Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

I am quickly becoming a fan of Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve.

1. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, The Chichi Hoohoo Bogeyman.

Three sisters* are reunited at their grandparents' house near Pine Ridge for what looks to be a long summer together. Against a backdrop of unexplained, and perhaps supernatural, events related by their parents, the three girls share ghost stories and sneak off for illicit explorations together, eventually encountering a scary stranger that they dub the "chichi hoohoo bogeyman" after the Sioux, Hopi, and European figures that are used to scare young children.

There's a lot I like here. Two of the three girls are mixed-culture (the girls' parents are variously Lakota, Hopi, and white), but there is no exoticization or othering, just the girls building their own culturally-fused world that both overlaps, and is different from, the worlds of their parents. I also love that the girls' illicit explorations isn't framed as children-vs-the adults -- the children worry about their grandparents' potential disappointment in their rule-breaking, and consequently try to work out how to break the rules while living up to the spirit of them, which is a nice switch from what I usually see. Similarly, I recognize and like the intermittent conflicts the bolder two sisters experience about whether to bully their more timid sister along, sometimes leaning toward pushing too hard, but usually falling back to respecting her desires to not do something. I recognize these kids and relationships more than I recognize those that usually appear in "sneaking away from parental supervision" stories.

Also, these girls who take the boat to secretly go explore the island in the river that they don't have permission to go explore? Girls. Not boys. I was all about the "taking the boat and going exploring" books when I was a kid, and they had a way of focusing on boys, boys, boys. (Also, speaking as a girl who loved taking the dinghy out when I was a kid, preferably without parents? I recognize these girls' experience very well.)

Fair warning, Sneve's storytelling style doesn't follow the European convention of relentless-drive-toward-the-storyteller's-goal, but uses a much slower and meandering technique. I enjoyed that, but those wedded to the European storytelling convention are likely to be frustrated by the pace.


2. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, Lana's Lakota Moons.

Flag for oyceter and anyone else who's been looking for intra-POC friendships: the two sisters* in this story are Lakota; their best friend is Hmong.

Pacing-wise, this one ambles and curves even more than The Chichi Hoohoo Bogeyman, but as I said before, I don't consider this a flaw. A good chunk of page-time is spent on cultural education, either the grandparents passing traditions to the children, or the Lakota and Hmong parents exchanging histories and experiences. Readers who don't like "teachy" books -- as distinct from "preachy" books, which this isn't -- aren't going to be fans of this one. I, however, did like this one.

This is a quiet book about a close but conflict-ridden relationship between two sisters, told with a fair bit of underlying sadness and loss, which is interlaced with learning how to identify and preserve what is both valuable and preservable. As you might guess from that description, this isn't a happy-go-lucky upbeat book, but it doesn't read to me as an extreme downer, either. Loss is one of the things that colors the lives of these three girls and their families, but it is not the only thing in their lives, and it is not something that they are utterly helpless in the face of.

It was this book, more than The Chichi Hoohoo Bogeyman, that pushed me over the line into becoming a Sneve fan; I'm definitely keeping an eye out for her other books.


* in the Lakota sense. To most English-speakers, they'd be first cousins.

60. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, Bad River Boys.

A children's picture book of the encounter between the Sicangu Lakota and the Lewis and Clark expedition, told from the perspective of the three Sicangu boys who had swum out into the river to greet the expedition. The meeting between the Sicangu and the Corps of Discovery isn't simplified, moralized, or narrativized, which makes this book difficult to follow if you don't know the contexts or the history, and those looking for a neatly-told "story" will be disappointed. There are explanatory historical notes in the back, but they're brief.

(For those who are unfamiliar: the Sicangu controlled trade access on that stretch of the Bad River -- the Missouri -- and expected tribute from traders moving upriver. Whereas the French traders had been willing to pay such tribute, the U.S. Corps of Discovery was not only unwilling, but considered themselves forerunners of the new local authority. Add to that the fact that Sicangu authority wasn't invested in one guy and his underlings, the way the Americans kept behaving as if it was, plus inadequate translation, and the whole mess came down to an armed standoff between the Sicangu and the Discovery Corps, the only violence or near-violence of the expedition.^*)

One of the things I very much liked about the book is that it is framed as completely normal to be a Sicangu boy; there's none of the "explanatory" exoticizing one too often sees, and various details make it clear that the Lakota were not savages, but people who had a high respect for children, guests, and good manners. Similarly, I liked that the book put Lewis and Clark into an appropriate, non-mythic historical context: the boys are very familiar with white men and speak some French, while the chiefs decorate their tipis with French, British, and Spanish flags.

