Hello, I'm Richard Nicholas Nimz, prospector of the written word. Well, I suppose I should cover a Newbery Medal recipient somewhere in this season, and I want to do one that most people aren't familiar with. So, the Newbery Medals have just started to get handed out. Winners include Doctor Doolittle (which I think requires more detail), The Cat Who Went to Heaven (which I already covered), and... well, ever heard of Caddie Woodlawn?
Brink, C. R. (1947). Caddie Woodlawn. The Macmillan Company: New York.
Summary: Out in Wisconsin, near the end of the War Between the States, there lived the Woodlawns. In the course of one year, many things happened. Normal things like having to deal with bullies the teacher won't handle, but also having to suffer through the fear of war with the Natives. But through it all, Caddie Woodlawn carries on.
Thoughts: Personally, I wasn't overly fond of it, but everyone else probably might be. The characters are alright and the plots are rather engaging. However, there are some unflattering tropes about Native Americans in play, such as racial slurs and 'Indians they talk much broken syntax' speech. In addition, there is a passage that justifies girls being held to a higher standard than boys. However, those can be forgiven as products of their time. What bugs me is something that seems to have continued to this day.
This author is a seeming feminist (for at least most of the book) and a non-racist (for the time she wrote in). You can tell this by the way she writes. Her eleven-year-old main character is unsubtle about the extinction of the passenger pigeon, even though there are fifty years yet to go before that happens in-story. Native Americans are shown without any kind of blemish, even though the author tries to tell the audience that such blemishes exist. Furthermore, the main character, throughout most of the book, is a tomboy that shuns anything girly (something shared by the writer, who assigns such interests the most disdainful characters in the book), and rarely, if ever, fails at anything, and never fails hard.
My problem isn't children's books containing a political message. However, that message takes a far back seat to everything else. If the least-flawed characters in a work of fiction all fit into one social category (or if all the unforgivably flawed characters fit into one social category, save for a very small or not-fleshed-out minority), the author puts agenda before story. A character who can't fail is not dramatically satisfying, and the implication that some groups of humanity are all good or all bad except maybe a few members is garbage. Even with good intentions, it's simply bad storytelling.
I've seen this done multiple times, in TV shows, films, and books aimed at children, and when writers/producers try to tell 'girls can do anything guys can do' or 'racism is wrong' and do it poorly, the result often comes up 'only white men can be evil and/or stupid and they need different social groups to lead them by the nose'. This message sticks with children, and convinces them that their own race/sex is under unjust attack (remember, white men have a better life by average to use as a baseline, and many just have flat-out bad lives). Thus, any attempt to change their group's genuinely evil practices has to work all the harder to overcome their hostility. Many good ideas have been suggested to fix this, such as having more than one of a given minority or teaching children better messages about race, sex, and privilege, but the writing of stereotypes of any group is a practice that just can't be allowed to stand even if the good ideas don't get adopted right away. Children are blind to social categories, but even they will notice trends and take them down roads the artists couldn't have anticipated.
Again, this is probably something that most people won't mind. It is quite anti-racism and feminist for its time, the story is decent, and I rather like a scene where Caddie's father and the Native liaison to the white people are calmly talking while tensions are mounting, showing that there are moderates on both sides who don't want to fight. I just think that it would have benefited from a more even hand. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic does feminism better by letting female characters be free to do what they want, not just be men in women's bodies. Battle for Terra and, heck, the episode "Over a Barrel" from Friendship is Magic do Native versus Settler conflicts a little more interestingly by making both sides more complex and relatable. Yes, A Christmas Carol works in its unsubtlety, but Scrooge is a fleshed-out character whom the audience wants to see improve rather than yet another enemy to be beaten down. This book, though, reads like a repeat of so many stories that really could have been better.
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