Since I love diversity, I was looking forward to learning more about Native American fiction at this event at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. It was great to learn more about Native Americans and literature about the culture. The program was hosted by Betsy Bird, Youth Materials Specialist at NYPL and author. Stacy Whiteman and Cheryl  Klein are editors, and Joseph Bruchac and Eric Gansworth are Native authors. It was interesting to see the interchange between authors and editors during the program. Bird picked a great panel, and she asked interesting questions. 

Writers and Editors of Native Literature

Bird asked how the panelists came to their careers as editors or writers.

Klein loves to talk about diversity. She saw an American Indian blog. Then, she wrote to the author and asked for authors who liked to write fiction for kids. One of those suggested was Gansworth, and that is how she met him.

Gansworth was at a Native American Literature Symposium, and someone asked if he wanted to write for kids. There is a difference between writing for kids and writing for adults about early life.

Klein has received novels and short stories for adults about younger life. This forced her to question what teen literature is. She decided that it must focus on young people and the quandaries in their lives.

Whitman was looking for science fiction, including Native fiction. Joseph Bruchac was recommended by one of the editors. She called him up, and he had about five ideas for books.

Joseph Bruchac spoke and translated a few phrases in the Abenaki language. He stated that the role of women is important in his novels. Wolves have a different place in American Indian culture.

Bird mentioned that the vast majority of authors of children's and teen literature are White women.

Klein mentioned that both she and Whitman grew up on farms. They are both big readers and fans of diversity. Aristotle said that plot had to be a certain way; this is a Western perspective. She feels that characters will want to go to new places in order to expand their horizons; this came across in her comments to Eric. For example, she felt that a character would want to go to boarding school, but Eric definitely did not want his character at a boarding school. (I have to admit that I am biased about this point; my parents and I never wanted us to go to boarding school and be raised by the staff at the school.)

How to Write Native Books

Gansworth mentioned that a challenge in his writing is figuring out what people do and do not know. In working with Klein, he realized that he was responding to her editing requests by saying that he could not change his work. He started wondering how to say no without appearing to be negative. Klein asked great questions about what was important that enabled him to condense his stories.

Bruchac believes that in talking about the present, we are also discussing the past. Working with his editor Whitman was great, and it allowed him to tighten up certain aspects of his books. He tries to educate people about Native culture. He talked about little kids on the reservation falling asleep on horses while he was growing up. No one paid much attention to it. Sometimes there were four kids on a horse and two of them were asleep. (I do not think it would be wise for me to fall asleep on some of the horses that I ride.)

Whitman has a learning curve when it comes to learning the vernacular (slang) language. For example, "snagging" a girl means hooking up or making out. A huge challenge for multicultural books is making them work for an outside audience while not alienating inside readers.

Writers and Editors: A Labor of Love

Gansworth mentioned that spell check is a dodgy mechanism for many Native books. In addition, it is hard to write accents into books. That is one reason that he was very excited to work on his audio book. He does different voices for different characters.

Klein loves working with Gansworth. She hopes that authors continue to reach out by sending manuscripts to editors. She wants them to be patient with publishing houses so that the multicultural work can reach a larger audience. 

Gansworth grew up on a small reservation that was five miles by seven miles in area. Later in life, he met a woman who was a similar age to him that also grew up on the reservation. He was surprised that he never met her during his childhood. She explained that he was from a bad part of the "res." This was illuminating since he did not realize that there were "good" and "bad" parts of the reservation.

Klein met an author who believes that words in languages other than English should be italicized. However, the Chicago Manual of Style clearly states that they should be in regular font. 

Bruchac mentioned that prominent use of Spanglish in the United States. (I definitely hear that in the Bronx, where 60% of the residents are Hispanic.) There are other cases of where two languages are intermingled, and it seems to make sense to people. 

Bird asked the authors to discuss the audience that they are writing for. She wanted them to describe how they use both American and Native American styles in their writing.

Bruchac always aims to write things that people can understand.

Gansworth writes for the future reservation kids. Kids on reservations find it boring to read about their own lives. Science fiction is very popular in American Indian culture.

