Final Eval. of Native American Books

I chose to focus on Native American literature for my final project. I am not too familiar with this genre of literature so I thought it would be interesting to write about and learn about. While looking for inside authors I had somewhat of a hard time finding them. I figured that pretty much all Native American books were written by Native Americans and African American books were written by African Americans, etc. This is surely not the case. I didn’t have too much trouble in finding books, but it was more work than I had expected.

As a whole my books were all very interesting. I found that half of them dealt with Native Americans as a culture and the other half dealt with Native Americans living an ordinary life with ordinary issues. Native Americans were all depicted in a very positive light and the books showed certain parts of the Native American culture such as the becoming of age for a young boy in Moonstick to young Indian boys being put in a residential school with no way to get home in Home to Medicine Mountain. The other books such as The Blue Rose and Jingle Dancer show Native Americans going through personal issues and living a modern ordinary life with no stereotypes. These books are all wonderful ways for children to learn more about themselves and the culture as a whole. Most of them would be wonderful for teachers to use as a teaching tool and help students to better understand the Native American culture. They also teach some lifelong lessons and could be a great asset to any lesson.

The authors of the books were all insiders. Most of the authors were told these stories by someone they were very close with. They were almost all true stories which depicted a very real lifestyle, most of which occurred many years ago. I thought this was very interesting to know these events actually happened. Some of it is very sad to know the way some were treated back before the war, but is very promising to know how things in life such as discrimination and stereotypes are beginning to diminish.