There are some things that I don't like, however: it is too easy, in my opinion, to misread the adults' demands for tribute appropriate to their status as merely greedy children wheedling for more candy, and York describes himself (albeit with the aid of a interpreter who has previously been established as faulty) as having "once been a wild animal," before he was captured by slave traders. One of the strengths of the book is that Sneve doesn't condescendingly tell the reader how s/he should be interpreting the story, but in both cases, I would have liked the text to be clearer about the intercultural mangling of POV that was happening in those exchanges.

I have mixed feelings about the illustrations, as well. The opening spread makes me happy, as do most of the shots of the children. (I especially like the children treading water in the river, having swum out to meet the Corps' boats and discovering them possibly not so friendly, covertly signing to each other to swim underwater if the encounter turns worse.) I adore this full-page shot of York, but the very next page is rampaging, openmouthed, braves-with-tomahawks, a la The Matchlock Gun and too many westerns. There's something a little too, I dunno, romanticized about this set of illustrations.

I feel like I'm being more critical than the book deserves -- I mostly wish there were a lot more children's books like this. Children's books that portray Indians as something that it's utterly normal to be, books that don't relegate Indians to backdrops or scenery, nor foreground them only as exotic, tragic fantasy material. I want children's books that talk about important cultural/historical markers from Indian points of view, instead of faux-Indian points of view. There's a lot that I like about this book, and some things that I wish were different, but my feelings about Bad River Boys mostly revolve around how incredibly rare it is to see a book like this.

* In his journal, Clark referred to the Sicangu as "the pirates of the Missouri" and "the vilest miscreants of the savage race." I note that it was hardly the Sicangu who were the pirates; Lewis and Clark had been trying to smuggle trade goods upriver past the Sioux!

61. Alvin M. Josephy, Jr. (ed), Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes.

Ten Native authors -- Geraro A. Baker (Mandan-Hidatsa), Roberta Basch (Puyallup and Coeur D'Alene), Richard Basch (Clatsop Nehalem), Roberta Conner (Cayuse, Umatilla, Nez Perce), Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux), Debra Magpie Earling (Confederated Salish and Kootenai), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Allen V. Pinkham Sr. (Nez Perce), Mark N. Trahant (Shoshone-Bannock), and Bill P. Yellowtail (Crow) -- writing nine essays about Lewis and Clark and the so-called Corps of Discovery for the 200th anniversary of the expedition.

It's hard to sum this one up because the (white) editor deliberately exercised the loosest possible control: he selected the ten authors, then promised to publish what they wrote without editing for tone or position. Some authors brought on the snark, others wrote very personal reflections, others offered their own nations' accounts of the Corps of Discovery, others explicitly debunk aspects of the Lewis and Clark mythos. Some themes are consistent throughout the essays, however. Lewis and Clark were not the "first" anything that the mythos so often claims to be: not the first discoverers, not the first elections, not even the first white men. Also, the Corps of Discovery was a recent event, one that occurred within the stream of history, not at the beginning of it.

Two essays that I particularly wanted to mention:

Roberta and Richard Basch's "The Ceremony at Ne-Ah-Coxie," which gives the history of the Clatsop tribe, who had hosted the Corps of Discovery in their winter quarters at Fort Clatsop. There is a pizza parlor in Seaside that displays of a photo of a woman who is allegedly "the last of the Clatsop", but the Clatsop continue to exist, albeit federally unrecognized. In 1951 the Clatsop negotiated a treaty which formally ceded land and would have established a reservation; that treaty was never ratified, and the proposed reservation became a military base, and then a state park.

Bill Yellowtail's snarktastic "Meriwether and Billy and the Indian Business", full of lovely details sporking the L&C mythos -- such as L&C repeatedly arriving places to find that their trade goods had arrived months before them -- interspersed with Yellowtail's thoughts on modern Indian governance and entrepeneurship. The essay closes:

Clark was righteously sore about his loss of valuable horses, ostensibly to some nocturnal Crow Indian entrepeneurs. He vented his pique by actually drafting an extensive speech by means of which he would chastise the Crows. "Children. Your Great Father will be very sorry to hear of the (Crows) stealing the horses of his Chiefs warrors whome he sent out to do good to his red children on the waters of the Missoure." But then he goes on magnaminously: "Children. If any one two or 3 of your great chiefs wishes to visit your great father and go with me... You will then see with your own eyes and here with your own years what the white people can do for you. They do not speak with the tongues nor promis what they can't perform."

We can only wonder how the Crows would have reacted, had Clark ever found them to deliver his diatribe.

It is not so hard to imagine how we would respond to that speech today.

Probably we would say: Meriwether and Billy. Welcome back after all these years. Bring horses.

62. Frank X Walker, Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York

Poem cycle by Afrilachian poet Frank X Walker, narrating the Corps of Discovery's expedition in the voice of York. These are gorgeous and subsversive snapshots of moments of the journey; taken together, they build a life-story that is very obviously operaticin its sweep.

