A Broken Flute
So, I've been slowly, oh-so-slowly working my way through Oyate.Org's A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children. If I ever finish it, I'll write it up for 50books_poc, but in the meanwhile, you get this, because I can't hold what I have to say for that long. (grrlpup would laugh at the suggestion that I've been holding back: Saturday I was reduced to kicking the brand-new interpretive sign at the base of SE 50th and Hawthorne with its stupid "they ate roots and acorns" bullshit. What am I descended from, bears?? Grrlpup says we should do a satire-plaque to replace the "great accomplishments of Dr. Hawthorne" plaque, consisting entirely of breathless detail about what Dr. Hawthorne ate.)
So, yeah. Most of you know I'm part-Native, most of you know that I usually don't claim that identity (and perhaps I'll talk more about that in another post, later). I also wasn't well-educated in that identity. My dad didn't teach me much about being Indian. A little. Mom was a white elementary-school teacher, and tried to teach me Pride In My Heritage a la public school diversity curriculums. Which means that she gave me a bunch of children's books about the Lakota and Ojibwe, the two Native bloodlines in my family. (Except that these books never used those words: these books were about the "Sioux" and "Chippewa." Which will tell some folks quite a lot about these books.)
So, you've got that? I was told by my parents that I was an Indian, Sioux and Chippewa, just like my dad, but I was "educated" about that identity primarily via white-POV books about Indians.
A Broken Flute, all 433 pages of it, exists for no reason other than to point out how deeply and disgustingly screwed-up most kids' books about Indians are, and how much these books damage kids. This book brings up so much rage that I am having a difficult time reading much more than a few paragraphs at a sitting. Deep, consuming, I-need-a-sledgehammer-to-express-myself rage.
And not just one rage, no. A multiplicity of rages, at all sorts of levels, ricocheting around and crashing off one another, like surf trapped among the rocks.
I'll give you an example of how reading this book goes.
Rage 1: That the atrocity happened.
Frankly, being part-Native in this country and reading about your own history is not easy. Especially not the parts of our history that are available in the public domain. Nineteenth-century (and earlier) whites mostly didn't think of us as much better than rats, and it's both as simple and as ugly as that.
For example, in the section of this book reviewing children's books about the California Missions? Not only were Indians enslaved to build the cursed things, but the enslaved Indians were considered so far from human that when they died, their bodies were used as construction materials. Or, for another example, during the Diné death march to Bosque Redondo (aka "The Navajo Long Walk"), U.S. soldiers murdered all the Diné women who went into childbirth because the soldiers didn't want to delay the march. If you have any familiarity with the actual history of this country, it's full of atrocities like this. They come unremittingly, one fully as bad as the next.
And this isn't even what A Broken Flute is about. This is background material. But still, whenever I get to some new, impossible-to-take-calmly-detail, I have to take a break. Try to shake off enough of the biting freshness of my outrage so that I can actually continue to the point of the book.
Rage 2: (optional, depending on topic) That I didn't know about it.
My education is spotty. The California history covered in here, in particular, is something I have little knowledge of.
So the thing with Indian skulls and bones used as fill in the mission walls? Being used as decorative elements? I didn't know. Which meant that when, years ago, a Californian friend sent me a photo of the sugar-cube Mission his daughter had built for school, I cooed over it.
I cooed over it.
This system that I was raised in is so very fucked up, that I can't even advocate for my own self. The system has made me complicit by ensuring that I don't even know what needs to be fought back against.
So again, I have to put down the book and go rage for a while.
Rage 3: The very, very stupid shit that the reviewed books say, or fail to say, about these atrocities.
The book that advocates building sugar-cube models of the missions has a single paragraph about who performed the labor on these missions. It refers to the enslavement of Indians as "the mission lifestyle." Another book about the missions managed to characterize it as some sort of win-win thing: "you build these buildings for us, and we'll teach you to farm." And never mind the deep sickness in having nine-year-olds build sugar-cube models of death camps.
