Bad Michigan books

Promulgation of Damaging Ethnic Stereotypes as a Cottage Industry in Northern Michigan:  Book ReviewsImagine confronting in your public schools, libraries, and community bookstores colorful children’s books full of imitation stories about your culture that utilize characters and words from your language but feature sexual predators, child molesters, murderers, and rapists from your extended family’s personal and oral histories. Imagine complaining to your local schoolteachers, librarians, and booksellers only to be told that this is acceptable, because the author has placed an obscure disclaimer in the front of the book, because the author is a very nice person with children of her own who claims to be honoring you by manufacturing these materials, because people from outside of your culture enjoy this particular form of lampooning you, or simply because the books make money for a lot of people outside of your extended family. Imagine this type of lampooning resulting in your inability to obtain equal employment at equal pay or resulting in deprecating comments directed at your children by their peers. This is what happens every day to the Anishinabeg, the aboriginal people of the western Great Lakes.

The notion that a non-Indian can create alternative Native American legends and histories manifests residual racism, and the practice would not be tolerated were any other contemporary culture targeted in such a fashion. The practice has been described as disrespectful and exploitive by every Native American elder with whom I have discussed it. It is considered a threat to the very survival of our culture and is equated with genocide. When one disregards our culture, one disregards us as human beings. We are inseparable from our stories and our traditions. And we are tired of being told that we have no place in contemporary American culture unless we adapt these things to meet the marketing needs of non-Indians who have taken over more than ninety-nine percent of our traditional lands and now see fit to take over our cultural formatting as well.(Excerpted from Debbie Reese's American Indians in Children's Literature, 6/27/07.)