Native American Picture Books of Change: The Art of Historic Children's Editions (review)

Historical studies of children's picture books are rare, and rarer still are studies of picture books by and about Native Americans. Rebecca Benes's Native American Picture Books of Change is a welcome contribution to this neglected area of children's literature. As might be expected from a museum publication, this volume resembles a coffee-table book, with a generous glossy layout, historical photographs, and a multitude of full-color illustrations. Given this format, we should not be surprised that the writing is directed to a broader audience, and that Benes does not assume her readers have extensive knowledge of children's literature. However, given the dearth of critical work on Native American picture books, it is likely that even professionals in the field will find much unplowed territory between these covers.

Benes's primary focus is on a series of readers produced by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for Indian schools from the 1920s through the 1940s. These readers were the first children's books to respect the indigenous languages, promote the indigenous cultures, and employ indigenous artists. All this came about as a result of an enlightened administration in the Bureau of Indian Affairs that sought to reverse the policy, dating to the nineteenth century, of assimilating the Native Americans into the white culture, stripping them of their languages, their customs, and their pride. As early as 1922, the trend began with the publication of Elizabeth DeHuff's Taytay's Tales, a volume that celebrated Native American traditions. Perhaps the most notable feature of this book is that it is one of the first books to be illustrated by Native American artists, including, among many other illustrators, Fred Kabotie. Kabotie was but a teenager at the time, and he would go on to illustrate many other children's books. DeHuff herself was not Native American, but she was the first of a line of talented writers who had a deep appreciation for Native American culture and a love for the people.

By the 1930s, the new movement was underway to preserve and promote the Native cultures. Anthropologists, concerned over the loss of many Native languages, began to create orthographies for those remaining—the Navajo language, for example, was not transcribed until the mid-1930s. As late as 1937, Benes points out, nearly 90 percent of Navajo children spoke no English, and the Navajo language was exclusively an oral one. Soon, however, bilingual readers began to appear, readers that both aided in reducing the illiteracy rate and in restoring cultural pride. The author commissioned to write the Navajo series of readers was Ann Nolan Clark. Benes persuasively argues that Clark, who is best known as the Newbery Award-winning author of Secret of the Andes, deserves as much recognition for the many children's books she wrote during the 1930s and 1940s. Her books celebrated Native American heritage with poetic simplicity and sensitivity rarely found in commissioned books or school readers.

Clark is rare because she is able to write convincingly about a variety of Native cultures; one of her most famous picture books is In My Mother's House (1941), a Pueblo story wonderfully illustrated by Velino Herrera. Benes describes this poetic narrative of Pueblo life as "one of the most outstanding children's books of the twentieth century" (34). For the Navajo, Clark wrote the Little Herder series, which contain lovely illustrations by the Native American artist Hoke Denetsosie. Benes devotes a chapter to a series of readers about the Sioux (who, she points out, are more properly referred to as Lakota or Teton). The Sioux readers came out during the 1940s, and many were written by Clark, who traveled to the Dakotas and immersed herself in the Sioux culture. Andrew Standing Soldier, a Lakota, illustrated several of the books in this series, revealing a very different style from that of the Southwestern Indians, a style far more realistic, even...