to understand that there’s more than you’ve been told, and for every community member that lives in this nation you should know this. This is not information that should be kept from you, and that’s really my hope for the book that it gives that information in understandable bite-sized chunks.  

The story behind We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga is — I mean, each book is its own distinct entity, of course, and it has its own journey. That book was the easiest to write. I sat down and I made a four-square grid with things that we do in each season. And as the book starts out it talks about the Cherokee people were taught to be grateful, not just for wonderful things, but also difficulties in our life.

And I wanted to have at least one thing in each season that might be difficult, whether that’s sending a family member off to military service. Whatever it is, I wanted something like that in there. And so the book really is like a poem because there’s an opening line in the stanza, then there’s the sub-parts of the stanza, and then each refrain is completed. And each season has its own stanza. And then there’s the ending.

And what, what breaks from that — of course — is that introductory paragraph on the first page. And I really just looked at, okay, now that I have this list of things that happened in each season, like gathering the honeysuckle to make baskets. It was like how do I make that as pleasing to the ear, as well as really tapping into also the five senses? 

I mean, in our daily lives we encounter and deal with all five senses, and we do that across all the seasons, and that needed to very much be an intentional part of what I was working on in the book. 

I wrote the text using ‘we’ meaning the Cherokee people as a collective, but if you look at the art you will see there is a family, a Cherokee family introduced on the first page whose members will appear throughout the book. You kind of follow them through the story.

It’s literally like the ancestors were right there helping me put everything on the page. The others I’ve had to work a little harder for. 

And I recently had the opportunity to visit the Cherokee Nation’s Immersion School. I met with third graders. I knew they had read the book, their teacher had shared that. Unbeknownst to me, they had each prepared their own topics. She had 12 students in the class and each of the 12 topics they took on, and explained in the Cherokee language, alright, this is an immersion school so they don’t speak English in the classroom, everything is writing in the Cherokee syllabary, and that’s what they speak.

And they had taken each topic and what it meant to them. I almost started crying when this was explained to me because this is exactly what I wanted to have happen with this book, again, whether the kids are Cherokee, other Native Nations, or non-Native that they would take on the topic and learn something and apply it to their lives. And so to see our children from the Cherokee Nation taking this information in and understanding it at third grade, I mean, I was like, ‘It’s never going to get any better than this as an author for me.’ 

How much different our lives would be today if I had had that information and my generation had that information in third grade — wow, wow. 

The inclusion of a Native language, whether that’s Cherokee or any other language in books for young people now is much more, becoming much more common, which is wonderful. And it’s not that there weren’t books published before, because Charlesbridge had done a book back in 1994 called Itse Selu which was the Cherokee Harvest Festival book, so I knew it was very much possible to put the Cherokee words in a book, and so I did.

I have a complete Cherokee language version of At the Mountain’s Base, that’s an e-book that you can get in the Cherokee Syllabary. For our immersion school, for adults that are learning and families that are learning the language online, that’s a wonderful book then for them to be able to read in the Cherokee Syllabary.

I did a short story in Ancestor Approved, which is a middle-grade anthology that came out in February of 2021, and I centered that with an Ojibwe family in Michigan, and I used a lot of Ojibwe words in that, and consulted with a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who is an Ojibwe expert on that. 

For me, wherever I can put that language in that makes sense I’m going to. For Indian No More, Charlene my co-author, she had used the Chinuk Wawa language which is what the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde speak, and that’s what the young people learn now, so that’s in the book as well. 

Anytime that it works — because again, if you are writing an authentic piece, there are many families that use that language. They will use English and their language, sometimes they’ll just speak in their language, so it makes sense to have that in the story, but also if we’re going to support Native language revitalization, right, so many of our grandparents and great grandparents lost their language through the boarding schools. 

In order to help that, we have to do our part. And so, I see including Native language in trade books as helping assist in that effort and also letting other kids know that there have been numerous languages on this continent long before any languages arrived from Europe. 

After my son was born, I started looking at the collection of children’s books, because I had collected children’s books since I was an undergrad. One of my classes was looking at what is the representation of children of mixed-race backgrounds in books. And so I was looking at, well, how are Native children represented in books?

