We noticed you have items in your shopping cart.
Would you like to submit your order before leaving?
You already have an order pending approval.
Do you want to overwrite your current pending request with this order?
You are trying to log on to your penworthy account that is shared with another user.
There can only be one active user in a shopping cart at a time. Please wait to log on
until the other user has signed out. For questions or concerns, please contact us.
10/08/2021
Indigenous Peoples Day
Monday, October 11th is observed in the United
States as Indigenous Peoples Day, a day to recognize and celebrate the many
diverse cultures that originally populated North America. Here at Penworthy, we
have several books that include indigenous characters, stories, histories or biographies. In honor of the holiday, here are a few to explore.
Once Upon a Time There Was a Little Bird is a sweet
story of a bird whose broken wing prevents it from migrating south with the
other birds in winter. She tries to find a tree that will shelter her and is
rebuffed again and again until the evergreens tell her they will keep her safe,
warm, and fed until spring. It is from an Anishinaabe tale explaining why
coniferous trees stay green year-round. This delightful book about kindness is
in board book form and can be found here.
Pocahontas Leads the Way is part of Disney’s “Before
the Story” series of early chapter books.
Rather than the familiar stories we know of Pocahontas, a member of the
Powhatan tribe in the Virginia Tidewater area, this book tells a tale of her as
a child going on an adventure with a friend named Nokoma, where they learn
about friendship, cooperation, and inner strength. Familiar Disney characters
like Meeko, the raccoon, and Grandmother Willow also put in appearances. This
is a fiction book and does not draw from either indigenous traditions or oral histories,
but may get children interested to learn more. Recommended for grades 2 – 3, you can find it
in our catalog here.
Penworthy carries many biographies, including some notable
Native Americans. Among them is Chief Joseph. Born in 1840, Chief Joseph
was a leader of the Nez Perce people, who became tired of being pushed off
their lands again and again by white settlers. Despite a treaty with the US
government, when gold was found on their land in the Wallowa Valley, the Nez
Perce were given 30 days to move to a small reservation in Idaho. The 700
members of the tribe packed up and began to leave, but some of them, angered by
their treatment, killed some settlers, and in retaliation, the US Army, some
2000 strong, began to chase the Nez Perce, who, under the leadership of Chief
Joseph, fled into Montana, hoping for assistance from the Crow tribes living
there. Help was refused, and in the freezing mountains, with his people starving,
Chief Joseph surrendered. “I will fight
no more forever,” were his famous words on that day. Although the Nez Perce
were told they could go home to Washington, they were sent to a reservation in
Oklahoma instead where many died, including Chief Joseph. This biography offers
illustrations, photographs, maps, and a glossary of terms used, and is a great
teaching tool for helping kids learn about the treatment of Native Americans in
the United States. You can find it in our catalog here.
Another biography currently in our catalog is of Susan La
Flesche Picotte. We reviewed that book on our blog on August 18, 2021. You can
read that review here. Susan La Flesche Picotte was the first Native American
doctor in the United States, having graduated from the Woman’s Medical College
of Pennsylvania in 1889, at a time when few women of any race were attending medical
school. In addition to practicing medicine, Dr. La Flesche Picotte was also a
social reformer and campaigned tirelessly for public health reform, temperance,
and the fair treatment of Native Americans. You can find her biography here.
The Fact vs. Fiction series has two volumes that deal with
indigenous peoples in North America. Perhaps most to the point for this article
is Christopher Columbus and the Americas, as in some parts of the US,
Monday is also still celebrated as Columbus Day. Many grew up being told that Christopher
Columbus “discovered” the Americas, but this book points out the many fallacies
in this story: the foremost of which is that indigenous people already lived
here, a people known as the Taino. Columbus’s quest for gold and riches led him
to kidnap some and send them back to Spain and enslave others to search for the
gold he was certain he would find. Hundreds of thousands more perished of
illness and diseases brought to the Americas by Columbus’s European crews. Columbus
firmly believed he had found a part of Asia—it wasn’t until 1501 when Amerigo
Vespucci identified North and South America as distinct landmasses that it was
realized they were not a part of Asia at all. Not to mention that there is
plenty of evidence showing that Norse explorers settled in what is now Canada
about 500 years before Columbus “sailed the ocean blue”. You can find this fun
book of facts here.
Another period of history that tends to romanticize how
European settlers is The First Thanksgiving. This title in the Facts vs.
Fiction in US History series tackles those stories and histories just as well. Most
of the Thanksgiving traditions many of us are familiar with come from a
painting called “The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth”, painted in 1914. The
clothing we associate with the Pilgrims, like tall black hats with shiny
buckles and white caps and aprons, come from that painting and not from history,
and the dress of the Native Americans in the painting is what would be worn by
the Sioux in the Plains States, not the Wampanoag, the tribe that lived in the
Plymouth area in 1620 and who were the ones that helped the travelers make it
through their first years in the area. While it is likely that the settlers had
a feast to celebrate their first harvest, they did not send an invitation to
the Wampanoag; they were likely attracted by the hunting and other activity
during the preparations for the event. Sadly, the goodwill and feelings of
thankfulness engendered on that day did not last. Within 50 years, the settlers
and the Native Americans were at war, and the relentless drive westward pushed
the indigenous people from place to place for hundreds of years. For many
Native Americans, Thanksgiving Day is a National Day of Mourning, and they gather
to mark what became a genocide of their people as European exploration and
settlement took away their ancestral lands and customs. Find the facts versus the fiction here.
There are many ways to honor Indigenous Peoples Day, but
perhaps the best is to use this day to learn more about the indigenous people who
were in your area before Europeans came. Learn some of their stories of nature
and their beliefs about the seasons or the stars. Many states are still full of
native names and customs—take the time to find out of your area has any and
teach your youngest patrons about them.
Add Comment: (* mandatory fields)
|
|