University Place

Indigenous Critique of Whiteness in Children’s Books

(speaking in a Native language)

– It’s good to see everyone here tonight in Madison.

I’m honored to welcome you to Dejope. The Ho-Chunk refer to this area as Dejope.

Say it with me please.

–
[All]
Dejope.

– Thank you, meaning four lakes. Lake Mendota, Monona, Waubesa, and Kegonsa, each of which is connected by the Yahara River. The Ho-Chunk people have lived in Dejope for millennia.

Everything we needed was here: water, fish, muskrat, beaver, game, agriculture. Also in this area are effigy mounds, conical mounds and burial mounds. Recently, the Ho-Chunk Nation, along with other Tribes, fought very hard for the protection of these mounds resulting in the passing of Assembly Bill 118.

The Ho-Chunk Nation hold in high regard our youth, elders and veterans. As such, I’m honored to be accompanied by several of our precious youth tonight. These students that I brought with me are high honor students or recently they’ve been inducted into the National Honor Society.

They are ambassadors of the Ho-Chunk Nation. So tonight, as I welcome you, I ask you to join me in acknowledging their hard work.
(applause)

And I’d like to invite Diana Hess, the Dean of UW-Madison School of Education to the podium to offer a welcome on behalf of the School of Education. Thank you.
(applause)
– Good evening everyone. My name is Diana Hess and I am the Dean of the UW-Madison School of Education. On behalf of the university and the school I want to thank everyone to campus. Whether you’re here in person, or watching via live stream, we are so glad you are able to join us.

We are so very honored to have been selected to host this year’s May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture by Dr. Reese.

I want to thank the Ho-Chunk Nation, the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, the Information School and the Friends of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center for their collaboration and partnership in putting on this event.

Every day in the School of Education our faculty and our staff are working hard to prepare future teachers. We want them to work effectively with all students. We want to help our students develop an awareness of the many social inequalities that impact schools and students. We want them to think hard about what they can do as future teachers to make this country more socially just and more equitable. Dr. Reese’s writings on the representation of Indigenous peoples in children’s literature are an invaluable resource for them and for all teachers. Thanks to her work, educators are better able to provide books in which Native children can see themselves, and through which other students are able to learn accurate information and history about Native peoples. I know that all of you are so eager to hear Dr. Reese’s presentation and I want to give a special welcome, thank you so much for coming.

Now I’d like to turn things over to Jamie Campbell Naidoo, who’s President of Library Services to Children, which is a division of the American Library Association.

(applause)
– All right, good evening. My name is Jamie Campbell Naidoo and I am proud to be the President of the Association For Library Service to Children, also known as ALSC. I welcome you to the 2019 May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture, which will be an evening of critical thought and conversation. Aficionados of children’s literature have gathered for this prestigious lecture since 1969, a tribute to its namesake, a respected author, editor, literary critic and educator originally from Mason City, Iowa. If May Hill Arbuthnot’s name does not ring a bell to you, you might know her name from the “Arbuthnot Anthology of Children’s Literature” or perhaps the textbook, “Children and Books.” Arbuthnot worked diligently to bring children and quality books together and advocated for a rigorous discussion of children’s literature. Indeed, she is quoted as saying, “I am a strong believer “in the efficacy of direct speech. “A forthright, vigorous lecture can set fire “to a piece of literature that had failed “to come to life on the printed page.”

As we work diligently to engage communities to build healthy, successful futures for all children and their families, it is important for us to be lifelong learners and to be open to lectures such as this that will challenge us to think critically about the books and stories that we share with our children and the impact these messages will have on our future leaders. Will these be messages that have walls that are divisive? Will they be bridges of understanding? Will there be mirrors? Will there be windows? Will there be sliding-glass doors? Or will they hear their stories at all? Tonight we’ll hear about this and more from our esteemed lecturer.

Now I am pleased to welcome Ernie Cox to come and welcome our lecturer for this evening.- Thank you, our committee had lots of discussion and came to a decision that I am so proud of. And then we were asked: Can you sum it up in a sentence? So this was the sentence we came up with for our announcement. Our selection of Dr. Debbie Reese recognizes her strong modeling of inclusion, integrity and respect, all ALSC core values, via the timely insights she shares on the influential blog, “American Indians in Children’s Literature.” Tried to think of a few other words and then I realized I had already seen them. In the 20 years I’ve served on committees for ALSC all of those committees have some aspect of public input. People can suggest or make nominations. This was an experience I had never seen. We received more field nominations than I had ever seen for a committee, really demonstrating to me the impact that Debbie has had on the field and I decided to just use some of those words.

Here’s one nomination we got: “Dr. Reese’s work has impacted countless educators “and literary scholars in how we think “and teach about Native people and how we unlearn “and relearn history and how to recognize “and decolonize for practice and scholarship. “She courageously calls out the many distortions “that persist in youth literature “and continues to impact Native youths. “Dr. Reese has also worked hard to make connections “between Native creators and publishing companies “so as to diversify the publishing pipeline “and to amplify Native voices.”

Another nominator that wrote in to us said that: “She is meticulous in her research “and courageous in speaking up about the many distortions “that persist in youth literature.”

And one more speaks to why this lecture is so important for her to deliver today.

“I highly recommend giving Dr. Reese the platform “that the Arbuthnot Lecture allows. “Not only because of her already impressive accomplishments, “but because of the impact that her lecture “will be sure to have on the future of our field.”

I’m really honored and pleased to welcome Dr. Debbie Reese.
(applause)

(cheering)
– Thank you… to all the people that are here and to the Ho-Chunk Nation and to the committee that selected me and the people that helped the committee to select me to be here.

I’m nervous. This is a huge honor and I acknowledge that honor.

I hope that what I say delivers for all of you, ’cause I do think it’s important to talk about whiteness in children’s literature.

I talk a lot about good books, but it is equally important that we talk about the bad books, ’cause there’s way more bad books in children’s literature and we need those to be moved aside so that we have space for people to say, “Oh, this is actually an Indigenous story.”

There are many stories that Native writers tell that when they’re out giving talks, people think, but that’s not a Native story. The stories they present are not seen as Native because they don’t match with the expectations of Indians sitting around a campfire telling stories. So I’m going to talk about “Whiteness in Children’s Literature,” tonight.

I want to also say the Diversity Jedi are here.
(cheering)
So, we have to applaud for them.

The work I started doing in the mid-1990s was shaped by this delightful child when she came into our lives. I had been a kindergarten and first grade teacher and all the books that were in my classroom library became her library. They became her books. We read a lot.

In 1993, we moved from our adobe home at Namb Pueblo to a nondescript apartment in the Midwest. Our goal, graduate school at the University of Illinois. My plan was to study family literacy, of course!

But that changed not long after we arrived on campus and I encountered Chief Illiniwek and love for a racist mascot. Trying to understand why people were so moved by that clearly ridiculous image changed my plans.

I started studying and talking about depictions of Native people in children’s books.

Precocious child that Liz was, my daughter, who is here tonight and her dad, George, and Nick who is soon to be part of our family, Precocious child that she was, Liz was speaking up about stereotypes too, four years old. When a teacher in her pre-school classroom pulled “Brother Eagle Sister Sky” off the shelf and got ready to read it aloud, Liz told her the book wasn’t right.

Not understanding what Liz was trying to say, that teacher told her she could play somewhere else in the classroom.

Liz was only four years old, but she knew there were images in the world that weren’t right. She was using that four-year-old voice to say so. I want teachers to listen carefully when children are telling you something. Their words have meaning to them. A year later in kindergarten, Liz came out of her classroom at the end of the day, plopped right down on the floor, opened her backpack and opened “George and Martha” to this page. She jabbed at George with that indignation of a five year old and said, “Mom, look! “It’s George and he’s a TV Indian.” That’s a phrase I was using with her then to describe stereotyping. See, just prior to moving to Illinois, we had both danced at Namb Pueblo. For us, dance is not performance. It’s not entertainment. It’s prayer. She understood the sacred nature of what we were doing and when we saw stereotypical Indians on TV and westerns and cartoons, I talked with her about what they looked like and what we looked like. The ways that we dressed when we were doing our dances were not what we were seeing on television.

So I was teaching her a phrase, “TV Indians.” They weren’t real. TV Indians became a catch-all phrase for us to use when we’d see stereotypes in books. So that particular incident with George became a Field Notes article in Horn Book Magazine. Its title was, of course, was, “Mom, Look! “It’s George, He’s a TV Indian!”

As Liz moved on through school, there was one book after another that we would need to address. In third grade she spoke up about “Caddie Woodlawn.” I’ll have a little bit more to say about that, shortly.

When you’re the parent of a Native or a child of color, your child’s identity is not affirmed in the ways that the identity of white children is.

You will be asking teachers, as that parent, for meetings to talk about the problems in the textbooks and the worksheets and children’s books that your child brings home. Fighting for my daughter’s well-being shaped the work I do as a scholar and a critic. Since then, I’ve met many people in Education and Library Science and some writers too, who focus on the well-being of children.

Our work includes looking inside the pages of children’s books, but from there, looking outwards. What forces in society are shaping the words and the illustrations we see in children’s books? That is one question we, the Jedi, bring to the work that brought us all here tonight.

That’s a question that teachers and librarians can ask when they pick up a book to use with children. Who wrote it? Who illustrated it? Does the book have Native people in it? People of color? How are they depicted? It is a questioning stance that I want teachers to bring to every single book they pick up. Don’t think that every author is going to do okay, because each book has to be looked at independently.

Just after five p.m. on Saturday, January 20th, yeah five p.m., I was going to bed. Some of you know that we turn in early at my house, sometimes before it’s dark outside. I was heading up the stairs and my phone rang. I glanced at it. I didn’t recognize the number, so I ignored it. Got ready for bed, laid down and then I looked at my phone. There was a message from that person who had called. So I listened to it. It was Barbara Genco. She said something about needing to talk to me as soon as possible.
(audience laughing)
I just took that last week for this part of the speech.
(Debbie laughing)
But seriously, I panicked because I had recently been asked to be on the 2018 ALSC Charlemae Rollins President’s Panel at ALA and I thought, dang, what did I do.