Because when I was a kid there really wasn’t representation of us by us. You would see characters in a book, let’s say Little House on the Prairie books, or things like that. I didn’t find those books interesting to read, so I didn’t read much past the first one, and I was a prolific reader. But, when I would read about those characters they looked nothing and acted nothing like my community or what I knew, so I was like, ‘Well these must be some folks somewhere else because they don’t seem like anyone I know.’

And of course it wasn’t until later that I realized that these folks have no real knowledge of Native people. Like, they’re not trying to show our full humanity, our complexity as fellow humans. 

What we’ve seen I would say even in the last five years has been just tremendous in terms of a variety of voices coming. Are we anywhere near where we need to be? Unfortunately, we are not. But all I can do is bring my background and skills and abilities to try to address the problem. You know, that’s how I was raised. If you see a problem, how can you be a part of the solution?

And part of that is helping to mentor and bring other Native writers or artists as illustrators into the field. So really that goes in line with my Cherokee identity — we are to be part of the community, we are to uplift other people, and provide that helping hand where it’s desired. 

When I was a child, there really were no books about Native Americans or American Indians – you know, either term is okay – that were available. There was just nothing. There were historical books. There were books that talked about culture in terms of books written by anthropologists. And there were some books like oh say Two Little Savages where you had white kids playing Indian.

But as far as something that really reflected Native reality, I couldn’t find anything. Maybe it was that lack of those books that spurred me on to write the books I would later write.

Well, one thing I try to do with folk tales from other Native traditions than those of the Northeast is to make sure that I have gotten the story right, one. Two, that I acknowledge it properly. Where is it sourced? Where does it come from? Three, that I’m telling a story that people from that tribal nation will appreciate my telling and will not criticize me for doing it, not that there’s not always the possibility of criticism. That could always happen, and I accept that criticism may come. But if by and large it’s accepted and those who have shared the story with me want me to share it, then I feel that I’m doing the right thing.

I know of so many children’s books – in fact, I would say virtually almost every children’s book that is a retelling of a Native American folk tale has been told in the absence of any Native advice, of any living Native input. And that is the one thing I feel is the great mistake because it means that things may be misinterpreted or also that stories may be told that are inappropriate, that are stories that are restricted.

To give you an example, I did – some years ago I helped put together a series at Symphony Space in New York City called “Coyote Walks Around.” It was performances of dance by Native dancers from different tribal traditions interwoven with traditional stories, and I did the storytelling. And the dancers were from various regions of the North American continent.

And in putting each one together I’d work with them. “What should I tell? How should I tell it? When should I tell it? Where should it be told?” And in one case a Cheyenne grass dancer, Mr. White Man, said to me, “I’d like you to tell the story of the grass dance.” I said, “I don’t know it.” He said, “I will teach it to you, but you have to tell it right, and you have to promise me you’ll only tell it when a grass dance is going to be done.” And so I’ve only told that story three times in my life, and it’s always been when a grass dancer has said, “I hear you know the story of the grass dance as we tell it. Could you tell it before I do the dance?” That to me is an example of a very, very real connection between the tradition, the story, and the proper telling of it.

In virtually all the writing about American Indian people, men are always lionized and women are always secondary. And the image of the Native woman as sort of a beast of burden, a person with no power is a European trope.

It’s not the reality within our Native cultures. Women are central and powerful. I remember my friend [unint.] of the Onondaga Nation. When I visited her one day in Syracuse, I said – this was back some decades ago, “What do you think about the Equal Rights Amendment?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t know about it.” I said, “What”? She said, “Yeah, I don’t think men could ever be equal to women.” But that sense of humor was making a really good point.

Another point, when I was at Onondaga, there was a reading being done of the wampum belts. The wampum belts are very significant. They maintain history and relationships between cultures, and they’re a very, very important part of Northeastern tradition. And one of the chiefs was holding up a wampum belt and describing it. And I was sitting in the back with some of the clan mothers, and one of my friends, Audrey Shenandoah, who was a clan mother, said, “Uh, excuse me. Excuse me.” And then she said, “You got it upside down.” He goes, “That’s why we got clan mothers,” and he turned it right side up.

But there is a sort of image there that men often do get it upside down, and it takes the women to turn it right side up.