One of the books about the Long Walk is a fictionalized account of a young girl on that death march. She was apparently a Shirley Temple precursor who would cheer folks by making up stories and singing songs. People's homes and livelihoods had been burned and destroyed; the people themselves had been rounded up and forced onto a death march; people were dying of hunger and exhaustion; soldiers were murdering children, elders, and women-in-childbirth - and the book is all about how cute little Shirley-Temple-Sings-A-Lot is successfully chasing away everyone's sorrow with her happy songs??
Oh, and also, the soldiers are really nice in that book. A young Diné women falls in love with one of them. Because, you know, it's all about gentle, compassionate Indian princesses understanding that the white men are good and nice and that her own people were wrong to be suspicious of them.
And we're barely even grazing the surface of the stupid shit in these books. Truly.
Excuse me, please, while I go rage a while.
Rage 4: The publication dates on these books.
These books aren't half-forgotten montrosities from the fifties.
Shirley-Temple-Sings-A-Lot is the title character of The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow, published in 1999. It's part of the Dear America series. Its average review on Amazon is four stars. (One of the few one-star reviews is from a Navajo boy who objects that the facts are wrong, the history too nice, and that it contradicts the stories of his Elders. Do me a favor, please, dear reader? Demonstrate respect for Native voices as an authority on their own history and go click "Yes, this review is helpful to me." I'll wait.)
Don't Know Much About Sitting Bull was published in 2003. This is a question and answer book with such profound delights as, "Q: Why did the Plains Indians like to fight? Why didn't they want peace? A: It's hard for us to understand a warrior culture, but the Lakota liked war." And don't even get me started on "Why did Lakota warriors kill babies?" Another gem from that book: "Modern kids can count coups [sic] with new toys, designer clothes, sports trophies, or money."
It goes on and on like this. Publication dates from the late 1990s and early 2000s. A very few of the reviewed books fall in the category of Classics That Would Not Die, but even they are reflections of what is popular right now.
(Hey, remember the bit in Little House on the Prairie where Laura talks about her family squatting on the Osage reservation in Kansas, not a mile from one of the main Osage villages, and how her Dad and the other squatters were stealing Osage horses and winter food stores, burning Osage farms, and robbing Osage graves, in a concerted attempt to drive the Osages off their reservation? No? Oh, that's right. She forgot to mention any of that. I guess it wasn't important. It's a good thing that Little House on the Prairie has fallen into disrepute as being one big nasty passel of lies, isn't it? Oh, wait, it hasn't? Excuse me while I go get my sledgehammer...)
Rage 5: All through my childhood, I knew there was something deeply wrong about all the "fair-minded" stuff people said about Indians, yet because I could never name what was wrong about it, I became convinced that I was the crazy one.
The Oyate reviewers speak in clear and uncompromising voices, detailing what is wrong with these books. Criticisms range from false "facts" about events or cultures, to the ludicrous mischaracterizations, screwy emphases, and tacit endorsements of racist and murderous acts in the ubiquitous "non-inflammatory" language. All the false facts pretty much blew past me when I was a child---what did I know about what Diné culture was really like?---but the screwy emphases, the tacit endorsements? I caught those just fine.
All through my childhood, I had squirmed at the oft-repeated descriptions of this or that Indian people as eating nuts and berries, but had never been able to name what was so upsetting about it.
But I'm an adult now. There are LOTS of things are upsetting about it. It's a building-block toward justification of genocide: Indians were the barest primitives, barely competent to keep themselves housed and fed; being overrun by whites was virtually an act of God---might as well assign murderous intent to a tornado in a trailer park. (You thought Manifest Destiny was an out-of-date doctrine? Hah!) "Nuts and berries" also gets used as code for "but you have modern medicine now! And pizza! So it all came out fine in the end!" And don't even get me started on the "romantic, pure, wild, natural" aspect of "nuts and berries".
