What Does Thanksgiving Make You Think Of?

No one, not one single person or family or toddler, is going to storm the doors of your library — be it public or school — and demand that you do a special Thanksgiving storytime.  Literally no one.  And yet.  And yet you, as a librarian, might feel compelled to offer a program along these lines.  Maybe because you’ve always done it.  Maybe because it’s easy and quick to pull together.  Maybe because all the teachers in your school are doing units on it and you want to support them.  Maybe because you think your patrons, the majority of your patrons that is, don’t really think about it as a “holiday” but as a more secular tradition.  But I want to urge you to stop and consider why you’re doing these programs and the messages they send to all your patrons, especially your Native/First Nations patrons.

Chances are pretty good that, unless you are reading this from a reservation, you are reading this from occupied and stolen land.  In many cases, even if you are reading it from a reservation you are not on the true ancestral homes of the people who reside there but on government-created settlements.  You are on land that people were killed for. Can you sit with that for a few seconds?  Can you really?

This is something I am acutely aware of in New Mexico, where we have 22 recognized tribes. I grew up playing with Native kids, I work with Native people, I serve Native children. Maybe, in other places, it’s a lesson you don’t have to think about as much. But it’s still true.

Many years ago, I decided my library would stop putting up grinning turkeys and making displays with puns about FEASTS and GOBBLE.  We don’t have pilgrim coloring pages, we don’t make stacks of books that look like turkeys.  Let me assure you we still have piles of Thanksgiving books — picture books and non-fiction too.

But November is also Native American Heritage Month. So at my library, instead of another story about sharing maize, we make a conscious effort to spotlight and celebrate books by Native American authors. You can too — and you can even tie it in with that “classic” Thanksgiving you might be reluctant to let go of.

What do you think of when you think of Thanksgiving?

I am sure many will have the same answers about family, community, and tradition.  If those are the things that are truly important to you about Thanksgiving, why not share messages about that through the works of Native authors?  This is a way you can help your patrons understand that Native Americans are still with us today — not just forgotten noble savages of the long-gone past bringing white people corn.

If Thanksgiving makes you think about tradition and community, why not share Jingle Dancer by Cynthia Leitich Smith?  This picture book is about a young Muscogee Creek girl who is trying to find enough tin jingles to make her jingle dress special at a powwow. Readers get to meet the people in Jenna’s life and community and learn about the specialness of the Ojibway tradition of jingle dancing.

If Thanksgiving makes you think about family and tradition, why not share Kunu’s Basket by Lee DeCora Francis?  In this picture book, Kunu becomes frustrated when he finds making a pack basket isn’t as easy as he imagined.  All the men on Indian Island do it, why can’t Kunu?  His grandfather helps him learn patience and practice in this story about Penobscot Indian Nation in Maine.

If Thanksgiving makes you think about happiness and family togetherness, why not share Sweetest Kulu by Celina Kalluk? Throat singer Kalluk shares an Inuit welcome for a baby in this tender, wondrous picture book full of arctic animals and Inuit traditions.

If Thanksgiving makes you think about cooperation and people coming together in peace and forgiveness, why not share with a class Hiawatha and the Peacemaker by Robbie Robertson? This longer picture book tells the story of how Hiawatha and the Peacemaker brought peace and united the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy in a model that would inspire the formation of the early American government.

If Thanksgiving makes you think about thankfulness and gratitude, why not share Thanks to the Animals by Allen Sockabasin? Little Zoo Sap has fallen off the sled in the cold winter forest, but the animals all keep him warm.  When his father Joo Tum finds him, he thanks the animals for saving Zoo Sap in this story from Passamaquoddy storyteller Sockabasin.

