Sharing this post on social media? Use this description to make it accessible: [Image description: Cover of ‘Mup’ by Raea Gragg. A teen and young child submerged under water, both are illustrated as Black-presenting with green eyes and flowing dark brown hair”]
Mup
Raea Gragg
Graphic Novel, Not recommended
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For critical discussion with kids
Q (age 9) enjoyed the time travel, adventure, message against climate-devastating oil consumption and Mup’s character growth about self-identity as she approaches puberty. I did too!
HOWEVER. Controversy! There were many things we found problematic with this book. I went on a little rant about it that went far too long, so I’m just gonna sum it up into a few points and let you do your own digging.
It’s fine for kids to enjoy the goofy adventures created by white people unimpeded by racialized trauma. But for white readers in particular – this comes with the responsibility of recognizing bias, naming it, and committing to not replicating this harm.
You might also like: Kyriarchy-Smashing Books for 9-Year-Olds
Problematic: Brownface
This book was published in 2020. How on earth does a white lady not pause before writing a character based on her very white sister (that rich white girl slouch! That level-10 Patagonia-fleece whiteness!) and then paint her brown for no apparent reason other than a grab at the ‘diversity’ market?
Problematic: Tampering brownface with proximity of whiteness.
BIPOC have light eyes all the time, it’s normal!
The thing is they’re not any more or less acceptable or beautiful than those with darker coloring. Just in case Mup having flufflier hair and darker skin than white readers would be comfortable with, Graegg drew Mup with light skin and green eyes. How exotic! All the diversity points of brownface, with the subtle ‘but she’s pretty’ message that remind BIPOC that in white supremacy culture, fairer BIPOC are easier on the eyes, and easier to empathize with.
Problematic: Zero effort to embrace Mup’s appropriated Blackness beyond looks
In appropriating a Black-presenting character and implying she’s multiracial, the very least Graegg could have done was run this book past a Black reader to get notes on what she’s missing. Three girls with kinks and curls just plop bareheaded into sleeping bags and jump up in the morning like the world won’t take them seriously until they take that frizz. Imagine that life!
You might also like: No White Saviors: Kids Books About Black Women in US History
Problematic: ‘Gotcha’ language
Mup’s dad uses ‘then I got you’ to refer to the phenomena of obtaining Mup. Like she’s a freakin’ Pokemon. Or a token Black family member to prove he’s open-minded. Regardless of race and adoption status – it’s just weird and gross to talk to our kids like we collected them like pogs.
BIPOC who have been collected by a white person who preens over you as a prized element of their social collection, you know exactly what I’m talking about. This language wouldn’t be more than an awkward blip on the radar if it wasn’t a white dad talking to his multiracial / transracially adopted daughter. The implied backstory of adoption, breeding mixed babies to fix your racism, or even just that Warrior Parent nonsense of objectifying kids as catalysts for a parent’s heroic journey – Ick. Ew. Gross. No thank you.
You might also like: The Reality of Being Adopted: Validating Stories for Adopted Kids
Problematic: Basic Boring Saviorism
The saviorism! A nameless, pan-African tribe has been invaded, colonized, and exploited by a white dude sporting a crown. It’s destroyed their way of life! They are helpless to stop it! Until two Americans show up and save the day within 48 hours.
You might also like: Creating An Anti-Racist Family Manifesto
OH COME THE FUCK ON, ALREADY: Complete lack of self-awareness
Alone, the nebulous, inky, infesting Black Dread (a creeping infestation that pollutes all life that is good and pure on Earth) would be a subtle sign that the author is not at all concerned with our culture’s value on lightness, whiteness, purity culture, and how it forms early bias and racial supremacy on young readers. But capitalizing on a shortcut based in anti-darkness while wearing the face of a Black-presenting character? On top of all the other goof in this book? Yikes.
Like the increased popularity of zombie movies during a refugee crisis and immigration boom, the symbolism of darkness as invading death takes on a deeper tone in the context of a white woman cherry-picking the symbolism of darkness to suit her whims.
Goodness gracious. What. WHAT. I mean we all make mistakes and goof up, cause harm, spread nonsense – but this is a hot messy lasagna of unapologetic privilege and zero self-awareness.
You might also like: Captivating Kids Stories To Recognize Privilege
Parenting is Praxis:
These conversations have to go somewhere. We can’t just read a book for ‘awareness’ and consider our work done. Here are a few ways we transform our family discussions from Freedom, We Sing into action:
- Talk about your family’s racial identities and recognize your role in working toward Black futures.
- Join & amplify the work of Revolutionary Humans, supporting social justice in parenting, non-profits, and community action.
- Find your local black-led organizations, check out the resources they suggest, and follow their lead in action.