Barbara’s a big name. Why is she calling me? Is she calling to tell me I can’t be on that panel? I did not call her back.

I was wide awake, afraid, but I saw that she was on Twitter,

so I sent her a direct message. She wrote me right back, thank goodness. She said we would talk the next day, that she had good news. So, whew! The next morning, I sat by the fireplace warm and toasty and listened to Barbara tell me that I’d been selected to do this lecture. “Are you sure, Barbara? “I don’t know Barbara. “There’s a lot of people out there who don’t like me.” She kind of laughed and she told me they were sure. She went into some detail about articles they read and they watched all my videos online.

And clearly they knew what they were doing in asking me to do this, so I said okay. She told me though, that the announcement would be made at ALA’s Midwinter Meeting, specifically at the 2018 Youth Media Awards event. I couldn’t talk about it till then. I couldn’t go to Midwinter. I couldn’t be in the room when they made the announcement, but it’s something I had done before. I invited Jedi, Tom Crisp, to watch the live stream with me. He was in Georgia, I was in Illinois, we’d done this before, we’d text back and forth as we’re watching the live stream from the award ceremonies. We had a running commentary of what they were making known to us as award-winning books. He didn’t know that Nina Lindsay, also a Jedi, would be saying my name.

In spite of Barbara’s assurances, I was anxious because quite frankly, I expected some polite applause. And, I was worried that some people might boo.

If anyone did that, Tom would help me out.
(chuckles)
Well, Nina made the announcement and there were cheers!

(applause)

There were cheers and there was applause and Barbara called me right away and said, “Did you hear them?” It was a great day! But ss I suspected, some people were not pleased. There was quite an active conversation about it on social media. One writer who was at Midwinter said she nearly leapt out of her chair to scream “No!” when she heard my name. Others declared they would boycott the lecture. I don’t know though, this is a full room. Don’t know if we had anybody boycotting. Some people wrote to the Arbuthnot Committee, some wrote to ALSC leadership, some wrote to me, saying that I don’t deserve this honor.

Obviously, the lecture was not taken away from me and here we are. I’m really happy to be here because the first children’s literature conference I attended was here in Madison in the 1990s when I was in graduate school. That’s when I met K.T. Horning and Ginny Moore Kruse. I’ve learned so much from them. Since then, I’ve been up here a few times. I remember meeting Janice Rice and I formed a wonderful friendship with her. She’s been a leading light in the American Indian Library Association for a long time. And it’s here that I met Omar Poler and learned of his outstanding work with tribal libraries in Wisconsin. When I learned that I’d be doing the Arbuthnot here, with all those warm memories of these people, I felt good. I was happy. So the title of my talk is “An Indigenous Critique “of Whiteness in Children’s Literature.” I started using the word whiteness in tweets in December of 2017. The suffix, “ness,” turns an adjective into a word that exemplifies a quality or state of being. So ness, turns the word white into the adjective, whiteness. I use it to refer to individuals and institutions with power that goes back hundreds of years and has a huge impact on our lives.

In my mind it is shorthand for an idea put forth by Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, the US Army Officer who founded Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879. His name is commonly associated with United States government boarding schools. In a speech about Americanizing Native students at Carlisle, he said: “A great general has said “that the only good Indian is a dead one “and that high sanction of their destruction “has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacre.” This is a man who was developing curriculum for kids. “In a sense,” he said, “I agree with that sentiment, “but only in this, that all the Indian there is “in the race should be dead. “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”

Essentially, Pratt wanted to do whatever was necessary to kill our identities as Native people and train us to serve white people as their servants and their laborers. He was an individual working within an institution that had nefarious plans for Indigenous peoples and the well-being of our Nations. Clearly, as you look around the room tonight, you see that he failed. ‘Cause we are here, with our songs and our music, our stories.

I have the word Indigenous in my title, but I could have said Native American or American Indian. All three of those are broad terms that are used to describe the peoples whose roots are in these lands that we currently call the United States.

First Americans, by the way, is not okay. Indigenous peoples were here long before the word America was used. Calling us First Americans erases our standing as Nations that were here before the United States was a nation. I use Native American, or American Indian, or Indigenous unless I am talking about a specific person or Nation.

When I talk about myself, I name my Nation. In naming it, I am being tribally specific. That’s one thing that I want teachers to do is look for tribally specific materials. I am enrolled at Namb, one of the 19 Pueblo Nations in what is currently known as New Mexico. I’m trying to use that “currently” and “now known as,” because things are in flux, always, historically. The historical record tells us things change. Borders change. Names change.

