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50books_pocFour more non-fiction books for middle grades about Native Americans. For context, these are the POC-authored books that were in this collection of books.
13. Richard Nichols (Tewa Pueblo), A Story to Tell: Traditions of a Tlingit Community. Photos by D. Bambi Kraus (Tlingit).
Marissa and her grandmother Fran spend a week together in Kake, Alaska, where they walk lots, talk lots, and grandmother teaches granddaughter about being Tlingit.
Marissa and Fran are the photographer's daughter and mother, and there is a lovely intimacy to the photos of the two of them. The remainder of the photos are mostly of the town and its waterways: they make me homesick for the Puget Sound (which bears some geographic similarity), and renew my desire to see the Inside Passage.
The text runs a bit stilted -- there's something awkward about how the text moves between the grandmother explaining things and the narrator explaining things -- but between the two, they cover a lot of ground.
14. Danielle Corriveau (Inuit), The Inuit of Canada.
Oh, I loved this. A just plain fun read, lots of info I didn't know, and lots of pride evident throughout. Overall, paints a portrait of a very competent people, whose members have rich, interesting, and often happy lives (or so one might gather from the people shown in the photos), who live in the present like the rest of us, but who also have clear continuity with their own cultural history.
Really, I can't say enough good things about it. I've gotten to the point where I kind of loathe The $Tribalname books, but this one was a cut above the rest, and I sincerely enjoyed it.
15. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve (Sicangu Lakota), The Nez Perce.
Overall, my comments would be very similar to my comments on the other title I reviewed from this series, The Apaches.
Some things I particularly liked: Again, beginning with a/the Nez Perce origin story, and again, no verbal hedging about whether it "really" happened or not. There was a succinct two-page spread about the Nez Perce sending a delegation to William Clark (yes, that William Clark, who was by then an Indian Affairs commissioner), to ask for a teacher, but instead getting missionaries who thought they had authority over the Nez Perce. In a similar vein, I found that Sneve's explanation about the political split within the Nez Perce over treaty-making with the U.S. to be very clear. She does have a nice touch at conveying, in a few short, simple sentences, not only a non-EuroAmerican point of view in a dispute, but the reasonableness of that point of view. That's a lot harder to do than it looks.
Things I didn't like so much: Lots and lots of past tense, and the "Nez Perce Today" section was incredibly short: one paragraph. (Going by headings, it was nominally two pages, but most of those two pages were spent on Chief Joseph's "Fight No More Forever" speech.)
16. George M. Cochran (Cherokee), Indian Portraits of the Pacific Northwest.
Published in 1959, each two page spread has four or five short paragraphs of information about a northwest tribe on the left-hand page, and a full-page charcoal portrait of a (usually male, usually older) person on the right hand page, quite often in regalia or traditional dress. Altogether, thirty tribes of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho are represented.
There's a lot about this book that just irritates me. The notes in the back say that Cochran visited PNW reservations, and "supplemented his observations" with research at local libraries. The notes lists as Cochran's "principal sources" such works as Bancroft's Native Races (1886), Haines' The American Indian (1888), U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology's Handbook of the American Indians North of Mexico (1907).
Principal sources, indeed.
Basically, just about any time one of Cochran's statements make me go "The fuck?" it turns out to be a direct quote -- or very nearly so -- of some 19th century text. I'd feel a lot better about this book if it labeled these wtferies, "Random opinions of 19th Century Europeans and Euro-Americans, most of whom were writing adventure-travelogues for the folks back home."
I haven't had nearly as much success tracking down who Cochran's portraits are of. The Nez Perce portrait is obviously Chief Joseph, but is unlabeled as such: he's presented as if he's just some random Nez Perce man, generally representative of all Nez Perce men. Most of the lower Columbia portraits are of people with flattened heads, which make me suspect Cochran was working from old photos and sketches. (Although I understand that there that there were still people with flattened heads alive in the 1950s, more-or-less contemporaneous with this book, so Cochran may have been working from life. BTW, the sketch of the child at that link is most likely the source for Cochran's "artifact" sketch on his Clatsop page.) I do know that some of the books Cochran was working from contained reproductions of photos and paintings from natural history museums, usually labeled no more specifically than "Chinook man" (as if these were type specimens), but I was unable to match any of those to a portrait. (Not that I spent all that long trying. Google Books is good for some tasks, but unwieldly for others.)
So, to sum up the irritating: frequent use of pseudo-objective, condescending, and sometimes sensationalizing language, all of which is completely decontextualized from the mid-nineteenth century Europeans whose words they are, plus portraits that are presented without any information about who the individuals pictured are -- even Chief Joseph goes unidentified.
Plus, also, lots of Relentless Past Tense. The book doesn't even bother to say that the text and portraits all refer back to the early nineteenth century -- apparently it goes without saying. When else would Indians have lived?
