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From: Jeffrey Canton <jeffrey_canton>
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 12:56:32 -0700 (PDT)
I have watched this discussion with very mixed emotions. I can empathsize with how First Nations children must feel to see themselves so cruelly portrayed but I don't blame the books - I blame the teachers.
As a Jew, the place I saw myself reflected in children's literature a child was as a victim of persecution of the Nazi regime with the exception of a book here and there like the One-of-a-Kind?mily stories which were certainly not any help to me as a kid growing up in Canada in the 60's and 70's. As a gay teen if I saw any reflections they were mainly stereoypical, mostly negative, and these books certainly didn't help me come to terms with my sexuality. But that didn't meant that I didn't take great pleasure in books and reading because I didn't see myself as I actually was in books.
It is a terrible injustice that contemporary native kids have to deal with the brutality and negative sterotypes which Debbie and Maia and others have pointed out pepper the world that Wilder paints in the Little House books but I'm sorry - you can't go on blaming the books ad infinitem. I grew up on a steady diet of Enid Blyton and Hugh Lofting and PL Travers and a host of other writers whose books had some obnoxious stereotyping and racist content but despite this steady diet of racially unpleasant texts I consider myself as free of racist tendencies as any other educated informed human being living on the cusp of the millenium. I also didn't grow up seeing myself as a victim of racial hatred becuase most images of Jews I saw were of helpless men women and children who went either to the gas chambers or managed to hang on to a thread of life in a death camp.
I completely agree that we need to balance these sorely misguided books but to dismiss them completely because they represent the perceptions of another time in history is the worst kind of censorship. If I applied the same rules to adult literature most of the great of the 20th century would have to be tossed out
- TS Eliot, Virginia Wool, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and more - whose work is full of anti-semetic banter which we in the late 20th century no longer find acceptable. And adults do not necessarily bring intelligence, as we all aware, to reading, despite their experience.
Don't you think that rather than toss out the Little House books which I believe have an innate literary value in spite of their inappropriate view of First Nations peoples, we should address them with new introductions, for example, that look at what's wrong with some of Wilder's views or classroom guides that offer these books as wonderful reading experiences that are flawed by these misrepresntations.
We can't toss everything out until there is as significant a body of vibrant First Nations literature that it can fully balance all the errors that are in existing literature. Strong new voices are being heard
- in Canada voices, for example, like George Littlechild and Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, C.J. Taylor and Jan Waboose and a growing number of others but this takes time.
But I think that it is the teachers and librarians who have to bear the repsonsibility of making it clear to contempoary kids - whether or not they are members of the First Nations or not - that there are flaws in these books that are deeply hurtful and that portray these people in ways that we no longer will accept unquestioningly.
On the Child_Lit discussion forum there has just been a lengthy exchange about censorship that followed the challange to an exhibition just opened at the Brooklyn Museum and to Harry Potter in several states. Censorship is wrong in whatever guise it assumes. The Little House books need a guiding hand in the 90's but that doesn't mean that they don't have a value and aren't worth sharing with contemporary kids.
Jeffrey Canton Toronto
--- Debbie Reese wrote:
====
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com
Received on Fri 15 Oct 1999 02:56:32 PM CDT
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 12:56:32 -0700 (PDT)
I have watched this discussion with very mixed emotions. I can empathsize with how First Nations children must feel to see themselves so cruelly portrayed but I don't blame the books - I blame the teachers.
As a Jew, the place I saw myself reflected in children's literature a child was as a victim of persecution of the Nazi regime with the exception of a book here and there like the One-of-a-Kind?mily stories which were certainly not any help to me as a kid growing up in Canada in the 60's and 70's. As a gay teen if I saw any reflections they were mainly stereoypical, mostly negative, and these books certainly didn't help me come to terms with my sexuality. But that didn't meant that I didn't take great pleasure in books and reading because I didn't see myself as I actually was in books.
It is a terrible injustice that contemporary native kids have to deal with the brutality and negative sterotypes which Debbie and Maia and others have pointed out pepper the world that Wilder paints in the Little House books but I'm sorry - you can't go on blaming the books ad infinitem. I grew up on a steady diet of Enid Blyton and Hugh Lofting and PL Travers and a host of other writers whose books had some obnoxious stereotyping and racist content but despite this steady diet of racially unpleasant texts I consider myself as free of racist tendencies as any other educated informed human being living on the cusp of the millenium. I also didn't grow up seeing myself as a victim of racial hatred becuase most images of Jews I saw were of helpless men women and children who went either to the gas chambers or managed to hang on to a thread of life in a death camp.
I completely agree that we need to balance these sorely misguided books but to dismiss them completely because they represent the perceptions of another time in history is the worst kind of censorship. If I applied the same rules to adult literature most of the great of the 20th century would have to be tossed out
- TS Eliot, Virginia Wool, Fitzgerald, Hemingway and more - whose work is full of anti-semetic banter which we in the late 20th century no longer find acceptable. And adults do not necessarily bring intelligence, as we all aware, to reading, despite their experience.
Don't you think that rather than toss out the Little House books which I believe have an innate literary value in spite of their inappropriate view of First Nations peoples, we should address them with new introductions, for example, that look at what's wrong with some of Wilder's views or classroom guides that offer these books as wonderful reading experiences that are flawed by these misrepresntations.
We can't toss everything out until there is as significant a body of vibrant First Nations literature that it can fully balance all the errors that are in existing literature. Strong new voices are being heard
- in Canada voices, for example, like George Littlechild and Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, C.J. Taylor and Jan Waboose and a growing number of others but this takes time.
But I think that it is the teachers and librarians who have to bear the repsonsibility of making it clear to contempoary kids - whether or not they are members of the First Nations or not - that there are flaws in these books that are deeply hurtful and that portray these people in ways that we no longer will accept unquestioningly.
On the Child_Lit discussion forum there has just been a lengthy exchange about censorship that followed the challange to an exhibition just opened at the Brooklyn Museum and to Harry Potter in several states. Censorship is wrong in whatever guise it assumes. The Little House books need a guiding hand in the 90's but that doesn't mean that they don't have a value and aren't worth sharing with contemporary kids.
Jeffrey Canton Toronto
--- Debbie Reese wrote:
====
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Bid and sell for free at http://auctions.yahoo.com
Received on Fri 15 Oct 1999 02:56:32 PM CDT
