The Heart of a Chief

I know this was not on my list of To Read books, but I read it anyways. I had to for class. And it made me do some thinking. My class is about diverse children's literature. I expected these books to break down stereotypes. Well, so far I am disappointed. I felt like this book did nothing but reinforce them.

It is about a young Native American boy, in the sixth grade. He lives on a reservation, but is in a general public school, instead of going to school on the Res. This book follows his life over the first semester of school that year. He does school projects and talks with the council of the res. He lives with his grandfather and great aunt.

None of these things by themselves shouts stereotypes. Except that he lives with his grandfather because his father is an alcoholic. He talks to the tribe council because they want to build a casino. The only thing that is not necessarily reinforcing stereotypes is his class project is about changing the school mascot from the Chiefs to something less demeaning. However, even this is shown reinforcing some stereotypes. At one point, someone who is in his group, who is white, gets punched by someone who wants to keep the name. He responds to this by saying that he had a run in with "white hostiles". This seems to create a stereotype against white people at the very least. The only black person even mentioned abandoned her son because she was on drugs.

It was a fairly well written easy to read book, that can be used to talk about modern day Indian Reservations, because there are parts that are encouraging. It shows the children learning their Indian language in an effort to keep it alive. It shows an Indian family that still has two parents and the kids all living together happily, even though it is just one. But if it is used in children's classrooms, I feel like the teachers would have to be very careful about the stereotypes that are still cemented within the pages.