A Native American Feast by Lucille Recht Penner, 1994.
This nonfiction children’s book explains the traditional foods of different Native American tribes and how they were prepared. (Throughout the book, they are referred to both as “Native Americans” and “Indians”, but mostly, the book uses the term “Native Americans.” The focus is on Native American tribes in the area that is now the United States, but the book includes information about various tribes across the United States.)
It starts with an Introduction that explains how European settlers came to North America and how the first settlers almost starved to death because they weren’t prepared for the conditions they found and didn’t understand the plants and foods of the Americas. In those early years of the colonies, the colonists relied heavily on help from nearby Native American tribes in learning techniques for hunting and growing food in North America. These colonists had to adopt some of the Native American foods and techniques of getting food in order to survive. Not only did European colonists adopt some foods used by Native Americans, but Native Americans also adopted foods that were introduced to them from Europeans, including some plants and grains, like apples and wheat, and some domesticated animals, like sheep. The focus of this book is on Native Americans and their cooking and eating habits, both pre-colonization and post-colonization. For more information about what the colonists were cooking and eating, see The Colonial Cookbook.
The book explains how we know what we know about Native American foods and cooking. Some information was recorded by early European colonists in America and European scientists who were interested in plants of the Americas, and archaeology provides information in the form of animal bones, clamshells, and pollen from plants that Native Americans cultivated, going back hundreds and even thousands of years. Native American eating habits shifted throughout their history, although they shifted very abruptly with the European colonization of North America.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
Contents
Every chapter, including the Introduction, contains recipes that readers can make at home. Some of them are easier than others. Some recipes include pieces of Native American folklore about them or the foods in the recipes. Many of the illustrations are 19th century drawings.
Rather than organizing the book based on tribe or geographic region, the chapters of the book are based around particular types of food or cooking and eating concepts:
Introduction
This section introduces how historians know about the history of food among Native American tribes and how their diets changed after the arrival of Europeans.
Recipes in this section are:
Hickory Nut Soup
Green Succotash
Pueblo Peach Crisp
Discovering America
This section includes information about the earliest known hunting and cooking habits of Native Americans. It includes a description of the “land bridge” theory of how the ancestors of Native Americans arrived in the Americas from Asia. As of the early 21st century, we still don’t have a definitive answer for precisely how ancient people first arrived in the Americas, more recent theories include the possibility of these ancient people being seafaring rather than finding a land crossing, although the land crossing theory is also still possible.
Then, it explains about the arrival of the European colonists. It doesn’t sugar coat that the arrival of the colonists and their westward expansion led to the extinction and endangerment of native animal species because these newcomers hunted them without restraint. The introduction of unfamiliar diseases, like measles and smallpox, to the Native Americans took many lives, sometimes even killing whole tribes. These drastic changes greatly impacted the lives and lifestyles of Native Americans, although some traditional habits survived, including the preparation of traditional types of foods.
There are no recipes in this chapter.
A Great Mystery
This chapter explains about hunting and gathering and the development of agriculture among ancient Native American tribes. The “mystery” is about the development of corn as we know it. It was never really a wild plant. The evidence suggests that ancient Native Americans deliberately created it by cross-pollinating different wild grass plants, but it isn’t really known which ones. Most of this chapter explains how widespread corn was as a food and the uses and folklore that different tribes had for it.
Recipes in this section are:
Roasted Corn on the Cob
Blue Pinole – a blue cornmeal-based drink with sugar and cinnamon, from the Southwest
Thumbprint Bread (Kolatquvil)
Hopi Blue Marbles – boiled balls of blue cornmeal dough, a traditional breakfast food
Wagmiza Wasna – a mixture of cornmeal and dried berries
Treasure
This section is about foods that Native Americans introduced to the rest of the world, like pumpkins, peanuts, chili peppers, sunflower seeds, maple sugar, and different varieties of beans, including kidney beans and lima beans.
Recipes in this section are:
Cherokee Bean Balls
Apache Pumpkin with Sunflower Seeds
Popped Wild Rice
Zuni Green Chili Stew
The Hunt
This chapter is about Native American hunting techniques and the animals they hunted.
Recipes in this section are:
Broiled Buffalo Steaks
Venison and Hominy Stew
Feast and Famine
This chapter is about Native Americans who lived in areas where food was scarce and ways of foraging for food during times of famine. It also explains special feast days.
Recipes in this section are:
Mouse Cache Soup – made with beef broth and seeds: sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, buckwheat groats, and millet
Iroquois Strawberry Drink
Mushrooms Cooked in Oil
Berries, Flowers, and Bear Fat
This chapter explains the seasonings that Native Americans added to food and cooking techniques that added nutrients.
Recipes in this section are:
Fried Squash Blossoms
Pemmican Cakes – the origins of beef jerky
Maple Sugar Drink
Wild Grape Dumplings
Inuit Ice Cream – a berry dessert originally made with seal oil but made with egg whites here
Wojapi – a Sioux fruit pudding
Lighting the Fire
This chapter is about how plants and animals were processed to make them ready for cooking, such as how corn and acorns were ground into flour and how animals were butchered. When they had to boil water, they often used vessels that would have been damaged if they were put directly over fire, so they would heat stones and put them into the water instead.