I’ve read Thanks to the Animals to kids several times during the Thanksgiving season and taken it to school visits when teachers requested a “Thanksgiving storytime” as outreach.  Not once ever has a kid or teacher said, “But this isn’t Thanksgiving!  I demand more pilgrims!”  Instead, they love hearing about Zoo Sap and all the animals.  Children understand the message of thanksgiving in the book and, like Joo Tum, they enjoy thanking the animals.  I also get a chance to discuss the Passamaquoddy tribe with the kids, which can be a great way to encourage adults to remember that Thanksgiving isn’t just about the same old story.

We, as librarians and educators, can be leaders in changing and expanding that story. We shouldn’t only celebrate and promote these works for one month.  We should make them fundamental texts we are excited to share with patrons all the time.  The works of Native authors and illustrators are worth our spotlight every month but, particularly in November, we can use this month, this holiday we “celebrate” without a second thought, to really help our patrons go beyond the same old story, the same old displays, the same old lies.

Additional Resources

American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving from the National Museum of the American Indian
Harvest Ceremony: Beyond the Thanksgiving Myth from the National Museum of the American Indian
Classroom Lessons from the National Museum of the American Indian
Curriculum Guide for Jingle Dancer from Cynthia Leitich Smith
Teaching Guide for Kunu’s Basket
More info on Celina Kalluk, including a video of her throat singing
Excerpt from the song and book Hiawatha and the Peacemaker
Allen Sockabasin reading Thanks to the Animals in Passamaquoddy

Thinking About Thanksgiving

What does this cover say, in a Thanksgiving display?

In many libraries, because of space, the "holiday" books are stored in the back and brought out for each holiday, put on display in a place people can easily find them.  Whether intentionally or not, the way we display these supports the marketing of holidays, and October through December becomes an almost relentless push of Halloween, Day of the Dead, Thanksgiving, and Hannukah-Kwanzaa-Christmas displays in many libraries.  With the exception of Christmas, for which I think there are officially enough books published to saturate the demand, these displays in many libraries are fully depleted for each holiday, and when the books are returned are likely stored again, without weeding.  So, when was the last time you really looked at your Thanksgiving books?

The story of  Thanksgiving that is commonly mythologized on school stages, with "Pilgrims" and "Indians" having a friendly potluck, is just that: mythology.  Oyate shares its resource "Deconstructing the Myths of the First Thanksgiving" on its website.   They credit the research done by Margaret M. Bruchac in collaboration with the Wampanoag Indian Program at the Plymouth Plantation, which also underpins her book co-authored with Catherine O'Neill Grace, 1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving.  Please take a moment to read through one of these resources, now, if you haven't before, as me summarizing the myths for you here would miss the point.  The upshot is that Thanksgiving is not a happy time for everyone, it didn't happen the way it does in the school play, and it is a time of mourning for many First Nations/Native people.

Many Thanksgiving books on the market now attempt to be factually correct, yet still walk a strange line...following the traditional "First Thanksgiving" narrative thread from the White colonists' perspective, and just shifting the language so as not to be caught in an all-out lie.   Robert Merrill Bartlett's The Story of Thanksgiving was revised in 2001, the same year 1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving came out, yet still traces and holds up the myth of the first Thanksgiving: "..two men name Squanto and Samoset appeared and made friends..."  "the Pilgrims wanted to celebrate their harvest...they held their first thanksgiving. They invited the Wampanoags to join them" ... "Today Thanksgiving is a happy time." (This book appears to be now, thankfully, out of print.)

Other books don't even try, and people still ask for books like Arthur's Thanksgiving, where kids dress up as Pilgrims and Indians and put on a play...because that's what some of us remember doing at Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving is about "tradition."  I'm doubtful though, that children appreciate being sold a lie. As 5th grader Taylor M. wrote to Debbie Reese, after reading the  Suppressed speech of Wamsutta (Frank B.) James:

I thought about all the way back to Kindergarten, right before Thanksgiving break we would always get these coloring worksheets of the happy little Pilgrims and Indians giving each other things. Up until now, I didn’t really realize that that’s not how it happened. Showing the happy little cartoon Indian was a lie. I think Kindergarteners and young children should know what actually happened, not with gruesome details, but they should know more of the truth. 

How much truth does your Thanksgiving collection tell? When is the last time you evaluated each book for accuracy? Sadly, I have found I can't reliably trust professional reviews to evaluate Thanksgiving books, or most children's books with First Nations/Native content; I depend on the resources from Oyate and Debbie Reese's blog to help me parse the presentation, and ask questions when I can't tell for sure myself.   I wish more reviewers would do this, and I challenge you to try it, this month.  I can pretty much promise you librarians there is something in your Thanksgiving collection that is worth weeding, so this is good and easy practice.

It is possible to have broader collections that allow for the many ways in which people approach this holiday, and tomorrow you will hear from Angie about how to develop your Thanksgiving display after your weeding.   To get you started:

You can buy Oyate's full resource "Thanksgiving: A Native Perspective" as a stand alone, or within their book "A Broken Flute," which includes many helpful articles and reviews of books you probably have in your library, but may never have really looked at through a First Nations/Native perspective.  If this is the first time you are checking out Oyate, make sure to explore everything in their "Resources" section.

At American Indians in Children's Literature, Debbie Reese gathers links to her "Posts About Thanksgiving" on the left sidebar, just scroll down.

And while we're on the topic of marketing holidays, check out Aya De Leon's blog post "Queridos Gringos" and take a look at your Day of the Dead materials before they go back into storage.

Still Listening, Still Learning

On October 23, illustrator Sophie Blackall’s blog post on the depiction of slavery in A Fine Dessert (which Blackall illustrated and for which Emily Jenkins wrote the text) set off a children's literature firestorm. Two weeks later, we’re still talking about it. This has been a charged topic and an exhausting one for many. Some readers may be ready to put this whole thing behind them, but many others are just starting to scratch the surface, and still more are trying to make sense of the whole situation.

This is more than just people arguing about a single picture book. This conversation is just one piece of a bigger discussion that must be ongoing, around issues that people of color and First/Native Nations have been raising for decades. The following (based on a very smart person's Facebook comment) is something that really resonates with me and, I think, sums the situation up beautifully:

What's hard for white people, I think, is realizing that we can do things that are racist and sexist. Few mean to, and the challenge is in listening and learning and knowing that is the best you can do. Getting it right all the time is impossible. But being open and humble is possible, even if it is very often uncomfortable or even painful. I keep reminding myself that facing that pain is less than what others have endured. It is the absolute least we can do. And it makes art more honest about humanity, to reflect this instead of the white and male dominated cultural models we are so often shown.

Here are some links to parts of the conversation. This is just a sampling. Read them, watch them, think about them. Let's listen to and learn from them, and from each other.

• On Letting Go
• AICL: Not recommended: A Fine Dessert
• AICL: The Power of Social Media to Change Children's Literature
• Crazy QuiltEdi: The dessert, by the way, is Blackberry Fool
• Fairrosa Cyber Library: Can We Talk of Solutions? 
• Jenny and Kelly Read Books: Oh, Kelly.
• Varian Johnson: A slightly different take on A Fine Dessert
• Daniel Jose Older's storify
• Kiera Parrott's storify
• NPR
• New York Times
• School Library Journal

Guest Blogger: Tanuja Desai Hidier

Reading While White is pleased to offer occasional guest bloggers who offer their own perspectives on race and books for children and teens.
 

MULTIPLI-CITY: ALL BORN CREATIVE DREAMERS

By Tanuja Desai Hidier 

South Asia Book Award acceptance speech, delivered by Tanuja Desai Hidier, award winner for Bombay Blues (Scholastic/Push, 2014), October 23, 2015, in Madison, Wisconsin.

 Well, as Dimple Lala—my protagonist in both Bombay Blues and Born Confused—would say:

FROCK!

Aaray waah! What a feeling! 

I can’t tell you how honored and happy I am to be here today, sharing this moment with such a wonderful group of authors— congrats, Paula, Padma, and Vivek—and celebrating with a conferenceful of book lovers and people committed to the exploration of cultures, identity, diversity, and the myriad ways in which we express these things. Thank you to the South Asia Book Award committee—especially Rachel Weiss, for her tireless work putting this all so gracefully together, and Kevin King. Thank you to The South Asia National Outreach Consortium: SANOC. And a shoutout to DJ Rekha, whose parties Basement Bhangra and Mutiny, in the late 90s in New York City provided a spark that partly set me off on my writing journey. 

And a huge thank you to my very patient husband Bernard, my little bachoodis Leela Marie and Zoé Rani…and, especially, to the very special people who since I was a child encouraged my writing path and whose own journey was the main inspiration for me to want to get to know Bombay better: So this is for you, my Mommy-ji, Bapuji, and dear, dear brother, Raj.

If as a child growing up in Wilbraham, Massachusetts—home of Friendly’s ice-cream!—and even later, as a much! bigger child in New York City, I could have imagined that such a thing as the South Asia Book Award could exist, this kind of celebration of diverse voices from the diaspora...

If my parents could have imagined it in their first days in the USA, when they were the first from both sides of the family to immigrate, where we were the only South Asians in our entire area, and were regularly asked what ‘kind’ of Indian we were—Cherokee? Apache?...

Well, I guess I wouldn't have had so much to write about later!

One of the reasons I wrote my first novel, Born Confused [prequel to Bombay Blues] was to fill a hole on my childhood bookshelf with an Indian-American heroine. Heroines. Heroes. With an exploration of ‘brown’.

And, many years after that, one of the reasons I recently wrote Bombay Blues was to move beyond, below the skin and a strictly cultural framework.

With an exploration of ‘blue’: the mood, the hue, the music.

The wild blue yonder.

And to forge my own connection with this motherland—Bombay: city of my mother’s birth, my brother’s, and the one where my parents met and married in an out-of-caste love marriage. A metropolis American-born me barely knew—yet that was, is, literally, in my blood.

The title Born Confused comes from the term ABCD—one that in many ways clarified my writing path. It stands for American Born Confused Desi—desi meaning a person with roots in South Asia— and is a moniker South Asians ‘from’ South Asia have for these second and now third generation Americans who are purportedly “confused” about where they come from. Where their roots lie.

In fact, there are two versions of this alphabet both quoted in Born Confused.

The first:

American Born Confused Desi Emigrated From Gujarat House In Jersey Keeping Lots of Motels Named Omkarnath Patel Quickly Reaching Success Through Underhanded Vicious Ways Xenophobic Yet Zestful.

And:

American Born Confused Desi Emigrated From Gujarat House In Jersey Kids Learning Medicine Now Owning Property Quite Reasonable Salary Two Uncles Visiting White Xenophobic Yet Zestful.

So… zestful, I’ll take! But I have yet to meet an Omkarnath Patel. If there’s one in the room tonight, please make yourself known!

What I wanted to do through my character Dimple, across both books, is turn that C for Confused to a C for Creative.

American Born Creative Desi.

This seemed to me to be a more accurate description of the South Asians who peopled my world—the ones I met in New York City, in the thriving music and arts scene there, but also the ones in my own home. These flesh-and-blood humans who were in fact shaping and creating the culture as they went along. As we went along. Like so many of the people who are in this room tonight!

It seemed to embody the idea that this Neither Here Nor There space is, in fact, a You Are Here.

A viable identity, a truth in its own right.

A WE are here.

And…now…here we are!

A hyphenated identity—well, we are all of multiply hyphenated identities, if you go far back enough (for example, Latin-American, Indo-Chinese, Afro-Caribbean). But not only culturally: As well as in the sense of being composed of many parts we often struggle to bring together. Double, triple lives we strive to balance, harmonize (for example, having one life outside of the home, one in it, in terms of society, sexuality, family, whatever it may be). We as humans are always-evolving jigsaws, constantly fitting the pieces together, making and unmaking and remaking ourselves….