For all that, there were some things I liked about the book, the most prominent of which was, hey, thirty peoples of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, with enough information to give one a sense of how happening an area this was. (Thirty peoples, by the way, is not a complete count for these three states: in the Puget Sound, f'rinstance, Cochran mentions only the Puyallup and Nisqually, and just off the top of my head, there are at least also the Lummi, Swinomish, Suquamish, Duwamish, and Skokomish. And I'm probably still a half-dozen short, if not more.) Although the blurbs about each people are short (and sometimes irritating and always context-free), there are clear suggestions of much larger stories here, with enough info that you could go looking for them, if you cared to. The book is mostly ordered by geography, which is helpful: he works his way around the Olympic Penninsula, then up the Columbia, and so forth. Cochran is also fairly consistent about saying where each people is now -- given what a mess treaty-making was out here, something along these lines is nice just as a basic whos-who factbook of some of the peoples in these three states. I mean, I can almost see handing this over to a kid, with the hope that they spend a lot of time pouring over it and end up saying things like, "Oh, hey! We're in Klickitat territory now!" whenever we go on road trips.
Almost. In the alternate fantasy world inside my head. Because actually, this "factbook" insists on making pronouncements about who's bloodthirsty, who's treacherous, and who changes into clean clothes regularly.
...I've been talking about the text all this time, mostly because I've got lots of easily-verbalized thoughts about the text. But Cochran, from what I can tell, was principally an artist, not an author. The text, you could argue, is not the point of this book; the charcoal portraits are. (Which does not make the text magically go away, of course.) So, the portraits: a few of the portraits are weaker than the others, but overall, I have spent a lot of time looking at the portraits. They are compelling. As irritating as the text is -- by turns sensationalizing and condescending -- the portraits are the opposite of that.
...yeah, I don't know if you can tell, but I have become downright fascinated with this book, in an sociological/historiographical artifact sort of way. I have spent way, way too much time thinking about it, wondering who Cochran was, why he wrote this book, and why he wrote it this way.
But -- and maybe I'm selling fourth-graders and their critical-thinking faculties short here, and if so, I'm willing to take that under advisement -- I have a very hard time imagining treating this as a children's book. Anything that straight-facedly discusses who's bloodthirsty and who's not? Just, no.
13. Richard Nichols (Tewa Pueblo), A Story to Tell: Traditions of a Tlingit Community. Photos by D. Bambi Kraus (Tlingit).
Marissa and her grandmother Fran spend a week together in Kake, Alaska, where they walk lots, talk lots, and grandmother teaches granddaughter about being Tlingit.
Marissa and Fran are the photographer's daughter and mother, and there is a lovely intimacy to the photos of the two of them. The remainder of the photos are mostly of the town and its waterways: they make me homesick for the Puget Sound (which bears some geographic similarity), and renew my desire to see the Inside Passage.
The text runs a bit stilted -- there's something awkward about how the text moves between the grandmother explaining things and the narrator explaining things -- but between the two, they cover a lot of ground.
14. Danielle Corriveau (Inuit), The Inuit of Canada.
Oh, I loved this. A just plain fun read, lots of info I didn't know, and lots of pride evident throughout. Overall, paints a portrait of a very competent people, whose members have rich, interesting, and often happy lives (or so one might gather from the people shown in the photos), who live in the present like the rest of us, but who also have clear continuity with their own cultural history.
Really, I can't say enough good things about it. I've gotten to the point where I kind of loathe The $Tribalname books, but this one was a cut above the rest, and I sincerely enjoyed it.
15. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve (Sicangu Lakota), The Nez Perce.
Overall, my comments would be very similar to my comments on the other title I reviewed from this series, The Apaches.
Some things I particularly liked: Again, beginning with a/the Nez Perce origin story, and again, no verbal hedging about whether it "really" happened or not. There was a succinct two-page spread about the Nez Perce sending a delegation to William Clark (yes, that William Clark, who was by then an Indian Affairs commissioner), to ask for a teacher, but instead getting missionaries who thought they had authority over the Nez Perce. In a similar vein, I found that Sneve's explanation about the political split within the Nez Perce over treaty-making with the U.S. to be very clear. She does have a nice touch at conveying, in a few short, simple sentences, not only a non-EuroAmerican point of view in a dispute, but the reasonableness of that point of view. That's a lot harder to do than it looks.
Things I didn't like so much: Lots and lots of past tense, and the "Nez Perce Today" section was incredibly short: one paragraph. (Going by headings, it was nominally two pages, but most of those two pages were spent on Chief Joseph's "Fight No More Forever" speech.)
16. George M. Cochran (Cherokee), Indian Portraits of the Pacific Northwest.
Published in 1959, each two page spread has four or five short paragraphs of information about a northwest tribe on the left-hand page, and a full-page charcoal portrait of a (usually male, usually older) person on the right hand page, quite often in regalia or traditional dress. Altogether, thirty tribes of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho are represented.
There's a lot about this book that just irritates me. The notes in the back say that Cochran visited PNW reservations, and "supplemented his observations" with research at local libraries. The notes lists as Cochran's "principal sources" such works as Bancroft's Native Races (1886), Haines' The American Indian (1888), U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology's Handbook of the American Indians North of Mexico (1907).
Principal sources, indeed.
- Cochran: "Although not a blood-thirsty people, Chinooks were frequently involved in quarrels..."
