Showing posts with label They Were Strong and Good. Show all posts
Showing posts with label They Were Strong and Good. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Stereotypical words and images: Gone!

Over the years, I've written about children's books that were revised.

A few days ago I compiled links about revised books (some are mine and some are from others who work in children's literature) and inserted them in my post about A Fine Dessert. Today, I'm putting them on a stand-alone page. If you know of other changes, do let me know. This set of links will eventually appear at Teaching for Change.

We are rarely told why these books were changed, and we're rarely told when the change itself is made.  Some changes are no-change, really, because the ideology of the book (writer?) is still there, beneath the words that get changed. Some changes--like the ones in picture books--are significant. All of them are, nonetheless, important to know about.

Thursday, February 03, 2011

Robert Lawson's "Indians--tame ones" and slaves in Minnesota

This weekend at the Children's Literature Symposium at Florida State University-Sarasota, I'll be giving a talk about the illustrations of Indians in books that won the Caldecott Medal. I've been doing research on the books, reading some of them for the first time, and re-reading others.

One that I am re-reading is Robert Lawson's They Were Strong and Good. Published in 1940, it won the Caldecott that year. The book opens with a Foreword that reads:
This is the story of my mother and my father and of their fathers and mothers.

Most of it I heard as a little boy, so there may be many mistakes; perhaps I have forgotten or mixed up some of the events and people. But that does not really matter, for this is not alone the story of my parents and grandparents, it is the story of the parents and grandparents of most of us who call ourselves Americans. 
So, Lawson tells us, They Were Strong and Good is a family history of sorts. His disclaimer is interesting---it leaves me with many questions. The cover of the book shows us his parents and grandparents:

and the end pages (pages just inside the front and back cover) show us the same people. This image is from Peter D. Sieruta's blog, Collecting Children's Books, where he's got an essay on They Were Strong and Good. His essay title is "They Were Strong and Good Enough for 1940."


In 1994 a revised edition was published. In the revised one, the phrase "Indians--tame ones" was changed. The phrase "tame ones" was omitted. That wasn't the only part of the book that was changed. Its language with respect to African Americans was also changed. Beverly Slapin wrote about the changes a few years ago, and Jean Mendoza shared some pointed questions about the original text.  Please take time to read what they said.

As I studied They Were Strong and Good yesterday, I honed in on this page:


The text that goes with the page places that image in Minnesota. In the foreground are an Indian man and woman who have been given a pie and are being chased away. But who is chasing them? The young girl behind the African American woman is Lawson's mother. Lawson was born in 1892, so I'm guessing the year for that story is roughly 1872, assuming his mother gave birth to him when she was 20 years old. So...  Minnesota in 1870s. Slaves? That gave me pause, so I started digging in to Minnesota history and slavery.  Right away I found a Minnesota Public Radio story about the research and upcoming book by Professor Christopher Lehman at St. Cloud University in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Here's the first few paragraphs from the MPR site:
St. Paul, Minn. — A St. Cloud State University professor has found evidence of slavery in several Minnesota counties before the Civil War, a groundbreaking discovery that sheds light on the Midwest's pre-Civil War history.

Christopher Lehman, an ethnic studies professor who is researching slavery in states along the upper Mississippi River, has documented slavery in Stearns, Benton, Hennepin, Ramsey, and Washington counties.

His research, to be published in a book in 2012, also found that prominent St. Cloud families of the mid-19th Century were slave owners.

I wrote to Professor Lehman to let him know about They Were Strong and Good and he's written back asking for more information. Hence, today's blog post. I don't know if it will, in the end, be useful to Lehman. What I find deeply satisfying about studying children's books is the information they hold. Some, like They Were Strong and Good tell us a lot about history and race. They should not be dismissed as "less than" because they're written for children.

There is value in having children study They Were Strong and Good. I don't recommend it be used with young children "as-is"---it should be studied by students in high school, perhaps in critical media literacy or social justice or civics courses.  

