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What's good, you're listening to Code Switch, the show about recent identity from NPR, I'm Gene Dumbi and real quick I want you to think back to when you were in school like, you know, kindergarten through 12th grade and try to remember all the books that you read that involved Native Americans, Indigenous people. Think of the art like whether they had Native characters in them or they were written by Native authors, just native anything? Are you coming up with an Ate?
For me personally, we didn't actually read any books by Indigenous people from the United States, like at all. And the ones that depicted Indigenous people were, I mean, you had the last mohikins which regularly refers to Native people as savages, has all kinds of stereotypes about Indians being violent, treacherous and eventually extinct and disappearing. The pale faces are masters of the earth and the time of the Red Men has not yet come again. My day has been too long. Yikes.
Well, today we're diving back into our series on book bans, particularly the way that the current wave of book bans by conservative activist groups has affected contemporary Indigenous literature. Like what happens when a book by an Indigenous author gets canceled? People think that it's a badge of honor but the reality is that what we see happening is that people see it to kill a mockingbird on the book list and they go and buy it to
kill a mockingbird and they feel like they've done a good deed. Well, to kill a mockingbird didn't need anybody to go and buy another copy. Books by Native writers and African American LGBT, all these groups were getting censored. Those writers are struggling very hard just to make a few sales. Let's come it up. Stay with us. This message comes from progressive insurance, where drivers who save by switching save nearly
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load times and 24-7 support. Your sites can handle high traffic spikes. Visit Bluehost.com. This message comes from progressive insurance, where drivers who switch could save hundreds on car insurance, get your quote at progressive.com today. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Do you want in on a secret? Like why broker culture is making a comeback? Or why a makeup fat is suddenly sweeping your feet? On the It's Been A Minute podcast, we know these things
don't happen by accident. So join me as we go beyond the trends and find out the why. Follow the It's Been A Minute podcast from NPR. Our stories get treated like folk tales. That voice you're in belongs to Debbie Wies. Like you know, red riding hood or three bears. But folk tales that native people write generally are more in line of creation stories or sacred stories. A good way to think about it is would we put Genesis over there by little red
riding hood? Absolutely not. Because we know that's a sacred story to the people it belongs to. Hours are the same way. Debbie is tribally enrolled at Nambaya Wingay, which is one of the sovereign native nations in the state of New Mexico. She's also a former professor of American Indian studies. The bulk of my work is centered on studying representations of native peoples in children's books. I grew up with a certain set of values that were imparted to me by our tribal elders
and one of those was that all the work that you do is not for you. It's for everybody. As one example, Debbie keeps a running list of the native books that have been banned across the United States. I come to this entire project as a teacher, as an educator, someone who sees the importance of children's books to furthering someone's understanding of who native people are. Books that are getting published today are not just for native
kids. They're important to native kids because they affirm our existence as native people in the present day. But they're also for non-native kids because those kids are being shaped by the information in the book. They'll grow up. They might be senators working on legislation that's going to impact native people. And so those the books are important for all readers. Because I think the country is better off if we all know history in a more informed way.
But Debbie told me she hadn't always planned to focus her work in this way. It all started decades ago when she and her family moved to Champaign or Banna in Illinois so that Debbie could start graduate school. And before they even showed up there, they were warned that they probably needed to be aware of the school's kind of well very janky Indian caricature mascot. The stereotypical one with the big feathered
headdress and fringed Buckskin. That mascot has since been retired. But at the time, it was everywhere. And the professor that was recruiting Debbie to come to the school was like, are you going to be okay with that? And she was like, don't worry. That's not going to be a problem. When I got there, I was astonished at how big a problem it was, how much people dismissed actual native voices because they were so in love with that mascot. And
I started to think, now, okay, what's going on? How did this come to be? And so I had gone to Illinois to study children's books and family literacy and shifted the focus of my research to depictions of native peoples and children's books. And when she really started looking, she noticed these depictions. Most of them extremely messed up just about everywhere. I saw characters that we love dearly as people in American
society. And I'm talking about Clifford, the big red dog in the Clifford's Halloween wearing a big headdress and grizzly bob with those cubs at a camp sitting around a fire wearing that big headdress. I began to notice how often children are exposed to stereotypical images. So that's what started it. I'll be saying that the landscape of literature has changed a lot in the decades since then,
in some good ways and some not so great ways. So I asked her to give us a little breakdown of how the state of play for books by and about indigenous authors has evolved since she first started her research. How big is the market and about how many books get published in the United States? Well, that has changed significantly. When I started working in this
field in the 90s, there were not that many. And what teachers were using were books with problematic imagery in them, not just picture books that I've already mentioned, but books like Little House on the Prairie with Derogatory and and errone, factually erroneous information. Islander the Blue Dolphins. These were these are classics award winning books. So I started teaching those as well. And I'd over all the industry of children's books began to pay
more attention than they had prior to the 90s. I think it goes in cycles. But anyway, we're in a cycle right now where there is tremendous interest. And it feels to me like we've gone from 10 to 90. I don't want to say zero to 90 because there were books before. But we're at a different place now with many books coming out each year. This wave of book bands and controversies around children's books. Does it feel novel to you? Like is this is this new territory for us?
