Putting First Nations Texts at the Center

For more than thirty years, I have been paying close attention to Indigenous children’s literature (meaning books about or for Indigenous children), generally in the representations of First Nations peoples in literature for children and young adults and specifically in literature for young people written by Native authors. There were a number of particular reasons for my interest: First, there are people from the Sweetgrass Cree Nation in my family, and I wanted books for my daughter that represented Indigenous people in realistic and non-colonialist ways. Then, while I was earning a baccalaureate and preparing for graduate school, I worked as a children’s and young adult librarian/library technician for a rural school division in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. Prince Albert was one of the first urban centers in Canada to attain a majority Indigenous population, and I needed the collections in my care to reflect the experiences of the division’s many Native students. And then, while writing my Master’s thesis, I free-lanced as a library consultant for the Little Red River School, north of Prince Albert. A joint effort of the Montreal Lake and Lac La Ronge Cree Nations, the school is K to 12 and built in the outline of an eagle. I selected the books, catalogued them, trained the teacher-librarian, and weeded the existing collections that were gathered from the various schools owned by the bands. My undergraduate in Native Studies minor served me well: I knew what to keep (those rare books that presented Indigenous peoples without bias or stereotyping) and what to discard (those hundreds of books that would not serve Little Red River’s children and young adults well). Week after week, I filled the recycling bins to overflowing with the discards. I dumped books by well-meaning white people who appropriated Indigenous lives and culture and created Native protagonists who were more objects of social studies than fully developed subjects. Think of it this way: when a story is written about a white child, the child is seen as an individual, so the Native child as individuated subject became the basis of my criteria for the collection. Therefore, I discarded those stories about the Native child that used that child to stereotype, moralize, generalize, and objectify—to write about a nation, a people, instead of about a child. So out went books like Whale Brother, which bears no relation to Inuit life; The Indian in the Cupboard, which is repellant for so many reasons; and the many books by Byrd Baylor, which are beautifully illustrated but misguided and misleading. And I happily binned that most heinous of all: The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her novels, I think, have done as much to damage North American First Nations as any colonial enterprise, military and otherwise.

In order to build the library, I spent dozens of hours online and on the phone searching for appropriate materials. A major help was Doris Seale (Santee Dakota/Cree) and Beverly Slapin’s Through Indian Eyes: The Native Experience in Books for Children published in 1987. Some of the books on my daughter’s bookshelves I kept or acquired for the Little Red River School, and some of those were books by cultural outsiders or what Clare Bradford terms “settler-society texts.” One good example is the work of Canadian children’s librarian Peter Eyvindson. Through the 1980s and 1990s, he published several picture books focusing on everyday issues in contemporary children’s lives, and most have Native people in them—particularly Red Parka Mary, Jen and the Great One, Kookum’s Red Shoes, and Kyle’s Bath. In Eyvindson’s stories, Indigenous children can find themselves and their community depicted in positive and human ways in a variety of settings, urban, rural, and reserve.

So, though my nominal purpose for this special issue was to collect articles and columns that examined literature for children about Indigenous subjects by Indigenous authors, I am abidingly open to work about First Nations peoples and experiences by non-Native writers and illustrators. As Lydia Kokkola points out...