And this hyphenated identity, I’ve come to realize, doesn't mean that you're 50-50, half of each, not quite either.

You can be 100-100.

200-200!

Zero!

INFINITE.

The city we all live as humans is MULTIPLICITY.

A hyphen doesn't have to be a border: It can also be a bridge.

It can also be a bridge.

And it’s on the bridge—

In the blur—

The in-between—-

Where life—the journey—truly occurs.

Events shape this journey. This history. Herstory. People do, grand actions to little ones, too. But language does as well: Language shapes history. Imagination makes reality. We can dream things into being, speak them into being. Write, debate, discuss—read them into being. And it is wonderful that more and more voices are being heard and celebrated—because only then can we come close to representing the diversity and richness of human experience, to even approximating a kind of truth:

By revealing and reveling in our multidimensional selves.

Because there are innumerable, untold (only some told) ways to be South Asian. Male. Female. Human.

Our stories are our arsenal, our fuel. Our example:

Of other ways to be.

Alternatives.

Coulds.

Possibility.

We’re a powerful chorus when we bring our voices together. When we make ourselves heard.

Because we are all, in fact, a wholly different kind of ABCD: All Born Creative Dreamers. And we are creating, scripting our own stories to realize our own dreams, expand and define our own space.

Our own spacES.

And, all of you: Your stories ARE stories. Never forget this.

Never underestimate the value of your own story. Only you can tell it.

Never underestimate the power of your own voice.

We need to hear it.

And thank you so, so very, very much for giving me the opportunity to be here today. For your time.

And for listening a little while to mine.

The 2015 South Asia Book Award ceremony took place as part of the 44th Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison--the world's largest such event, with more than 800 scholars, students, professionals, writers, artists, and others in attendance. The 2015 South Asia Book Award winners are Paula Yoo (children's book) and Tanuja Desai Hidier (young adult book). Also present at the ceremony were honor book authors Vivek Shraya and Padma Venkatraman. 

 Read Paula Yoo's acceptance speech on Crazy QuiltEdi.

_____________________________________________________________________

Tanuja Desai Hidier is an award-winning author/singer-songwriter born in the USA and now based in London. She is the recipient of the 2015 South Asia Book Award for second novel Bombay Blues, the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and the London Writers/Waterstones Award, and her short stories have been included in numerous anthologies. Her pioneering first novel, Born Confused—the first-ever South Asian American coming of age novel—was named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults and became a landmark work, recently hailed by both Rolling Stone Magazine and Entertainment Weekly as one of the greatest YA novels of all time on lists including such classics as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, and Little Women. Tanuja is also the innovator of the ‘booktrack’: Her first album When We Were Twins original songs based on Born Confused was featured in Wired Magazine for being the first of its kind. The music video for her ode-to-Bombay “Heptanesia” from her second album Bombay Spleen songs linked to Bombay Blues is currently airing on MTV Indies. 

On "Be Kind", and Other Bull****

Person A: [Something racist, intentionally so or not.]

Person B: Hey!! Hearing that racist bullshit hurts me!!  Stop it!!!

Person C: Gosh, Person B, why couldn't you be KIND in how you said that?

Person A: [Hits someone with their car, intentionally or not.]

Person B: Hey!!  You just hit me with your car, and... shit, this hurts, look, my leg is broken!!  Stop the car!!!

Person C: Gosh, Person B, why couldn't you be KIND in how you said that?

This is an expression of White fragility, which can take many forms.  Person C could also say, "Why are you tearing that driver to shreds?", or crack a joke that Person B is supposed to laugh at, despite the pain she's in (followed by a smiley face), or--here's the kicker--say "How dare you bring race into this?"  In my metaphor, that would be "How dare you bring her driving skills into this?"