Recipes in this section are:
Broiled Salmon Steaks with Juniper Berries
Broiled Rabbit with Corn Dumplings
Baked Beans with Maple Sugar
A Basketful of Water
Native Americans didn’t have cooking pots and pans made out of metal or glass until after the European colonists arrived. Before that, their cooking vessels were made of wood, stone, pottery, or tightly-woven baskets. This chapter explains the different types of cooking vessels they had, including the shells of pumpkins and gourds.
Recipes in this section are:
Pumpkin Shell Soup
Good Manners
This short chapter is about eating manners, superstitions, and taboos among different tribes. There are no recipes.
Thanksgiving
This section explains how Native Americans would give thanks to their Creator or Great Spirit or Nature or to animals and plants themselves for the foods that helped keep them alive. There are no recipes in this chapter.
Jingle Dancer by Cynthia Leitich Smith, illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu, 2000.
Jenna is inspired to become one of the jingle dancers at the powwow because her grandmother has been a jingle dancer. She loves the way the little cone-shaped bells on the dancers’ costumes sing!
Her grandmother tells her that there won’t be enough time to get the tin for making the jingles for her costume this time, but next time, she can dance with the Girls group.
Jenna knows how to do the dance because she has watched old videos of her grandmother dancing and has practiced. However, she can’t really do a proper jingle dance without the jingles for her dancing costume.
However, her grandmother isn’t the only person Jenna knows who has been a jingle dancer. Other women in Jenna’s family and among her family’s friends have also been jingle dancers, and not all of them dance anymore. Perhaps, with their help, Jenna can get the jingles she needs in time for this powwow!
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
My Reaction
I liked the way the book showed how Jenna’s family and friend supported her and helped her to take part in a tradition that they have all shared. They can’t all be there to see Jenna when she dances, but Jenna dances for all them, her dress covered in borrowed jingles!
A section in the back of the book explains more about Jenna’s tribe and the traditional dance shown in the story. The story is set in Oklahoma, and Jenna is part of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and has Ojibway (Chippewa/Anishinabe) ancestry. Elements of both tribal cultures appear in the story. The tradition of jingle dancing originated with the Ojibway people, and the book describes details of the costume (called “regalia” in the book) that women and girls wear to perform the dance. The book also contains a glossary of words that appear in the story with some additional details about their significance.
I think this story is a fun way to introduce readers to Native American traditions that may not be familiar to them. I also enjoyed the pictures, which have a lovely, dream-like quality to them.
This book is part of the New True Books series, a series of nonfiction picture books on a variety of topics. This particular book gives an overview of the history and culture of Native Americans.
The book starts with some basic definitions and broad explanations of certain aspects of Native American culture, beginning with the explanation of why Native Americans are sometimes called “Indians.” The book notes that each tribe of Native Americans also has a name for itself. Each tribe has had its own culture, which it thought was better than other tribes’ cultures, but throughout history, tribes have interacted and traded with each other. One factor that made Native American cultures different from each other was whether tribes relied mainly on farming or hunting and gathering for food.
The book refers to hunter-gatherers as “caretakers”, a term that I can’t recall seeing before for hunter-gatherers. The reason why they use the term “caretakers” is they say that hunter-gatherers took care of their environments and only took the plants and animals they needed for survival, not wasting anything.
There are sections of the book that discuss some general aspects of Native American culture, like types of homes and tribal leaders. Of course, as the book notes, many cultural aspects varied, depending on the tribe, the environment where they lived, and whether they were mainly farmers or “caretakers.”
The book also has sections about the Native America tribes of various regions of North America, like the Northeast, the Southeast, the Southwest, the Northwest Coast, and the Plains.
The book ends with a brief section called Changes, which explains how Native American cultures were impacted by the arrival of Europeans in North America.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
This nonfiction book is part of a series recommended for kids ages 9 to 12. It provides insights into the daily lives of Native Americans of the past by explaining their tools and inventions. I was intrigued by the idea immediately because I love books that give insights into history through the lives of ordinary people.
The book is divided into time periods and geographic areas of North America. At the beginning of the book, there is a timeline of important events in the history of North America and Native American culture, beginning c. 20,000 to 8000 BCE, when the ancestors of Native Americans are believed to have migrated to the continent and ending in 2006, the year the book was published. There is also a map showing major geographic regions of North America and the Native American tribes that live there. The chapters of the book are mostly grouped by region, except for the first two, which are about the First Americans and Archaic and Formative Periods.
The first chapter, called The First Americans, discusses theories about how the ancestors of Native Americans first arrived on the continent from Asia. The exact circumstances of their arrival are unknown, but there are some possible migration paths that they could have taken. The chapter discusses the Ice Age that existed when this migration took place, how people found food, and Clovis culture, one of the earliest known civilizations in the Americas. One of the activities from this section is about archaeology, which is what we use to learn more about ancient civilizations that did not leave written records, and how to create an archaeological site of your own.
The next chapter is about the Archaic and Formative Periods, which were characterized by climate change as the Ice Age came to an end and many plants and animals that had thrived in the colder climate died off. The changes in the environment cause Native American groups to make changes in their own lifestyles. Rather than relying on herds of large animals for food, they began cultivating crops. They made pottery and developed new cooking techniques. They still hunted, using a device called an atlatl to throw their spears further and with more power. Civilizations like the Maya flourished.