I think that historians would say we've been through something like this before. This is not the first time books are getting banned. But I think this is maybe a more precarious time because of how not just US society, but the entire globe seems to be devolving in terms of being open to the many peoples of the earth. It seems there's some it feels a very vulnerable time for everyone. What kind of consequences before a book or a book
author when their work ends up on these lists? People think that it's a badge of honor. And they there some people may feel. Yeah, that's a badge of honor. But the reality is that we see happening is that people see it to kill a mockingbird on the book list and they go and buy to kill a mockingbird. And they feel like I've done a good deed. Well, to kill a mockingbird didn't need anybody to go and buy another copy. But books by native writers
and African American LGBT all these groups were getting censored. Those writers are struggling very hard just to make a few sales. Those are the books that need more sales. So they're lacking visibility that to kill a mockingbird has in the first place. And so the idea that they would feel good or would be good for their book to get banned or censored is not it doesn't pan out the way people think it would. Do the publishing companies take any special
action when they when these books end up on these lists or what are their responses? Some have, but not in the ways that writers would like. I think some publishing houses and editors are doing what I think is the same thing that we see teachers and librarians do which is soft banning. Soft banning meaning that they just back away from a project because it's too much trouble. Scholastic in particular did something like that. They had they have I don't know how old
you are. But I never had a book fair when I was a kid. I'm in my 60s. But book fairs are big. Book fairs are big. And they had a diversity bookshelf in the last couple of years. They put the diverse books that they were publishing on the diversity bookshelf. Wow. So they they had a special self where they just stashed the diverse books. Yes. Some librarians were outraged about that. They said, what are you? What are you asking me to do? What are you suggesting that I do?
There was a tremendous outpouring about that. And so Scholastic retreated from that. And they they moved away from that. They are integrating those books back into the regular book fair offerings. Wow. Oh, there's like kind of distopian. I know. Oh, man. On your blog, America Indians in Childress Literature, you have a subsection or a category titled not recommended. Right. Books like Little House on the Prairie, Island of the Blue Dolphins. They have misrepresentations of
Native people and they have bad history in them. So with that driving force, the idea that kids are learning from these books that we hand to them, I look carefully at that representations for the quality of that and for the history. Can you tell us a little bit about the sort of bad history in Little House on the Prairie, for example, like what in which ways
was the history sort of distorted in this representative indigenous people? In Little House on the Prairie, she creates a story where Native people are running around with very little clothing on. One of the major tribes that was there during the time that she was writing that were that story is depicted were the Cherokee. Before the Cherokee were removed from their homelands in the South to what was then called Indian territory, they had been sending some of their students
to elite schools on the East Coast. They had been visiting Washington DC and having negotiations. They were not primitive people. No Native people were primitive anytime. That's also a misrepresentation that you see in a lot of children's books. We were not primitive. We were different in various ways. So anyway, with Little House on the Prairie, she depicts them as savage, primitive people and that's just not historically accurate. I imagine that was probably the baseline of representation for
the time that Laura Ingalls-Wilder was writing his books. That wasn't anomalous necessarily. That was kind of the whole landscape. That's how it was done. The fact is just about all those classics and best-selling quote-unquote folk tales about Native people. They're all problematic. So that's why these books matter so much. The ones that are getting published now, that are getting banned, that are getting challenged because they're feeling a tremendous need.
So what should we do about books like Little House on the Prairie, right? Books that run through with these misrepresentations. Do we put them away? How do you think we should treat them? We get into sticky spaces, don't we? Because it sounds like we're trying to ban them. But I come to that question as a teacher. Again, I keep, I fall back on that idea that I'm a teacher and that in a classroom we are charged with teaching kids with educating them, not with miseducating them. So a book that has
problematic inaccurate content. If that's a math book and it says something like 2 plus 2 is 5, a teacher won't use it or if they see that error, they will say, oh look, there's a problem here, somebody goofed. So I think when you have a book like Little House on the Prairie and you know the actual history, you can set it aside because you as a teacher who is charged with education can say, yeah, this book is not going to work because it miseducates kids.
