Outside World Connection

For my religion class we had to read Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt and then an article that was a negative response to the book. To sum up the article, William K. Power bashes Neihardt saying that he transformed the book into what the white man would want to hear, not what was actually true to the Native American culture.

Here is an interesting quote from the article:

"Essentially, in Black Elk Speaks and other books written by white men for a white
audience, the ideas, plots, persons, and situations of these books have been constructed to
conform to the expectations of a white audience that generally knows little about what it
means to be brought up as a Lakota over the past one hundred years."

Again, I thought this was interesting how this theme of inaccuracy in multicultural literature shows up time and time again. Of course we need to be aware of it in children's literature, but also in the literature WE read!!!