You might also like: All My Sons Deserve Respect! Complex Black Boys In Kidlit
If you don’t have patience for this nonsense,
Grab some good graphic novels for elementary-aged kids
Additional Reading For Grownups:
- When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir
- Mindful of Race
- All My Sons Deserve Respect: Search for Complex Black Boys in Kidlit
You might also like: Children’s Books By Brilliant Black Women: #OwnVoices Authors & Illustrators
Is this #OwnVoices?
AHhahahah NO.
Learn more about #OwnVoices, coined by autistic author Corinne Duyvis
How we calculate the overall awesomeness score of books.
Stay Curious, Stand Brave, and Smash The Kyriarchy
Support the Abolitionist Youth Organizing Institute. My kids have two parents to support them – but through the AYOI, we can support and connect with youth to end targeted policing and incarceration.
“Project NIA [the AYOI lead organizer]’s mission is to dramatically reduce the reliance on arrest, detention, and incarceration for addressing youth crime and to instead promote the use of restorative and transformative practices, a concept that relies on community-based alternatives.
If my work makes it easier for you to raise kind & courageous kiddos, you can keep these resources free for everybody by sharing this post with your friends and reciprocate by supporting my work directly.
Ways to support Raising Luminaries: Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book | Buy toothpaste | Subscribe to Little Feminist Book Club
Sharing this post on social media? Use this description to make it accessible: [Image description: Illustration from ‘The Truly Brave Princesses,’ by Dolores Brown & Sonja Wimmer. A young orange-haired, be-caped girl with amblyopia sits astride a tall tree branch and looks off into the distance, a visual metaphor for the low bar of her ‘heroism’ in living with a disability.]
The Truly Brave Princesses
Dolores Brown & Sonja Wimmer
Picture book, Not Recommended
Keep Raising Luminaries & Books for Littles free and accessible for readers who can’t afford a paywall.
Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with my statement of accountability. If you’re into supporting libraries (please do!) more than consumerism, you can also support my work directly:
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This story is supposed to be inclusive. So why do we feel so alienated?
Let’s take deeper look at The Truly Brave Princesses, [TBP] which a member referenced in a comment on Adipositive Kids Books, requesting a deeper analysis:
“I would love to read a longer review of The Truly Brave Princesses if you ever feel up to writing one. I checked it out from the library once to see if it was worth reading to my preschool classroom. I ended up deciding not to, for reasons I still can’t articulate. It was the strangest feeling, reading it…it had so much in it that I always wish more children’s books had, but it just felt…wrong somehow. ‘Tokenizing’ is one word that comes to mind, but that doesn’t fully encompass everything that felt off about this book.”
– Alyssa M., early childhood educator & disability rights advocate
Why it feels off: The Truly Brave Princesses is a bucket of ableism, internalized hetero-sexism, and model-minority bullshit.
Every woman in the book is presented like a spectacle in a carnival sideshow where the makers use targeted identities to entertain the reader and show off how good and accepting and progressive we all are. This is inspiration porn – using non-threatening, tokenized model minorities to make folks who control the narrative feel better about themselves.
Projects like this sum up that cringe-worthy affirmation of white-, able-, and cishet-centered motivational posters – It’s okay to be different!
Thanks for the permission, I guess?
Regarding the model minorities – the makers don’t even stretch – they highlight only the safest and most socially moderate ways to be ‘different.’ Lesbians and single women – but no openly trans or nonbinary femmes. A woman who proposed to her boyfriend (seriously that’s her only defining thing!) and a single mom – but no polya or blended families. A lady doctor, but no sex workers, working poor, or women who demand credit for emotional or domestic labor. For a book that gives a half-assed attempt at diverse representation, they just made such an overwhelmingly lazy attempt.
You may also like: Kids Books Featuring Capable Disabled Characters
Tokenizing under-represented women as a spectacle
The premise of this book is that these girls and women are the other – people who aren’t reflected in the mainstream media. By accepting who they are and not dying of despair or whatever, that makes them so brave. Truly brave.
The author couldn’t even be bothered to write a story or hook to engage kids. Every spread reads like a listicle of bland dating site profiles. The selling point of this lineup isn’t because the makers find these women fundamentally human and ordinary, but because they don’t. Creating a spectacle of targeted identities – a series of profiles presented one after another for your shock, awe, pity, and inspiration, betrays how the makers perceive each woman as imperfect and bizarre.
There are some moments for validation and reflection. If we reached (real hard), a kid could look at one of the women in this book and think – they are like me! It means something to have girls of size, and girls with disabilities to know they are worth reflecting in a story.
But do we have to get so…stereotype-y about it? Using targeted identities as a spectacle of caricatures, to sell books, is ultimately dehumanizing and further paints these highlighted details – She’s unmarried! She’s got a lisp! as traits of the other. Marking these identities as something that sets us apart and defines us, rather than just something that we are, in addition to being human.
On the surface – all these books start out with the same premise – humans are diverse little critters, and we all need to see ourselves as worthy of acceptance and celebration.
