Native authors of children's book have small representation, but powerful voices in children's books. Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve has been writing for children for over fifteen years and Michael Dorris, new to the children's book field, is no stranger to either children or writing. Both have different styles and formats, both present honest images that honor and authenticate the Native experience.

Michael Dorris' debut children's book, Morning Girl, is a seventy-two page novel for readers eight and up about a Taino family. (Hyperion, $12.95) Dorris' dedication to genuine expression of child and cultural views creates a book that defies stereotyping. Instead of a epic version of a people destroyed, Dorris focuses on individual characters whom he develops until a story speaks from their experiences. To his characters, the coming of Columbus is a minor footnote. Their concerns reflect their values, rather than sensational global dramas.

Dorris grew up reservation reading of Native peoples were unlike anybody he knew or wanted to know. The truer trademarks of small Native community life-- laughter, storytelling and intimacy-- were missing in the books he read. He shares the gifts of his heritage in Morning Girl where these values are an integral part of the book's structure.

Family members know and understand each other completely. Even struggling in the war of sibling rivalry, Morning Girl aids her brother, Star Boy, when he needs her support. Humor helps siblings and parents through the difficulties of miscarriage, separation, and the rockiness of two children coming of age. The drama of every day life eclipses events outside their known world.

Part of the way readers become part of the Taino world is through the fresh vision of Morning Girl and Star Boy. Morning Girl's uncle once told a lie "and never untied it, ever, with the truth." Star Boy alone in a storm is "slapped" in the cheek by an "angry wind." Their responses to the world bring Dorris' work poetry, but most of the book is written in colloquialisms. He does this purposefully to avoid the style of writing Native conversations that "sound like a bad translation of a foreign language." In this too, Dorris fights to defend the commonplace whose quiet mystery is more potent because of the way it whispers.

The parents in Morning Girl are equally developed. They discipline gently, listen carefully, joke lovingly, and respect resonates through all their interactions. Morning Girl's father takes seriously her desire to see her own image. He kneels to approximate her size, offering her reflection in his eyes as "the answer to your question". He further reassures her by telling her that the pretty girls will "always here when you need to find them."

Dorris follows the native tradition of storytelling. He relates his story simply and eloquently and lets his audience find the lesson. He hopes readers who have identified with his characters and their depth will be chagrined and indignant when they imagine an encounter with a man who has a presumptuous ethnocentric view. Dorris also hopes that this story will carry messages beyond its historical setting into present time, "where people as myopic as Columbus fail to see the beauty and complexity of a society that is unfamiliar".

Virgina Driving Hawk Sneve was propelled into writing for children by her own children. Witnessing her daughter's excitement over Laura Ingalls Wilder books, she was shocked to find that the South Dakota setting seemed devoid of Indian inhabitants and the one Indian pictured was savage and frightening.

Shortly after when visiting Native relatives in South Dakota, her son was disappointed that he couldn't go to a Sun Dance because "he didn't get to see real Indians."

It wasn't only her surburban-raised children that were confused. Sneve found her South Dakota Indian school students had strange ideas about Natives. "They were either very savage and brutal; drunk and lazy; or they were very noble and child-natured and these children didn't fit anyplace and I became very much aware of their need for them to have some accurate information about their past as well as their present."

"In my books, I always try to write about something from the past that still affects us today and will in the future." This is quite true in Dancing Teepees: Poems of American Indian Youth, (Ages 9 and up; Holiday House, $14.95). She blends poems remembered by generations of peoples with those of contemporary tribal poets. Spare and at the same time, image-laden, the vitality sparked by her word choices are no accident.

Sneve was nurtured by her grandparents and other Elders in the oral tradition and learned "a great respect for words and understood that words have power and must be used responsibly, without waste." The poems she remembers and the ones she writes are breathtakingly evocative in her appreciation of the miracle of everyday life. "Grandmother," she writes, "I watched an eagle soar/high in the sky/ until a cloud covered him up./ Grandmother,/ I still saw the eagle/behind my eyes."

Though she believes in bring the past alive, she wishes, along with other Native writers that publishers and book buyers were more interested in contemporary themes. The marketplace still seems to crave the "glamour and romance of hunting buffalo and living in teepees." Currently she is working on a series of non-fiction books about various tribes for Holiday House which she is trying to write accurately and sensitively, all the time feeling tremendous responsibility, knowing " how my people have been portrayed in the past." Her book on the Sioux and the Navajo will be released in Fall of 1993 by Holiday House.

Uniting her personal past and present, she is writing a non-fiction adult book titled Completing the Circle which will be published by the University of Nebraska Press. In this book, she places the oral history of her grandmothers' families in the context of written history "because there's very little written in recorded history about Indian women." She also honors past and nurtures the future, carrying on the oral tradition in telling stories to her four grandchildren whenever she is with them.

©Susie Wilde 1998