'Not a badge of honor': how book bans affect Indigenous literature
GENE DEMBY, HOST:
What's good? You're listening to CODE SWITCH, the show about race and identity from NPR. I'm Gene Demby. And real quick, I want you to think back to when you were in school - like, you know, kindergarten through 12th grade - and try to remember all the books that you read that involved Native Americans - Indigenous people. Think really hard, like, whether they had Native characters in them or they were written by Native authors - just Native anything. Are you coming up with anything?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: For me personally, we didn't actually read any books by Indigenous people from the United States, like, at all. And the ones that depicted Indigenous people were - I mean, you had "The Last Of The Mohicans," which regularly refers to Native people as savages - has all kinds of stereotypes about Indians being violent and treacherous and eventually extinct and disappearing.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: (Reading) The pale faces are masters of the Earth, and the time of the red men has not yet come again. My day has been too long.
DEMBY: Yikes. Well, today, we're diving back into our series on book bans, particularly the way that the current wave of book bans by conservative activist groups has affected contemporary Indigenous literature.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: Like, what happens when a book by an Indigenous author gets canceled?
DEBBIE REESE: People think that it's a badge of honor. But the reality is that what we see happening is that people see "To Kill A Mockingbird" on the book list, and they go and buy "To Kill A Mockingbird," and they feel like they've done a good deed. Well, "To Kill A Mockingbird" didn't need anybody to go and buy another copy.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
REESE: Books by Native writers and African American, LGBT - all these groups who are getting censored - those writers are struggling very hard just to make a few sales.
DEMBY: That's coming up. Stay with us.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
REESE: Our stories get treated like folktales...
DEMBY: That voice you're hearing belongs to Debbie Reese.
REESE: ...Like, you know, "Red Riding Hood" or "The Three Bears." But folktales that Native people write generally are more in line of creation stories or sacred stories. A good way to think about it is, would we put Genesis over there by "Little Red Riding Hood"? Absolutely not - because we know that's a sacred story to the people it belongs to. Ours are the same way.
DEMBY: Debbie is tribally enrolled at Nambe Oweenge, which is one of the sovereign Native nations in the state of New Mexico. She's also a former professor of American Indian studies.
REESE: The bulk of my work is centered on studying representations of Native peoples in children's books.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
REESE: I grew up with a certain set of values that were imparted to me by our tribal elders, and one of those was that all the work that you do is not for you. It's for everybody.
DEMBY: As one example, Debbie keeps a running list of the Native books that have been banned across the United States.
REESE: I come to this entire project as a teacher, as an educator - someone who sees the importance of children's books to furthering someone's understanding of who Native people are. Books that are getting published today are not just for Native kids. They're important to Native kids because they affirm our existence as Native people in the present day.
But they're also for non-Native kids, because those kids are being shaped by the information in the book. They'll grow up. They might be senators working on legislation that's going to impact Native people. And so those - the books are important for all readers, because I think the country is better off if we all know history in a more informed way.
DEMBY: But Debbie told me she hadn't always planned to focus her work in this way. It all started decades ago when she and her family moved to Champaign-Urbana in Illinois so that Debbie could start graduate school. And before they even showed up there, they were warned that they probably needed to be aware of the school's kind of - well, very janky Indian caricature mascot.
REESE: The stereotypical one, with the big, feathered headdress and fringed buckskin.
DEMBY: That mascot has since been retired, but at the time, it was everywhere. And the professor that was recruiting Debbie to come to the school was like, are you going to be OK with that? And she was like, don't worry. That's not going to be a problem.
REESE: When I got there, I was astonished at how big a problem it was - how much people dismissed actual Native voices because they were so in love with that mascot. And I started to think, now, OK, what's going on? How did this come to be? And so I had gone to Illinois to study children's books and family literacy and shifted the focus of my research to depictions of Native peoples in children's books.
DEMBY: And when she really started looking, she noticed these depictions - most of them extremely messed up - just about everywhere.
