I think that one thing that you find, and I had mentioned this in a noon talk I gave today at NCTE, is that people love Indians, and we suffer from that love. They love us so much they use us as symbols for conservation, for sports teams. They use it inappropriately and often in a stereotype fashion. And then going even further they love Indians so much they want to be Indian. They take on an Indian persona like the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the Campfire Girls or authors who feel they can get into a Native American head and tell a Native American story.
And the result is often a story where it’s purportedly a Native American character, but in fact they have a European sensibility. Even though they’re supposed to be Indian, they don’t feel, sound, or act Indian. And this happens time and again in storytelling where something is told in a way it would never be told in a Native tradition, and it is told inappropriately, inaccurately.
One of the worst examples of children’s books I can think of that uses Native American text is a book called Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, a very popular, beautifully illustrated book. But if you look at that book from a Native viewpoint, you see several things that are truly objectionable. One is that each time a Native person is depicted, virtually every time, they’re wearing a conglomeration of clothing and decoration that embodies not just one tribal nation but several.
It would be like, you know, having someone purportedly Dutch while they’re wearing a kilt. And that kind of inaccuracy is common. Second, it shows sort of see-through transparent ghostly Indians at the beginning and the end as if Indians no longer exist. It uses the text of Chief Seattle’s speech, but it uses a text that was not exactly what Chief Seattle said, and that text has been written and rewritten many times.
It was originally spoken in Snohomish – excuse me, Suquamish, Duwamish – Suquamish, Duwamish. And then it was written down weeks later by a white minister who heard it translated into first a trade dialect and then from the trade dialect into English. And then he didn’t write it down until weeks later. So, there’s one, two, three, four steps removed.
Another thing about that book is even the botany is wrong in it. It shows kids in one picture playing in a field of flowers which were actually California poppies, which is an invasive species. It’s been crowding out medicine and food plants throughout the West Coast. It shows people in birch bark canoes when these were people of wooden canoes in the Pacific Northwest.
It has a picture of a warehouse clear-cut forest in the end when such forests are tremendously damaging to the ecology and counter to the way Native people would treat the forest. And then the title, Brother Eagle, Sister Sky. Within Northwest Native traditions the sky is father, the earth is mother. So, Brother Eagle, Sister Sky makes no sense at all. So, there’s an example of a book that’s been very popular, celebrated as showing Native culture, which is full of real, real significant problems.