Quantcast
Channel: American Indians in Children's Literature (AICL)
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 1006

Questions and thoughts about place, time, and how a picture book starts

$
0
0

These are some random thoughts and questions that I am trying to bring together into a coherent paragraph that writers, editors, teachers, parents... everyone, really, can use to think critically about picture books. These thoughts might look like a poem but that's not my intent. I've got it laid out this way to give space to my thoughts. 

A picture book.

Any picture book.

Set in what is currently called the United States of America.


Every time, every book, 

I think about how it starts,

And where it starts,

And when it starts,

and what the answers to those questions tell me.


In the Arbuthnot lecture I gave,

I was critical of Sophie Blackall's book about a lighthouse.

Remember?

It centers a white family on what I see as the homeland of Indigenous people.


People love that book.

No... some people love that book.

It won the big award.

 

But it--and most books about people in what is currently known as the United States--leave out Inconvenient Facts. 

People say "but that [those Inconvenient Facts] is not what that book is about."

That is a Convenient Defense.

It lets them collude with a narrative they don't want to disrupt.  


I want to disrupt that narrative.

Do you? 





Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 1006

Trending Articles