REESE: I saw characters that we love dearly as people in American society. And I'm talking about Clifford the Big Red Dog in "Clifford's Halloween" wearing a big headdress, and Grizzly Bob with those cubs at a camp, sitting around a fire, wearing that big headdress. I began to notice how often children are exposed to stereotypical images. So that's what started it.
DEMBY: Debbie says that the landscape of literature has changed a lot in the decade since then, in some good ways and some not-so-great ways. So I asked her to give us a little breakdown of how the state of playful books by and about Indigenous authors has evolved since she first started her research.
How big is the market, and about how many books get published each year?
REESE: Well, that has changed significantly. When I started working in this field in the '90s, there were not that many. And what teachers were using were books with problematic imagery in them, not just picture books that I've already mentioned, but books like "Little House On The Prairie," with derogatory and factually erroneous information, "Island Of The Blue Dolphins" - these are classics, award-winning books. So I started critiquing those as well. And overall, the industry of children's books began to pay more attention than they had prior to the '90s. I think it goes in cycles. But anyway, we're in a cycle right now where there is tremendous interest, and it feels to me like we've gone 10 to 90. I don't want to say zero to 90 because there were books before. But we're at a different place now, with many books coming out each year.
DEMBY: This wave of book bans and controversies around children's books, does it feel novel to you? Like, is this new territory for us?
REESE: I think that historians would say we've been through something like this before. This is not the first time books are getting banned. But I think this is maybe a more precarious time because of how not just U.S. society but the entire globe seems to be devolving in terms of being open to the many peoples of the Earth. It seems there's some - it feels a very vulnerable time for everyone.
DEMBY: What kind of consequences befall a book or a book author when their work ends up on these lists?
REESE: People think that it's a badge of honor, and they - some people may feel, yeah, that's a badge of honor, but the reality is that what we see happening is that people see "To Kill A Mockingbird" on the book list, and they go and buy "To Kill A Mockingbird." And they feel like they've done a good deed. Well, "To Kill A Mockingbird" didn't need anybody to go and buy another copy.
DEMBY: (Laughter) Right.
REESE: But books by Native writers and African American, LGBT, all these groups who are getting censored, those writers are struggling very hard just to make a few sales. Those are the books that need more sales. So they're lacking visibility that "To Kill A Mockingbird" has in the first place. And so the idea that they would feel good or it would be good for their book to get banned or censored is not - it doesn't pan out the way people think it would.
DEMBY: Do the publishing companies take any special action when these books end up on these lists, or what are their responses?
REESE: Some have, but not in the ways that writers would like. I think some publishing houses and editors are doing what I think is the same thing that we see teachers and librarians do, which is soft banning. Soft banning meaning that they just back away from a project because it's too much trouble. Scholastic, in particular, did something like that. They had - they have - I don't know how old you are, Gene, but I never had a book fair when I was a kid. I'm in my '60s. But book fairs are big. Book fairs are big. And they had a diversity bookshelf in the last couple of years. They put the diverse books that they were publishing on the diversity bookshelf.
DEMBY: Wow, so they had a special shelf where they just stashed the diverse books?
REESE: Yes. Some librarians were outraged about that. They said, what are you asking me to do? What are you suggesting that I do? There was a tremendous outpouring about that, and so Scholastic retreated from that, and they moved away from that. They're integrating those books back into the regular book fair offerings.
DEMBY: Wow. Oh (laughter), that's, like, kind of dystopian.
REESE: I know.
DEMBY: (Laughter).
REESE: I know.
DEMBY: Oh, man. On your blog, American Indians In Children's Literature, you have a subsection or a category titled Not Recommended.
REESE: Right. Books like "Little House On The Prairie," "Island Of The Blue Dolphins" - they have misrepresentations of Native people, and they have bad history in them. So with that driving force, the idea that kids are learning from these books that we hand to them, I look carefully at the representations for the quality of that and for the history.
DEMBY: Can you tell us a little bit about the sort of bad history in "Little House On The Prairie," for example? Like, what - in which ways was the history sort of distorted and misrepresenting Indigenous people?