I'm looking forward to the Symposium, listening to learning from others who also work with and study children's books. One keynote speaker is Mary GrandPre. She did the illustrations for the Harry Potter books. The other keynote will be given by Kenneth Kidd, author of Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. An excerpt from his book is available at the publisher's website. If you're near Sarasota on Saturday, consider attending the symposium. Registration for the general public is $85.00 and includes lunch and snacks.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

THEY WERE STRONG AND GOOD, Review by Beverly Slapin

[Note: Yesterday’s post (written by Jean Mendoza) was about a children's book called They Were Strong and Good. Today, you can read Beverly Slapin's review of the book. Her review is also in A Broken Flute: The Native Experience in Books for Children.]
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Lawson, Robert, They Were Strong and Good, illustrations by the author. New York: Viking Press (1940, 1994). Unpaginated, b/w illustrations, grades 2-3

Originally published in 1940 and republished in 1994, They Were Strong and Good is described by the author as being “the story of my mother and my father and of their fathers and mothers.”
"When my mother was a little girl there were Indians in Minnesota—tame ones. My mother did not like them. They would stalk into the kitchen without knocking and sit on the floor. Then they would rub their stomachs and point to their mouths to show that they were hungry. They would not leave until my mother’s mother gave them something to eat."
Look very closely to find what was changed in the 1994 edition:
"When my mother was a little girl there were Indians in Minnesota. My mother did not like them. They would stalk into the kitchen without knocking and sit on the floor. Then they would rub their stomachs and point to their mouths to show that they were hungry. They would not leave until my mother’s mother gave them something to eat."
This illustration is of a Black woman—a bandanna-wearing “mammy”—brandishing a broom at two Indians who are running away with stolen food.
In another section, the 1940 text reads:
"When my father was very young he had two dogs and a colored boy. The dogs were named Sextus Hostilius and Numa Pompilius. The colored boy was just my father’s age. He was a slave, but they didn’t call him that. They just called him Dick. He and my father and the two hound dogs used to hunt all day long."
And the 1994 text reads:
"When my father was very young he had a Negro slave and two dogs. The dogs were named Sextus Hostilius and Numa Pompilius. The Negro boy was just my father’s age and his name was Dick. He and my father and the two hound dogs used to hunt all day long."
This illustration is of a Black youngster dressed in rags, carrying two dead animals, walking behind his young white master. Several other illustrations also show Black people dressed in rags, in various positions of servitude.
They Were Strong and Good received the Caldecott Award in 1941, which even for that time period is a little surprising, given its stereotypical and derogatory depiction of both Native and African-American people. The 1994 edition is not improved by its minor textual changes. It was a horrid little book then with its sense of white entitlement and superiority and it’s a horrid little book now. In order for some children to be proud of their cultures, should other children be made ashamed of theirs?
—Beverly Slapin

Monday, September 04, 2006

Jean Mendoza: Reflections on THEY WERE STRONG AND GOOD

[Note: Today’s post is by Jean Mendoza, professor in Early Childhood Education at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois. Jean and I are both former schoolteachers and have collaborated and commiserated many times as we raise our children in a college town that embraces a race-based mascot (“Chief Illiniwek”). See our article "Examining Multicultural Picture Books for the Early Childhood Classroom".]
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Debbie,

The list you shared several weeks ago of top-selling paperbacks is disturbing, and resonated with an experience I had recently. 

I’ve been revisiting Louise Erdrich's Tracks, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and Four Souls. Recently, I noticed on a colleague's door a big poster of Caldecott (children’s book) Award winners, going 'way back. There on the bottom row was Robert Lawson's contribution to the "canon": They Were Strong and Good, a mostly uncritical look at some of that author's forebears. It contains the following lines (if I remember right):
"When my mother was a little girl there were Indians in Minnesota--tame ones. My mother did not like them. They would stalk into the kitchen without knocking and sit on the floor. They would rub their stomachs and point to their mouths to show that they were hungry. They would not leave until my mother's mother gave them something to eat."
In contrast, Erdrich’s accounts of the fictional lives of Nanapush, Kashpaws, and Pillagers reflect a different historical and personal reality situated in essentially the same locale at about the same time as Lawson’s family stories.

For an adult reader, Erdrich provides a kind of unintended backstory for Lawson's superficial and bigoted child-directed comments about those "tame Indians". In order for the Lawson forebears to settle in Minnesota, the land had to be taken from families whose own forebears had made their lives on it, and from it, for millennia -- forebears who could undoubtedly have been described as “strong and good” themselves.

Obviously we are to assume that Lawson’s “tame Indians” were too lazy or incompetent to get food on their own, choosing instead to rudely enter the rightful home of Lawson’s hardworking family to beg. Erdrich’s characters may have been fictional, but the waves of disease, famine, and land theft were horribly real to the actual indigenous people of Minnesota & the Dakotas. What a small, shallow, relatively ahistorical world-view Lawson’s book expresses, despite the array of countries his ancestors hailed from!

Lawson does not seem to question what might have led up to the situation he describes. Did none of his strong/good ancestors ever say, “Hm; we prosper while others in the same space starve. How did this come to pass?”

In Four Souls, Erdrich has a (Euro-American) character describe a particular house:
“On the most exclusive ridge of the city, our pure white house was set, pristine as a cake in the window of a bakery shop.”
In the preceding chapter, however, Ojibwe elder Nanapush tells a more complete story of that house: the origins of the stones, the brick, the iron – and most importantly (as it turns out), the wood.
“Once this stone had formed the live heart of sacred islands,” says Nanapush; but now to the couple who occupy the house, that stone “was a fashionable backdrop to their ambitions.”
Not sure where to take this line of thought now, except that this experience makes me wish that if a teacher, parent, or librarian is going to recommend that a child read They Were Strong and Good simply because it has the Caldecott stamp of approval and seems like a good All-American story, that teacher/parent/librarian would first read Erdrich’s books.

There’s another “All-American” story behind Lawson’s – one that any child in the US ought to have access to, so that he or she doesn’t construct a false picture of how the US came to be.

I guess then the next step would be for that adult to recommend Erdrich’s children’s novels, The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence to the same child. In fact, ideally the child would have read Birchbark and Silence BEFORE giving Strong and Good a second glance. Then Erdrich’s picture of Ojibwe life can become a lens through which the child can consider the picture of “tame Indian” life Lawson presents.

Books like Lawson's seem never to fade into richly-deserved oblivion. A visit to the Amazon.com reader reviews indicates that They Were Strong and Good is still making some people feel fine about themselves, 60-some years after it was awarded the Caldecott, which means that it continues to be a tool for the disinformation of children, whether or not teachers, librarians and parents mean for it to be so.

By the way, I appreciated the comments from the mother whose daughter kept encountering Education of Little Tree. Thanks for the account of what critical reading and writing can look like (and feel like). Many people have written eloquently about the problems that book has and presents, and still it manages to be beloved of many who resist any questioning of its value – and who are determined to continue its legacy of bigotry and lies.

I’ve asked this question before in other circles and had interesting replies: Is there, or should there be, some kind of “ethics of aesthetics”, that would have an answer to the notion that, for example, an author's background or bigotry "doesn't matter because the book was well-written". Is an award for illustration, for example, a good enough reason to keep Strong and Good in print and on Recommended lists, when it perpetuates negative images of Native people (not to mention an apparently sympathetic or apologist view of slavery)?

At what point might an author, an illustrator, a publisher, a librarian, a teacher have a responsibility to say no to what's in a book in the interest of "doing no harm" to the child reader? Always, sometimes, never? And then, what constitutes "harm"...


---Jean Mendoza