That description is VERY popular, and it's because it nests so nicely with almost every popular myth that white Americans like to tell themselves about their history with Native Americans. Plus, it has the bonus of being cryptic enough that it can be disguised as honoring and acknowledging Native peoples.
In years past, when I have tried to say this to people, when I have tried to point out what is so glaringly, insidiously awful about a plaque that reads, "The Multnomah tribe once lived here. They ate nuts and berries. Then Captain Hawthorne came and OMG EXCITING CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY AND PHILANTHROPY GUSH GUSH GUSH!"...? People have stared at me like I'm a conspiracy-theorist. Because that language is ubiquitous. Everywhere. Normal. What else could anyone possibly say about Indians?
Yet here, in Broken Flute, we have many, many authors who are pointing out exactly the same thing that I was seeing. Saying it clearly, without minimization. Unequivocally detailing the connections to the larger patterns, demonstrating that this "fair" and "non-divisive" language is anything but fair and non-divisive.
Which means that when I was a kid, when I felt crazy and stupid because this book about Chippewa living in wigwams and eating cranberries made me feel ashamed? When I couldn't see what this had to do with Pride In My Heritage? I was neither crazy nor stupid.
More rage. Rage that I never heard these voices when I was a kid; rage and grief that I grew up doubting myself and my own sanity whenever I detected something that seemed so deeply off in these books.
Number 6, Which is More Like Getting Kicked in the Stomach than Rage: What I learned.
Near the end of many of these reviews, the authors will say something along the lines of "Non-Native children will come away from this book having learned that missionaries taught Indians to work. Native children will learn that their lives don't matter as much as cattle and oranges."
I was that child.
Let me be clear. I was BOTH those children.
The first statement, about what non-Native children will learn, is predicated upon the assumption that Native children are part of a community who are teaching them the difference between what really happened and the elided versions of history say happened. I didn't have that. I learned from these books that Indians were lazy and backward, and that it was their manifest destiny that they should end up dead. I learned that if that destiny came to pass in such a cruel and ugly way, it was because the Indians didn't have the good sense to be graceful and sportsmanlike about getting out of the way. ("They failed to adjust to modern life," as these books like to say.) And of course, I learned these things at a deep don't-even-realize-you're-learning-it level, the one that's hard to find and unlearn.
Intertwined through with that, I also learned that I didn't matter, that I was supposed to be dead. I learned that if I saw ghosts in my history books, ghosts in the landscape, if I walked around my town and saw the walls and buildings drenched in blood... Well, I was just crazy. Because it didn't happen; and even if it had happened, it didn't really matter; and even if it had mattered, everyone was fine with it anyway. In fact, they were so fine with it that it seemed to me rather a lucky thing that no one seemed to know or believe that I and my dad were Indian, because us being alive was obviously an oversight, and you wouldn't want to bring that oversight to anyone's attention. I was just another unseen ghost walking among unseen ghosts. Unseen ghosts and murderous people.
And make sure you understand this: the reason I came to believe that the people now were murderous, is because they seemed intent on insisting that the stuff that happened then wasn't murder.
I tell you, the passages describing that "non-Native children will learn... Native children will learn..." would seem spookily prescient if I hadn't already lived it twenty-five years earlier. Even so, I read it on the page and realize that it's true, that IS what I learned. And it's like a kick to my stomach. I don't want a sledgehammer this time. I want to vomit.
So. Yeah. That's why I'm reading A Broken Flute a few paragraphs at a time. (Actually, I've gotten better these past few days; I can read pages at a time now.) But even though it's slow and painful, I am compelled to keep on with it. It has knowledge I need: false knowledge I want to leave behind (and certainly NOT pass on inadvertently to someone else); true knowledge I was never taught.
Ye gods, I wish this book had been available when I was a kid. I wish that my parents had it, that my schoolteachers had it. That they used it. Lots of well-intentioned people screwed my head over pretty thoroughly.
Many of the reviews in A Broken Flute are available on the oyate.org website. Or better yet, get a copy of A Broken Flute for yourself. And use it.