After the second chapter, the other chapters discuss tribes by region:
The Northeast Woodland and Great Lakes Tribes – The Algonquian and Iroquois
This chapter discusses Native American tribes from the East Coast to the Midwest, around the Great Lakes, who primarily lived in woodland areas. The Iroquois and the Algonquian were both collections confederated tribes. There is information about the Algonquian language, which contributed some words to English, including moccasin, succotash, hominy, hickory, and moose. There is also an activity about creating Algonquian style pictographs and petroglyphs.
The Southeast Tribes – The Cherokee, Catawba, Creeks, and Seminoles
The tribes in this chapter lived in and around the Appalachian Mountains. It explains about Sequoyah, who developed a system of writing for the Cherokee language.
The Great Plains Tribes – The Cheyenne, Lakota Sioux, and Comanche
The tribes of the Great Plains were migratory, following herds of buffalo, which were a primary source of food. Because they moved often, everything they owned, from the tepees where they lived to the tools and other objects they used, had to be easily portable. The Comanche were particularly known for being expert horsemen. This chapter also discusses the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Sacagawea, who was part of the Shoshone tribe from the Rocky Mountains. She had been abducted when she was young, and when she joined the Expedition, she was able to guide Lewis and Clark and their men back to the territory she had known when she was a child and to the Pacific Ocean. Activities for this chapter include making a rattle of the kind children used as toys, making a miniature bullboat, and making a war bonnet (using pieces of poster board instead of feathers).
The Southwest and Mesoamerican Tribes – The Hohokam, Mogollon, Anasazi, Maya, Aztec, Hopi, Apache, and Navajo
I know this area because this is where I grew up. Much of it is desert, and the book is correct that there can be sharp differences in temperature between day and night. In modern Southwestern cities, buildings and pavement can hold in heat even at night, but there isn’t much to hold in heat in the open countryside, not even much humidity in the air to hold heat once the sun goes down. There is an abundance of clay in the soil in this region which local tribes used to make pottery and adobe homes.
Among the civilizations discussed in this section are the Hohokam, whose name means “Vanished Ones” (I’ve seen different versions of the translation of that name, but they’re all words to that effect – that they are gone, vanished, disappeared, etc.) because, for unknown reasons, they seem to have suddenly abandoned the area where they had previously lived and farmed for generations. They don’t seem to have died off, at least not all of them. It’s believed that they were the ancestors of the Pima and Tohono O’odham tribes, and the book discusses that a little further on in the chapter. There is a Pima story about a fierce rainstorm and a massive flood that killed many people, but The Hohokam were the ones who built the original irrigation canals for watering their crops. Later, when settlers came from the Eastern United States, they found these abandoned canals, dug them out, and started using them again. The canals are still in use today, and one of the activities in this chapter of the book is about irrigation.
This section of the book also covers the Maya and the Aztecs, who lived in what is now Mexico and Guatemala. There is an activity about creating hieroglyphs, like the kind that the Maya once used.
In the part that describes the Navajo, there are activities for sand painting and Navajo-style jewelry.
The Pacific Northwest Tribes – The Nootkas, Makahs, and Tlingits
Much of this chapter discusses hunting and fishing and the preservation of food. Because food-related work mostly took place during a single season due to the severity of the winters, there were periods of time when the members of the Pacific Northwest Tribes had time for social and artistic pursuits. The book explains the meaning of totem poles, and there is an activity for readers to create their own.
The Arctic Tribes – The Inuit
The lives of the Inuit were shaped by learning to live in a very cold environment. The book explains how they built igloos out of packed snow and ice, but really, igloos were temporary shelters. The houses they lived in long term where made of sod and were partially built underground for insulation. There are activities for building a snow cave called a quinzy (this requires that you live in a place with snow) and for playing a game called Nugluktaq.
The last chapter in the book is called New Immigrants, Manifest Destiny, and the Trail of Tears. It’s about how European settlers arrived in the Americas, the westward expansion of the United States, and the confinement of Native American tribes to reservations.
The book ends with an Appendix with further information about Native American Sites and Museums State by State. There is also a glossary, index, and bibliography.
This is the third book I’ve reviewed on the topic of Indian Sign Language, and the reason why I wanted to include this one is that it was part of the list of recommended reading in one of the others, a book that was written much later. I can see why it was recommended. I found the readability of this book to be lower than the later book, but there is information found in this book that isn’t found in the later book.
The introductory notes at the beginning of the book explain a little about the author’s background. He grew up near the Sioux Indian Reservation in the Dakota Territory during the late 1800s, which was where he was first introduced to this form of sign language. He was not Native American himself, but he was later ceremonially adopted into the Sioux tribe. He became a lecturer about American Indian issues, and he discovered that people were very interested in his sign language demonstrations. He wanted to create this book so there would be a readily-available text explaining how the language works. He credits this form of sign language as being “probably the first American language. It is the first an only American universal language. It may be the first universal language produced by any people.” I’m not completely sure that’s true, but the author does have great respect for the beauty and utility of the sign language and the role that it played in Native American history.