And what do you, what do you hope the future looks like for the landscape of Indigenous literature for children? I'm doing everything I can to help teachers learn how to look critically at the problematic content and why they can reach for a book by a native writer who is writing from their own family's history and who is including information in their book that is not in a textbook.
There are periods of US history that native people experience like the termination period, that native writers write about that because our families went through termination. And so that content is in the book that you'll never get it somewhere else until textbooks change. That's being denied to native kids who see that history when they read that book and to non-native kids as well. In that conversation we spend a lot of time talking to Debbie about what she's sick
of seeing and what she just doesn't want to see. But we also asked her to recommend some of the best books by Indigenous authors that she's come across recently. And you can check out her list of recommendations on the code switch blog. It includes picture books, middle and high school age text nuanced, fleshed out Indigenous characters and storylines. And coming up a conversation with an Indigenous Hawaiian author who says that if America's won a banner book have added because
that's not really her problem. What happens on the US continent is what happens on the US continent and it's irrelevant to me. I don't care. That's after the break. Stay with us. This message comes from NPR Sponsor Squarespace. Kickstart or update written content on any website, product description or email with Squarespace AI, generating instant personalized results that no one show your brand identity. Explain what your site is about, choose your tone,
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will have fun. You can have fun almost in spite of those things. Make the most of every day this summer whether you're jet setting or staying close to home. Listen to the Life Kit podcast from NPR. Jean, just Jean this week. Code Twitch. So before the break we were talking to Debbie Reese about the dangers of book bans and their consequences for indigenous literature. But I also spoke to an indigenous author who had a really different perspective. At least about how book bans
factor into her life. My name is Hina Lei Moana, Wang Kalu, and I am from the islands of Hawaii. When I called up Hina Lei Moana, it was morning her time. She's six hours behind me. She was sitting in her home in Honolulu. I'm sitting here at my mother's little table where she eats. I'm as a water bottle next to me. My laptop is on a jam jar. I do not live in the lap of luxury. I live like most other Hawaiians and island people. We live humble, simple lives.
Hina Lei Moana is the author of an all ages book centered around a little known piece of Hawaiian history. It's called Kapaiamahu. And in 2023 it got pulled into this really ugly fight in Virginia. They're almost led to a library there closing. The book was one of more than a hundred children's books that were described as having, quote, pornographic content, all because of a quick detail about gender in the story. The fight kicked off a stir in the Virginia County where this was all going down,
but Hina Lei Moana didn't seem to be losing sleep over any of this. When I spoke with her, I asked her if she knew that this fight had even happened. No, I didn't. I don't mean to be rude to American friends, whoever you may be, but I'm a Hawaiian. Hina Lei Moana told me that she understands why some people feel this need to defend themselves, defend their work when it comes under this kind of scrutiny. But she said that's not really her ministry. I'm Kanaka first. Hawaii is my mainland.
What happens on the US continent is what happens on the US continent. And it's irrelevant to me. I don't care. If it was banned, I can't control what happens in Virginia or any other state. She said she's willing to engage in critiques of her work if they come from other Hawaiians, people who share her values and share her culture, and especially people who share her language.
But she said, I'm not someone who will say I'm a proud American. I'm required to carry a US passport, but I'm not trying to champion for American flag issues or things that I rude at there because I have to focus on what's important to me here at home in my mainland. And again, this is meant to be no offense, but you know, anybody who's feeling some kind of way about the words that I'm saying, I really challenge you to think about where your centering is.
I'm clear about my center. I'm clear about my allegiance, and I'm clear about what I will allow to impact my life. And then there's the fact that the people trying to ban her book don't seem to really understand the story. So I guess, I mean, let's talk about what the book is about. Kapai Mahu is the name of one of the legendary healers. And the story tells of their journey that comes from the ancestral homelands of Kahi Ki or known to the world as modern day Taiti.
Centuries ago, four Mahu healers traveled from Tahiti to Hawaii, and they shared their healing arts with the people of Hawaii, and those healers would become revered. The people of Hawaii expressed their thanks with the monument in their honor. And these huge zones were brought all the way down by the ocean and dedicated to their memory and and imbued by the healers to
to be a place where people could come to and pay respects. Then, Hime Le Moana's book tells what happened to those stones next, because they were there for centuries, and then the Kalanazas came. And they forced the indigenous people to give up their beliefs and their folkways and the story of those healers and their stones was mostly forgotten, even though the stones were still there.
