In the recent literary news, three examples popped up (two in Canada, one in the US) of writers utilizing Native stories without doing adequate research or asking for necessary permission. I’ll be focusing on each in a series of posts. Believe me, these are not the first examples of authors taking liberties with tribal content. There is a long tradition of uninformed, stereotype filled portrayals of Indigenous people/characters/stories/culture. So many, in fact, that it is difficult to find accurate ones.
Indigenous people are sensitive about this issue because of how little control we are allowed in our public portrayals. Often discussed as a singular group, federally recognized tribal nations exist in both the US and Canada with their own distinct languages, religions, cultures, and histories. The worst of portrayals do not even include a tribal name or any discernible cultural markers, working entirely on terribly outdated stereotypes. Natives are exoticized, romanticized, demonized, dehumanized, and objectified—our existence is seen as historical despite all evidence to the contrary. Top that with the small percentage of the population we inhabit, our lack of media influence, and the high levels of existing poverty in our tribes and it becomes easy to see why we do not take these issues of portrayal lightly.
Each of the three instances that will be discussed here at least name the tribe they endeavor to portray, some even discussing/researching their work with members of that existing group prior to publication. The structures utilized to mitigate the issues brought up with each publication and the impact of those decisions going forward in the publishing industry are important topics to discuss. Today, we’ll discuss the poetry collection Who Took My Sister?
Shannon Webb-Campbell took a path utilized by several poets prior and wrote pieces based on news reports. “Who Took My Sister?” is a collection of poems specifically from news of murdered and missing Indigenous women. Webb-Campbell claims “the instinct to write the work came from a place of heart, advocacy and solidarity.” Several of the women’s families disagreed, especially since none of them had been contacted by the author prior to the book’s publication and did not appreciate the way their family members were displayed in the text. I have not read the collection, so I can only comment based on the accusations made by the surviving family which claim the poems focused on gruesome details of the death and dehumanized the victims.
I do not want to bog us down in discussion of what ownership family members have of the portrayal of their deceased loved ones, who has the right to write or portray victims of violence, and different ways the author could have handled these issues better. All of this has been covered in the recent past–thanks to the controversy surrounding Kenneth Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown.” There’s more in this story that could be unpacked, but I want to focus on the positive outcome. Due to the controversy, the publisher of the collection, Book*Hug, wrote a nice statement and removed the book from sales. Book*Hug worked swiftly to right the situation as best they could, even though the book was already in print and available for sale. This, sadly, is a rarity. All the more reason to focus on the places that offer ethical responses to unfortunate books or problematic authors.