The later book had the vocabulary of the sign language organized by topic, but this book (like an earlier one) had it organized in alphabetical sections, like a dictionary. The hand signs are shown in drawings on one side of the page, with lines and arrows to indicate movement where necessary, and written descriptions of the hand signs on the other.
The range of vocabulary is much more broad in this book than in the newer book, and it includes descriptions of more complex words and concepts that can be conveyed by combining some of the signs for simpler words. For example, the word “generous” can be indicated by making the signs for “heart” and “big”, and there is a list of synonyms for words. The book also demonstrates how to form sentences using the vocabulary words.
There are a couple of sections in the back of this book that provide additional information about other forms of communication, pictographs and smoke signals, which is interesting because the later book that I mentioned also made references to these other forms of communication but didn’t really offer details about how they work. This book is very detailed on the subject of pictographs, showing what different ideographs mean and explaining how to tell entire stories with them. It even explains the correlations between sign language and pictography. The book ends with some historical information about this form of sign language and suggestions for a unit about Indian sign language for a boy scout troop meeting, which include a somewhat cheesy play where the boy scouts pretend to be American Indians and use words like “How” and “paleface” with each other. The book seems very good and thorough on the technical explanations of the language, but I suspect it could be a little better on the subject of cultural representation.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
How; Sign Talk in Pictures by Iron Eyes Cody, 1952.
I like nonfiction books on esoteric topics! This one has kind of a kitschy feel to it. It’s partly the “How” in the title, like the way Native Americans talk in old movies, but it was written around the time those old black-and-white westerns were made, and this sort of movie theme is actually a major issue with both the book and the author. We found this book as a library discard, and part of the interest for me is that another book by the same author (available through Internet Archive) was used as recommending reading in a later book on the same subject.
The author and his wife appear frequently in pictures in the book, demonstrating different signals in Indian sign language. Part of the book near the beginning explains about the author’s life, and what it says actually isn’t true, but the real story of the life of “Iron Eyes Cody” is pretty interesting. The main reason for the deception is that Iron Eyes Cody was an actor known for playing Native Americans in films, beginning in the 1920s. To support his film persona, he claimed to be of Native American descent, but the truth is that both of his parents were Italian. His birth name was Espera Oscar de Corti. In the book, he says that he was born on his family’s ranch in Texas, but he was actually born in Louisiana, and his parents owned a grocery store. The family did live in Texas for awhile. After his father died, he and his brothers moved to California to pursue acting careers, changing their last name to Cody. As part of his film persona, he was known to wear his Native American costumes on a daily basis, as if he were living a Native American lifestyle. Many people really believed he was Native American, but this costume quality is part of what gives the book that kitschy vibe. If you think that you’ve never seen or heard of Iron Eyes Cody before, it’s actually very likely that you have because one of his acting roles was that of the “Crying Indian” in the “Keep America Beautiful” anti-pollution PSAs of the 1970s. Yep! He’s that guy, and that’s the man who wrote this book.
So, you can disregard many of the details of Cody’s brief autobiography (there’s a fanciful story there about how he got the name “Iron Eyes”, but Chief Iron Eyes was actually the name of the character he played in the 1948 movie The Paleface with Bob Hope), but what is real is that he was married to an archaeologist of Native American descent, Bertha Parker (referred to as Yeawas in the book and also appearing in pictures to demonstrate the sign language), and they had two adopted children, also of Native American descent (one of which appears in pictures in the book). Outside of his acting work, Cody supported many charitable causes that helped Native Americans and promoted the study of Native American culture. He had a collection of Native American costumes and art that he called the Moosehead Museum, and he offered lessons in Native American arts and crafts, songs and dances, and lore out of his home. (The book doesn’t really offer details about how that worked, but my guess would be that his wife, the archaeologist, provided much of the instruction or at least educated Cody about these subjects before he taught others.) Cody also worked with the Boy Scouts, helping with Scout-O-Ramas and acting as an adviser about Indian (Native American) lore. He also sometimes helped the Girl Scouts. The book is dedicated to “the youth of America, especially the Boy Scouts of America.” If you would like to know a little more about Cody, I recommend this YouTube video and this one.
On the one hand, a person who is deceptive or misleading about their identity and credentials is worrisome and probably rightly considered unreliable. However, as near as I can tell (not being an expert on this topic myself), the information presented here seems reasonably accurate, and I think that’s probably due to research, consulting with experts, and the influence of the author’s wife, who did have credentials as an archaeologist and ethnologist and had connections to other scholars through her museum work. One of the beginning sections of the book is called “A Brief History of Sign Language by Bertha Parker Cody” with an accompanying list of works consulted (texts spanning 1880 to 1926, the 19th century ones apparently written by army officers because their ranks are given, if you’re curious – Bertha’s a woman after my own heart because she also added a note to her citation about a book with a particularly good bibliography section, and I’m a great believer in notes).
So, now that you know who’s talking here, let’s discuss what they have to say about Indian Sign Language, the main topic of this book.