If TBP princesses makes us nervous to highlight and amplify targeted people – how can we do it without being so…gross?
Contrast TBP this with the early 1992’s We’re Different, We’re the Same following Sesame Street’s mission to dismantle colorblind fallacy and erasure.
Contrast TBP with the saccharine (but endearing) earnestness of 2001’s Different Just Like Me – in which a white girl meets new friends in a believably vanilla plot. The protagonist makes a genuine connection with each person – recognizing their difference from her but ultimately shows how much more they have in common. It’s cognitively appropriate for young readers, understanding that some folks (primarily younger kids and folks raised in the colonist/supremacist paradigm) wrestle with the concept of both/and. Two things can be the same in some respects, but different in others. One thing can contain contradictions. A girl can be both disabled, and capable and awesome.
The people the in Different Just Like Me aren’t presented like a lineup in a carnival sideshow, and they aren’t each defined by whitewashed, colonized standards such as marriage status. Mitchell stays in her lane and doesn’t pretend this book is written for anyone but people like her – a white, abled audience, but she touches on the concept of diversity with respect and curiosity.
Contrast TBP with 2016’s The People You May See, in which Sky actively solicited #OwnVoices interviews to amplify the voices of people who feel judged on the street, so she could boost their voices and break stigma. Interviews are presented in their own voices, speaking for themselves, not as representations of a monolithic identity.
Contrast TBP with 2017’s Lovely, or They She He Me, and similar books focusing on radical body diversity and acceptance, where fictionalized characters are celebrated in pride parade of solidarity and representation. Some stories, such as M is for Mustache, even reflect acceptance into the story as a literal, unapologetic pride parade. Affirming that folks erased from traditional media are unconditionally worthy of dignity and self-determination – and deserve to feel seen and connected as a part of the community – not as a spectacle for the mainstream’s entertainment.
Is this book actively malicious, or just willfully ignorant?
TBP swerves away from responsible representation into objectifying us is – falling into the trap of presenting characters in this story in what feels eerily like a beauty pageant parade or a series of dating profiles – as if waiting for the readers’ approval.
Unlike the older books, which all reached some level of connection and humanity, TBP stumbled and explodes in a fiery bingo-chart of denigrating, tokenizing model minorities, reductive stereotypes, and assumptions on how women’s identities still hinge on their romantic relationships (SERIOUSLY EW GROSS YUCK NO).
TBP was printed in 2018 (and a second edition in 2019 because we love half-assed garbage, I guess), plenty of time after the kidlit industry had been packed with good examples of how to celebrate diversity and boost #OwnVoices identities. Even if we pretend the makers were locked in a silo for the past 20 years and had no access to libraries, the internet, or communities like ours (I do this work for free and still white abled ladies come up with excuses!) a few minutes of pause would have given someone in the supply chain a moment of pause – right? At the very least – even if this is how Wimmer does inclusion in Europe (why oh why, as a European does she keep drawing pan-Indigenous person from Turtle Island!?), someone on this side of the pond should have been like ‘Wait hold up this isn’t gonna fly with disabled BIPOC in America.’
Baring some extreme ignorance and/or that silo situation I mentioned above, it’s hard to see this book as anything but an attempt to further stereotype and disempower people with targeted identities as the other. It feels like a Fox News sidebar article.*
But honestly – I don’t think this was malicious. I think this is just the same old stuff we keep finding in kidlit, over, and over, and over again – makers who want ally cookies, who want to capitalize off the wave of progress, but who don’t want to pass the mic. It’s just that same goofy white-centering that harms targeted people while patting our heads and telling us to be patient and complacent. A message far more dangerous than transparently malicious books we can see right through.
*If you don’t want to benefit Fox with more views and clicks – 80% of articles highlighting women are about their bodies or romantic relationships. The other 30% are just photos of AOC talking, maligning her as unstable ’cause she demands updates in legislation – which btw, is her job.)
You may also like: Radically Body-Positive Kids Books
So what messages does this book send our kids?
[Video description: How The Truly Brave Princesses capitalizes on flattening targeted identities into stereotypes and feel-good inspiration porn, our deeper look at the elements, images, and text. Closed captioning available.]
[Video image still: Me, a disabled Chinese person, looking all like ‘wow so brave!’ sarcastically at a dead-eyed, inert, emotionless caricature of how the makers think a disabled Chinese woman looks.]
Is this #OwnVoices?
Author: Dolores Brown (she/her)
Illustrator: Sonja Wimmer (she/her)
I perceive both of these authors as white, cis, and probably abled. Given the span of identities they tried to cram in there (and they really tried to cover the gamut on conservative relationship statuses), I’m sure they must overlap with at least a few. However – they portray the most targeted and maligned identities in the book as condescending handi-capable Go Fund Me profiles, focusing not on what makes them interesting, what challenges they’ve overcome, or how they are badass, and more of a handful of attributes that (sarcasm) make them seem like normal people! (/sarcasm)
Not quite an MDA-telethon style bewareness campaign, but kind of like one of those parties where your Nice White friend shows you off as the token ‘diverse’ friend to show how cool and worldly they are. There are not end-notes disclosing who they hired as a sensitivity reader, nor whether they ran this by (or compensated) any #OwnVoices rights & representation advocates.