We are peoples with unique histories, stories, songs and languages. Some children’s books tell you that the Indian word for baby is papoose, as if these hundreds of Tribal Nations all speak the same language. We don’t. The whiteness of the US educational system means that most people grow up rather ignorant about Indigenous people. Most people, for example, can say words like “treaty,” but not realize that it refers to diplomatic agreements between Native Nations and other nations, including European nations.

At Namb, we’ve had diplomatic agreements with Spain, Mexico and with the United States. We’ve fought hard, successfully, to retain our identity

and keeping our status as a Sovereign Nation. Next time you’re in Washington DC, go see the statue of Po’pay. This is someone significant to our successful retention of our tribal identity. He led the Pueblo Revolt against the Spanish in 1680. We need a children’s book about Po’pay. One is being written and I think it will come out in 2020.

Our present-day status as a Sovereign Nation is rooted in this history and my personal family history drives what I do too. These two men are my grandfathers. I have a white grandfather,

but that doesn’t mean that only 3/4’s Namb Pueblo. If you’re a citizen of the United States and your grandma was born in France, that doesn’t make you 3/4’s a citizen of the United States. You are a citizen, period.

That’s a concept that needs a lot of work in American society.

On the right is my Dad’s father. He’s white, born in Arkansas in 1911. When he was born, his surname was Yates. That was his name all his life. On the left is my Mom’s father. He was Hopi, born at a Hopi village in Arizona around 1895. His surname was Sakiestewa, but when he went to a US government boarding school, he was given a new name. He became Rex Calvert for the rest of his life.

Changing a Native child’s name was standard practice in the boarding schools.

Whiteness changed my grandfather’s name, but he retained that identity as a Hopi man. He raised several children at Ohkay Owingeh and he always called my mom by her Tewa name, Oyegi.

She was given that name through a ceremony. My Tewa name and our daughter’s Tewa name, were given to us through a ceremony. If you think about your own name, especially a name that is specific to your family or your community, or maybe a name that came to you through a religious ceremony, you understand, names are important.

In 2015 my cousin’s little boy brought home this worksheet from school: Native American Names. He was supposed to pick an Indian name. The instructions on the worksheet say: “Think of an animal or part of nature. “Think of a characteristic about yourself. “Put them together.” His parents were appalled. They wrote to me about this activity. Activities like this, I hope you know, are a dime a dozen. I’m sure you’ve seen them.

They are inappropriate and I hope that when you see someone doing one, you engage them in a conversation and ask them to stop doing it.

In 1900, when my Hopi grandfather was a child,

whiteness was busy changing Native children’s names.

Killing the Indian, as Pratt had instructed. Fast forward to 2015 and whiteness was asking kids to pick an Indian name.

Seen in light of this history, I hope you understand why I object when writers and people who make worksheets make light of Native names. When you pick up a children’s book where the author has Native characters and makes light of their names, I’d like you to set it aside, but I’d also like you to tell others about why you’re setting it aside.

I want to look at some statistics now. If my cousin went looking for books to read with his child, he’d have very few new books to choose from.

That year, 2015, CCBC received 42 books published in the US and Canada with enough Native content to be counted as being about Native people. That 42 books is the 0.9% you see in the graph. Of that 42, only 19 were published in the United States. Canada publishes more books than the United States does.

If my cousin was looking for fiction, he’d have ten books to choose from. If he was looking for books by Native writers, he’d find three. None of those three are published by one of the big five publishers. Being published by one of the big five publishers is important. They have marketing departments that can promote a book by sending copies to bloggers and giving them away at conferences. In short, lots of visibility. They have lots of visibility that small publishing companies can’t do.

In my analysis, year after year, books from those big five publishers are ones I cannot recommend. They’re not written by Native writers and they are full of stereotyping and bias and factual errors.

The graphic– I want you to look at this too. The graphic shows 7.6% in the African, African-American category. I want to say a few words about that. In 1965, the Saturday Review published Nancy Larrick’s article, “The All White World of Children’s Books”. Larrick studied books published from 1962 through 1964 and found that 6.7% of the books in her study included one or more African Americans. That’s not much change. We’re looking at 50 years and 1.1% change in that 50-year period.

Most of the books Larrick wrote, showed a life far removed from that of contemporary children. This line in her article, I re-read the article for tonight, has resonance for me, for those of us, the Jedi, she wrote: “To the child who has been involved “in civil rights demonstrations of Harlem or Detroit, “it is small comfort to read of the Negro slave “who smilingly served his white master.”

Smiling slaves… then, and smiling slaves now, as we saw in 2015 and 2016 in “A Fine Dessert,” published by Random House and “A Birthday Cake for George Washington,” published by Scholastic. I put those red X’s on those covers because I want the imagery that you carry away with you tonight about those books to be, um, something’s not okay with this. Larrick focused on books about African Americans, but I wondered, what were the depictions of Native people in children’s books? And so if she had done a study of Native depictions in her sample, what would that look like? How many books would she have found? I did a search using WorldCat on the database for 1962 through 1964. I limited my search to fiction and I got 130 books.