Research for Native Work

Bird asked Klein and Whitman to offer any advice that they might have for editors working with authors writing about other cultures.

Whitman approaches being an editor as being a student. She likes working with books starring a person of color or written by a person of color. Listening to the authors is vital and doing research about the culture (e.g. Apaches) is also imperative. In one book she was working with, she discovered that a character was named after a historical figure. Finding about the actual person that the character was named for greatly facilitated her understanding of the manuscript. 

Klein toggles between being an advocate for authors and being an advocate for readers. She listens to both the stories and the authors.

Whitman also consults cultural experts for more information.

Klein emphasizes the importance of finding cultural allies who can talk about books in order to promote them (e.g. Laurie Halse Anderson). Editors are responsible for cultivating those relationships and for marketing the book to the world.

Whitman does not always put a character of a different culture in a book, but when this happens, the editors want it to be authentic. There is currently a trend of placing photographs on the covers of teen books. She was able to find a girl who was part Navajo through Bruchac for the cover of a Native book. They were able to find a sports photographer to take the pictures.

Bird asked for any advice the panelists had for editors who are working with cultural books. Some of the authors on the panel have worked with multiple editors.

Gansworth previously had an editor who was not good at helping him make his story understandable to a wider audience.

Whitman sometimes writes epic 10-page letters to authors describing changes that she would like to see and commentary about their work.

Klein once wrote a 36-page letter to an author.

Bruchac finds travel historians to be very helpful. His Lacota friends help him a lot by making sure his stories are authentic. He is grateful to editors who have made his stories better than they would have been if left alone. To him, a good editor is a gift. Authors are fools if they do not listen to their editors. However, some publishing houses would not accept books that were published by different publishing houses. When the books were accepted, they did quite well; they were popular. 

What's Next?

Bird asked the panelists to describe their current writing projects.

Gansworth is working on some Beatles stories.

Bruchac is working on a book about the early life of Eli Parker, a Civil War general. He was a Native American who went to school as a kid in White culture. 

Audience Questions

Bird opened the floor to audience questions. 

One audience member commented that she appreciates efforts to preserve Native American languages. 

Bruchac shared the fact that his son Jesse teaches the Abenaki language. Many words, such as animal names and place names come from Native language (e.g., moose and Onondaga Country—where I grew up!)

Another person asked if the panelists feel a responsibility to tell stories that are all-encompassing of the Native culture. She also asked how they feel about non-Native authors writing stories about Native life.

Gansworth writes about the world that he knows. He has Seneca friends. However, he is not Seneca himself, so he would never write a Seneca story in any detail. He mainly believes that they could do a better job. Some members of his family have married non-Natives, and he can always tell that his family acts differently around non-Natives. The jokes are a little bit tamer. Some members of his family hate the fact that he writes novels about Native culture. He is not sure that outsiders can understand Native culture well enough in order to write about it.

Whitman does publish Native fiction by White writers. She published Hammer of Witches by Shana Mlawski, who is not Native. However, Mlawski did not write from a Native point of view. She did much research, and the story was about a Spanish/Moorish character who met Native people. 

A third audience member asked the panelist what was the best way to learn about Native history and influence her students.

Bruchac said that there is much great children's literature about Native Americans, including Through Indian Eyes and A Broken Flute. Those books were edited by Jewish and Native librarians. He could spend hours talking about source material for Native books. In 1992, he attended a conference, and 300 Native authors were present.

Gansworth mentioned that word of mouth is a great advertising tool. He takes seriously recommendations from people who know his taste and what he might be interested in.

Whitman stated that if people buy the books, publishers will be interested. Then they will seek out more Native authors and publish more multicultural work.

Another audience member asked the panelists to discuss biracial Native and African books and characters.

Bruchac acknowledged that there is much racial mixing and books about mixed Native characters. He has a friend who writes from both Native and African perspectives. He is the head of a Native studies department at a college.

Upcoming Children's Literary Salons
Saturday, November 1 at 2 p.m. at the Schwarzman Building
Margaret Wise Brown & Antoine de Saint-Exupery

• Joseph Bruchac's web site
• Eric Gansworth's web site
• Books on Native Americans