Final Project

For my final project I am working on spending time researching American Indian novels. I am excited because I contacted Debbie Reese to ask her to help me locate some exceptional young adult novels and she e-mailed me back three suggestions and I was able to track down all three novels. I have spent some time thinking about novels that I have read that had the theme of American Indians in them and more often than not they were like the My Heart is on the Ground Dear America book that we looked at in class. While I'm on this topic, I was a little bit surprised to then see a Dear America book listed as a good example of Hawaiian culture in one of our coursepack readings for this week. Is this an example of differing opinions or is quality control vastly different in the Dear America series?

While I was exploring Debbie Reese's blog she had a link to a blog "How to write a historical young adult novel with an Indian theme (for fun and profit)" While it was a very humorous list, it was sad to realize it was funny mostly because nearly everything she said was true. Some of the things on her list:
Name your characters in the traditional Indian way, using the formula that has been followed for decades: an adjective or participle followed by a noun.

In one of my other classes my group just finished reading Sing Down the Moon which was a Newberry Honor book. In it there are names like Bright Morning which clearly follows the formula.

Another requirement for writing a novel:
Never, ever have your Indian characters use contractions. Indians did not do that.

We saw this come up over and over in My Heart is on the Ground

For the full text of this blog post http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2008/02/beverly-slapins-how-to-write-historical.html

I definately recommend you check it out.

I'm so glad that I will have some examples of really good novels about Native Americans to share with you at the end of the class. Hopefully after this project I can find novels to use in my own classroom that won't make me cringe when I hear some of the things that were on the list that I linked to above.