Roll of Thunder... Red Scarf Girl... YA Native American Lit.?

Though I whole-heartedly believe that we should select authentic texts, maybe our criteria within these authentic texts should be toughened even more. Some texts like Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry (which I read this week) and Red Scarf Girl (which I've taught in the past) take into consideration the outsider audience, and these to me seem more readily useful for a classroom teacher.

Roll of Thunder… tells the story of an African-American family that struggles to maintain its economic independence in a hostile southern farming community during the Great Depression. The section that stood out to me as extremely useful and wisely crafted was when the Grandmother repeats the oral history of the family to her granddaughter named Cassie, which allows the readers access to background history of Post-Civil War Reconstruction. Cassie is also useful as a young protagonist because she's grown up in a somewhat isolated situation on the family farm, and her parents have to explain economic pressures and the culture of bigotry that she's beginning to encounter.

Student readers need various contexts if more emotionally based expressions of empathy are to occur. Why not work these contexts into the novel? After reading Nisreen's post about Naomi Shihab Nye's novel Habibi, it sounds like Nye employs some similar devices to get necessary information to young readers without giving the additional task of digging up supporing contextual materials to teachers who are stretched thin enough already. Here's my new literature selection motto: work smarter, not harder by choosing a book that actually considers it's YA audence. I'll get off soapbox now. As a side note: the more developed adult characters in Roll of Thunder… are essential in providing this context, and as a result the book felt different than most of the YA books that I've read.

Comparing the course pack description of the novella Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom to the YA novel Red Scarf Girl, I felt that RSG provided more contextual support even without supplemental materials than LOHFB. To begin with, RSG has a young protagonist, Ji-Li Jiang, who gradually learns about the Chinese Cultural Revolution that's happening around her, in the same way that my students figured things out as they read the book. I think students identify with Ji-Li more than with Hua from LOHFB because age-wise she's their peer as well as a talented student (I've only taught this book with high-ability students by the way). Hua as an adult artist… well, you know how those artistic folk are… ☺, but I would also expect students to have some difficulty understanding divorce and abortion from an adult perspective, even from an insider perspective!

Granted, I was working with high-ability seventh grade students, but little time was spent trying to understand what was happening. Socratic Seminars would begin with comments like "Well, this is sort of like the Holocaust… but It's different because…" and "Don't get me wrong, but this Chairman Mao guy was a genius, a terrible guy, but a genius." Almost all of my students came to understand that they needed to de-center their experiences from their American cultural point of view. If students have to work so hard to feel something for a book that they're gushing more over the death of a dog than a child, then maybe the teachers from the course pack article weren't using the right book to begin with.

To me, books like Roll of Thunder… and Red Scarf Girl and maybe Habibi allow readers into the 'house of the other' in a more inviting way by being aware that the audience isn't from around their neck of the woods. They find ways to work the necessary contexts in. Young protagonists help this cause, developed adult characters help too, and developed adult interactions with young protagonists also help to give readers of what-ever age friendlier access to these other worlds. In addition, teachers of young adults can more efficiently support youth in find meaning in cultures different from their own. Okay, now I'm getting off the soapbox... really.

Since I've gotten that rant out of my system... if anyone knows of a Native American novel that's inviting and written at a young adult level, I'd love to hear about it. It seems like their culture in particular has walls that are taller and thicker and legitimately built with more anger and distrust than most multi-cultural ethnicities. I've read Momaday's House of Dawn, Silko's Ceremony, and Erdrich's poetry (some of which I've used), but I'm pretty sure that these are more difficult than even my high-ability students can handle. I've also read Richter's The Light in the Forest, but now I'm wondering how authentic that book really is.