More than a Footnote: Quiet Hero, Saltypie, and Sharice's BIG Voice

Finding picturebooks focused on the Indigenous experience at Indian Residential (or Boarding) Schools set in the United States is a challenge. While Canada has experienced [publishing boom in the past ten years quote], the United States has seen no such increase in sharing these stories. However, the brutal history of Canadian residential schools being literally unearthed has, fortunately, prompted a "reckoning with [the] cross-national history of abuse of Indigenous people" (Jackson, 2021), and the United States is beginning to question the silenced history of its own boarding school program, as evidenced by the creation of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative in June 2021.

Vandever's (2017) "Fall in Line, Holden!" most directly confronts the issue of boarding schools, introducing the topic in the third opening. He also includes a wonderful author's note at the end of the book that describes boarding school education as "a militant term of conformity and an attack on language and culture" and rightfully ascribes "the negative social and economic conditions that exist in many Indigenous communities today" to the forced detachment from the families, heritage, and "sense of identity" that these children faced (Vandever, 2017, n.p.). Haaland (2021) notes that "survivors of the traumas of boarding school policies carried their memories into adulthood" (p. 1) and "their experiences still resonate across the generations" (p. 3). We can not afford to continue to ignore these wrongs. Haaland acknowledges that "while it may be difficult to learn of the traumas suffered in the boarding school era, understanding its impacts on communities today cannot occur without acknowledging that painful history" (para. 5), a sentiment Vandever echoes in his acknowledgement section as well.

Because "Fall in Line, Holden!" is entirely about boarding schools, it has a dedicated post of its own. Three other books on the American market, however—Quiet Hero (Nelson, 2006), Saltypie (Tingle, 2010), and Sharice's Big Voice (Davids, 2021)— each briefly mention the personal and/or intergenerational trauma of the boarding school program while their storyline is focused elsewhere. I have thus decided to treat them all within the same post.

Quiet Hero

Quiet Hero: The Ira Hayes Story (2006) was written by S.D. Nelson, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and tells the story of Ira Hayes, a member of the Gila River Pima Indian Reservation who served in the Marine Corps during WWII and was one of six soldiers to help raise the flag on Iwo Jima. The story begins by detailing Hayes' life at home on the reservation, with warm-hued illustrations depicting a happy family life. The fourth opening shows Ira at school being tormented by girls at the school, and fifth opening shows the grim living conditions of the school children, all bunked together in uniform shades of dull grey and brown. The accompanying text notes that "he was deeply lonely" and that "letters were Ira's only way of staying in contact with his family" because students were not permitted to visit with their family." By the next spread, however, Ira has enlisted in the Marines and is soon off to battle.

The minimal discussion of the boarding school program within the story is supplemented with a rather robust author's note. Nelson (2006) notes that life on the reservation was difficult in the 1940s and that "many families were near starvation," and because parents realized their children would at least be kept fed and clothed at schools, they "reluctantly sent their children away" to government-run schools that would "[attempt] to assimilate Native American children into the white American way of life" (n.p.). By the 1940s "students no longer wore uniforms" and "strict punishment was reduced," but many students, including Ira Hayes, still found "the boarding school experience...foreign and frightening" (Nelson, 2006, n.p.).

Saltypie

Nelson's treatment of boarding schools, brief as it is, is rather robust compared to the one-spread mentions in both Saltypie (Tingle, 2010) and Sharice's Big Voice (Davids, 2021). In Saltypie: A Choctaw Journey from Darkness Into Light (Tingle, 2010), author Tim Tingle reminisces about his grandmother and his family's vernacular term "saltypie," a word his father came up with as a young child and which the family now uses to "carry on" after experiencing an injustice or pain they can't do anything about (Tingle, 2010, thirteenth opening). When his grandmother is in the hospital and the family has gathered to wait for the results of her surgery, they reminisce about all the "saltypie" experiences she had gone through in her life, including being taken to boarding school and having to remain there for Christmas after her father died "and there was nobody to take her home" (sixteenth opening).

