 So Debbie we talk a lot. We do. We don't get to talk in person very often. We don't and I've never heard her give a talk before and that was outstanding. Wow thank you. Well you I was like look at Debbie just freestyling and I'm gonna stand up there and read. So we are both independent scholars. Yes. Yes. We are both unpopular in certain circles. Yes. Yes. But we are both committed to making sure that the kids in our communities have the mirror books that they deserve and that all children are getting accurate representations culturally specific representations. I would love it if you could share with the audience your thoughts on Sherman Alexi's picture book Thunder Boy. Okay. All right. It's not tribally specific and that's one of my four concepts that I said is very important. We don't know the nation that this child is from in that book. We don't know the nation that his parents are from. We know that or some of us know that if you happen to be in one of the schools where Sherman Alexi is touring and talking about that book and he is saying in those spaces that the child is of his own nations which is Spokane. So he is saying it in the talks he's giving but it's not in the book and I think that's a huge problem because it becomes a generic any kind of Indian it doesn't matter kind of story which is precisely what we're pushing against as teachers and people who are interested in expanding what people know about native people. So I think that's a real problem. I do hope they put a an author's note or an editor's note some kind of a note in the back of the book that will help people know a little bit more about that and to that end I have a page on my website that talks about that a little bit about native naming in particular because it varies by tribe. It's not the same across tribes. I said there's over 500 federally recognized nations and amongst that when we talk about diversity and the conversations we're all having right now about diversity we're thinking about about race and culture and ethnicity but if you start talking about native nations it just explodes because of the language differences amongst all those nations and the religious differences and all that. So that book is a problem. I know it won a big award yesterday. I think it will probably be in the running for additional big awards. I want librarians to I don't want to say don't buy it because I do like the story but I read that story as a person firmly grounded in who I am as a person who grew up on my reservation and I know my sister's grandkids are going to love that story because it is funny and their dad is a big guy just like the character in there. So the reader really makes a difference and what the reader brings to the story really makes a difference but right now we're talking about a very ignorant society and until we get to a society where there's more general knowledge we do need author's notes. So I wondered if do you put author notes in your books? So certainly for the lynching book I definitely had an afterward and pointed people to further resources and tried to give some historical context. I think it's so interesting because I mean we were talking a little bit about specificity and I cringe too when I see a book that's set in Africa it's like really which you know can we be a bit more specific or a book that's set in the Caribbean and there's a lack of specificity but then there is this part of me that feels like the more in-depth we go and the more detail we provide the more we give them to appropriate and I wonder if you could talk about the dominant culture and the way it reads difference and specifics and details like essentially when I was reading your blog about you're one of your blog posts about Thunder Boy you were concerned about teachers reading this book and then saying everybody pick your own name. Right that that that's a huge concern for me because in the recent news cycle one of the recent news cycles when Donald Trump was going after Elizabeth Warren and one of the memes that emerged on Twitter was he started calling her um Pocahontas and people said he was ignorant let's make a name for him and so there was like what's Trump's Indian name kind of thing going on which is just poking fun and mocking really significant pieces of who we are as native people so um there are things that I don't share things that that we the details of what goes on in the Kiva the way that I got my name I'm not going to share that because such knowledge has been appropriated and mocked and made use of in ways that denigrate what it means to me and I think that that's a real concern to native people who are trying to protect their children from being the subject of mockery there's a I have a I've been talking increasingly about adding another piece to Rudine's sliding glass doors and mirrors and that's curtains every people everywhere has a curtain that they draw on certain things that they do because that's not everybody's business and so we have curtains and the way I came upon that was actually trying to develop that use that her metaphor for a talk I was going to give in Hawaii last year and thinking about a window for someone to use to learn about native people and I googled windows and Kiva and Pueblo Indians and it brought our Kiva up and one of our ceremonial structures and it had a curtain on it and I said duh right there's certain things that we do not share and here's a perfect way for me to bring that idea into the into the conversation that's so interesting can we talk about men for a minute sure I wonder do you think that Sherman Alexi in some ways gets a pass from some people because he's a man Sherman Alexi has that dimension to his character to his personality that people just adore you know he has he has fans I don't need to say anymore you know what I mean he has a lot of fans he plays well to a white audience and there's this among a lot of women in the country there is this kind of a swooning around men that doesn't happen around women and I think that means that their books sell in ways that women's books don't sell that alluded to that and I think that's very true now I was really disappointed in Sherman and I've had dinner with him more than once I haven't talked to him about this book but I was very disappointed that I was hearing him speak at various functions with this book and saying that no one else is doing this kind of writing and I think what what Louise Erdrich what about Cynthia Lighting Smith what are you telling us about the women who are doing this work um I think it's a huge problem yeah I have to say I've I've heard enough anecdotes from other black women writers like I said I don't get invited to a lot of places but they've been at ALA and other conferences and said they've been trampled by white women librarians trying to get next to the one straight male of color in the room and I have witnessed that fangirling in person and it's not cute it's really not and as a feminist you know I always I'm always you know Debbie Downer whoa your name for real but how do we start a conversation that says sisterhood matters or doesn't matter in the children's literature community in a community dominated by women how do we even have that conversation I find it particularly difficult for me as a black woman because I want there to be more black male authors I want there to be black men going into schools talking about the books that they write and what we see right now is that the majority of illustrators are black men the majority of writers are black women so then I have black women friends who are illustrators and I'm always trying to promote them and I work with women illustrators as often as I can but it becomes very difficult to say anything because the black male in our society