White people, we *have* to get tougher.  We have to learn to bear the discomfort of race-related criticism, and challenge ourselves to consider--no matter how someone informs us of the fact--that if we're being criticized, we should focus on apologizing for and learning from our words and actions, and not on the manner in which we're being educated.  Here are some tips that have helped me work through the discomfort when I've been called in on things:

1. First, I take deep breaths, from my belly.  If I've been called on something in a public space, I try not to cry, lest my tears become a weapon (NB-I don't always succeed, more coming).  I try to get my throat to loosen up.

2. I remind myself that the person educating me is doing so at risk to him/herself.  I need to thank them for that.

3. I remind myself that White culture and White dominance WANT me to feel paralyzing, unproductive guilt and shame rather than a galvanizing desire to accept my imperfections, learn from them, and do better next time.

4. I say, "I'm sorry."  I do my homework.  And then I follow up with a more complete apology.

We've seen some great examples of this in recent days.  And some not-so-great.

I thought about ending with a funny GIF, but this really isn't funny.  This is about how we prioritize the pain experienced by human beings.  Studies have shown that White children as young as 7 believe that dark-skinned people are less susceptible to pain than White people and that White people feel less empathy for Black people experiencing pain than White people experiencing the same pain.  This translates directly into greater and better access to health care for White people.

All this could make a conversation about children's literature seem, by contrast, trivial, but this is how we train our children, especially White children, to perpetuate--or interrupt--the status quo.   We are their gatekeepers to a better education.  And right now, we're not prioritizing White people's pain over equal pain expressed by Black people (as was done in the study I cite above).  We're prioritizing White people's discomfort with *the manner in which we are being informed of the pain we're causing people of color and First/Native Nations people* over the pain we're causing people of color and First/Native Nations people.  And that's just plain bullshit.

On Letting Go

It's never easy discovering a serious fault with a book I originally appreciated greatly.

It's never easy, and yet...what do I have to lose, really? What am I giving up when I can admit something may not be as wonderful as I originally thought?

And so it is with A Fine Desert: Four Centuries, Four Families, and One Delicious Desert. I liked so much about it from the outset when I read and discussed it with colleagues last spring.  I still like so much about it: The small details, the big arc, the way it looks at continuity and change from such a child-friendly perspective.

As for the much-debated way it handles the blackberry fool made in 1810 by an enslaved woman and child? I confess I glossed over much of it. The only image that gave me pause initially was the one in which the mother and child are closeted away eating the treat together. I remember asking, "How is a child reader going to make sense of that scene without any explanation?"  This idea of an unmediated experience with that part of the book was particularly worrisome to me. But while I did think briefly of children of color, of Black children, and wondered if it would generate a sense of shame or confusion, I read the author's and illustrator's notes, and let my vague sense of discomfort go.

After all, there is so much wonderful in the book, in both the writing and the art. That contemporary family and community at the end brought it all home for me.  Yes, this is the world we live in, and I love it. So I've enthusiastically featured A Fine Desert in several talks to Wisconsin librarians.

Fast forward to now. I've had ample opportunities to read various articulate opinions on the depiction of this enslaved woman and child. I've had ample opportunities to think. To consider. To learn.

And I've changed my mind.

I cannot ignore the voices of those who have helped me understand something I didn't consider before: No matter how thoughtful the intent was in depicting this mother and child, the end result is that it can be seen as perpetuating painful imagery of "happy" slaves.

Am I ashamed I didn't see this myself? Yes. Because it's the kind of thing I'd like to think I wouldn't miss.

But I'm not so ashamed that I'm going to dig in my heels.

I can let go of A Fine Desert.

Did I come to this decision easily? No. Am I sad about letting go of the book? Yes.

But it's a small sadness.

Yes, I still appreciate many other things about A Fine Dessert, but I can also accept that this is a fault it cannot overcome for me when it comes to recommending it to librarians and teachers.