“Little Runner of the Longhouse” and “Red Fox and His Canoe” were among the first ten hits that I got. Both are “I Can Read” books and both are illustrated by Arnold Lobel. Both are stereotypical.

That pose is just hard to get rid of,

Indians peering into the distance. I started first grade at Namb Pueblo Day School in 1964. When I was there, the librarian from the local public school came by every couple of weeks with a box of books we could choose from. So this is the same, 1964, the same time period as Nancy Larrick’s article. I don’t have a clear memory of reading these books, but I probably did. Thirty years later, when I was teaching children’s literature at the University of Illinois, a student brought a book from home to share with the class. Seeing it gave me a jolt.

It was definitely one of the books that had been in that box. I recognized it immediately when she brought the book out. When I started turning its pages, wow, I had another jolt. So much stereotyping in that book.

I don’t recall being upset by what I saw in “Little Owl Indian.” I probably already had some semblance of that TV Indian in my head. I was of course, surrounded by my Native family and relatives and community and I liked school.

I loved to read and I did well in school. See? That is me holding an award that I got from my teacher.

But if I zoom in on the award, you’ll see that it says Debra.

That wasn’t my name. My parents told my teacher, “Her name is Debbie.” The teacher said, “That’s a nickname, “her name is Debra.”

That’s whiteness.

And she put that whiteness on my award.

“Little Owl Indian” did not hurt me, but a basal reading series I had did… have an impact on me. I learned to read from the “Tip” series. When we moved to Illinois for graduate school, I was struck by the tree-lined streets and the houses with pitched roofs and the big piles of leaves and it seems silly to say it now, but the sidewalks.

Lingering in the recesses of my mind was Janet

in her nifty blue coat, hat and roller skates. Now why did I find all of that so striking? Why was that making me feel something? I think it was the power of whiteness. My life as a child growing up on our reservation was not in any of the books that I read. I had this kind of imagery and I think that I had internalized that good life: Tree lined streets, sidewalks, roller skates. That’s what life was supposed to be about. How could I not internalize that? Whiteness is very powerful.

I wanted to be Janet.

I’m kind of sad about that memory now, but thinking about it, holding onto it, helps me remain aware of how powerful story is, how it can shape and manipulate us.

Music does that, too. A lot of people are captivated by Lin Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton: The Musical.” For some, the music and the color-conscious cast tug on their heart strings.

Jean Mendoza, a Jedi, and I saw Miranda’s musical in Chicago a couple of years ago. The almost all-white audience was clearly under his spell. Jean and I sat there grumpy. Grumbling. The song that stands out most in my mind is Song 22 in Act One: “Dear Theodosia.” It’s a duet sung by Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. Both men are new fathers singing to their children that they will, quote, “come of age with our young Nation. “We’ll bleed and fight for you, we’ll make it right for you.”

We heard people around us sniffling. They were in tears. It is a moving song. Dad’s singing to their babies is very moving.

I was moved, but I was also angry. The audience is meant to think about these men fighting for independence from the British. That’s not all they were fighting. The audience is supposed to think about how wonderful that new nation was going to be for their white children.

The audience is not being asked to think about the Native parents of that time period, imagining the future of their children and their Nations. That’s not part of Hamilton’s musical. Miranda left Native people out and he glossed over the fact that Hamilton owned slaves. The history, as historians have pointed out in books and articles, is wrong.

In our forthcoming young adult adaptation of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s “An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States,” Jean and I ask readers to think critically about the history that is told through that musical.

Ticket sales tell us, Whiteness loves this rags-to-riches immigrant story.

History or the historical accuracy doesn’t matter.

In recent years, a great many people have shown their support, they love that, they love that musical and they’ve shown support for immigrants by joining marches and protests. It was invigorating to see and be part of that and to know too that Yuyi Morales was working on a picture book about her journey from Mexico to the United States.

When it was released in 2018, many of us were deeply touched by the story and the vibrant, joyful, multi-media illustrations of a mother and her child. We were sure that we’d hear Jamie Campbell Naidoo announce that “Dreamers” had been selected to receive the 2019 Caldecott Medal. That didn’t happen. With a blockbuster musical about immigrants and a societal-wide embrace of immigrants, I can’t help wonder, but like what happened? What happened in that room in those conversations amongst the 2019 Caldecott committee?

Was an unconscious whiteness at work there in that room? Is that why they chose Sophie Blackall’s “Hello Lighthouse?”

Blackall won the Caldecott in 2016 for “Finding Winnie.” Is it really the case that out of the thousands of books published, her art is the most distinctive in two separate years?

I asked these kinds of questions on Twitter. As you might imagine, it made some people angry.

To me, “Dreamers” was the perfect book for this time.

But. was it deemed politically correct?

I have no doubt that people think books like “Hello Lighthouse” are neutral or apolitical.

That’s whiteness at work. From my perspective, the politics in “Hello Lighthouse” are front and center. It’s nostalgia for times past. It’s palpable.

In Blackall’s book, the life of a white family is affirmed and the lighthouse that they live in is on what used to be Native lands.