REESE: In "Little House On The Prairie," she creates a story where Native people are running around with very little clothing on. One of the major tribes that was there during the time that she was writing that - where that story is depicted were the Cherokee. Before the Cherokee were removed from their homelands in the South to what was then called Indian territory, they had been sending some of their students to elite schools on the East Coast, they had been visiting Washington, D.C., and having negotiations. They were not primitive people. No Native people were primitive anytime. That's also a misrepresentation that you see in a lot of children's books. We were not primitive. We were different in various ways. So anyway, with "Little House On The Prairie," she depicts them as savage, primitive people, and that's just not historically accurate.
DEMBY: And that, I imagine, was not - that was probably the baseline of representation for the time that Laura Ingalls Wilder was writing those books, right? Like, that wasn't anomalous, necessarily.
REESE: No, that was kind of the whole landscape. That's how it was done. And the fact is just about all those classics and bestselling, quote-unquote, "folk tales" about Native people, they're all problematic. So that's why these books matter so much, the ones that are getting published now, that are getting banned, that are getting challenged because they're feeling a tremendous need.
DEMBY: So what should we do about books like "Little House On The Prairie" - right? - books that are sort of, like, run through with these misrepresentations? Do we - should we, like, put them away? Should we - like, how do you think we should treat them?
REESE: We get into sticky spaces, don't we? 'Cause it sounds like we're trying to ban them (laughter). But I come to that question as a teacher. Again, I fall back on that idea that I'm a teacher and that in a classroom, we are charged with teaching kids, with educating them, not with miseducating them. So a book that has problematic, inaccurate content. If that's a math book and it says something like two plus two is five, a teacher won't use it, or if they see that error, they will say, oh, look, there's a problem here. Somebody goofed. So I think when you have a book like "Little House On The Prairie" and you know the actual history, you can set it aside because you, as a teacher who is charged with education, can say, yeah, this book is not going to work 'cause it miseducates kids.
DEMBY: And what do you hope the future looks like for the landscape of Indigenous literature for children?
REESE: I'm doing everything I can to help teachers learn how to look critically at the problematic content and why they can reach for a book by a Native writer who is writing from their own family's history and who is including information in their book that is not in a textbook. There are periods of U.S. history that Native people experience, like the termination period that Native writers write about that because our families went through termination. And so that content is in the book that you'll never get it somewhere else until textbooks change. That's being denied to Native kids who see that history when they read that book and to non-Native kids as well.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: In that conversation, we spent a lot of time talking to Debbie about what she's sick of seeing and what she just doesn't want to see. But we also asked her to recommend some of the best books by Indigenous authors that she's come across recently. And you can check out her list of recommendations on the CODE SWITCH blog. It includes picture books, middle and high-school-age text, nuanced, fleshed-out Indigenous characters and storylines. And coming up, a conversation with an Indigenous Hawaiian author who says that if Americans want to ban her book, have at it because that's not really her problem.
HINALEIMOANA WONG-KALU: What happens on the U.S. continent is what happens on the U.S. continent, and it's irrelevant to me. I don't care.
DEMBY: That's after the break. Stay with us.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: Gene - just Gene this week - CODE SWITCH. So before the break, we were talking to Debbie Reese about the dangers of book bans and their consequences for Indigenous literature. But I also spoke to an Indigenous author who had a really different perspective, at least about how book bans factor into her life.
WONG-KALU: My name is Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, and I am from the islands of Hawaii.
DEMBY: When I called up Hinaleimoana, it was morning her time. She's six hours behind me. She was sitting in her home in Honolulu.
WONG-KALU: I'm sitting here at my mother's little table where she eats. I'm - and there's a water bottle next to me. My laptop is on a jam jar. I do not live in the lap of luxury. I live like most other Hawaiians and island people. We live humble, simple lives.
DEMBY: Hinaleimoana is the author of an all-ages book centered around a little-known piece of Hawaiian history. It's called "Kapaemahu," and in 2023, it got pulled into this really ugly fight in Virginia that almost led to a library there closing. The book was one of more than a hundred children's books that were described as having, quote, "pornographic content," all because of a quick detail about gender in the story.
