Children's Literature Association Quarterly

The 1987 celebration of the U.S. Constitution is in fact a celebration of a struggle for recognition and acceptance by various minorities within the United States. The rhetorical phrase, "We The People . . .," raises the question: Who were "the people?" They were not Black until a war had been fought. They were not female for more than 130 years. They were not the people indigenous to North America. Our study of the Amerind in literature points to the ongoing nature of the struggle, and to the wide applicability of Thurgood Marshall's words about unpleasant truths. In the following statement, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice refers specifically to the maintenance of slavery by the Founding Fathers, but his remarks apply equally to genocidal policies aimed against Native Americans in their own country:

No doubt it will be said, when the unpleasant truth of the history of slavery in America is mentioned during this bicentennial year, that the Constitution was a product of its times . . . . But the effects of the Framers' compromise have remained for generations . . . . Some may . . . observe the [Constitution's] anniversary with hopes not realized and promises not fulfilled.

(5,6,9)

Clearly the long-range effects of human rights compromises are still in evidence. For example, Native Americans still seek to reclaim confiscated lands and to dismantle a super-structure of false images and debasing concepts.

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, when the New World became the New Frontier, the image of the Amerind as uncivilized became standard literary fare. Biased tales of the actual or imagined internments of whites by American Indians were disseminated as a propagandistic addendum to a national policy of Indian eradication. Unfortunately, a number of modern books are equally misleading. Mary Gloyne Byler, who is a Cherokee and who helped critique six hundred children's books for the Association of American Indian Affairs, comments on these works. She writes:

American Indians . . . contend with a mass of materials about themselves . . . . There are too many books featuring painted, whooping, befeathered Indians closing in on too many forts, maliciously attacking "peaceful" settlers . . . ; too many books in which white benevolence is the only thing that saves the day for the incompetent, childlike Indians; too many stories setting forth what is "best" for American Indians.

(5)

Not much has changed in the portrayal of the Indian since the seventeenth century publication of Mary Rowlandson's Captivity, a popular narrative detailing the hardships of a captive white woman. In 1975 the "captivity" sub-genre was resurrected and re-tooled in Evelyn Sibley Lampman's White Captives, a novel based on Reverend R.B. Stratton's Captivity of the Oatman Girls: Being an Interesting Narrative of Life Among the Apache and Mohave Indians (1857). In an author's note, Lampman claims that now, over a hundred years later, it is possible to look at the white captivity experience "more dispassionately" (177). But for whom is this done? And what is gained by her mode of "dispassion"? The book does achieve an evenness of tone, a stylistic improvement upon the overbearing prose of the Reverend Stratton's document. But style of writing does not diminish the fact that Lampman's White Captives projects all the images and assumptions described in Mary Gloyne Byler's critique. It offers us a natural point of departure for a look at the portrayals of Indians in works that span genre categories. Included in our coverage are the fantasy works of Lynne Reid Banks, The Indian in the Cupboard (1980) and The Return of the Indian (1986), and three environmentalist novels by Jean Craighead George, Julie of the Wolves (1972), The Talking Earth (1983), and Water Sky (1987).

Lampman's White Captives keeps strictly to the formula established in its source narrative; it idealizes whites at the expense of the Indians, who are characterized as savage, unfeeling, undisciplined. Every aspect of the three societies—Euro-American, Mojave, Apache—is presented in a comparative mode, the Indian falling short to the Euro-American in nearly every category. For example, Olive, the older of the two Oatman girls, hates the people...