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35 Chapter 2 Indians Mythic and Human ■ Cherokee editor Mary Gloyne Byler wrote in the early 1970s that in contrast to other minority groups in the United States, who “have been, and are still, largely ignored by the nation’s major publishing houses— particularly in the field of children’s books,” Native Americans “contend with a mass of material about themselves. If anything, there are too many children’s books about American Indians.”1 Native people play essential if supporting roles in the heroic children’s tales of nation-building that ultimately demand their “disappearance.” For that reason, when adults recall childhood experiences with classics like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books (1932–1943) or Carol Ryrie Brink’s Caddie Woodlawn (1935), they tend to forget that Indians were even present in the texts. Native characters lurk in the corners, serving as literary devices that highlight the warmth and safety of the nuclear Anglo-American family and the suppressed desires of white, tomboyish girls and liberty-loving boys who wish to be freed from the civilizing influence of domesticated women. Indians have long been present in American adult literature too, but the abundance of indigenous characters in American children’s books stems in part from nineteenth-century social Darwinist thinking that equated Indians with children. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall, best known for developing the concept of adolescence, argued that if Indians were permanently childlike, then it stood to reason that children must also be like Indians. Drawing on romantic conceptions of children being in a state of nature, Hall argued that child development mirrored the evolutionary process of the human—or more accurately, the Anglo-Saxon—at large. In their path to adulthood, children “recapitulated” the evolutionary stages of man. By mimicking the “primitive” activities and pursuits of Native peoples, white children smoothed the process of advancing to the next stage of social and intellectual development. Hall’s theory ultimately informed the creation and programming of youth organizations such as the YMCA’s Indian Guides and Princesses, Camp Fire Girls, Boy Scouts, 36  Child-Sized History and Girl Scouts.2 But the association of non-Native children and Indians continued long after Hall’s theory—and social Darwinist thinking more broadly—lost credibility. As a genre, the western reached its heyday in the 1950s, precisely the time when the inevitable result of social Darwinist thinking—virulent, racist nationalism—was revealed in the defeat of Nazi ideology. The postwar popularity of American westerns invigorated children’s cowboy-andIndian fantasies, as did toy guns, Daniel Boone hats, juvenile frontier biographies, and summer camp activities. The trend continued well into the next decades, with the wildly popular television series Little House on the Prairie airing in the 1970s and early 1980s. In 1980, the year former western actor Ronald Reagan was elected president, British author Lynne Reid Banks published what was to become the best-selling children’s book in recent U.S. history, the Harry Potter series excluded.3 Banks’s The Indian in the Cupboard (1980), a fantasy about cowboy-and-Indian play turned real, enthralled American children and their teachers, quickly becoming an elementary school read-aloud. When the boy protagonist Omri places a toy Indian and, later, a toy cowboy in a medicine cabinet and turns the key, he transforms his white, middle-class London bedroom into his very own American frontier.4 As he explains to a friend, “Little Bear isn’t a toy. He’s a real man. He really lived. Maybe he’s still— I don’t know—he’s in the middle of his life—somewhere in America in seventeen-something-or-other. He’s from the past.”5 Once alive, the miniature cowboy and Indian behave exactly the way their brightly colored bodies would suggest: as caricatures from an unspecified time and place. Antiracist critics have objected to the manner in which the novel’s Indian speaks, pointing out that Little Bear identifies himself as an eighteenth-century Iroquois but talks like a 1950s movie Indian: “Now! You make magic. Deer for Little Bear hunt. Fire for cook. Good meat!” (59). Such racist dialogue, critics argue, is inexcusably ignorant .6 Worse yet, Little Bear, who was originally a mass-produced plastic toy, can literally be possessed. Omri’s reference to him as “my Indian” makes obvious the colonial perspective from which the novel is told. If the word “Indian” was replaced with that of another minority group, some educators argued, the racism would...

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