Who’s taking bets that A. They ran it by that one unpaid token ‘different’ friend who was pressured to and uncomfortable obligatory approval, or B. They didn’t even bother running this by anyone they tried to stereotype?
So in terms of representation I’m gonna go with…no. No this is not an #OwnVoices book.
Learn more about #OwnVoices, coined by autistic author Corinne Duyvis
Transparency & Cahoots!
I first found this book at our local library (which we support with donations), and later requested a copy to research for this post. If you absolutely must buy a copy to teach kids about critical reading and don’t have access to a library, learn how to support your local indie bookstore on Bookshop – but ugh, don’t support this drivel, buy one of those other books above instead.
How we calculate the overall awesomeness score of books.
You might also like: Books for Girls Aren’t Just for Girls: Normalizing Girls of Color
Stay Curious, Stand Brave, and Transform Justice
If my work makes it easier for you to raise kind & courageous kiddos, you can keep these resources free for everybody by sharing this post with your friends and reciprocate by supporting my work directly.
Ways to support: Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book | Buy toothpaste | Subscribe to Little Feminist Book Club
But if your resources are limited – first support the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network, an #OwnVoices BIPOC, gender-creative, Autistic-run organization which advocates and organizes to support rights for multiply-disabled and neurodivergent Black, Brown, Indigenous & LGBTQiA2S+ folks.
Sharing this post on social media? Use this image description to make it accessible. [Image description: Illustration from ‘Polar Bear Island’ by Lindsay Bonilla & Cinta Villalobos. A polar bear paints the words ‘No Others Allowed’ on the welcome sign to Polar Bear Island.]
Polar Bear Island
Picture Book, Best for using with kiddos ages 5+ to expose the model minority myth
Keep Raising Luminaries & Books for Littles free and accessible for readers who can’t afford a paywall.
Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with my statement of accountability. If you’re into supporting libraries (please do!) more than consumerism, you can also support my work directly:
Donate or shop using an affiliate link via| Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book
Turns out it’s a book about xenophobia.
I picked this up thinking it’d be another book about saving the polar bears & environmentalism. Nope. It’s about closed borders. Cool. Okay, I’m game. Let’s do this.
The Mayor of Polar Bear Island is a xenophobic conservative polar bear named ‘Parker.’ Not ‘Mayor Parker,’ just ‘Parker.’ The author never explains why an island has a mayor, nor why he goes by his first name. The lack of explanation leaves me unsatisfied. I like my anthropomorphic bigots to have some back story, y’know?
Anyway – Parker loves his island exactly the way it is, so he leaves up a passive-aggressive welcome sign, “Welcome to Polar Bear Island, No Others Allowed.”
The 6-year-old found the juxtaposition of ‘welcome‘ paired with a direct ban confusing and hilarious. I had to explain to him that he’s saying other polar bears are allowed, just not other species. It’s unclear!
From here, the story could have gotten really interesting. And then it…didn’t.
Here are a few of the messages the author could have unpacked for kids with this setup:
- The deep ties of social conservatism and the myth of racial purity.
- The futility of attempting to freeze society or viewing the past through rose-colored glasses. Living in a community means growing and changing together. Handing power to the next generation to survive, taking responsibility for our impact on others and our shared humanity – plus growing up means things are bound to change. The story takes place in the arctic! Where stuff can literally freeze for thousands of years! Tension! Metaphors! Missed opportunities!
- How immigration & emigration is both a natural and expected byproduct of life and survival on earth. Otherwise our ancestors wouldn’t have ever left Africa. OBVIOUS. I want to use the convenient metaphor that humans aren’t plants because we’re not rooted to the ground but DUDE, even plants migrate!
- A changing climate and the resulting melting ice caps means real estate in the arctic is becoming rare and even more valuable. We’ve always had refugee migration from natural disasters and conflict, but now we also have a climate refugee crisis. What’s our responsibility to care for each other? How are we complicit as fossil-fuel consumers in destroying another’s home?
Yeah… the book doesn’t tackle any of that. So many missed opportunities. It’s more about…tourism?
Anyway – Parker tries to ban visitors and immigrants, and a penguin shows up. Then there’s the slippery slope xenophobes clutch their pears over – because soon after, the penguin’s family follows and the island is practically infested with penguins after that.
Oh right – there’s another missed opportunity. The importance of circular migration! Circular migration is when people go back and forth seasonally or as needed. Which closed borders destroy, and transform into linear migration – where people can’t leave for fear they won’t be allowed back in. And how this drives the influx of immigrants because families belong together.
Banning circular migration means entire communities must live in a climate where humans can survive all year round, instead of just showing up as needed and then returning home when natural resources return, they’re able to rebuild after natural disaster, or the established population no longer needs the extra labor. OBVIOUSLY.
That same old model minority bullshit
This penguin shows up. The family shows up. This island is full of friendly, helpful penguin tourists. I say tourist because the story is clear that this first penguin is a traveler – someone who likes to keep on the move. This is not someone here to stay. This is someone coming to visit for pleasure.
Polar Bear Island was was published in 2018. It’s about a xenophobic leader. So it’s really hard and I dare say, impossible to read this outside the context of the 2016-2020 US administration’s continued efforts to instate and maintain immigrant bans and border walls targeted toward people of color.
So here is where it gets icky – this book becomes a story about the model immigrant. The model minority – a good immigrant who offers their weight in value. An immigrant who contributes. Or in this case, a family of penguins who show up asking for nothing, offering only helpful tricks like cozy slippers and innovative transportation design.
What then, of the climate refugees? The poor, hungry, sick, and tired we’re so proud of claiming?
Oh – those immigrants aren’t mentioned in this book. They muddy up the argument that we should allow open immigration to nations with plentiful resources, because immigrants are helpful to us.
Which is terribly objectifying, and more than a little disgusting – right? Teaching our kids that immigration is good! (If the immigrants can be put to use).
NO. The movement of humans, of living species, across the planet should be a living right – particularly when living in one particular place becomes life threatening. Particularly if a group of humans living on one chunk of the planet (cough, cough, China, the USA) are using a disproportionate amount of carbon-emitting fossil fuels, leading to the direct devastation of countries with less resources. We are causing natural disasters and creating climate refugees, then banning them from escaping to safer spaces. This is some NIMBY bullshit.
So listen – I am 100% for introducing xenophobia to kiddos so they can see how it’s just pure nonsense. I’m also cool with discussing the messy tensions of culture clash, and even the costs of immigration to the native population. I want to talk about the difference between invasive colonization versus open immigration! I want to talk about the constant struggle to maintain cultural identity in a diaspora against pressure to assimilate! I want to talk about how we bring in brown to keep Black down.
What I do NOT want to talk about, is how immigrants must earn their safety, their value, and their ability to stay based on how many slipper socks they’re willing to sew for the established citizenry and how well they build railroads.
Those who’ve read it caught that, right? The part of the story where the penguins build ice paths for the polar bears like our ancestors built the fuckin’ railroads? But in this story, no Irish or Chinese immigrants were banned, denied citizenship, tortured, murdered, or lit on fire while building infrastructure for white profit.
You might also like: Immigrants Belong Here: Books Helping Kids Advocate For Human Rights
Parenting is Praxis
These conversations have to go somewhere. We can’t just read a book for ‘awareness’ and consider our work done. So – what shall we do with all these big feelings we have about banning immigrants and that damn wall?
Here are some ideas from what we did as a family after reading books about the refugee crisis and family separation:
- Discussed the utter absurdity of using taxpayer money to build a border wall. It took seconds for my 5-year-old to be like “But mom. Airplanes” before collapsing into a pile of disbelieving laughter at the fact that a five year old is more knowledgeable about human migration than our president.
- Collaborate with the Decolonizing Childhood Coalition to raise funds for Immigrant Families Together to end family separation at the US/Mexican border.
- (Pre-covid), hosted a sidewalk lemonade & life coach stand to raise funds for Immigrant Families Together. The 7-year-old poured the lemonade, the 5-year-old provided career advice.
- Created an Immigrant Solidarity Family Action Toolkit to support more families in destigmatizing immigration within their own families and writing advocacy letters and create their own forms of community & family action to raise awareness and funding.
Advocacy work should be normal, and integrated within family life.
Did your family or classroom do something to advocate for immigrant rights & open borders? Share your advocacy work in the comments to motivate more folks!
You might like: Kids Books About Radical Interdependence
This is your go-to book for…
- Introducing the concept (and futility) of closed borders and xenophobia
- Unpacking the model minority myth
- Discussing land ownership, borders, and land rights – is migration a human right?
I’d read this in rotation along with…
This isn’t a one-and-done conversation. We need to bring this conversation back to kids from multiple angles. Get these from your local library, or your local indie bookstore (Bookshop supports local indie stores if you’re self-isolating during the pandemic).
- The Someone New tackles xenophobia in a more personal, empathetic way
- Carmela Full of Wishes centers the children impacted by family separation
- From Far Away an #OwnVoices story written by a Lebanese Canadian child refugee
- Joseph’s Big Ride, Q’s favorite book at age 7 – a story about a boy, a bike, and a new friend and the main character happens to be a refugee – but a child first.