Hina Le Moana's book captures all of this, but she says that she herself hadn't heard the story of the stones growing up, even though she grew up seeing those stones all the time in Waikiki. I remember as a young child swimming at the beach there, and then we would come up to the shore, and we would lie on them, put our towels on them, because we didn't know what their significance was, and they were just a part of the landscape there at the beach.
But in the 90s, Waikiki went through this major cultural revival, and as part of that revival, the stones got moved. They went from being essentially these artifacts lying on the beach to upright monuments acknowledged as part of Hawaiian history. Today, they're surrounded by a short fence and a plaque in Hanululu, like a memorial, and that's a big change,
and a positive one, she says. But Hina Le Moana said that that's kind of an outlier, that the bigger trend is still for the stories of Hawaiian people to be covered up or left untold altogether. So many other stories have been relegated to the annals of historic texts, newspapers,
and other historic writings. There's so much to be told about my people, but it alludes to the reality that I, being ethnically Kanaka, come from a population in Hawaii that is dwindling, and that's due to Exodus, my people heading to Great Turtle Island,
otherwise known to the world as continental US, it is true that the US continues to illegally occupy Hawaii, and my people run to the US because we are taught that seeking the American dream is the ideal, and part of that means that we no longer have our people to tell our own stories, and so in Hawaii our reality is we are a minor minority in our own homeland, and that makes it exceedingly difficult to not only tell our stories, but more so just be a presence to be respected, of which
oftentimes we aren't. Even with the story of the stones, a story that has been given more prominence, Hina Le Moana says the part of the story of the healers and the stones that have been papered over was the fact that the healers were Mahu, they were both male and female spirits, and it's that detail about those Mahu healers that landed her book on that list to be manned, because Kapai Mahu was grouped in with a bunch of other books that were described as having,
quote, LGBT themes. The presumption was that the healers in Kapai Mahu were trans, but Hina Le Moana says that reflects a really deep misunderstanding about what it means to be Mahu. I do not consider Mahu an identity. Pacific Islanders do not identify by sex or gender, and while many of us acquiesce to the larger current, the under sweeping or underpinning current of westernization and colonization, it is important to make note that Pacific Island culture,
especially when it comes to Hawaii. Sex and gender is not an identity, it simply is a detail of life, and when you talk about the word Mahu, it's an adjective, it describes elements of that person and whether the elements be physical, and not just the physicality of someone, but also possibly their physical desires, their physical interactions with other people, but Mahu also will reveal to you possible elements of the individual's internal space that they maintain and that
they hold, mentally, emotionally, as well as spiritually. So in the effort to reinstate Mahu to a rightful place of understanding Mahu is a term that is very inclusive, it is rather broad and sweeping, it is often mistaken by modern day people, ethnic Hawaiians and other for being trans,
and while the application of the word Mahu to someone of the west who sees it as transgender or transsexual, depending on which term they use, it is pulling that life's experience, synthesizing it through the western lens, but if you pull it through the Hawaiian lens, Mahu could apply to someone who looks like a gender binary male, it might look like a gender binary female, or they may be somewhere in between, or they may have come from one side completely over to the
other and vice versa. So Mahu once again, it is an inclusive term, it's not an identity, it simply is a description of the individual. That description of what it means and what it doesn't mean to be Mahu, remind him of a conversation we had on this podcast not too long ago with the historian Joel's
Gil Peterson. Joel's concern was that in trying to make the term trans a broad, inclusive category, we fall back on using the concept of being transgender, even when we're talking about people from very different cultural contexts, with very different understandings of identity and gender, people aren't really operating with binary ideas, western ideas about gender and sexuality. Here's Joel's from that conversation. The term trans, the term transgender,
you know, has had this incredible career. It has great PR and the thing that is its greatest strength that it's supposedly radically inclusive. This term is just ethnocentric and that's a loaded thing to say, but really simply, it comes from one specific culture, like the United States, it's an English word, right? It was invented by a single class, you know, of people with a certain degree of education, and then they went on to claim it could apply to anyone in the entire world.
And that's just simply not true. And that's exactly the thing that has been frustrating in Hinale, Moana. She said that in the context of the U.S. mainland culture wars, those binary ideas are really, really meaningful. They're really fraught ground to be fought over. But in her world, that's just not what it is. But I hope that the telling of the story will show that when it comes to being Mahu, the part about being Mahu is almost irrelevant, except for the fact that being Mahu
makes you even stronger. And it makes you a more powerful healer in the case of the healers, because they harness the mana, the power, the spiritual power of male and female in one person. That's a significant thing. Meal and Moana says, people who don't like our book can continue to do whatever it is. They feel they want or need to do, even if they want to ban it. I'm not going to feel some kind of way about it, because that's their personal thought. And being American is highly
predicated upon personal individual freedoms. That is not the way of Pacific Island culture. And so if you didn't like it, that's your personal opinion. And great, I don't have to bother with you, but don't bother with me by that same token. So, you know, I'm not trying to force anything upon anybody else. I'm not over there trying to insist that the library, any library, school or otherwise is required to have it. If they have it, they don't, they don't.
