Spotting Stereotypes in Children's Books About Native People

Every November, school libraries pull out the same stack. Pilgrim hats, a feast, a friendly man in a feathered headdress who seems to exist only to help the newcomers through their first winter. Teachers and parents reach for these books with good intentions, and many of them have no idea that the picture of Native people inside was shaped in the early twentieth century and has barely moved since.

The trouble is not that these books are rare or obscure. It is that they are ordinary. A child can get through elementary school having met Native people only as figures from the past, dressed in a generic costume, speaking in broken English, and gone by the final page. Nobody set out to teach that. The books did it quietly, one read-aloud at a time.

Where the stereotypes come from

Most of the patterns in children's books about Native people were set during a specific period. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, the federal government was running the boarding school system and dividing reservation land through allotment, while popular culture was settling on a single image of "the Indian": Plains clothing, tipis, horses, feathers, and a tragic sense of disappearing. Wild West shows, dime novels and early films spread it. Children's publishing borrowed it wholesale.

That image served a purpose. If Native people belonged to the past, then the land policy of the present did not need explaining. I have written about that era in the boarding school legacy, and the connection is not a stretch. The same decades that tried to erase Native languages in schools produced the picture books that told children Native people were already gone.

Some of those books won major awards and stayed on library shelves for generations. The American Library Association renamed its Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 2018, partly because of how the Little House books portray Native people. That decision did not remove the books from libraries. It acknowledged that a beloved series had taught generations of children something untrue.

What to look for on the page

You do not need to be a specialist to catch most of the problems. A slow read with a few questions in mind will flag the majority of them. These are the patterns I see most often, roughly from the easiest to spot to the hardest.

Past tense and vanishing

Does the book talk about Native people only in the past tense? Does it end with them leaving, dying out or fading into the landscape? There are more than 570 federally recognized tribal nations in the United States today, plus state-recognized nations and many more across Canada and Mexico. A book that leaves a child thinking they no longer exist has taught a falsehood, however gentle the illustrations.

One generic Indian

Can you tell which nation the characters belong to? If the story is set on the East Coast but everyone lives in tipis and wears Plains war bonnets, the author has pasted one image over hundreds of distinct peoples. Good books name the nation, and the details match it: the Wampanoag lived in homes called wetu, not tipis.

Animals, alphabets and counting

Books that turn Native people into animals, mascots or letters of the alphabet ("I is for Indian") or into objects to be counted reduce human beings to props. Counting rhymes in this vein have long histories that most parents have never looked into.

Speech and the "helpful native"

Pay attention to how Native characters talk. Broken English, grunts or the word "How" are signs of a caricature. So is the character who exists only to guide, rescue or approve of the white protagonist, with no family, aims or point of view of their own.

A useful question for any book: who is telling this story, and would the people in it recognise themselves?

The "it is just a product of its time" defence

When people raise these issues, the most common reply is that older books reflect their era and should be read in context. There is something to that. Historians read old documents in context all the time, and an adult reading a 1940s novel can bring that context with them.

A five-year-old cannot. Picture books and early chapter books are not read as historical documents. They are read as the world. When the only Native characters a child meets come from those books, the child does not file them under "1935 attitudes". The child files them under "what Native people are".

That does not mean every older book must be thrown out. It means an old book about Native people should not be the only one on the shelf, and an adult reading it aloud should be ready to stop and say, "this part is not true, and here is why." Context is a job for the reader, not an excuse for the book.

Finding better books

The single most useful check is authorship. Is the author or illustrator a citizen of the nation the book describes, or did they work closely with that community? That is no guarantee of quality, and some excellent books come from outside writers who did the work. But the books that get the details right are, far more often than not, written from the inside.

A few well-recognised places to start:

• We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom, illustrated by Michaela Goade, which won the Caldecott Medal in 2021.
• Fry Bread by Kevin Noble Maillard, a picture book about a contemporary family, which won the Sibert Medal.
• The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich, a middle-grade novel that tells an Ojibwe family's story from the inside, in part as a counterweight to the Little House books.
• The American Indian Youth Literature Award, given by the American Indian Library Association, whose winner lists make a strong reading list on their own.
• Debbie Reese's long-running review site American Indians in Children's Literature, which looks closely at both new and older titles.

For classroom teachers, these books fit naturally beside the issues raised in what schools still get wrong teaching this history. And for families wanting to connect a book to living culture, the work on how oral history preserves what written records miss is a good companion, because many of the best new books grow directly out of stories told within families.

One shelf this week

Pick one shelf this week: your child's bedroom, a classroom library or the holiday display at your local branch. Pull every book with a Native character and read each one with the questions above. Note which nation, if any, is named, whether the people are alive in the present, and who wrote it. If the pile is all past tense and feathers, swap in one title from the list above before the next read-aloud. One book will not undo a century of habit, but it gives a child a second picture to compare against.