What ended up happening was I got a box in the mail from her husband with newspaper clippings, a thumb drive and photos of her as a child. Because the book is historical fiction, it is based some on her childhood, some on other citizens of the Grand Ronde Tribe that were relocated, and then, like I say, some fictional elements.
So, I was concerned because I thought, ‘Okay, I have no one to ask to verify tribal realities for the Nation, etc.’ Lee & Low, very generously, sent me out to meet with the Cultural Resources Department at Grand Ronde.
I said, ‘What I would like is to be able to access your archives and visit with you all, and ensure that what we’re representing is accurate, and if it’s not accurate then I want to make sure it’s changed.’ They were extremely helpful, because again, when you have people who have lived away from the tribe for most of their lives, many people because they were low-income when they left, which is why they had to, I mean, people who could remain in Grand Ronde had either pooled money together to buy the land or had the resources to buy the land they lived on at the price that the U.S. government set.
That was not Charlene’s reality for her family and so she was moved, they were moved to Los Angeles. And I wanted to make sure that what was in the book was accurate, and some things were more pan-Indian in nature and not as specific to Grand Ronde, and so I changed those things. And I wanted to make sure that I was using — that what she had for the Chinuk Wawa language is what they were actually teaching right now, instead of what would have been maybe what her grandmother and other people said.
I employed my mom and my husband to help with fact checking of other things because a lot of people are very aware of what went on in 1957, when the bulk of the book is taking place.
So, was Popeye really a float during the Macy’s Day Parade that year? You know, kids can Google things. Adults reading the book will be like, ‘That wasn’t what that tool cost in that year.’ I don’t want those kind of things coming back to me.