Tingle (2010) acknowledges his "passing references to the Indian boarding school experience and the Trail of Tears," but asks that readers focus on the issue of who threw the stone at Tingle's grandmother and ask themselves why so that we "can pocket [our] stones and extend a hand in friendship" (author's note). Indeed, the story of Tingle's grandmother is one that beautifully exemplifies the power of this olive-branch mentality. As Borrows (2008) said, "we only have to grasp our most fundamental teachings and notice how they are lived by good people in our communities to start along this path" of reconciliation and live those principles as well, so that "we might eventually realize that we were governing ourselves in matters most important to our future happiness" (p. 31). The moment this is achieved, "the Indian Act will be extinguished because we no longer give it power over our lives and communities" (Borrows, 2008, pp. 31–32). The place to begin, Tingle says (2010), is with a "real and more truthful education about American Indians" (author's note).

Sharice's Big Voice

Sharice's Big Voice (2021) briefly mentions boarding schools at the fifth opening. Davids, herself, never attended an Indian boarding school, but because she "looked different from them," her peers kept asking her "What are you, Sharice?" so one day she asked her mother that question (n.p.). Sharice's mom answers by telling her, "We're members of the Ho-Chunk Nation" (Davids, 2021, n.p.). The illustrations include a speech bubble coming from her mother with an image of a little girl in traditional clothing and the text explaining that her "mom was removed from her family and told to pretend she wasn't Ho-Chunk" (Davids, 2021, n.p.). As with Quiet Hero (2006) and Saltypie (2010), more information regarding boarding schools can be found in the explanatory notes at the end of Sharice's Big Voice (2021). Here, on the nineteenth opening, Davids (2021) mentions that for over 100 years, "Native children were forced to leave their families and live in residential boarding schools, where they were horribly punished for speaking their languages or practicing any traditions" including the use of their given names (n.p.). Some parents responded to this cruelty by not "giving their children Native names at birth" so they wouldn't accidentally use the wrong name at school (Davids, 2021, n.p.). Davids (2021) ends her notes by saying that she is continuing to "uphold our warrior tradition" by using her position in the US Congress to "[fight] for the protection and security and rights of all" (n.p.).

Nelson (2006) did his own illustrations for Quiet Hero in a rather realistic style, while Karen Clarkson, a Choctaw artist known for her portraits of Indigenous women, provided the illustrations for Tim Tingle (2010), who is also a member of a Choctaw tribe. Clarkson uses her art as "a way to draw attention to social injustice" and says that art can "influence today's perceptions" (Clarkson, 2020). Her portraits imbue her subjects with strength and resilience, something easily seen in Saltypie (2010).

The artwork in Sharice's Big Voice (2021), on the other hand, was done by Joshua Mangeshing Pawis-Steckley, an Ojibwe Woodlant artist, in a "style that best honored the relationship both Sharice [Ho-Chunk] and I [Ashinaabe] have to our past, present, and future as Indigenous people on Turtle Island" (artist's note, n.p.). He says that Sharice's Big Voice "resonated deeply with [him] because she speaks so openly about how she grew up disconnected from her nation" and shows how she sought to forge those connections (artist's note, n.p.). Their collaboration illustrates that although each tribe is distinct and each individual experience so personal, and although the "history of residential schools in Canada, and the damage this wrought on Indigenous families, communities, and culture, cannot be understood through one or even a handful of books" (Wolf, 2017, p. 156, as cited in Harde, 2020, n.p.), many injustices Indigenous people face collectively been so universal—for example, "by 1926, 83% of Indian school-age children were attending boarding schools" (NABS, n.d.)—that they can tell many story with a unified voice.

My hope is that as our nation wrestles with this more transparent and truthful knowledge about the history of the Indian Boarding School program, we will be open to sharing and hearing stories that center experiences of children who suffered through the system, rather than constantly relegating them to the footnotes.

Works Cited:

Borrows, J. (2008). Seven Generations, Seven Teachings: Ending the Indian Act. National Centre for First Nations Governance, 1–34.

Clarkson, K. (2020). SWAIA 2020 Preview—Karen Clarkson. Retrieved July 27, 2021, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ4ilvNsUOU&t=185s

Halaand, D. (2021). Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/secint-memo-esb46-01914-federal-indian-boarding-school-truth-initiative-2021-06-22-final508-1.pdf

Harde, R. (2020). Talking back to history in Indigenous picturebooks. International Research in Children’s Literature, 13(2), 274–288. https://doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2020.0358

Jackson, L. (2021, July 23). America Had Residential Schools, Too. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/23/podcasts/canada-residential-schools-indigenous.html

NABS. (n.d.). US Indian Boarding School History. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. Retrieved July 27, 2021, from https://boardingschoolhealing.org/education/us-indian-boarding-school-history/