There’s no neutrality there. In fact, if we think about it, every children’s book for which the setting is this continent that book is set on what used to be Native lands. If we could hold that fact front and center every time we pick up a children’s book that is set on this continent, how might that change how we view children’s literature? How might that shape the literature as we move into the future? I don’t know and it’s hard to think about, but I want to think about it. I think we should think about that.

Let’s take a look at another book about a white family on Native lands, “Little House on the Prairie.” That book and Laura Ingalls Wilder have a tremendous hold on many people, especially in Wisconsin… some of these states here in the Midwest. I’ve written a lot about problems in “Little House on the Prairie,” with its history and its representations of Native people. I do a lot of workshops for teachers and that’s me getting ready to do a workshop because I highlight passages in the book. I buy lots of used copies of it and I highlight the passages and take them to the workshops and I say, read this aloud.

People generally don’t remember those passages.

I’ve received a lot of letters from Native parents who are frustrated that their child’s teacher is using that book. They know that book has the potential to hurt their child’s sense of well-being. Wilder depicts Native people as primitive, mostly naked, more animal-like than human. Three times in the book a character says, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” I know some of you are thinking, but Pa and Laura, they like the Indians. But their sympathies are with the good Indians.

When Pa says, “That’s one good Indian,” he’s talking about an Indian who chose to fight other Indians in order to protect Pa and his family. If that Indian had chosen to join the others, Pa wouldn’t have been calling him a good Indian.

If you think Pa and Laura are sympathetic towards Indians,

I think whiteness might be manipulating you.

On February 7th, 2018, I read a post to the ALSC blog that surprised me. It was an invitation to ALSC membership to join their leadership discussions at the upcoming midwinter meetings to talk about the book award names. They wanted to consider the implications of having awards named for individuals whose currently recognized place in the Canon of Children’s Literature is not consistent with ALSC’s values.

Those goals and values include inclusiveness, integrity, respect and responsiveness. Well the board planned to start by looking at the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award. I was stunned. Skeptical. Having done years of work on stereotypical imagery in books, especially on “Little House on the Prairie,” I thought, this is going nowhere.

But I was wrong. At the annual meeting in July, the board of directors listened to the findings of the task force they had charged with studying the award names, and then they voted.

Again, I was stunned, because they voted to change the name. That was huge news.

The print and cable news media covered it.

Twitter exploded.

Even William Shatner weighed in.
(audience laughing)

To so many people, the idea that anyone would object to Wilder or her books was astonishing. In fact, Native and people of color have been objecting to the content of children’s books and stories for a very long time. I often cite William Apess and his autobiography, “A Son of the Forest,” it was published in 1829.

In it he shares a story from his childhood. He was Pequot. And as a young child he was placed with a white family. He went to school with them and through story, he learned to be afraid of Indians. As an adult he wrote about the impact those stories had on him as a child. I imagine that if he were alive today, he’d be using social media to talk about it.

Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, blogs… they’re all forms of social media that have provided disenfranchised people with a platform. In 2015 people used Twitter to talk about Sophie Blackall’s “A Fine Dessert” and E. E. Trujillo’s “When We Was Fierce.” In 2016 we used it to talk about “A Birthday Cake for George Washington” and “The Continent” by Kiera Drake. In 2017 we talked about “The Secret Project” by Jonah Winter. In 2019, Amlie Wen Zhao’s “Blood Heir” and Kosoko Jackson’s “A Place for Wolves” were the focus of much discussion. All these books and conversations about them were the subject of lots of articles and news segments in places like The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, Fox News, MSNBC.

Instead of taking children’s literature seriously however;

and the analysis that we try to do as critics of children’s literature, it got framed as entertainment and drama,

Assaults on freedom of speech. To the Jedi, those mainstream articles were ignoring the criticism that can shape children’s literature and they were ignoring the audience for all these books. That audience is young people.

There’s another important dimension to what’s happening with these books. I have them on the slide in a deliberate way. Books on the left are available to you today. You can go get them. Books on the right were recalled or canceled.

This is an early observation I am making here, and it may not hold water over time, but I am noticing: Is there a pattern developing? The books on the right are by writers of color. The books on the left are by white writers. Is it the case that writers of color are more in tune with the impact their words will have on children?

When they withdrew their books from publication, they cited criticism from people who know what they’re talking about. There was a lot of drama on Twitter. There were lots of quote/unquote pile-ons…

from people who don’t use their real name when they’re talking about anything.

They made the conversations uncomfortable and painful for the writers, but I believe that the decisions the writers of color made was in response to the criticism, because they believe it has merit; they know it matters.

For the mainstream media, articles about these books were part of the 24-hour news cycle. They were big news in these 24-hour periods; gone from the next 24-hour cycle. But for the parents and the teachers and the librarians that use children’s books and for the writers and editors and publishers, reviewers and critics who create, promote, and study children’s books, our concerns about books are not a 24-hour news cycle. For those of us who believe in the power of children’s books, we’re in it 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We know children’s books shape the future.

