Revealing the Storyteller

This essay is one story about a search for texts that I would feel comfortable sharing with the next generation of my family. As a person of mixed Polar Inuit and European descent living in the United States, I have had difficulty finding ways to maintain and expand contact with my indigenous heritage. While I have been blessed with friends from other Nations who have adopted me and welcomed me into their communities, I am left to learn about my own people through books. This task is further complicated because my mother designated me as the person who must be our family's cultural educator; it has become my responsibility to filter through the existing Inuit-centered children's books, passing along the best while protecting the children from the books that reinforce the most hurtful images of our people. It is important to locate and share books that are worthwhile, especially those written by authors who take the time to demonstrate consideration and respect for the people whose culture they depict. I look for books that can help the next generation learn about their heritage without being shamed by misrepresentations, and for those that emphasize the similarities among humans, not just the differences among Anglo and Inuit peoples. This process, I'm afraid, is often frustrating and frequently offensive, as I repeatedly come across horrifically misinformed messages and blatant stereotypes that characterize my people as technologically primitive, socially unsophisticated and, often, as genetically inferior. The texts that are disrespectful to our traditions are often produced by authors who claim too much ownership of the stories they borrow, and so their illustrations seem contrived and inappropriate. From a contemporary perspective, many of these books are hopelessly dated and display an ignorance of Inuit cultures. Others show signs of a struggle between some limited sense of responsibility to the people they depict, and the apparent pressure to get a product to market. There's a part of me that wants to give both authors and books the benefit of the doubt out of a sense of fair play, that wants to forgive slights and assumptions out of the kindness of my heart, that wants to show them the consideration I would want to be shown myself. But that isn't the part of me writing this essay. Rather, here I am torn between appreciating any depiction of my people that I can share with the next generation and resenting the reality that I may have to unteach every sentence in every book. This part of me reads many of these books in the context of five hundred years of inquisition politics, colonization, and genocide. It recognizes that the business of cultural appropriation goes far beyond wannabes and almost-weres; as Pam Colorado explains, the danger is that non-Indians will have the power to define what is and is not Indian, even for Indians. We are talking here about an absolute ideological/conceptual subordination of Indian people in addition to the total physical subordination they already experience. When this happens, the last vestiges of real Indian society and Indian rights will disappear. Non-Indians will then 'own' our heritage and ideas just as thoroughly as they now claim to own our land and resources (qtd. in Churchill, 102). Colorado's point, as I see it, is that the danger lies not in the possibility that non-Native people can understand a culture and represent it fairly. Instead, she attacks the presumption that outsiders must inherently know a culture better than those who belong to it, that only the outsiders (read Colonists or Victors) have the authority to define Native culture. Ultimately, this mindset is informed by a frightening real-world circumstance: all that belongs to a people is up for grabs if the lawyers are good enough. Because the publishing world makes many of its decisions based on potential earnings rather than cultural integrity, I guess it shouldn't surprise me that the most significant impediment to undertaking a systematic analysis of Inuit-centered children's literature is locating books worth studying

Indigenous · Media studies · Offensive · Political science · Sociology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law · Themes in Literature Analysis

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