The form of biography really interests me I suppose because I read so many when I was younger and was very familiar. As a kid I remember walking into the new Saratoga Public Library children’s room and saying I’m going to read every book in this place, and I just about did. It took me about seven years, but I just about did. And I loved true stories about people’s lives. But I noticed that so often stories about American Indian people were highly inaccurate, often very biased, did not give the character credit for intelligence or emotional maturity or complexity or humor.

The lack of humor just shocked me because any time I was around other Native people, there was always joking and teasing going on even in some of the most serious situations. So, when I decided to write biography, I wanted to try to bring those elements to the table and to tell things from a point of view that reflected a tribal reality that people in that tribal nation would recognize.

And as I’ve written these books, I’ve never done them in isolation. I’ve never done it with simple research from texts. If I use text, I use primary material, but I go beyond that. I go to the actual tribal nation itself, speak with people, talk with descendants of these people, and try to get an understanding of how they would want the story told. So, if you take a book like my picture book, Crazy Horse’s Vision, I worked very closely with S. D. Nelson who illustrated it because he himself is from Crazy Horse’s people. And in doing his illustrations he and I made changes in my text so that the illustrations and the text would work together in a much more effective fashion.

My son, Jesse, who teaches Abenaki all around New England, a very fluent speaker, even has a website called WesternAbenaki.com., he and I have begun doing bilingual texts.

So, it’s English line by line translated from Abenaki and then a third version which is then sort of colloquial English. So you can see the process of moving from one language to the other. And I think it’s very interesting because if for example I would say I live in Saratoga Springs, in Abenaki I would say [Abenaki].

I am of Saratoga or the medicine spring place. So, it’s [unint.] I am of that place. And that gives a different sense than just living there. You are of that place, not just from that place. And there’s a linguistic difference between the two.

I do a lot of writing about nature, and I suppose there are a number of reasons for that. One is that I lived in the country. I grew up in a natural setting in northern New York State. The Adirondack Mountains are in my backyard really truly. And my grandfather spent a lot of time in the woods. He was a lumberjack as well as being a Native American and would always take me into the forest.

So, I felt that connection from a very early age. I was writing little stories about animals. I was collecting plants and bringing in animals and keeping them as pets and then releasing them. And when I went to Cornell University, I went as a major in wildlife conservation. For three years, I was a wildlife conservation major and then I took some courses in creative writing and switched my major.

And I think that background has made it seem very natural for me to always have that as a component of my reality, that natural world. In fact, the 90‑acre property that belonged to my grandparents and great‑grandparents is now a nature preserve where my son, Jim, created something called the Ndakinna Education Center. Ndakinna means “our land” in Abenaki.

And on that nature preserve we teach animal tracking, wilderness survival skills, we do storytelling, we bring in Native and non-native speakers on nature and on our traditional culture, we do language immersion classes, and we do what we call the arts of life, which brings together body and spirit and mind and emotion to try to make a more balanced life.

When teachers and librarians are choosing books with Native stories or native themes or Native tales, there are a number of things they should do. One, they consider who the author is. What is the author’s legitimate connection to this material? See what is cited in the book. What are the sources for this material? And sometimes they can turn to guides such as Through Indian Eyes, a book by Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin or A Broken Flute by the same two authors, which are surveys of children’s literature books by and about Native Americans.

I think that you owe it to yourself and to your school to be as informed as possible. And you owe it also I think to the community of humanity in general to see American Indian literature and stories not as separate, not as a little category to put off in a corner, but as something that’s part of the body of world literature that should be inclusive and that we as human beings have so many things in common, we’re part of the same circle, but every point on the circle is unique. And therefore, we need to recognize the uniqueness of the perspective from that point on that deeply connected circle.

The myth of the disappearing Indian or the vanishing Indian is something that’s been part of the overall sort of purview of Native culture from the Western point of view for over 150 years. And it is something that is untrue, has always been untrue, will remain untrue. In fact, Native populations are increasing. In fact, there’s a great growing awareness of our traditional cultures and our languages. Even though many are vanishing or in danger, people are attempting to restore and hold onto them.

And Native people are part of the present, not the past. It was mentioned today – I recall this very clearly that there were 94 books which focused on African Americans published last year, and of those 94, only four were not in the past. A similar statistic can be found in terms of books about Native Americans usually not by American Indians, that virtually all of them are in the past, not in the present.

And as a writer, I’ve written many stories about present-day Native people. And I’ve now written books about Native people in the future in a science fiction vein.