For hundreds of years, whiteness has had its way, but today we’re using social media to push against whiteness.

In January of 2015, the American Library Association held its first-ever Day of Diversity at its Midwinter meeting, co-chaired by Allie Jane Bruce and Jamie Campbell Naidoo. It was a day-long invitation-only event that brought together many people to discuss strategies to ensure that all children have access to diverse literature and library programming. It was, in short, an all-out effort to interrupt the whiteness of children’s literature. Roger Sutton, the Editor in Chief at Horn Book was there. And a few weeks after the Day of Diversity gathering, Roger asked a provocative question on his blog: “Are we doing it white? “Are we reviewing books from a white perspective?” Long conversation took place. One of my takeaways from it was that people can, will and do find ways to say, “No, we’re not doing it white.” You know, literary merit.

The question Roger posed, “Are we doing it white?” is on my mind because of a children’s book exhibit right now in Minneapolis that I hope to get to see before it closes. The exhibit is called, “The ABC of It: Why Children’s Books Matter.” It was first curated by Leonard Marcus and mounted at the New York Public Library in 2013. Now it’s at the University of Minnesota’s Anderson Library. When they were bringing that exhibit to Minnesota, they also worked with the University of Minnesota Press and published a companion book for the exhibit.

Before the exhibit opened, people were telling Lisa Von Drasek that certain parts of the exhibit needed historical context. Without that context, problematic books and authors in it were being celebrated uncritically. In particular, people had concerns about the Dr. Seuss books and about “Caddie Woodlawn.” With enough pressure, some of it on social media, Lisa has begun to make some changes to the exhibit.

In the case for “Caddie Woodlawn,” she started to make changes right away. On that photo on the left, do you see that red circle? That card in the middle is titled, “Things to Think About.” When the exhibit opened that wasn’t there. In response to pressure, she put that in there. People told her that’s not enough, it needs to be more visible. So this is an ongoing conversation about how we present the history of children’s literature in places that many teachers will be visiting.

So Lisa put that caution banner on the cover and that caught people’s attention. That helped people to ask questions: “Why it was on there? “What’s wrong with that book?”

Lisa has been blogging about the exhibit. She’s been trying to respond to criticisms of the exhibit. She reported that the caution tape is generating a lot more interest than the “Things to Think About” card was.

This afternoon as I was double-checking my notes, ’cause I try to be accurate in what I say, I wanted to know exactly what she was calling that card so I went to her blog post to double-check it and it’s gone. I got one of those Error 404 messages. I don’t know what’s going on; I guess we’ll see. I was glad to know, I am very glad to know that there are changes happening to that physical exhibit, that the people at the Kerlan are interrupting the whiteness of the exhibit by providing this kind of context. That is really important because that is a powerful institution.

The book that they created to go with the exhibit is by Leonard Marcus. Lisa’s making changes to the physical exhibit, what’s happening to the book?

When she was bringing the exhibit to Minnesota, she wanted to have a children’s book that would go along with it, that could be used in children’s literature classrooms. I’ve been doing an on-going analysis of that, it’s very white.

Is it going to be edited?

I hope so.

There is a PDF copy of it. I think edits can happen, but you have to make those things happen by asking the questions. I want to circle back now and tell you about the term, Diversity Jedi, and how that term came to be. In October 9th, 2015, Edith Campbell, a Jedi, shared some thoughts on Facebook about this book, “Large Fears,” written by Myles E. Johnson and illustrated by Kendrick Daye. It’s a self-published picture book. It’s about a queer black boy. Edi was happy to know about this book because, she said, “There are not enough books for marginalized young people.” Well, Meg Rosoff, a white author of several books for children and young adults, responded to Edi, saying, “There are not too few books “for marginalized young people. “There are hundreds of them, thousands of them. “You don’t have to read about a queer black boy “to read about a marginalized child. “The children’s book world,” she said, “is getting “far too literal about what needs to be represented.”

A conversation about her comments ensued on Facebook and Twitter. It came on the heels of discussions of the depictions of the smiling slaves in Sophie Blackall’s “A Fine Dessert.” There were also conversations going on then about the quote, “civilized Indians” in Laura Amy Schlitz’s “The Hired Girl.” Three weeks later, Rosoff tweeted about all of us and our conversations, calling us, quote, “The Debbie Reese Crimes Against Diversity stormtroopers.”
(audience chuckling)
Stormtroopers? Those are the bad guys!
(audience chuckling)
Sarah Hamburg, a Jedi, pointed out the historical roots of that word. Stormtroopers were Nazis. Rosoff’s characterization was clearly unacceptable.

Children’s book author Ren Saldaa offered a different term: Jedi Knight. I started thinking about what we might call ourselves. Then on November 2nd Muscogee author Cynthia Leitich Smith sent out a tweet with the hashtag, #DiversityJedi. She said she might have given up writing stories about Native peoples if it weren’t for people who care when so many others don’t. Her words had tremendous resonance for me and for others who hold fast to the idea to the fact that the words and illustrations children see in their books can reflect their existence or mock their well-being.

