Swapping Tales and Stealing Stories: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Folklore in Children's Literature

Library Trends, Wntr, 1999 by Betsy Hearne

PERSONAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXTS

When I was young, I took a class bus trip from my home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Cherokee, North Carolina, and walked through a Cherokee village reconstructed and run by the tribe. That evening we gathered at an outdoor theater to wait until darkness fell and stars pierced the sky. The night grew cold. A wail rose from the darkness, launching a performance of "Unto These Hills," which depicted the U. S. army's destruction of Cherokee villages in the surrounding mountains followed by the devastating forced march of the remaining nation to Oklahoma. Although I was sitting with schoolmates, I felt completely alone with this tragedy, logy with tears and unable to speak afterward. It never occurred to me that there was any difference between the children on that march and me except that they were dead and I was not, an accident of history that only increased my empathy since the vagaries of birth seemed so random. Such is the power of story to move one across temporal, cultural, ethnic, and geographic boundaries. At some level, the story became my story. It entered a new person who was supported by a mythological construct completely different from the teller's, a person (to complicate matters) who became a storyteller.

This story about a story has both a personal and a sociopolitical context. In terms of personal context, the experience culminated a childhood punctuated by weekly family rituals of hunting for arrowheads along the shores of Lake Chickamauga and camping out while my father, born and raised in India but not Indian and certainly not American Indian, hunted and fished with a bow and arrow. While other kids played store, I played at grinding acorns between two large rocks. It took hours and provided a healing rite amidst the painful realities of 1950's racial tensions between African Americans, then called Negroes, and whites, now called European-Americans. In the course of these realities, I was captivated by a third-grade assignment for each student to write a story about the shadowy painting on our schoolroom wall of a Native American, known as Indian then, paddling a canoe along a mysterious waterway. This assignment launched a writing life (unless you count "My Book of Peoms" [sic] written at age 4), and forty-five years later I incorporated it, along with an African-American story that I had heard even earlier, into an autobiographical novel as a metaphor for the journey made by a lonely white girl (Hearne, 1998a). The voice of the fiction writer says, that's fine. The voice of the inner critic says, hold on. Although the third-grade episode actually happened, my subsequent use of it--the use of a Native American to project a white person's dilemma--may not be fair. Although it is my story, it may not be my story to tell. Power imbalances between Anglos and Native Americans can overshadow personal meaning with political implications.

The personal context I have just explored reveals the complexity of a story embedded in one life at a cultural crossroads of European-American, Native-American, African-American, and Asian (the father from India) influences. The broader sociopolitical context is even more complicated and will be the focus of this investigation. However, one point with which I will launch the discussion is the impossibility of separating: (1) story from context, and (2) personal from sociopolitical context. Studies that do so, in an effort to be objective, lose sight of the inevitable confluence of interaction between individuals and their environments--a process increasingly recognized by anthropologists and folklorists collecting stories from a culture other than their own. In examining issues of cultural context for folklore in children's books, my personal context will inevitably be a silent subtext. This is a point we need to remember in thinking about all the personal/professional opinions expressed later in this discussion.

The angle of sociopolitical context I will explore here is the critical controversy in my folk group of children's literature specialists--of which I am a thirty-year veteran member--about who owns story, specifically folktales, but also story in a broader sense as folktales serve as a bridge to legend, personal narrative, oral history, and history. Whose story is history? Whose history is story? (We will, for the sake of parameter, set aside the gender implications of using the term history instead of herstory.) To focus on these questions, I will examine some examples of the literature that generate the conflict, some critical response to that literature in print, and a sampling of the heated and heartfelt exchange about that literature on Internet discussion groups.

ATTRIBUTION AND INTERPRETATION

The background for this work began five years ago with two articles about source citation in picture book folktales, which at the time ranged from nonexistent to sporadic (Hearne, 1993a, 1993b). Since that time, writers, illustrators, publishers, and reviewers seem much more attuned to the importance of notes about story sources and cultural origins (see, for instance, Birch, 1996; Horning, 1997), just as in nonfiction for children we no longer welcome phrases such as "studies show" but demand which studies, with documentation. However, evasive new citation tactics for folktales have also developed right along with new expectations. Even when a note appears, as in the case of The Windigo's Return: A North Woods Story by David Wood (1996), it may not tell us much: