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Notes to chapter 2 on pages 235–37. 45 You must not lose, leave your culture behind and story. You got to hang on and give it behind … your children. Keep going. —Bill Neidjie, Story about Feeling 2 Indigenous Texts and Publishers In Jingle Dancer (2000), by Cynthia Leitich Smith, Cornelius Van Wright, and Ying-Hwa Hu, the protagonist Jenna dreams of jingle-dancing like her Grandma Wolfe, but it is too late to mail-order jingles for the coming powwow.1 She visits her Great-aunt Sis, her friend Mrs. Scott, her cousin Elizabeth, and finally Grandma Wolfe, each of whom provides her with jingles so that she ends up with enough for four rows, which are sewn onto her dress by her grandmother. At the powwow, Jenna dances for each of the women who have helped her, ending with Grandma Wolfe, who “warmed like Sun.”2 The story is shaped by Native American narrative traditions in a number of ways. First, it is organized around the number four: the stages of life represented by the four women, the rows of jingles, the four visits, and the four directions taken by Jenna as she proceeds on her quest. Second, the passage of time is signified by reference to the personified figures of moon and sun (“As Moon kissed Sun good night”; “As Sun arrived at midcircle”).3 Third, when Jenna visits Great-aunt Sis, she is told a Muscogee Creek story about Bat, inserted as an interpolated story within the account of Jenna’s progress toward the state of jingle dancer, so alluding to Native American traditions whereby cultural values are transmitted indirectly and through narrative. Crucially, the significances of Jingle Dancer are located in Jenna’s experience of interdependence and communal endeavour as the four women help her and she in turn honours them by dancing. What distinguishes Jingle Dancer from the vast majority of settler society texts is that it treats as normal and natural Jenna’s aspirations and the values of her culture. In this way, it offers Native readers the kind of narrative subjectivity taken for granted by the white children who are the implied readers of most children’s literature, while positioning non-Indigenous readers as outsiders to a culture that they may imaginatively comprehend but that is marked by difference. In her essay “A Different Drum: Native American Writing,” Smith describes the advice given her by an author unsettled by the structure of Jingle Dancer: “‘It’s three,’ I was told by a living legend. “Three because that’s the tradition. Three pigs, three wishes, three goats. The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. It’s three, always three, because that’s what feels right.’”4 The conviction of the “living legend” that three is “what feels right” is of course a highly Eurocentric view of what is normal, built on a lifetime of narrative experience incorporating Western folktales (“three pigs, three wishes, three goats”) and Christian traditions (“the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost”). The “legend” has internalized these narrative structures so thoroughly that a story based on the number four is literally unthinkable. In her essay, Smith describes the processes of self-censorship that shaped her writing of a story incorporating “a heavy dose of old-time Indian humor— a slow-boiling, ridiculous situation becoming ever more ridiculous.”5 On the advice of two non-Indian readers, she cut out the joke so that the story would appeal to a mainstream audience; but she was left with questions about her own practices as an author and about diversity in children’s literature: “Is there any place in children’s books for writing that reflects Native idiosyncrasies ? Or rather, if diversity of voice matters at all, does it only apply to diversity that appeals to the mainstream audience?”6 Many Indigenous authors tell similar stories about the dilemmas they face when writing for mainstream audiences, but aside from self-censorship of the kind Smith describes , systemic forms of intervention occur in mainstream publishing companies as the processes of selection, translation, editing, and marketing typically shape Indigenous texts into mainstream products. In the settler societies I consider, access to publishing houses favours those for whom English (and, in francophone Quebec, French) is their first language, and the minority status of Indigenous readerships ensures that mainstream publishers produce relatively little Indigenous writing except that which can readily be marketed to non-Indigenous readers. There are notable exceptions : in Australia, University...

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