The fight kicked off a stir in the Virginia county where this was all going down, but Hinaleimoana didn't seem to be losing sleep over any of this. Like, when I spoke with her, I asked her if she knew that this fight had even happened.
WONG-KALU: No, I didn't. I don't mean to be rude to American friends, whoever you may be, but I'm Hawaiian.
DEMBY: Hinaleimoana told me that she understands why some people feel this need to defend themselves and defend their work when it comes under this kind of scrutiny. But she said that's not really her ministry.
WONG-KALU: I'm Kanaka first. Hawaii is my mainland. What happens on the U.S. continent is what happens on the U.S. continent, and it's irrelevant to me. I don't care. You know, if it was banned, that's - I can't control what happens in Virginia or any other state.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: She said she's willing to engage in critiques of her work if they come from other Hawaiians - you know, people who share her values and share her culture and especially people who share her language. But, she said...
WONG-KALU: I'm not someone who will say, I'm a proud American. And, I mean, I'm required to carry a U.S. passport, but I'm not trying to champion for American flag issues or things that are rooted there because I have to focus on what's important to me here at home in my mainland.
And again, this is meant to be no offense, but, you know, anybody who's feeling some kind of way about the words that I'm saying, I really challenge you to think about where your centering is. I'm clear about my center. I'm clear about my allegiance, and I'm clear about what I will allow to impact my life.
DEMBY: And then there's the fact that the people trying to ban her book don't seem to really understand the story. So I guess - I mean, let's talk about what the book is about.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WONG-KALU: "Kapaemahu" is the name of one of the legendary healers, and the story tells of their journey that comes from the ancestral homelands of Kahiki, or known to the world as modern day Tahiti.
DEMBY: Centuries ago, four Mahu healers traveled from Tahiti to Hawaii, and they shared their healing arts with the people of Hawaii. And those healers would become revered. The people of Hawaii expressed their thanks with a monument in their honor.
WONG-KALU: And these huge stones were brought all the way down by the ocean and dedicated to their memory and imbued by the healers to be a place where people could come to and pay respects.
DEMBY: Then Hinaleimoana's book tells what happened to those stones next, because they were there for centuries. And then the colonizers came, and they forced the Indigenous people to give up their beliefs and their folk ways. And the story of those healers and their stones was mostly forgotten, even though the stones were still there. Hinaleimoana's book captures all of this. But she says that she herself hadn't heard the story of the stones growing up, even though she grew up seeing those stones all the time in Waikiki.
WONG-KALU: I remember, as a young child, swimming at the beach there. And then we would come up to the shore, and we would lie on them, put our towels on them because we didn't know what their significance was, and they were just a part of the landscape there at the beach.
DEMBY: But in the '90s, Waikiki went through this major cultural revival. And as part of that revival, the stones got moved. They went from being essentially these artifacts lying on the beach to upright monuments acknowledged as part of Hawaiian history.
Today, they're surrounded by a short fence and a plaque in Honolulu like a memorial. And that's a big change and a positive one, she says. But Hinaleimoana said that that's kind of an outlier, that the bigger trend is still for the stories of Hawaiian people to be covered up or left untold altogether.
WONG-KALU: So many other stories have been relegated to the annals of historic texts, newspapers and other historic writings. There's so much to be told about my people, but it alludes to the reality that I - being ethnically Kanaka - come from a population in Hawaii that is dwindling, and that's due to exodus - my people heading to Great Turtle Island, otherwise known to the world as continental U.S.
It is true that the U.S. continues to illegally occupy Hawaii. And my people run to the U.S. because we are taught that seeking the American dream is the ideal. And part of that means that we no longer have our people to tell our own stories. And so in Hawaii, our reality is we are a minor minority in our own homeland.
WONG-KALU: And that makes it exceedingly difficult to not only tell our stories, but more so just be a presence to be respected, of which oftentimes we aren't.
