Jeff Derrickson

Responsibly Portraying the Past

            It occurred to me as I began thinking about the ways Native Americans are portrayed in standard academia that I should be very conscious about my own sensibilities on the subject.  As a future teacher, it is very important to me that everyone is represented fairly, and my own memories from history classes leave a lot to be desired.  It seems that, while historically accurate, classes seem to focus a little too much on the negative aspects of history, which can inadvertently promote racism as well as a negative self-image to all races.  As a future English teacher I wish to familiarize myself with both the positive and negative portrayals, so I may promote the former and utilize the latter to provide an example on the incorrect portrayal of Native Americans.

            Timeless classics such as Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie, contain several damaging portrayals of Native Americans.  Both categorize the Natives in the same breath as wild animals who hunt white people and scalp them.  This is a severely negative stereotype that should never be used as an accurate portrayal, and I would like to think that modern children would be savvy enough to identify them as such.  The more imminently threatening portrayal of Natives comes from books such as Brother Eagle, Sister Sky, by Susan Jeffers, which portrays Natives as a proud and tragically romanticized warrior race.  It gets tricky here, because one might think that this is a portrayal in a good light, but the tragedy lies in their portrayal as a people of the past, and not of the present.

            As teachers, it is our responsibility to expand a child’s knowledge, and we cannot do that if we do not expand our own.  In our age, it is ingrained in us that, while you are not supposed to believe what you see on TV, you can find truth in a book.  If a teacher unwittingly adds a book such as Arrow To the Sun: A Pueblo Indian Tale, by Gerald McDermott, catastrophic damage to the world views of students can be caused.  Arrow makes no effort to be accurate in any way, and many of the inconsistencies of the book would have been settled had McDermott simply cited to which Pueblo people out of the twenty plus tribes in New Mexico and Arizona he was referring.  However, the fact that it is marketed as Native American folklore puts the book in a position to be read and learned from by a child.

            To search out appropriate literature, teachers must seek tribe-specific stories instead of broad characterizations of Native Americans, or worse, Indians.  Like with any source that is utilized, the original source must be cited.  A tricky condition, due to the oral nature of told and re-told Native stories, but essential nonetheless.  Modern Native characters must be depicted as normal people, and not the weird guy who says things like “many moons ago.”  The Native American culture is not extinct, and must not be treated as such.  Even referring to them as a “once proud people” is fatalistic and insulting.  All in all, it does not seem to be that difficult to think and speak sensitively of the Native Americans.  One must simply align the element of humanity with Natives, and observe the Golden Rule.

One thing that I will take away from this course is the glimpse we were given of Native American culture in A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.  Though she was entirely negative towards the Natives, perhaps with good reason, her writings showed a different side of the story that would have been greatly welcome to me in my high school history classes.  I wish to provide that sort of alternative view to my students in order to help make their learning experience a little more complete.

References:

Reese, Debbie. “Proceed with Caution: Using Native American Folktales in the Classroom.” Language Arts 84.3 (2007): 245-256. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 4 May 2010.

http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/