Cynthia’s picture book, “Jingle Dancer” is one that I talk about a lot. It is the book I wish we had when Liz danced for the first time, back in 1994.

Relative to the rest of the scholars and critics in children’s and young adult literature, we, the Diversity Jedi are really few in number, but we are making a difference. We research and we write and we talk about the numbers of books published and the quality of those books and the politics of what and who gets published. As scholars, we’re pushing the industry. We do in-depth study of books, situating our words within hundreds of years of whiteness.

I’m supposed to give a lecture that is a significant contribution to the field of children’s literature, but I could easily spend this entire hour talking about the Jedi and their work, because that work is a significant contribution to children’s literature. So I want everybody to know about Naomi Bishop and her leadership of the American Indian Library Association and their decision to rescind the award they gave to Sherman Alexie.
(clapping)
I think everybody should read Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s “The Dark Fantastic.”
(audience cheering)
You should all know about Laura Jimenez’s blog and her research on graphic novels and social justice in children’s literature. I want to tell you about the work that Sarah Park Dahlen and her team did to launch the open access journal, “Research on Diversity in Youth Literature.” You should look that up. It’s an open access journal. You can download all of those articles and I definitely want you to get the one called “The Cat is Out of the Bag:
[Orientalism,]
Anti-blackness “and white Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books.” It’s written by Katie Ishizuka and Ramn Stephens. You should also look up Edi Campbell’s blog posts
(cheering)
about the research she is doing on monkeys in children’s books.

I want you all to read Zetta Elliot’s books and her blog too, because she’s asking some hard questions about the choices writers of color make. And I got to tell you, you got to go read the work of Allie Jane Bruce and the people who blog at Reading While White.
(clapping)
And before a week passes, order Daniel Heath Justice’s “Why Indigenous Literatures Matter.”
(clapping)
My heart swells every time I see the tweets from the Native teens in Florida.

They tweet from the @OfGlades account on Twitter.
(cheering)

And they blog about books at Indigo’s Bookshelf.

I want to talk about the work that, Shannon Gibney and Thaddeus Andracki and Breanna McDaniel, and Sujei Lugo, Anne Ursu, Angie Manfredi, Ann Clare LeZotte, Cris Rhoades,

Daniel Jos Older, Stacy Collins, Marilisa Jimnez, and Sonia Rodriguez are doing every day. Because these are people I learn from.
(clapping)
They inspire me. So much of what we stand for is under attack by very powerful forces. Some days it feels hopeless. Many days we’re afraid. And we should be. Because threats that the Jedi receive are serious.

But here we are, gathered in this room, this evening. We are here because our parents and grandparents and our great-great-greats fought for their children and grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. They fought for the rights of our people to exist, to tell the stories we choose to tell, the way we want to tell them.

We’re doing that now. We’re doing what they did. We’re fighting for our children, our grandchildren, our great-great grandchildren. We are all resisting whiteness.

I am glad that Cynthia Leitich Smith kept writing her books. I think she has done more to help Native writers of children’s and young adult literature than any other Native writer out there.

Through their stories and words, Native writers are resisting whiteness and they are providing Native children with mirrors. Though “Jingle Dancer” will always hold a special place in my heart, I think Cynthia’s “Hearts Unbroken” is her most significant work.
(clapping)

I love that one of her characters hands a copy of Eric Gansworth’s book, “If I Ever Get Out of Here” to another character in the novel.

In my mind I can see Alexis, one of the @OfGlades teens, who is working in a library, handing that book to a Native kid.

There’s more to say about “Hearts Unbroken.” In it, Cynthia deftly addresses misguided claims to Cherokee identity, mockery of Native names, the racist editorials written by L. Frank Baum and that ever present question many of us wrestle with: “What do you do when you find out “that a favorite author is racist?”

Or if you find out that that author has been sexually harassing someone?

In 1986, Walter Dean Myers, an African American author, used the New York Times to call out stereotypical, and racist and biased depictions of African Americans. He wrote that the images of Dinah, the black maid in “The Bobbsey Twins,” Friday in “Robinson Crusoe” and Eradicate in “Tom Swift” were harming black children and white children too.

All children are shaped by what they read in books. He reflected on the 1960s and his hope then that change was coming. When he saw more books coming out in the 1970s he said he thought that they were revolutionizing the book publishing industry.

Then in 2014, Myers had another item in The New York Times. Its title, “Where Are the People of Color “in Children’s Literature.” It was a painful note on how much had not changed. He died a few months later, before the highly visible conversations on Twitter started taking place.

On April 4th, Vicky Smith, children’s book editor at Kirkus, published a column titled “Diversity Jedi.” In it she said that she thinks the changes we’ve seen in the last few years in children’s literature are due to the sustained work of Diversity Jedi on social media. If Vicky is right, we’re carrying on the work that Walter Dean Myers did.

If you’re on Twitter, look for our hashtag.

Retweet us and help us. Let’s all revolutionize the book publishing industry.

Thank you.
(applause)