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bjbj Moderator: . . . well and really so pleased through the film of Macy's actually. We are
so pleased that this year we have 45 books in the multi-cultural collection. And we have
been putting together a multi-cultural collection since 2007. Macy's has helped us with that.
These are actually books as you see them. And one of them, the I Love Saturdays y domingos,
my own students who are teaching have told me in their _____ [00:00:35] classes that
when they use the books and they start with I Love Saturdays y domingos, their own children
perk up because they recognize Sunday. This year, in addition to the 45 books, we have
teaching materials for parents, for community based organizations, and for educators. And
so if you are any of those three, those will be added to the website and they are totally
free. They are all in PDF files, so you can download them. They are beautiful. They have
been designed, and they actually followed the common four standards. If you are a teacher,
you need that. Well, Joe, speaking of censorship, so you, your book is one of those that has
been taken off the shelves in the Arizona schools; multi-cultural, the whole topic is
a very hot one right this minute. How do we answer people who say that multi-cultural
literature is inferior, that it takes the place of the western cannon of the literature
from Greece, and from Rome, and from England? What do we say to critics like that? Dr. Joseph
Bruchac: Keetah [ph], keetah means listen in the Abenaki language. The Creator gave
us, every one of us two ears and only one mouth. We are supposed to listen twice as
much as we talk. And we are supposed to remember because those ears are on either side of our
head; we can always hear at least two sides of every story. If you hear only one side,
you are half-deaf. And it is also true that in literature, just as in music, in storytelling,
we and our children look to see ourselves, but also to see others, to experience other
lives and experience our own. If the child cannot find herself or himself in a picture
book, what image does that child have of herself or himself? When I grew up, there were no
really good books that dealt with native people that dealt with American Indians, just as
there were also no really good books that dealt with African Americans or Asian Americans.
Oh yeah, we had Little Black Sambo. We had the five, or six or seven Chinese brothers,
who knows how many there were. We had caricatures. We had pictures which were not realistic.
And it is only when people begin to write about their own communities from their own
experience that we begin to have the children's literature that truly reflects those realities.
That is not to say that you have to be from one of those communities to write well about
that community. If you are willing to really listen and really look, and learn over a long
period of time you may be able to do that. But to have a literature that is dominated
by people who come from one perspective means that you are always going to see a narrow,
tunnel vision of life itself. Our children do not live in the classroom, they live in
the world. And this world we live in is a great circle. Like the breath that went through
this flute and came out as song, it is shared by all of us. It is heard by all of us. Each
of us in that circle has a perspective that is different from everyone else's. But we
can all see the center. And if we look forward, we also can all see each other's faces in
that circle. That is what literature does for us. It helps us see each other. It helps
us hear each other's words, recognize each other's faces. See ourselves in others, but
also see that everyone is not us. Which is one of the dangers of limiting literature,
of limiting life. You know, kids learn by hearing. They learn by reading. If you want
a young man, it is almost always a young man, who does not read well to become a better
reader, all you have to do is read to him from books regularly. That is all you have
to do. Every level of reading increases it. Every ability increases, except for spelling.
That is how it works. A good friend of mine is John Cheska [sp], and John and I talk a
lot about the whole questions of guys who read and finding literature and finding material
that will encourage people to become better readers. All of the things we are trying to
improve in our schools by testing can better be done in other ways. Everyone who knows
anything about brain development, for example, knows that if you have ability in music and
you increase your musical ability, your mathematical skills increase. It is directly related. Everyone
who knows anything about history realizes that we learn history better when it is told
in a story, rather than in numbers and names that are memorized out of context. What better
stories do we have than a story that brings to life a time, a place and a people in a
memorable children's book. I became a write for my own children. I told stories first
to my kids and then began to write them down. And so my children turned me into a children's
writer. And when I write, I always keep in mind that kid I was who never saw himself,
poor, mixed blood, in a book. I never saw myself in a book, although I saw lots of other
people and learned from them, and also still loved them. I mean, I read every now, every
three or four years I re-read The Jungle Book, which is a very interesting cross-cultural
story, I might add. Kipling had something there about being raised by wolves and being
a poor Indian child who has been deserted by his own culture. We as human beings need
each other, we need each other. There is a tradition within the Abenaki culture, and
by the way, I think that bilingualism, trilingualism, multilingualism is deeply important. Whenever
I write a book about any other cultural group, I spend a long time learning everything I
can about that language and about those cultures, and from the people themselves, not just from
the internet. The internet is, I think Dickens would say, is an idiot. It has no mind. It's
true, it doesn't have a mind. It only has the input of people who don't know often what
they are talking about. And so when you hear other people, when you hear other languages,
you hear the world and see the world in a different way. I know just today, we were
riding over with the guy who drove us over, the van was from Togo. I lived in West Africa
for a few years, and so we were talking back and forth in Ew . I sang him a song I learned
in Ghana many years ago. You know, when you hear someone else's music, you also hear who
they are. And you know, American music is more complicated than we, than a lot of people
think it is. I just want to mention one ethnic writer, who is a very good friend of mine,
Frank Chin, an incredible playwright. Frank also does country/western music. And we were
sitting around playing music together. And he said, "You know, people have said I sound
like Charlie Pride. And Charlie Pride is the black Hank Williams. And so I guess that makes
me the yellow, black Hank Williams." That is Frank Chin for you. And so I wanted to
share with you very briefly, to have you hear another language. This is a book of poetry
by myself and my son, Jessie, called Two Rivers (speaks in Abenak language). Abenak is one
of the Algonquian languages of the northeast, very similar to the Powhatan language of our
region here. A lot of their words are very much alike and Jessie has been teaching the
Abenaki language for over 15 years. And we have been writing things in the language together
for a few years and doing a few small publications. This is called The Wind Eagle. I will do it
for you first in the Abenaki language. The wind eagle gives breath to the earth, that
breath which we all share, that breath which we all share. Moderator: Well, it is too bad
we are so afraid of languages. You know, the great news writer, at the beginning of the
1900s said that if English were good enough for Jesus Christ, it was good enough for us.
That was _____ [00:10:59]. He was, had come back from a world tour, said he could not
and remember now, I tell this now, it is nothing if you don't get that satire, but he said
if English was good enough Jesus Christ, it was good enough for us. [End of audio] LOC_MBC
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