Sprit Mound

We returned to the boat at sunset, my servent nearly exosted with heat thurst and fatigue, he being fat and unaccustomed to walk as fast as I went wast he cause.
—William Clark, August 25, 1804

Capts. Clark an Lewis together with nine mens
an me along to carry an cook
walked 'most a whole day to see Spirit Mound.

I didn't want to go no place
so sacred even the Indians afraid to step,
so I pretends to be more tired than I was.

This piece a land so full a spirits
I felt little hairs praising on the back a my neck
but Capt. Clark don't seem to understand
what be sacred to others any more
than he see the difference
between me ana pack mule.

Maybe the chief should have bade him
to think a it as the Great White Father's
mother's undergarments or that
what's under her skirt.

Emory Dean Keoke and Kay Marie Porterfield, American Indian Contributions to the World

43. Trade, Transportation, and Warfare
44. Food, Farming, and Hunting.
45. Medicine and Health.
46. Buildings, Clothing, and Art.
47. Science and Technology.

This is a five-volume series, aimed at approx. junior-high schoolers upper elementary grades. (There's a related single-volume Encyclopedia by the same authors; I can't speak to its similarities or differences to the five-volume version, other than that it's apparently aimed at junior-high schoolers.) I've been posting highlights from them in my journal (links above), but wanted to review the series as a whole.

Speaking personally, reading these was almost giddy-making. As a kid, I was given lots of books about Indians that featured nuts and berries, under the misguided notion that this would teach me "pride in my heritage." Plus there was all the elementary school-curriculum stuff -- the one I remember most clearly had us rumpling up paper bags and then cutting armholes and neckholes to make shirts allegedly in the style of Northwest Coast Indians. (The paper bags were supposed to represent cedar bark, and the rumpling was supposed to represent a treatment to soften the fibers, but my primary takeaway was that Indians allegedly made clothes that were ugly, ill-fitting, and uncomfortable, using materials that had all the sophistication of household garbage.¹ Additionally, I keenly remember feeling very alone in that classroom.) Eventually you grow up and learn to debunk those narratives, but there's still a hole at the center, a hole where a truer narrative should have been.

This series is a nice antidote to those all those nuts-and-berries narratives. All week long, I've been trying my friends' patience with all the giddy "...and that's something you have American Indians to thank for!" that I've been doing.

There's an awful lot that I like about these books. In addition to simply providing a list of influences and accomplishments, they implicitly challenge the narrative that the Fertile Crescent is the cradle of civilization, as well as the idea that a "contribution to the world" should be defined as "something adopted by Europeans" or that innovations necessarily default to Europe-and-those-civilizations-claimed-by-Europe unless you can show that another culture did it first. (The way some people tell it, the only things that China ever invented were the compass and gunpowder. Um, no. The Yellow River was an independent cradle of civilization. China invented a whole slew of things.)

The "what counts" debunking is largely implicit, but there's quite a lot of explicit debunking of misconceptions going on in the sidebars to the text. F'rex, there's a really nice sporking of the idea that Indians were too stupid to know the "true" worth of glass beads. (The sidebar uses stamps and stamp collecting as an example of how value is constructed. Bit of paper? Essentially worthless. Put the proper picture on it? Worth an arbitrary number of cents. Make an error in the picture, or make the stamp otherwise rare? Extremely valuable. Glass beads aren't inherently worthless, and certainly weren't worthless in the numbers they initially came to the Americas in. It was importing them by the ton that depreciated their value.) Similarly, a sidebar takes on the notion of "stone age technology" by discussing the relative sharpness of Aztec stone surgical knives and modern surgical scalpels, and that one might sanely choose to use stone, even when metalworking is available. Similarly, the book notes, the Aztecs used stone swords that could behead a Conquistador's horse.

(Speaking of Conquistadors, I loved all the anti-Conquistador snark. Well, okay, technically, there was exactly zero snark -- the tone of the text is all very mature and dignified throughout. That said, anything that scared/upset/befuddled Conquistadors gets an additional paragraph or two. Keoke and Porterfield don't themselves snark, but they sure toss a few soft and easy pitches over the plate for those of us who might want to snark on Conquistadors. I, for one, appreciate it.)

About the only shortcoming to the series, in my mind, is that there are no endnotes. (I know, I know, it's aimed at kids.) But when you're all, "Wow, really? What was the deal with that?" the next few links of the documentation trail aren't in the book, which can be frustrating. :-/

But mostly? These made me very happy, and I'd like to see them get some widespread use.

ETA: Oyate sells both versions: elementary school five-volume version; high school one-volume version.

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1 My library has an ample collection of contemporary books full of similar craft projects, including making religious objects out of paper plates and old magazines. There are days that I want very much to write a "Explore World Religions Through Crafts" book that features directions for making Temple Garments out of garbage bags and how to bake your own Eucharist.