Jewel H. Grutman

Reading Level: Intermediate
Genre: Historical Fiction
Summary: Thomas Blue Eagle is a young Sioux Indian who is sent to the Carlisle School to learn the ways of the white man. This ledgerbook shows the thoughts, feelings, and drawings of Thomas Blue Eagle as he remembers his old Indian life and describes his new life at the school.
Evaluation: This book helps the reader understand what it was like for Native Americans to live in a world that was being controlled by white men. The content of this book is very age appropriate and relevant because Thomas Blue Eagle is an Indian child. This book explains his feelings and teaches the reader about the Carlisle School, which they may not be familiar with. The illustrations in this book also help tell the story. The writing and pictures look like they are done by a child, helping the reader better see through Thomas Blue Eagle’s point of view and allowing them to connect even more to his writing and feelings.… (mehr)

This book is absolutely stunning. It caught my eye right away because it has a blue cloth jacket and is laid out horizontally instead of vertically. And then I opened it and my jaw literally dropped. The book has marbled endpapers and lined pages like a journal. And the illustrations are just spectacular!

The hand calligraphed text purports to be a journal kept by Thomas Blue Eagle, a fictitious boy from the Sioux tribe who was sent to the Carlisle Indian School at the end of the 19th Century. In the documentation for this book on the website of the terrific Heard American Indian Museum, we learn:

This book was inspired by the magnificent ledger drawings made by Plains Indians in the late 19th century. It is primarily based on letters, pictographs, and documents from the Pratt papers located at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It is also based on journals, photos, pictographic drawings on paper, and other materials located at the Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle, Pennsylvania."

There is more to the book than the drawings of course, and I thought the quality of the story was a perfect match for the illustrations. Thomas Blue Eagle tells us a great deal about his life in the plains before he goes to school.

He tells a bit about his time at Carlisle - not too graphic but enough information for us to know that it was a culture-killing experience for the Native Americans who went there. He concludes:

"I have learned the white man's ways, as my father wished. I have learned his numbers and tools. I have larned to tell my stories with the white man's words. I have also learned that the white man does not see with the eyes in his heart and that he does not hear our Mother Earth crying."

The book is dedicated to “all the brave young Native Americans who took that long, lonely journey into the white man's world and studied at the Carlisle Indian School."

Discussion: Carlisle was an Indian boarding school founded in 1879 for the purpose of “civilizing” young Native Americans so they would give up their own culture in favor of that of the majority culture. Founder and Superintendent Richard Henry Pratt believed that “the Native Americans should be uprooted from their tribal past to “achieve full participation.” In practice, this meant erasing, as much as possible, any trace of Native American customs, culture, language and religion from the children at the school. Indoctrination was not easily accomplished. Hundreds of children died during Carlisle’s 39 years of operation, not only from infectious diseases, but from trying to escape. Physical, emotional, and sexual abuses were not uncommon. Students caught speaking their native languages were beaten, sentenced to hard labor or confinement, or they had their mouths washed out with lye soap.

Nevertheless, The Carlisle School was a model for 26 Indian boarding schools founded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) across the country. (You can watch an NPR 1-hour documentary on the schools – “a story of cultural genocide” - here.)

This book for children doesn’t show the worst of the negative aspects of the school, but readers can still get a sense of the culture clash that occurred. The drawings by Adam Cvijanovic are so exquisite and the story intriguing enough that one hopes readers will have enough interest to pursue the topic and find out more about what happened to Native Americans, especially those who went to the Carlisle School.… (mehr)