Bancroft (1886): "Although by no means a blood-thirsty race, the Chinook tribes were frequently involved in quarrels..." - Cochran: "The Rouge River Indians were a warlike people, proud and haughty, but treacherous."
Bancroft (1874) quoting Miller in the Indian Affairs Report, 1857: "The Rogue River Indians and Shastas 'are a warlike race, proud and haughty, but treacherous and very degraded in their moral nature.'" - Cochran: "Both men and women were well-developed, resembling the Nez Perce."
USBAE (1907): "Both the men and the women are well developed; and although Shoshonean in language, in physical characters the Bannock resemble more closely the Shahaptian Nez Perces..." - Cochran: "Flatheads often changed their clothing, cleaning them with pipe clay."
Bancroft (1886): "The Flatheads often change their clothing and clean it with pipe-clay." (Bancroft was supposedly citing Ross Cox, Adventures on the Columbia River, 1831, however, I cannot find the quoted passage in Cox.) - Cochran: "The dog tongue was the only dish cloth known to the Okanogan."
John Jacob Astor (1849): "The dog's tongue is the only dish-cloth known." (Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River)
Basically, just about any time one of Cochran's statements make me go "The fuck?" it turns out to be a direct quote -- or very nearly so -- of some 19th century text. I'd feel a lot better about this book if it labeled these wtferies, "Random opinions of 19th Century Europeans and Euro-Americans, most of whom were writing adventure-travelogues for the folks back home."
I haven't had nearly as much success tracking down who Cochran's portraits are of. The Nez Perce portrait is obviously Chief Joseph, but is unlabeled as such: he's presented as if he's just some random Nez Perce man, generally representative of all Nez Perce men. Most of the lower Columbia portraits are of people with flattened heads, which make me suspect Cochran was working from old photos and sketches. (Although I understand that there that there were still people with flattened heads alive in the 1950s, more-or-less contemporaneous with this book, so Cochran may have been working from life. BTW, the sketch of the child at that link is most likely the source for Cochran's "artifact" sketch on his Clatsop page.) I do know that some of the books Cochran was working from contained reproductions of photos and paintings from natural history museums, usually labeled no more specifically than "Chinook man" (as if these were type specimens), but I was unable to match any of those to a portrait. (Not that I spent all that long trying. Google Books is good for some tasks, but unwieldly for others.)
So, to sum up the irritating: frequent use of pseudo-objective, condescending, and sometimes sensationalizing language, all of which is completely decontextualized from the mid-nineteenth century Europeans whose words they are, plus portraits that are presented without any information about who the individuals pictured are -- even Chief Joseph goes unidentified.
Plus, also, lots of Relentless Past Tense. The book doesn't even bother to say that the text and portraits all refer back to the early nineteenth century -- apparently it goes without saying. When else would Indians have lived?
For all that, there were some things I liked about the book, the most prominent of which was, hey, thirty peoples of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, with enough information to give one a sense of how happening an area this was. (Thirty peoples, by the way, is not a complete count for these three states: in the Puget Sound, f'rinstance, Cochran mentions only the Puyallup and Nisqually, and just off the top of my head, there are at least also the Lummi, Swinomish, Suquamish, Duwamish, and Skokomish. And I'm probably still a half-dozen short, if not more.) Although the blurbs about each people are short (and sometimes irritating and always context-free), there are clear suggestions of much larger stories here, with enough info that you could go looking for them, if you cared to. The book is mostly ordered by geography, which is helpful: he works his way around the Olympic Penninsula, then up the Columbia, and so forth. Cochran is also fairly consistent about saying where each people is now -- given what a mess treaty-making was out here, something along these lines is nice just as a basic whos-who factbook of some of the peoples in these three states. I mean, I can almost see handing this over to a kid, with the hope that they spend a lot of time pouring over it and end up saying things like, "Oh, hey! We're in Klickitat territory now!" whenever we go on road trips.
Almost. In the alternate fantasy world inside my head. Because actually, this "factbook" insists on making pronouncements about who's bloodthirsty, who's treacherous, and who changes into clean clothes regularly.
...I've been talking about the text all this time, mostly because I've got lots of easily-verbalized thoughts about the text. But Cochran, from what I can tell, was principally an artist, not an author. The text, you could argue, is not the point of this book; the charcoal portraits are. (Which does not make the text magically go away, of course.) So, the portraits: a few of the portraits are weaker than the others, but overall, I have spent a lot of time looking at the portraits. They are compelling. As irritating as the text is -- by turns sensationalizing and condescending -- the portraits are the opposite of that.
...yeah, I don't know if you can tell, but I have become downright fascinated with this book, in an sociological/historiographical artifact sort of way. I have spent way, way too much time thinking about it, wondering who Cochran was, why he wrote this book, and why he wrote it this way.
But -- and maybe I'm selling fourth-graders and their critical-thinking faculties short here, and if so, I'm willing to take that under advisement -- I have a very hard time imagining treating this as a children's book. Anything that straight-facedly discusses who's bloodthirsty and who's not? Just, no.
