Reviewed by: Native American Picture Books of Change: The Art of Historic Children’s Editions Susan Gardner (bio) Native American Picture Books of Change: The Art of Historic Children’s Editions. By Rebecca C. Benes . Foreword by Gloria Emerson . Santa Fe, NM: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2004. No citizen of the United States is immune from the major sources of stereotyping American Indians: the electronic media, advertising, and children's literature. As all of these play powerful roles in the socialization of mainstream (and even Indian) youth, it is hard to outgrow these images and fantasies. However, traditional Native American societies, in their oral storytelling (dating back at least 30,000 years), had little concept of what we call "children's literature," which, interestingly, is defined by its audience: the "protected class" of modern childhood in the Western European-derived world. Traditional Native American conceptions of "the self" locate its origins in ancestral time out of mind; children are the ancestors reborn; the notion of an "individual" attains significance as a function of kinship placement and membership of a prior and over-arching social whole, the People. Moreover, in non-Western, traditional societies, it was assumed that understanding the stories grew with time; endings did not have to be happy, nor were certain subjects taboo; and oral narrative/storytelling was the means by which cultures preserved their memory, history, knowledge, and wisdom. As one elder has said, "We are Indian people because we tell each other Indian stories." During the Treaty-making era, although treaties in international law are conducted between sovereign entities, Federal law had already classified Native Americans as "domestic dependent nations." A predictable rhetoric perceiving them as children or wards under the Great Father's protection ensued, particularly when land cessions became involved (1784–1868). No other American ethnic "minority" is paternally administered by a sub-Cabinet agency, in this case the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the U.S. Dept. of the Interior. In the later nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, when assimilation and forced deculturation within government and church-run off-reservation boarding schools were Federal policy after the confinement of Native Americans to reservations, an unforeseen effect of suppressing Native languages and cultural practices was the development of pan-Indian identities and a nascent literature in a new, shared language: English. One way to address a mainstream audience, early Native writers discovered, was via "children's literature." The entrée of American Indian-authored stories into the Euramerican literary [End Page 333] mainstream was thus by dint of their infantilization. (Salishan) Mourning Dove's Coyote Stories sanitized the great Trickster. (Dakota) Charles Eastman and his Euramerican wife Elaine Eastman's Wigwam Evenings domesticated traditional narrative. One of (Mohawk) performing artist E. Pauline Johnson's forums was mass-circulation magazines for children and their parents. During the same time period, English-born artist Ernest Thompson Seton started the Woodcraft Indian societies for Canadian and American white youth. In England, the Boy Scouts (founded in 1908) and the Girl Guides (1910) were negligibly influenced by Seton's model, but in North America The Boy Scout Handbook evolved from Seton's The Birch-bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians. In 1911, the Camp Fire Girls was established. This imitative trend survives in YMCA summer camps where Euramerican children acquire "Indian" names, clan affiliations, and survival skills. However honorable the values taught, Euramerican children are only playing at being Indians, during "quality" "down" time. In the boarding schools, Native American children were not playing at being white. They had no choice in the matter. A heavily propagandistic literature took aim at graduates of Native American boarding schools to ensure that they would maintain the intended allegiance to white, "clean," and Christian values. Novelist Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), doyenne of American Indian women writers of the Southwest, recalls Stiya: the Story of an Indian Girl, published by the U.S. War Dept. in 1881 and written by a white woman, Marion Bergess (masquerading as "Tonka," a meaningless name). Bergess had been a teacher and dormitory matron at the notorious Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, PA, whose former military founder Richard Pratt's philosophy was "to...