Irredeemable Stories? Native American Children's Literature and the Radical Potential of Commercial Literary Forms
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9744402 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Emily Nagin Emily Nagin, Emily Nagin (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1 |
| Publication date | 2016-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Studies in American Indian Literatures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0730-3238 • E-ISSN: 1548-9590 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.5250/studamerindilite.28.4.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W2605649244 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
Irredeemable Stories?Native American Children’s Literature and the Radical Potential of Commercial Literary Forms Emily Nagin (bio) In 2014 I came across Meghan Cox Gurdon’s op-ed “Darkness Too Visible” and Sherman Alexie’s rebuttal, “Why the Best Kids’ Books Are Written in Blood.” The articles, both of which appeared in the Wall Street Journal, debate the necessity of what Cox Gurdon dubs “dark content” in young adult (ya) literature. Cox Gurdon laments dark content—which she defines as “kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings”—and suggests ya novels be censored. Waxing sentimental, she writes that adolescence “is brief; it comes to each of us only once, so whether the debate [about content in ya] has raged for eons doesn’t, on a personal level, really signify.” Alexie fired back, arguing that when “cultural critics fret about ‘ever-more-appalling’ ya books ... they are simply trying to protect their privileged notions of what literature is and should be.” He went on to say that his ya novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian aims to give teens “weapons—in the form of words and ideas—that will help them fight their monsters.” To Alexie, dark content is not only an important part of ya, it is essential. I should say here that I’m in Alexie’s camp. As a teen I sought out dark books because they felt honest in a way more wholesome literature did not. Now I work with teens and write fiction featuring teenage characters, so as a reader, writer, and educator I have an ongoing stake in this debate. I also have some pressing questions: What is my responsibility to my readers? Do the texts I teach and the stories I write limit the ideas I want to communicate? These questions are essential because, contrary to Cox Gurdon’s assertion, the history of ya does signify. Children’s literature scholars such as Clare Bradford, Kent Baxter, and Roberta Seelinger Trites have pointed out that books for children and teens have historically proposed [End Page 1] worldviews and moral codes in service of white supremacist social-evolutionary theories. This is especially relevant to books featuring American Indian characters, because popular literature generally naturalizes colonialist notions of what it means to be American Indian. Policies engendered by these racist social-evolutionary theories still echo in how we talk and write about teens, especially minoritized teens, today. So to dismiss this history or, worse, to legitimate its ideology is an act of violence. Some authors have attempted to use commercial forms to combat racist narratives, however: Francis La Flesche’s The Middle Five, Natachee Scott Momaday’s Owl in the Cedar Tree, and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian all work to uproot stereotypes. Published at roughly fifty-year intervals, these books provide a broad overview of the way thinking about teens and American Indians has evolved over the course of the twentieth century. They are thematically similar, featuring Indian protagonists who negotiate complicated relationships with power. All three have been flagged as educational resources.1 And they are all written in commercially viable, teen-focused forms: the boy book, the coming-of-age story, and the young adult novel. But as Clare Bradford points out, commercial books seeking to challenge the dominant discourse often walk “a fine line between subversion and an uneasy complicity,” which can make their potential to enact change murky (Unsettling Narratives 29). So the fact that these books were written in commercially viable forms raises an important question: Is it possible to call attention to the injustices of a white supremacist system by employing a form that has historically naturalized that system? a brief history of adolescence We think of adolescence as the years between the ages of twelve and eighteen, when we encounter formative experiences determining what kind of adults we will become. Though this definition is deeply ingrained in our worldview, the concept of adolescence is relatively new. When the Industrial Revolution and the accompanying rise in urbanization produced higher enrollment rates in city high schools, a new segment of the population was born: teens who didn’t
Art · Great Rift · Literature · Rebuttal · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Themes in Literature Analysis
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |