Week 6- Dr. Debbie Reese’s Blogs

Dr. Debbie Reese is a Native American professor at UIUC who focuses on “American Indians in Children’s Literature.” She responds to the notion of difficulties regarding children books that accurately portray Indians. While glancing over her blogs I came across Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons. Since I was studying this novel in one of my other classes I was interested to take a closer look at a critical perspective of indigenous people in this book. Beverly Satin’s response was extremely critical of the social events pertaining to Native Americans. Although she admits the novel is beautifully written and a compelling story she is thrown off by the cultural and historical flaws of “Indian” material. The protagonist, Sal, constantly refers to her “Indian blood,” and the quote “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins” is used and abused. Yet the story doesn’t provide any insight to anything Native American. The title itself implies that the story is based around Native American beliefs dealing with a closer relationship and better understanding of nature. Although the title can be assumed to correlate with Indians, the book provides little contextual evidence that it is indeed so. Even though the book is fiction, the characters are manipulated and misrepresented to further demonstrate racial prejudice.