- Both The Lumberjack’s Beard & The Bear With The Sword are cute, funny, and won’t send kids into a spiral of despair. They both use deforestation and messages of restorative justice to unpack how greed and power force vulnerable people (well, animals) to flee, and our responsibility to provide safe harbor and make amends when that happens.
- Coloring Without Borders is a fantastic activity book whose proceeds go directly to Families Belong Together to reunite families separated at the border.
Is this #OwnVoices?
Author: Lindsay Bonilla (she/her)
Illustrator: Cinta Villalobos (she/her)
Not in the way we want it to be. This isn’t immigrant #OwnVoices immigrant – more like #OwnVoices tourist.
Bonilla’s author bio says she is a mom in Ohio, and enjoys international travel. I can’t find any info on whether she’s an immigrant, but it seems like that would be worth mentioning in the author bio blurb at the end of the book. Villalobos was born in and lives in Spain. She also enjoys international travel.
Learn more about #OwnVoices, coined by Corinne Duyvis.
How we calculate the overall awesomeness score of books.
Transparency & Cahoots!
I borrowed a copy of this book from our local library, (which we support with donations).
Stay Curious, Stand Brave, and Support Community Libraries
If my work makes it easier for you to raise kind & courageous kiddos, you can keep these resources free for everybody by sharing this post with your friends and reciprocate by supporting my work directly.
Ways to support: Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book | Buy toothpaste | Subscribe to Little Feminist Book Club
And if you find my work helpful and want to keep it free & accessible for all – join our Patreon community so I can keep these articles coming. But if your resources are limited – support Immigrant Families Together first.
Sharing this post on social media? Use this description to make it accessible: [Image description: Illustration from ‘Coyote Columbus Story’ by Thomas King & William Kent Monkman. Coyote, wearing shorts and high-tops, asks to play ball with Christopher Columbus and his men. Columbus peers suspiciously over the upside-down map of ‘The New Route to India’ as his men unload muskets, machine guns, and weaponry onto the shore in the background.]
Keep Raising Luminaries & Books for Littles free and accessible for readers who can’t afford a paywall.
Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Check out the full affiliate disclosure along with my statement of accountability. If you’re into supporting libraries (please do!) more than consumerism, you can also support my work directly:
Donate or shop using an affiliate link via| Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book
What a fun way to end school celebrations of genocide
I’m not going to get into details on vile human-trafficker and mass-murderer Christopher Columbus. You probably know about that massive jerk by now.
AND YET – It’s 2020 and throughout the US, teachers still celebrate ‘Christopher Columbus Day’ in their classrooms. Maybe because he never set foot here? Is that what we’re celebrating? He killed and enslaved less people here than in Central America? Yay?
(Seriously though – wtf, how is this still a thing?)
But I WILL go on about this SPECTACULAR story that doesn’t just dismantle myths and stereotypes, it pies them in the face with a wild cackle.
Trusting kids with the ‘both…and’ of history’s horrors and the joy we need to survive it
A Coyote Columbus Story engages kids with the deeply powerful but mistake-prone trickster, Coyote. This is an adventure in Indigenous storytelling, a subversive critique at colonist consumerism, and an Indigenous perspective of historical events. This is how we tackle hard topics in an age-appropriate way. A really funny way.
Maybe too funny? Is it disrespectful for us to be laugh so hard about at an act so horrifying?
For those who have said about this book that genocide is not funny, there is this: Humor has been our salvation. If we couldn’t laugh, sometimes at really awful stuff, there wouldn’t be any of us here.
With that – this is an intro book to get kids started on the topic of colonization, genocide, and slavery – one that doesn’t send them spiraling into despair. A quick antidote for the construction paper Santa Maria our kids bring home from school in October.
I think the problem is when we stop at the easy laughs, and refuse to carry these conversations into the deeper, harder evolution of reconciling history and how we apply this knowledge today. So many settlers are afraid to talk about colonization with kids beyond that cowardly myth: ‘Europeans came. The Indigenous people died. Even though some unfair stuff happened, it’s out of our hands, because they’re all dead and we don’t have to concern ourselves with their suffering.’
But no – this story pokes that myth in the ribs – a hard, conspiratorial reminder that Indigenous people survive. Taíno and Arawak people targeted by Columbus are still here. They created innovate ways to survive the violence and erasure of colonialism that continues today. Still fighting for their rights, their families, and still pushing against an active tide of genocide.
So we enjoy this book – especially on Indigenous Peoples’ Day in October. And then we follow it up with deeper books about our responsibility to amplify Indigenous activism and decolonize our local spaces.
Shade on victim-blaming
Those of us who benefit from oppression love a passive voice. “The Indigenous people were enslaved and killed.” No one is killing and enslaving them. They’re just…ending up like that! Nothing to be done if they’re going to get themselves into that kind of predicament! ::Brushes dust off hands::
As Indigenous literature scholars such as Dr. Deb Reese (American Indians in Children’s Literature) and Jean Paine Mendoza (A Broken Flute) have pointed out – settler’s favorite children’s book about colonization (ex: Encounter) blames Taíno people for failing to recognize the warning signs of invasion. This trope shows up again and again both in kidlit and resources for higher education.