So book bands are a real tricky subject, right? In some ways, if it's like giving them more oxygen, makes them more important than they really need to or ought to be. But on the other hand, Debbie Reese, the scholar we spoke with earlier said, these bands are having a tangible, negative effect on a lot of authors and a lot of readers. So it makes sense to me that Debbie Reese and Hina Leimo and Amoan Kahlu conceptualize these bands in really different ways.
So let's take Debbie's approach. Her seems to be, let's engage and dive right in and explain the people what they're getting wrong, what they're missing, and tell them why that matters. So that's why these books matter so much. The ones that are getting published now that are getting banned that are getting challenged because they're feeling a tremendous need. And Hina Leimo and Amoan's approach seems to be more, okay, let's do the work for the people
who want to engage with it earnestly and honestly. And we can just kind of roll our eyes at everybody else. For her, the people that matter most for her work are young people, especially Hawaiian young people. And she wants them to know that regardless of what any institutions with power might tell them, they are allowed to define their own identities using the definitions and markers that matter to them. Just as she uses the ones that matter to her.
If I walk this through as a learning exercise, I would say that I am Hina Leimoana Wang Kahlu. I am the child of Georgia, Moana Matthias and Henry Dayao Wang. I'm the grandchild of Mona, Kalaniokalani Kealoha and John Fertado Matthias. And also grandchild of Edith Gungilok and Henry Gung Lim Wang. That is my genealogy. I am born on the island of Oahu in the southern district of Kona, known to the world as Honolulu.
I live in the valley of Nguanu with Lanihuli Peak at the top and three bodies of water, Waikahalulu, Puwe Huahu and Nguanu flowing to the sea of Mamala. And there are many other names for the spaces and places around me. My genealogy and my land is my identity. Hina Leimoana says there are two words from her culture that are central to her value system. Kulana and Kuleana. Kulana is one's role, one's status or one's place, one's rank, one's title
and one's position. Sometimes you might consult your job. So that's Kulana. And then Kuleana is duty, obligation and responsibility. If you know your role, you know who you are and you know your place, then you should know the duties, obligations and responsibilities that require fulfillment. And therefore that's what you need to do. That becomes the standard and the measure
by which Karnaka should rightfully be assessed and evaluated. For those of us in our community, whom recognize rightful Hawaiian ways of being and existing and thinking and seeing the world in my own personal example, any commendation or any positive appreciation that has come the way of my name Kuluhina to the community, it's because I have availed myself to a life of service. I will exist as I am and you will not impose anything upon me. Period, you know, they're just irrelevant.
I'm sorry, I know I keep saying that, but I don't have time for people who either don't want story I've told or or don't like it. That's that's just them. I have other things to do, better with my time. There are many more other pressing issues in the Hawaiian community for me to tend to. I'm also a caregiver for my mother. I'm sorry, but when it comes to equity and inclusion,
I will be your equal and I will be included in the mix. If there is a requirement for my skill set, if there's a requirement for my understanding and if there's a requirement for my ability and capacity to serve, if you if my participation or if my presence is either unwarranted or unwanted, then I simply say, well, thank you. I've got other things to do anyway. Bye bye. And moving right along. And that's our show. You can follow us on Instagram at mpr code switch. If you know, it's more
your thing. There's this code switch at mpr.org and subscribe to the podcast on the mpr app. Or wherever it is, you can check out your podcast. You can also subscribe to the code switch newsletter by going to mpr.org slash code switch newsletter. And another way to support our work here is to sign up for code switch plus. It's small, but it makes a really big difference for us. And you'll get to listen to every code switch episode without any ads. You can check it out at plus dot mpr.org slash
code switch. And thanks to everyone who's already signed up. The episode you're listening to was produced by Christina Kala. It was edited by Leigh Dunella and Courtney Stein. Our engineer was James Willitz. And we will be remiss if we did not shout out the rest of the code switch massive. That's Xavier Lopez, Jess Kong, Dalia Mortada, Verne Williams, B.A. Parker and Lori Ziraka. As for me, I'm Gene Demby. Be Zia. Support for NPR and the following message come from Bombas. Bombas makes absurdly
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