DEMBY: Even with the story of the stones - a story that has been given more prominence - Hinaleimoana says that part of the story of the healers and the stones that had been papered over was the fact that the healers were Mahu. They were both male and female spirits. And it's that detail about those Mahu healers that landed her book on that list to be banned - because "Kapaemahu" was grouped in with a bunch of other books that were described as having, quote, "LGBT themes." The presumption was that the healers in "Kapaemahu" were trans, but Hinaleimoana says that reflects a really deep misunderstanding about what it means to be Mahu.
WONG-KALU: I do not consider Mahu an identity. Pacific Islanders do not identify by sex or gender. And while many of us acquiesce to the larger current, the undersweeping or underpinning current of Westernization and colonization, it is important to make note that Pacific Island culture - especially when it comes to Hawaii - sex and gender is not an identity. It simply is a detail of life.
And when you talk about the word Mahu, it's an adjective. It describes elements of that person and whether the elements be physical - and not just the physicality of someone but also possibly their physical desires, their physical interactions with other people. But Mahu also will reveal to you possible elements of the individual's internal space that they maintain and that they hold - mentally, emotionally, as well as spiritually.
So in the effort to reinstate Mahu to a rightful place of understanding, Mahu is a term that is very inclusive. It is rather broad and sweeping. It is often mistaken by modern-day people - ethnic Hawaiians and other - for being trans. And while the application of the word Mahu to someone of the West who sees it as transgender or transsexual, depending on which term they use - it is pulling that life's experience - synthesizing it through the Western lens.
But if you pull it through the Hawaiian lens, Mahu could apply to someone who looks like a gender-binary male. It might look like a gender-binary female. Or they may be somewhere in between, or they may have come from one side completely over to the other and vice versa. So Mahu - once again, it is an inclusive term. It's not an identity. It simply is a description of the individual.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: That description of what it means and what it doesn't mean to be Mahu reminded me of a conversation we had on this podcast not too long ago with the historian Jules Gill-Peterson. Jules' concern was that in trying to make the term trans a broad, inclusive category, we fall back on using the concept of being transgender, even when we're talking about people from very different cultural contexts, with very different understandings of identity and gender - people who aren't really operating with binary ideas, Western ideas, about gender and sexuality. Here's Jules from that conversation.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
JULES GILL-PETERSON: And the term trans - the term transgender - you know, has had this incredible career. It has great PR. And the thing that is its greatest strength - that it's supposedly radically inclusive. This term is just ethnocentric. And that's a loaded thing to say. But really simply, it comes from one specific culture - right? - like, the United States (laughter). It's an English word, right? It was invented by a single class, you know, of people with a certain degree of education. And then they went on to claim it could apply to anyone in the entire world. And that's just simply not true.
DEMBY: And that's exactly the thing that has been frustrating Hinaleimoana. She said that in the context of the U.S. mainland culture wars, those binary ideas are really, really meaningful. They're really fraught ground to be fought over. But in her world, that's just not what it is.
WONG-KALU: But I hope that the telling of this story will show that, when it comes to being Mahu, the part about being Mahu is almost irrelevant except for the fact that being Mahu makes you even stronger. And it makes you a more powerful healer in the case of the healers, because they harness the mana - the power - the spiritual power of male and female in one person. That's a significant thing.
DEMBY: Hinaleimoana says people who don't like her book can continue to do whatever it is they feel they want or need to do, even if they want to ban it.
WONG-KALU: I'm not going to feel some kind of way about it because that's their personal thought. And being American is highly predicated upon personal, individual freedoms. That is not the way of Pacific Island culture. And so if you didn't like it, that's your personal opinion. And - great - I don't have to bother with you. But don't bother with me by that same token.