We blame Indigenous people for failing to fight back (but when they did, we call them ‘savages.’)
We blame them for naivete, for failing to respond to starving visitors and immigrants with death and internment (we Americans do so love to denigrate compassion and humane treatment!)
We blame them for daring to be in the wrong place, in the wrong time (The wrong place being their home.). For leaving such a tempting resource out where invaders could see it – a land they had cultivated with roads, infrastructure, and soil they had enriched through years of agriculture. Kind of like blaming a home-invasion on a person who took great care of their house.
Which sounds a lot like blaming survivors of harassment and violence for leaving the house / not leaving the house / smiling too much / refusing to smile / asking for it …ad nauseam.
A Coyote Columbus Story refuses to do that. The responsibility of violence and harm belongs on the people who chose to do main, kill, and enslave others. We must stop blaming the survivors of colonization for being easy pickings. Or, as reasonable folks would put it – empathetic human beings who don’t mug each other.
Although we get hints of Columbus’s crimes against humanity, he’s not actually centered in this story – the way he is in most. His human targets are no longer accessories, but people with a rich cultural history long before he showed up. People who are innovative, smart, with agency. People who, as Claudia Fox Tree, Arawak educator, can tell you – survived.
This story is not just about the past. It is alarmingly relevant today. This is the perfect cautionary tale – for many of us who benefit from colonization, who continue to erase and ignore Indigenous people, and who exploit and devastate the land:
You better watch out or this world is going to get bent
But what about this federal holiday celebrating a supremacist Columbus as an Italian American?
Okay first – Columbus never set foot in the land currently known as North America. So let’s get the out of the way. He was not a ‘product of his time’ as no other individual – before or since, as “he enslaved five thousand Indigenous people through his career. More than any other individual in history, ever.”
Which is to say – your average Genoese person was not, at the time, nor now – a brutal murderer and slaver. Suggesting Columbus is representative of Italian Americans in the past or present is – kind of offensive?
Folks who oppose Indigenous Peoples Day like to reduce Italian American heritage to Columbus (who himself was brought back to Spain in chains for crimes against his own men.) These advocates are claiming that by acknowledging the history of this one jerk, we’re doing… reverse-racism against white people and making it “a crime to be white.“
Aside from the fact that talking about the impacts of genocide and not celebrating your crush with a federal holiday is not the same as criminalizing your identity. (Although honey, that’s a thing, just not a valid threat to you.) This particular line came from a group who claimed both ending Columbus day to be an attack on white people, and in the same rant, denied Italian Americans hold the identity or privileges of whiteness in 2018’s America. PICK A LANE, LADY.
This was in a city hearing where a group of Fox News viewers went on to heckle an Indigenous mother into tears as she tried to explain the impact of schools celebrating Columbus Day on her child.
Which is all to say – folks who can’t acknowledge the truth about Columbus are not the inclusive representation of Italian American culture they claim. Just a small subset who value European culture, and lives as supreme above the safety and dignity of Indigenous people. Which is a fancy, tap-dancing way of saying: white supremacists.
The US holiday of Columbus Day was initially based a fictionalized novel by Washington Irving (where Columbus was a hero and adventurer, rather than a guy who was terrible at basic geography, who went full-on monster). The holiday itself was orchestrated by Generoso Pope (1892-1950), who held the job of perpetuating Mussolini’s fascist propaganda throughout the US.
(So if you are wondering, yes, to be anti-Columbus is to be anti-fascist. If you thing fascism is shitty and don’t want it in the US – THAT IS A GOOD THING.)
The US developed a virtue signal holiday to welcome Italian Americans into the folds of whiteness, in the standard ploy to divide poor European immigrants, Indigenous people, and Africans displanted by enslavers from rising up against a common oppressor. An olive branch of “We will stop lynching you if you assimilate to whiteness. Here’s a holiday to show our good will!”
And in true model-minority fashion, it worked. For a time.
However, compassionate Italian Americans have always resented our government linking their heritage to Columbus and his acts. As we gain more access to the voices of Indigenous people, we are becoming aware of the true history behind colonization, and our role as settlers in perpetuating that harm by celebrating their genocide. Progressive Italians are starting to resent being tied to the legacy of Columbus – and are organizing to work in solidarity with Indigenous people. Like our good friends in the Italian Americans for Indigenous Peoples Day Massachusetts, for example.
To add fuel to the flames, before Italians were welcomed into whiteness, earlier versions of the KKK were against the creation of Columbus day. Which completely derailed the point Indigenous people have been making this whole time – Columbus Day shouldn’t be a thing not because Italian Americans don’t count as white (or do they? That lady really confused me), but because Italian Americans are not a monolith – and they are certainly not represented by this bottom-feeder Columbus.
