“The Kind of People That We Are”: Working in the World of Children’s Literature

Images of Native people are everywhere in popular culture, from books, movies, and television to advertising, sports, and fashion. However, this means that Native people, histories, and cultures have long been stereotyped, distorted, and often deliberately misunderstood and misrepresented – especially in the field of children’s and youth literature. I’ve served as a cultural and historical consultant for a number of children’s books and I’ve written several of my own, and my experiences working in the field of children’s literature have radically changed how I approach my work as a scholar, as a teacher, and as a parent. As a colleague and I wrote in 2021, “As we approach childhood as a clear site for racialization and a foundational period of learning about the workings of race and racism, we understand children’s literature and culture as a key vehicle for transporting (often harmful) ideas about race from the past into the present in which they are often not simply preserved but reinforced, often with dire consequences.”

This paper demonstrates how popular culture – and children’s books in particular– shapes both our individual and our collective interpretations of Native people, Native histories, and Native cultures. As the ongoing conversations and contestations around Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series, for example, have made abundantly clear, the world of children’s and youth literature have long housed both implicit and explicit depictions of both racism and cultural appropriation. By contrasting historical depictions of Native people in children’s literature with the rise of children’s books by Native authors and illustrators, this paper underscores the crucial need for this growing segment of children’s literature.