So, you know, I'm not trying to force anything upon anybody else. I'm not over there trying to insist that the library - any library, school or otherwise - is required to have it. If they have it, they have it. If they don't, they don't.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: So book bans are a real tricky subject, right? In some ways, it feels like giving them more oxygen just makes them more important than they really need to or ought to be. But on the other hand, Debbie Reese, the scholar we spoke with earlier, said these bans are having a tangible negative effect on a lot of authors and a lot of readers. So it makes sense to me that Debbie Reese and Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu conceptualize these bans in really different ways.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: So let's take Debbie's approach. Hers seems to be, let's engage and dive right in and explain to people what they're getting wrong, what they're missing, and tell them why that matters.
REESE: So that's why these books matter so much - the ones that are getting published now, that are getting banned, that are getting challenged - because they're feeling a tremendous need.
DEMBY: And Hinaleimoana's approach seems to be more, OK, let's do the work for the people who want to engage with it earnestly and honestly, and we can just kind of roll our eyes at everybody else. For her, the people that matter most for her work are young people, especially Hawaiian young people. And she wants them to know that, regardless of what any institutions with power might tell them, they are allowed to define their own identities using the definitions and markers that matter to them, just as she uses the ones that matter to her.
WONG-KALU: If I walk this through as a learning exercise, I would say that I am Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu. I am the child of Georgette Moana Mathias and Henry Dai Yau Wong. I'm the grandchild of Mona Kananiokalani Kealoha and John Furtado Mathias and also grandchild of Edith Gum Gew Look and Henry Gum Ling Wong (ph). That is my genealogy. I am born on the island of Oahu in the southern district of Kona, known to the world as Honolulu. I live in the valley of Nuuanu, with Lanihuli Peak at the top and three bodies of water - Waikahalulu, Puehuehu and Nuuanu flowing to the sea of Mamala. And there are many other names for the spaces and places around me. My genealogy and my land is my identity.
DEMBY: Hinaleimoana says there are two words from her culture that are central to her value system.
WONG-KALU: Kulana and Kuleana. Kulana is one's role, one's status, or one's place, one's rank, one's title and one's position. Sometimes you might consider it your job. So that's Kulana. And then Kuleana is duty, obligation and responsibility. If you know your role, you know who you are, and you know your place, then you should know the duties, obligations and responsibilities that require fulfillment. And therefore, that's what you need to do. That becomes the standard and the measure by which kanaka should rightfully be assessed and evaluated. For those of us in our community who recognize rightful Hawaiian ways of being and existing and thinking and seeing the world, in my own personal example, any commendation or any positive appreciation that has come the way of my name, Kumu Hina, to the community, it's because I have availed myself to a life of service.
I will exist as I am, and you will not impose anything upon me - period - you know? They're just irrelevant. I'm sorry. I know I keep saying that, but I don't have time for people who either, you know, don't want the story I've told or don't like it. That's just them. I have other things to do better with my time. There are many more other pressing issues in the Hawaiian community for me to tend to. I'm also a caregiver for my mother.
I'm sorry, but when it comes to equity and inclusion, I will be your equal, and I will be included in the mix if there is a requirement for my skillset, if there's a requirement for my understanding and if there's a requirement for my ability and capacity to serve. If you - if my participation or if my presence is either unwarranted or unwanted, then I simply say, well, thank you. I've got other things to do anyway - bye-bye - and moving right along.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DEMBY: And that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram @nprcodeswitch. If email is more your thing, ours is codeswitch@npr.org. And subscribe to the podcast on the NPR app or wherever it is you get your podcasts. You can also subscribe to the CODE SWITCH newsletter by going to npr.org/codeswitchnewsletter.
And another way to support our work here is to sign up for CODE SWITCH+. It's small, but it makes a really big difference for us, and you'll get to listen to every CODE SWITCH episode without any ads. You can check it out at plus.npr.org/codeswitch. And thanks to everyone who's already signed up.
The episode you're listening to was produced by Christina Cala. It was edited by Leah Donnella and Courtney Stein. Our engineer was James Willetts. And we would be remiss if we did not shout-out the rest of the CODE SWITCH massive. That's Xavier Lopez, Jess Kung, Dalia Mortada, Veralyn Williams, B.A. Parker and Lori Lizarraga.
As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be easy, y'all.
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.