In fact – using a violent terrorist as the monolithic representation for entire group of people with an ethnic identity is kind shitty. Who wants that? SERIOUSLY – WHO WOULD WANT THAT?!
St. Paddy’s day (not federally recognized bank holiday, but still) is fun, and I think the St. Patrick was generally a good guy. But you know what? If I, as an Irish Bostonian (we do St. Paddy’s HARDCORE) found out he murdered babies and fed them to dogs – I would be COMPLETELY DONE with both the man and any day honoring him. I would be 100% okay handing that day over to survivors of his attacks so we can boost their truth and we can reconcile as a community. And if I didn’t believe his detractors, I could still do my parades and wear green and, for the Irish part of my culture at least, I would face no discrimination or negative consequences for letting St. P go.
Italian Americans demand better representation
I don’t want to spend too much time centering the settlers and white folks in this – but this is all to say, to both my family and friends who are Italian Americans – I agree. You deserve better than this brutal stereotype. So we’re working on a children’s book list celebrating Italian culture, Italian authors & Italian American stories that show how wonderful and non-murderous Italian Americans really are. For my 2nd-gen Italian grandma, my kids of Italian descent, my cousins, uncles, and friends – I hope you’ll leave a comment with your kids’ favorite books celebrating their heritage and ethnicity. Columbus is a cracked and distorted funhouse mirror that doesn’t reflect Italian readers. You are the badass folks who founded the anti-fascist movement and fought against redlining! You deserve accurate representation free of the stereotypes and lies.
You might also like: How to Subvert Racist Gate-keeping in Education
Parenting is Praxis:
These conversations have to go somewhere. We can’t just read a book for ‘awareness’ and consider our work done. Here are a few ways we transform our family discussions from A Coyote Columbus Story into action:
- Follow Indigenous leadership: We found our local indigenous nations and looked for ways to follow their lead, support their initiatives, and educate our communities on how to decolonize.
- The Indigenous Peoples’ Day Toolkit is designed to get you started. This year, we read the Bear, Horse, and Sparrow story in the Indigenous Peoples’ Day Toolkit to counter the construction-paper Santa Marias and other genocide-celebratory nonsense my kids pick up at school. This story serves as a launchpad for settler kids to recognize their role in decolonization.
- As parents and community members, we’ve been supporting the UAINE in instituting Indigenous Peoples’ Day in our city as a first step to truth and reconciliation for the past two years.
- This year, we’re working in relationship with Elizabeth Solomon, member of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, in creating an IPD event in our city.
- Support voting access for Indigenous people by donating to the Native American Civil Rights Fund.
- We keep talking about this – like every conversation here, this is something we need to continue talking about. Here are a list of guided discussion questions to continue what we experience in this book with kids.
You might also like: Kids Books Dismantling The Myth of a ‘First Thanksgiving’
Read this book along with…
This isn’t a one-and-done conversation. We need to bring this conversation back to kids from multiple angles. Here are a few more books pick up when you set this one down:
- Fry Bread, We Are Water Protectors & The People Shall Continue – Affirming the refrain ‘We are still here’
- Coyote Tales – A short chapter book by the same author, Thomas King. Such fun!
- Find more children’s books to honor Indigenous Peoples Day
You may also like: Following Indigenous Leadership in Climate Justice
Is this #OwnVoices?
Author: Thomas King (he/him) is of Cherokee and Greek descent, and is not enrolled in the three federally recognized Cherokee nations due to family separation. (Enrollment is super complicated, thanks to an intentionally destructive legacy of US legislation).
Illustrator: William Kent Monkman (he/him) is of Swampy Cree & English-Irish descent, and is a member of the Fisher River Band in Manitoba.
Learn more about #OwnVoices, coined by autistic author Corinne Duyvis
How we calculate the overall awesomeness score of books.
Transparency & Cahoots!
We purchased a copy of A Coyote Columbus Story, because the Earthquakes read it frequently. Make sure to check it out of your local library to keep it in circulation, and perhaps grab your own copy while supporting local indie bookstores on Bookshop.
You should definitely check out: The Indigenous Peoples’ Day Family Action Toolkit
Stay Curious, Stand Brave, and Support Indigenous Voting Rights
If my work makes it easier for you to raise kind & courageous kiddos, you can keep these resources free for everybody by sharing this post with your friends and reciprocate by supporting my work directly.
Ways to support: Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book | Buy toothpaste | Subscribe to Little Feminist Book Club
But if your resources are limited – support the Native American Civil Rights Fund first. I have easy access to voting – but the US is still blocking many Indigenous people from voting, and they’re working to remove those barriers.
“Our recent report, Obstacles at Every Turn, details obstacles that Native voters face at every turn in the voting process” – the Native American Civil Rights Fund.
Psst: Here’s a list of guided discussion questions that we’ve used with the Earthquakes while reading this book.
