Indigenous History Is Far From 'Fiction' - Editorial
The recent news out of Texas involving the temporary reclassification of a 2023 Indigenous history book for young readers by local author and Tribal historian Linda Coombs as fiction was shameful, but, unfortunately, not entirely surprising given the recent trend of book challenges in America.
The book in question, “Colonization and the Wampanoag Story,” details the first encounters of New England’s Indigenous tribes with European colonists and the immediate and long-term impacts of colonization from a Native perspective.
It was published last September by Penguin Random House as part of its “Race to the Truth” series, a collection of five books for middle-grade readers about North American history, written by the people they are about.
Penguin Random House’s recent statement asserts that the book is “a carefully researched, fact-based account” of America’s early beginnings from the Indigenous perspective. We agree. To attempt to classify the book as anything but a nonfiction, historical work is asinine at best and willfully ignorant at worst.
Ms. Coombs is a historian of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), and is a well-known individual in both the local Indigenous and wider Cape Cod communities. She has for years been a leader in efforts to preserve and uplift Native culture and history in Cape Cod and beyond. Yet, a library card holder in Montgomery County, Texas, was able to anonymously challenge her work earlier this fall, submitting a not-yet-publicly-available “challenge” regarding Coombs’s book to the county’s five-person review committee. The committee, reportedly appointed to privately review children’s books that were anonymously challenged by citizens, decided to move Coombs’s book out of the juvenile nonfiction section of the Montgomery County Memorial Library system and redirect it to the fiction section.
The outcry was swift, and rightfully so. The rash decision of a five-person citizen’s committee, which is devoid of any librarians, to classify the book as fiction did not stand in the eyes of the Montgomery County Commissioners Court, which last week ordered the book restored to the nonfiction section—a sound decision, considering that the Library of Congress, libraries local to both Cape Cod and Texas including Houston, Austin, and Mashpee, and the book’s publisher, Penguin Random House, all classify the book as nonfiction.
“Until now, you’ve only heard one side of the story: the ‘discovery”’ of America,” the book’s sleeve reads, “told by Christopher Columbus, the Pilgrims, and the Colonists. Here’s the true story of America from the Indigenous perspective.”
We wish that this anonymous challenger, whoever they are, takes something away from this. Maybe it is not their fault—education on America’s Indigenous tribes, cultures, and histories is not easy to come by in our nation’s school curricula. But that information and those stories are out there, just waiting to be picked up off a shelf (in the nonfiction section, please) and absorbed by inquiring minds. Or maybe it is—Texas is among the top states when it comes to book challenges, which have morphed into a device to essentially censor books involving topics of race or racism, LBGTQ+ individuals or experiences, or other contentious topics.
Ignorance is bliss, but bliss is a privilege. Whitewashing and sugarcoating history will get us nowhere, and help no one. History, no matter how hideous, cannot be erased. It demands to be paid attention, reckoned with, learned from.
Whatever the reason, shoving books to the back of the shelves or slapping a “fiction” sticker on an authentic telling of history from a point of view you disagree with, will ultimately do nothing. Removing historical accounts from the reach of children only is a disservice to those children. Today more than ever, there are countless voices speaking their truth to power. Linda Coombs and her historic accounts of what Indigenous peoples experienced during the dawn of our nation are just part of a chorus of voices that refuse to be silenced any longer. Whether you choose to listen or not is a personal choice, but no one person—or five-person committee, even—should have the ability to steal that option for the rest of us.