In a foreword to the book, F. W. Hodge, director of the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles, where Bertha Parker used to work, discusses the concept of sign language and non-verbal cues used in communication by people all over the world. People in different countries, speaking different languages, might recognize a nod of the head as meaning “yes” or a finger placed against the lips as a gesture to be quiet, but sign languages convey much more than these simple ideas, allowing people to hold entire conversations. The Indian Sign Language presented in this book was used by many different tribes, ranging from Canada all the way south to Mexico. If members of different tribes encountered each other, they could use this language to communicate, no matter which language they spoke verbally. When people of European descent learned this sign language, they also gained the same ability to communicate with a wide range of Native Americans, without even needing to speak a single word aloud. Hodge said that this was an uncommon skill for people of European descent, although he does mention one of the army officers referenced by Bertha Parker Cody in her essay.
In her essay, Bertha Parker Cody also explains the concept of sign language, referring to it as a kind of “universal language.” She explains how people have used hand signs and gestures to convey ideas and concepts throughout history. She says that the reason why this type of universal language based on gestures was necessary because, in the territory now known as North America, there were once more than 500 different spoken languages among Native Americans. Even groups who were living no more than 10 miles away from each other might be speaking completely different languages, but they would need to be able to interact with each other and communicate. It is unknown exactly who invented this particular system of sign language (although there are some possible theories), but it was particularly developed by the Plains Indians because they were nomadic buffalo hunters, often encountering other tribes as they followed the herds. As an added benefit, because the language is completely silent, hunters could use it without startling their prey, and warriors could use it with each other before a surprise attack on an enemy. Chiefs of tribes would even use sign language to convey important messages because it would guarantee that people would pay attention and focus on the hand signs to interpret what they were saying. She explains that there are signs that the language changed over time and variations existed among different tribes, there was enough commonality that members of different tribes could communicate with each other effectively. She concludes by saying that their hope was that this book would help to keep knowledge of this sign language alive among young people at a time when it was falling out of use and living knowledge.
The actual vocabulary of the sign language is presented in sections organized alphabetically, with drawings and photographs of Cody and his wife performing each of the hand signs.
The book ends with a section about hand signs for numbers and counting and a section presenting examples for forming complete sentences using the hand signs presented in the book.
The final part of the book contains an Acknowledgement from Cody to all of the people who helped with the research and writing of the book, including the photographer and the artist who did the drawn pictures.
My Reaction
I’ve already given some of my thoughts and reactions in the review above, but there is one more thought that I had about this book. I completely understand why this book was library discard. It is an older book, and there are newer ones that cover the same topic as well or better. The author is an actor who is not as culturally relevant as he once was, and although it wasn’t known at the time of his popularity, he was deceptive about his life and past. In some ways, though, reading and researching this book and its background was educational. The education I would say that I got from this book wasn’t just about sign language but also about perceptions vs. reality, the roles people play, the personas created by the movie industry, and also the expectations of the public and the credentials we require or are willing to accept from those with a message to spread.
That last part is the most complicated part, but the resources that I consulted to get the details of Cody’s life pointed out that he did genuinely encourage interest in Native American culture and support causes important to Native Americans, which begs the question of whether he would have been accepted in that role of spreading interest and providing support if it had been known at the time that he was not actually a Native American himself. The truth is that he was something of a fake and a poser. He wasn’t really what he pretended to be, and in a sense, he was acting in a permanent role, even outside movies. He was given roles as a Native American in films because his physical appearance made it credible that he could have been one, and as far as movies are concerned, that’s really all that matters. Average people believed he really was a Native American because he was a good actor and convincing, and they didn’t know enough about real Native Americans to spot the parts about his dress and act that didn’t quite ring true. However, I think that Cody’s interest in Native American culture was genuine, probably the most genuine part of his performance, and he appears to have taken a genuine pride in it. A person lying about their background is deceptive and makes other things that they do suspect, but I’m still left with some questions. If he had been honest about his family’s background, would his interest in Native American culture been accepted or would people have sneered and said that he should have stuck to speaking only about the culture his family came from? Is it possible for someone to adopt a new culture not based on family or upbringing but pure personal interest and choice, and if so, could it ever be as deep or authentic as the culture one is born into and brought up in? Or, will it only ever just be an act or a deception, something that might only fool those who don’t know how to see the reality? What is the difference, or is there one? Could the person doing it even get so deep into the act that they themselves don’t know the difference anymore?
North American Indian Sign Language by Karen Liptak, 1990, 1995.
This book is going to be one of three I’m planning to cover on the same topic because this book includes a list of recommended reading about North American Indian Sign Language, and I happen to have two other sources from that list in my collection. The other books I have are much older, and I’d like to compare them to this newer book and explain why the newer one does things differently.
To begin with, older books about this topic frequently just use the term “Indian” or “American Indian” to refer to Native Americans. This particular book defines its terms right at the beginning. The author says, “North American Indians are currently called both American Indians and Native Americans. I have chosen the term American Indians to reflect the preference voiced in a recent informal survey at an intertribal powwow in Reno, Nevada, and to help readers find the book more easily. The signs presented in this book are based on the sign language used by the American Indians of the Great Plains.” I appreciate it when authors explain their thinking clearly.
The introductory section of the book explains the purpose and history of using sign language for intertribal communications. It starts with an example of a fictional encounter between two members of different tribes who are strangers to each other. At first, they’re not sure who the other one is and if they’re someone who can be trusted, but when they begin using sign language to signal to each other who they are and what their intentions are, they realize that they’re from tribes who are friendly with each other and that it’s safe to continue communicating.
This particular form of sign language was particularly popular among Native Americans of the Great Plains, including the Cheyenne, Sioux, Kiowa, and Blackfoot tribes to allow communication between tribes that did not share a common spoken language and also within tribes in situations that demanded silent communication, such as during hunting and warfare or when communicating with people who could not hear well. American Indian sign language isn’t commonly used in modern times because there are others more commonly used, but it still appears sometimes at powwows or in Native American ceremonial festivals. This book is meant to present the sign language for fun and education.
It begins by explaining basic hand and finger positions and introducing some basic vocabulary, demonstrating signals for simple words, like “I”, “You”, “Yes”, and “No.” All of the hand signs are shown in drawings with arrows to indicate movement where necessary. It also introduces how to signal that you are asking a question.
The rest of the vocabulary is presented in themed sections, introducing words for family members, counting, seasons of the year, weather, time, food, clothing, feelings. This is different from the older books about American Indian sign language, which had vocabulary words organized alphabetically, like a dictionary. I prefer the approach of the themed sections because they demonstrate related words together and provide information for forming sentences as needed, like how to indicate that a concept is past tense. Later sections build on earlier sections, like when the section about seasons draws on the earlier concepts of counting and how to ask questions to demonstrate how to ask how old someone is or how to tell someone your age.
There are also sections at the back of the book discussing other methods of communication used by Native Americans, including smoke signals, pictographs, and petroglyphs.
The book is part of a series by the same author about various aspects of Native American culture. It’s available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.
This is the final book in the Indian in the Cupboard series. At the end of the previous book, Omri’s father learned the secret of Omri’s special cupboard and key, that it brings small plastic figures to life.
At the beginning of this book, Omri’s father suddenly announces to his family that he wants to take them on a camping trip. It seems like an impulsive decision because this isn’t something that the family usually does, and Omri figures that it must have something to do with the secret that the father and son now share concerning their small friends from the past.
After Omri’s father discovered his secret, the two of them had a serious talk, and Omri explained to him all about his past adventures and the very real consequences that they’ve had, both in the present and in the past. They need to consider carefully what they’re going to do because Little Bear has asked them for help with some trouble that his tribe in the past is having with the British. Knowing the history of the interactions between Europeans and Native Americans, both Omri and his father know that something serious is about to happen to Little Bear and his people, but how can they help? Omri explains to his father that they have the ability to go back into the past themselves, but in order to do that, they need to find something big enough to hold both of them, and someone else would have to turn the key for them to send them and bring them back.
Omri’s father later admits to him privately that he thought up the camping trip as a way for the two of them to disappear for a couple of days without anyone asking questions. Although he proposed the camping trip, he plans to arrange for him and Omri to have a private trip by themselves, discouraging the others from going along. Omri’s father also thinks that he’s figured out what they can use to send themselves back in time – the family car. It’s big enough to hold both of them, it locks with a key, and there’s even an LB in the license plate number, which they take as a hopeful sign. But then, Omri realizes that there’s a problem with that scheme. Even though the car locks with a key, it’s not the kind of lock that an old-fashioned skeleton key could open. They need a key with a different shape, something flatter. They decide that they need the help of Jessica Charlotte, who made the last key. Fortunately, Omri has a way to talk to her because he has the plastic figure of Jessica Charlotte.
When Omri brings Jessica Charlotte back, he finds that she has attempted to drown herself in a river (an event hinted at in the last book) because of her guilt at accidentally causing her sister’s husband’s death. Omri brings back a WWII Matron who has helped them before to treat Jessica Charlotte. When Jessica Charlotte recovers, she thinks at first that she must have died and that Omri is part of her afterlife. Omri assures her that it’s not the case, that she’s still alive. She is still lamenting over having caused Matt’s death and ruined her sister and niece’s lives, but Omri explains to her that he’s Lottie’s grandson. Jessica Charlotte feels better, hearing that Lottie grew up, married, and had children, so her life wasn’t completely ruined. Omri can’t bring himself to explain how Lottie was killed in a bombing during WWII, but he asks for her help to create a new key. Aunt Jessie, as she asks to be called, agrees to help Omri, and he and his father give her their car key to duplicate.
However, when Aunt Jessie returns with the key, they realize that they’ve miscalculated. When a person comes from the past with anything they make or bring with them, it’s always small, like the miniature people themselves. Aunt Jessie’s key is a duplicate of the key they gave her, but it’s small, too small to use in the car. Omri and his father aren’t sure how to get around this problem, so they decide to go on the camping trip with Omri’s brother Gillon, just camping like normal, while they think it over.
It turns out that something magic happened to the car key while it was in the past with Aunt Jessie. When Omri’s father turns the key in the car, Omri suddenly finds himself in the past, but not the past he was hoping to visit. Because they brought some things that belonged to his Great-Grandfather Matt with them on the camping trip, Omri suddenly finds himself in India, during the time that Matt was living there. Omri is inside a puppet in a marketplace, and his great-grandfather buys him. Also, to Omri’s shock, Gillon is also inside a puppet that his grandfather has.
Their mother eventually rescues them by opening the car and turning the key. She was alarmed because it seemed like her husband and sons all passed out in the car. Omri and his father don’t have a real explanation for her, not wanting to explain that the car key is now magic. (She decides that there must have been an exhaust leak, and they were all overcome by fumes.) Gillon was knocked unconscious when his puppet was dropped on its head, and his mother takes him to the hospital, using her spare car key. (When Gillon recovers, he thinks it was just a weird dream he had because of the car fumes.) Meanwhile, Omri and his father talk about the situation, and Omri’s father reveals that, while the boys were taken to India, he ended up in Little Bear’s time because he was carrying some wampum belonging to Little Bear.
So, know they know that it’s possible for them to use their car key to go back in time, but if they try it a second time, who will turn the key for them to bring them back at the appropriate time? The only other person who can come with them on their “camping trip” who knows their secret and can be trusted to help them is Omri’s friend, Patrick. However, Patrick isn’t happy that he’s only there to help Omri and his father go back in time and that he won’t be going himself. He does agree to help them, but unfortunately, he has plans of his own while Omri and his father are occupied elsewhere.
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).
My Reaction:
Although Omri’s father wonders at first whether it’s a good idea to try to help Little Bear because of the risk of changing the past and affecting the future, Omri has learned that it’s not quite as simple as that. During his previous adventures, he has felt an irresistible pull to use the cupboard and the key, even when he wasn’t always sure it was a good idea, and there are indications that Omri’s interactions with people in other time periods seem fated to happen. He did save Jessica Charlotte’s life when she tried to drown herself, and other things Omri has done seem to fit with wider events.
When Omri and his father are figuring out how to help Little Bear with his problems with the British in his time, they do some research about Little Bear’s time and talk about the ways that 18th century British people treated Native Americans. Knowing what Little Bear is likely to face, they feel like they have a responsibility to help him as best they can. When Little Bear explains in more detail what his people have been suffering at the hands of the British and other settlers, Omri feels guilty, knowing that he’s also British, while at the same time knowing that he was not responsible for things that happened before he was born. This is something that people still struggle with today, hearing about difficult periods of history and knowing that their ancestors (or at least other members of their society, if not literally their direct ancestors) played a role in making life difficult for others, setting up situations where real people suffered or were killed. The best Omri can do is to help Little Bear make the best possible decisions to ensure the survival of his people. Of course, being able to help with that much is part of the time traveling fantasy of this story. Real people can’t actually go back in time and intervene to influence others and change the course of history.
The books in this series aren’t for young children, and as the series progresses, they get more serious in subject matter. There is discussion of suicide, not just with Jessica Charlotte’s attempt to drown herself but when Little Bear explains that his first wife killed herself after being raped by white men. There is violence in the story when the Native American village is attacked and people are shot. Overall, the story is pretty straight-forward in the way in confronts the dark sides of history. Omri and his father advise Little Bear to take his clan to a place where they know that they will be relatively safe and among other Iroquois, but they know and admit to Little Bear that even that won’t solve all of their problems and that there will be other hardships in the future. It’s an imperfect solution to a massive problem, but Omri senses that it is best choice that they could make and that Little Bear and his family will live the safest possible life because of the decision they made, and their descendants will survive.
Omri and his father struggle with knowing that things are going to be hard for Little Bear’s people no matter what choices they make. There is no magical solution to everyone’s problems in the story, and the book doesn’t offer a firm moral or solution to Omri’s guilty feelings when he sees firsthand how badly Native Americans were treated (a form of “white guilt“, although the book doesn’t use that term). Overall, I would say that the book confronts the dark parts of history and human guilt on a very individual level. Omri and his father can’t solve the large issues completely because they can’t control them. They can’t control the past, and they can’t control other people, not even the people who come through the cupboard as miniature ones, like living toys. Everyone is an individual with their own choices to make, and every choice, even the wrong ones, changes the course of history.
After Omri saves Jessica Charlotte’s life, she realizes that what she thought was a dream before she stole her sister’s earrings was real, that she saw and spoke to Omri, and that he could have warned her about what would happen if she went through with her theft, how Matt would have died and how everyone’s lives would be changed for the worse. However, Omri did choose not to warn her because not everything was changed for the worse. After Lottie’s father died and her family lost their money, Lottie still grew up, fell in love, got married, and had a daughter. It’s true that she did die young in World War II, while her daughter was still an infant, and changing the theft of the earrings might have changed that in some way, but not without changing other things. Omri has discovered that changing things about the past, even seemingly small things, can change larger parts of history, and his psychic gift seems to guide him toward making only choices that help the flow of history instead of working against it. If he had prevented the theft of the earrings, his great-grandfather might have lived longer and so might Lottie, but if that happened, would Lottie have ever met the man she eventually married and had Omri’s mother? Omri’s father wouldn’t be happy without his wife and sons, and if Omri never existed, would some of the other things he did that impacted history have happened? Also, if Lottie hadn’t died in the bombing during WWII, would someone else have been where she happened to be and died in her place? The bomb that killed her would have fallen anyway because that was part of someone else’s choices, a person who never enters this story and whose decisions can’t be controlled. Time and history and the ripple effects caused by individual choices are complex. Omri has his psychic gift to guide him, and even his father, who admits that he never used to believe anything he couldn’t see for himself, comes to trust it.
People without this sort of magical gift have only themselves to rely on to make the best choices they can to make the world as good as possible, even in the face of others’ bad decisions. I think that a large part of the choices that Omri makes in the story and dealing with “white guilt” in real life come down to the combination of frustration and the acceptance of choices made by other people who can’t be controlled. Modern people might hate what happened in the past and feel badly if people related to them were part of it, but we don’t have the option to change things that have already happened. There comes a point where you have to accept the knowledge that you can’t control others, no matter how much you might want to make better choices on their behalf. The only person you can control is yourself.
I’m a white person, descended from colonial settlers in America, and I don’t actually see “white guilt” as a negative thing. I see it as a human thing. If you can feel real emotion at someone else’s plight, a wish that bad things didn’t really happen, or a feeling that what happened shouldn’t have happened and an honest desire to change even the unchangeable past for the better, it means that you’re a real, thinking, feeling human being with a sense of right and wrong, and there’s nothing bad about that at all. Feelings are just tools, to give us hints of what we need to do or how we need to behave in our lives. Feelings aren’t always completely accurate, but sometimes, they give us hints of things that need to be fixed or clues that whatever we did before didn’t really work, that we made the wrong choice or did the wrong thing. I think what upsets and confuses other white people about “white guilt” is the conflict between loving ancestors and wanting to be proud of them and admitting that some of them had a real dark side and did some pretty awful things. Some people have trouble dealing with that, thinking that it’s impossible to feel two things at once, loving someone and being angry with them for things that they’ve done, but it really is possible. Two things can be true at once, and you can have mixed feelings about many things.
Feelings are complex, as complex as people are, and I think it’s as possible for a person to both like and hate another person for the things they’ve done as it is to both like a sweater for the way it looks but not want to wear it because it’s itchy and uncomfortable. I think that’s about the best advice that I can actually offer to other white people trying to make sense of that feeling. Sure, that sweater looks pretty impressive. It has a nice color and a cheerful pattern, and you might think it would look impressive on you if you wore it, but honestly, it’s better if you just leave it on the mannequin. It’s overpriced, out of style, and won’t look at all impressive when it makes you constantly want to scratch all of the places where it itches. Let it go.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
The frustrating thing about feelings about the past and about other people’s lives is that we can’t fix those particular things. In real life, we can’t go back in time, and we can’t even “fix” other people in our own time because that’s something they have to do themselves, if they’re going to do it. You can suggest things to other people, but there’s always a point where they have to make the decisions themselves. But, the good news is that, if you can’t control other people, nobody can completely control you! The way I see it, the most useful thing about this “white guilt” is remembering that this is something we don’t want. Maybe there’s something charming about the rosy, nostalgic view of the past, but honestly, you wouldn’t be happy living there, and if you actually had to live with your ancestors, you’d probably discover that you wouldn’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things and maybe wouldn’t even get along at all. So, why would you want to try to carry their old baggage with you into your life and spend your life and your precious time constantly trying to explain or excuse their bad choices? You’ve got your own to life.
Give credit where credit is due for both the good and the bad things, and let our ancestors’ records speak for themselves. You won’t accomplish anything for twisting your feelings into knots for trying to protect the feelings of the dead and justify their actions. They don’t even feel anything anymore. They are dead. Let them rest. We don’t want to add to bad things that have been done in the past and to keep having things in our lives to feel guilty about, and that’s okay because there are new choices to be made every single day. Put your focus there. You have a present to live and a future to plan. Knowing about the past is interesting and informative, but the past isn’t where we really live. Admire it like a nice sweater on a mannequin, take note of the price tag, and move on. We don’t have to make the same old choices that have made people, including ourselves, unhappy just because that’s the way things have been before or because we feel like we have something to prove about our ancestors. They had their chance to make the choices in their time, for good or bad (and frequently, some of each, but you can’t help that), and now, it’s our turn to make the choices because this is our time.
Speaking of bad decisions, Patrick almost gets Boone and Ruby killed because of his recklessness when he brings them back while Omri and his father were with Little Bear, which he did just because he was bored and felt left out of their magical adventure, which wasn’t really pleasant and fun for them anyway. Boone and Ruby both make it clear how they feel about that, and Omri also makes it clear that this is the end of the magic for him and Patrick. Boone and Little Bear have their own lives to live, and Omri’s gift tells him that it’s time to let them get on with living their lives without interference. Omri still has the cupboard and the key, but he no longer feels the pull he felt before to use them because he has played his part in history and in the lives of his little friends, and there is nothing more he needs to do. He doesn’t feel the need to lock these things away as he did before because he already knows that he will never feel the urge to use them again. When something’s over and the moment has passed, you just know.
Before the end of the story, Omri’s mother admits to him that she knows all about the little figures and that the cupboard brought them to life, although she never actually saw any of them herself. She has also inherited the family gift and is aware of what the cupboard does, even though she has not used it herself. All along, she’s been pretending that she didn’t know what was going on, although she really did. She’s a little sorry that she didn’t see the little people herself, but she knew that not interfering was the right thing to do. She thinks that letting the magic go and not using the cupboard again are the right decisions, and she doesn’t want Omri or his father to tell Omri’s bothers about the magic because, if they do, it will never end, and it’s really time for it to all end. This really is the final book in the series.
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