Indians in LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS

Over on the child_lit listserv, a subscriber posted a link to an online article in The Weekly Standard. Titled "Picture Perfect," the article is about an exhibit of the Little Golden Books. Here's the excerpt that caught my eye:

"The great Leonard Weisgard--who painted covers for the New Yorker before he was 20 and whose half-century career ranged far and wide--illustrated another Margaret Wise Brown classic, Pussy Willow, for Little Golden Books. Even more arresting than his painting of the soft grey kitten peering up between grasses and wild strawberries at a grasshopper in flight is his picture for Indian, Indian: a black-haired, clay-colored little boy encountering a recumbent white horse with flowing mane, full of power and grace, in a field of daisies.

It is surprising how undated these pictures are. A few images and titles are politically incorrect by present standards. Doctor Dan the Bandage Man's counterpart is, I'm afraid, Nurse Nancy. And the traditional family ideal implicit in We Help Mommy, We Help Daddy, and The Happy Family--whose cover shows a girl in a dress picking flowers from a flower bed and a boy pushing a hand mower across the surrounding lawn--has taken a beating in the decades since these books appeared."

Did you notice what Anderson found arresting? Undated? Does she not know about stereotyping of American Indians? Is that why she didn't include Indian, Indian in the second paragraph? For your reference, you can see the photo she found so arresting here.

There's a lot of "Indians" in the Little Golden Books... Here's some titles:

Rin Tin Tin and the Lost Indian
Brave Eagle
Hiawatha
Roy Rogers and the Indian Sign
I'm an Indian Today

I've got to get all these books and scan the images...

UPDATE, 3:32, 7/2/2009
The books I listed above are old. To my knowledge they are no longer in print. You can still get them through used bookstores. LITTLE GOLDEN BOOKS does, however, continue to publish Indian imagery in its books. One example is their Peter Pan book, which is based on Disney's film. Click here to see images from that book, and click here to see my post about I'm an Indian Today (published in 1961).

Response to HANK THE COWDOG

Betsy McEntarffer, a regular reader of American Indians in Children's Literature submitted a comment to my post about Hank the Cowdog. I'm post her comment here today. She wrote:

I read Hank the Cowdog several years ago when I was a paraeducator at an Elementary School. I tried to convince teachers and the librarian that the coyote images (believe me when I say the visual images are as bad or worse than the verbal ones)would make readers think of American Indians and were terribly derogatory and insulting. Needless to say I was pretty thoroughly ignored - and the series is a best seller! My granddaughter now is reading the series so I talked with her about the coyote images and she said, "I know they're just made up coyotes, Grandma, Indians are totally different." I hope she truly does understand. Thank you for persevering in the face of continual publisher and author insensitivity. Some of us are listening.

I read her words just after reading about a study in brain research that found people 'feel the pain' of people like them more readily than they 'feel the pain' of people who are not like them. You can read about the study in Science Daily. Obviously, Betsy's colleagues were unable to feel the pain of Native children who would see the coyotes as derogatory. Read the study, "Less Empathy Toward Outsiders."

How can we use the study? Is it possible we can say to people who are unmoved by our words "Hey, it isn't your fault, it is your brain's fault. You're hard wired not to care. But it doesn't have to be that way. Take command. Override what your brain is telling you."

I'm glad that Betsy's granddaughter understands that Indians aren't like the coyotes, but WHY is that conversation even necessary? Do we have that conversation about other groups? Any groups? Do you hand your child/student a book and say 'oh, and that part about X group, ignore it. It isn't accurate." How much does that happen?