As fans of Harry Potter know, there are two distinct responses to her "History of Magic in North America" stories. The first story was released on Monday, March 8, 2016. Fans were delighted to have more of her writing to read. Native people--those who are fans of her books, and those of us who study or write about representations of Native peoples in popular culture and children's literature--had a different response.
I'd been deeply immersed in a study of a handful of best selling children's books. This is in the popular Geronimo Stilton's Wild West:
I'd just read Rick Riordan's
The Lost Hero where a main character's dad is Cherokee, making her half Cherokee. She's taunted by other characters who ask her if her dad is an alcoholic and if she'll do a rain dance. Riordan had those words come from what we might characterize as "mean girls." I assume he did that to, in that way, show them to be inappropriate things to say, but far too many people won't pick up on that nuance. I worry that, without a direct push-back on those taunts, people will view them as an affirmation of existing stereotypical ideas, and use those same taunts themselves.
When I read Rowling's story, I was furious. I used the f-bomb in a tweet at her. The emotion it expressed was real. Use of the word wasn't necessary. As I read tweets by Native people, I saw a range of emotion. Anger. And hurt, too. Native people who are my daughter's age grew up reading Harry Potter. This particular group are adults now, in their 20s. She--and they--were huge fans of every book in the series.
But this short story? Their reaction to it was different. They read the first line, with its monolithic "The Native Americans" was bad, but each paragraph of that short story was laden with troubling misrepresentations of Native peoples.
Those who are following the news on this story know that major media is reporting on it, excerpting a few words from a stream of tweets, or, from a blog post. Below are links to items by Native writers. Please read and share them. I'll be adding others as I find them. If you see others, please let me know in a comment.
March 7, 2016:
"Magic in North America": The Harry Potter franchise veers too close to home by Adrienne Keene
March 8, 2016:
Yo, @jkrowling, my ancestors... (series of tweets) by Brian Young
March 9, 2016:
When we say... (series by tweets) by Johnnie Jae
March 9, 2016:
Magic & Marginalization: Et tu, JK? by Tate Walker
March 9, 2016:
Why it's more than fiction by Mari Kurisato
Over at Reading While White, Megan Schliesman's The Long Haul notes that we're in the year 2016, and that people have been objecting to problems in children's literature for a long time. She lists twelve people and invites readers to add to her list. I'm on that list, and so are Doris Seale and Beverly Slapin. My post, today, is my response to Megan's invitation.
For Native people who wrote about depictions of Native peoples in story, we can go all the way back to 1829 and William Apess.
William Apess was a Pequot activist and author. In the 1830s, he helped the Mashpee Wampanoags regain control of their lands. In 1829, his autobiographical
Son of the Forest was published. Apess was mixed blood. His paternal grandfather was a white man who married a Pequot woman. His father married a Pequot woman. Apess and his siblings were born, and they all lived with their his mother's family. At some point his parents split up and left, and the kids remained with their maternal grandparents. Through all this they were very poor and his grandmother was especially cruel.
He writes about how his grandmother was out, drinking, amongst white people. She returned home, intoxicated, and asked him if he hated her. He answered yes because he didn't realize that "yes" was the wrong answer. She beat him again and again, breaking his arm. He was four years old when that happened. His uncle took him away, to Mr. Furman, a white man who sometimes gave them milk. Apess was subsequently placed in Mr. Furman's home where he was well-cared for. It was a stark contrast to his life with his grandparents, but, in his autobiography, Apess takes care to tell readers that they ought not judge, without context, the causes of his grandmother's behaviors. He specifically mentions alcohol, wrongful taking of Native peoples possessions and land, "violence of the most revolting kid upon the persons of female portion of the tribe" (p. 15) -- which we are correct to interpret as rape.
When he was six, he went to school and embraced what he was taught, such that he became distant from his own identity as a Native person (p. 21):
...so completely was I weaned from the interest and affections of my brethren that a mere threat of being sent away among the Indians into the dreary woods had a much better effect in making me obedient to he commands of my superiors than any corporal punishment that they ever inflicted.
He recounts setting out with his family a couple of years later, to pick berries. While in the woods, they came upon a group of white girls who were also out picking berries, but their complexion, he wrote, was dark and made him think about Indians. Scared, he ran home. When he got there, Mr. Furman asked him what had happened. Writing about that incident as an adult, Apess wrote (p. 23):
It may be proper here to remark that the great fear I entertained of my brethren was occasioned by the many stories I had heard of their cruelty toward the whites--how they were in the habit of killing and scalping men, women, and children. But the whites did not tell me that they were in a great majority of instances the aggressors--that they had imbrued their hands in the lifeblood of my brethren, driven them from their once peaceful and happy homes--that they had introduced among them the fatal and exterminating diseases of civilized life. If the whites had told me how cruel they had been to the "poor Indian," I should have apprehended as much harm from them.
It is what Apess wrote there, in that paragraph, that matters to me in my work as a Native scholar who, 187 years later, is doing the same thing that Appes did in 1829. Through story, he learned to fear his own people such that he was afraid of them.
Obviously, misrepresenting who we are was wrong in 1829, and it is wrong now.
What J.K. Rowling did yesterday (March 8, 2016) in the first story of her "History of Magic in North America" is the most recent example of white people misrepresenting Native people. Her misrepresentations are harmful. And yet, countless people are cheering what Rowling did, and, dismissing our objections. That, too, is not ok.
It is, as Megan wrote, a long haul. And in that long haul, people are being hurt by those who cry "it is only fiction." It isn't only fiction. Stories do work. They socialize. They educate. Or--I should say, they mis-educate. Do your part. Join us in pushing back on misrepresentation. It has been a long haul. Let's bring that to an end, together.