is viewed as endangered and they are but black boys and black men are valued more highly than black girls and women who are also endangered so how do we say not just black lives matter but all black lives matter and then include trans people in that and queer people in that and I feel like I need I have an intersectional approach and and maybe a lot of other people don't how do we address that that intersectional conversation is really taking off I think in recent years it's not new but it is more visible than it has been in the past and it's a big one for us too because as the as the photographs that I showed you of native people it isn't what you look like that defines you as a native person but we do have a lot of people who have that mixed parentage and claim that native identity and do harm to native nations because they don't know what it means to make that claim they had a lot of people to take in those DNA tests and having finding out that they've got some native heritage and so there they are native and they can say that not knowing that actually the tribes don't recognize the DNA test as a way of saying you're a member of this nation because the tests aren't that specific um so intersection intersectionality is something very important in Cynthia Leitech Smith's books she is bringing in black indians into her stories the picture book jingle dancer the lawyer character in that book that was a sticking point for her to actually sell that manuscript people that she was shopping jingle dancer to thought well you have a lawyer in their indian lawyer really you know people didn't know that we are lawyers or in doctors or doctors indians have to be dancers and drummers and artists and that's it but your daughter just graduated from harvard law school she did and so jingle dancer was actually a very special book for me because i wish i had that book when my daughter first danced because it was about getting ready to dance and um anyway there's there's one of the characters is a lawyer in that book she's and so that that book works for my daughter now as a young child who is going to be dancing for the first time and as a lawyer who is going to be um practicing law um so that's a really big growing area and we need more information out there about that and that's what librarians are about you know you're about sharing information and providing good information to people so that when you have those conversations about intersectionality that they are ones that further what we know about all the people involved in um what we call we the people of the of this country can i make one concluding remark i just want to say thank you to you debbie because it is very easy for me to talk about my own oppression but i read an article recently that was called titled stolen lives on stolen land and what do african americans owe indigenous people and i feel like my community and i personally have a whole lot of work to do and i realized even as i was giving my talk that i i haven't made distinctions when i say kids of color and i should be adding first nations children um so i have work to do but you teach us so much and i just want to thank you for that thank you zeta so do we want to do q and a or do we want to just i don't want to get too far behind on our schedule we might have time for like one question should we do that or what do you think all right is this work no pressure but it's just one so hi i'm a children's librarian and i also have a legal background and debbie i was really um your talk really made me think to to define native people as members citizens of their nation and then when it started making me think is what what do you do about all the native peoples who aren't in federally recognized tribes who don't have it who don't have a recognized nation but they're a native person that that is a big conversation happening too there are the federally recognized tribes there are some state recognized tribes that are trying to get federally recognized and there's a lot of fake tribes out there so we have it's a very difficult conversation to have because there are the tendency is to say well forget federal recognition because that's the government that oppressed you in the first place and and so why would you want to be using federal recognition as your starting point and i think that we have to start somewhere and we start with that bit of information and then we spiral on out now there are people that are not tribally enrolled in federally recognized nations there are people that are disenrolled from federally recognized nations but it's a very political thing i think that's a big takeaway is that we don't walk on water you know native people are seen as like wow mystical wonderful wisdom filled people but we are political beings just like anybody else and so the resources the the stories that you're hearing about people getting disenrolled from a nation are happening because of the resources that are there and human beings being human beings they will fight for those resources and you're ending up saying well these people aren't enough indian so they are going to be disenrolled that doesn't address your question about what to do about that um i think there's a lot of thinking to do about that and um in terms of what i can offer to all of librarians when you want something practical on the ground to use right now i think we start with the historical context which means we were here first we're not first americans and the and the writings that i'm seeing about us being first americans that's really wrong because we weren't americans thousands of years ago we were our native nations and calling us first americans undoes that existence as a people that was here before europeans um so that's our starting place and it's and it will spiral out and there and there are ongoing conversations and much to learn about that um i don't have anything more to offer than and i and i wish that i did and i think we'll get there sometime but we have to start somewhere that's where i start you're not happy with that answer if you're that's the like it triggered a response of an emotional response of me so i want to understand your place of part of your unemotional battle well part part of what our ancestors fought like hell to preserve what we had and for for us to say we're going to step away from federal recognition and um let go of that we are undoing a whole lot and i think the risks are far too great to our existence if we if anybody moves away from that and any of the nations and so we're not seeing that happen i think nations are trying to figure out how to accommodate the others that are not part of their nations yet um but they're they're there's over 500 there's and they're all different some of them some of them are the the wampanoag for example you have to actually live there and be participating in the community the Cherokees don't have that part as part of their of their uh citizenship requirements i wish i had more to offer and i want you to fangirl i want you to fangirl zeta because because i think she does great books but you know don't fangirl and rinaldi because but seriously because a lot of writers pump out a lot of white writers pump out a lot of books about a wide range of people that they really don't know much about and um she might have some books that are excellent but the ones that she's done about native people are not excellent and so when you fangirl her and get all of her books because you like her you're doing a disservice to your patrons by providing them with materials that are not recommendable and then when that author gets critiqued the fangirls come for you yes they do sometimes not you personally i don't know that but yeah i've got on the mic thank you zeta and debbie so much