American Indians Need To Write Books

Indian Leaders Step Up

Jodi Rave stated the following on her blog – "As Native people, we need to express our thoughts and knowledge more often." This is so true. Too often we allow others to interpret our world for us. How many books have been written by American Indians? Not many. I remember when I was in college back in the late 60's – there were none. And then all of a sudden Custer Died For Your Sins: an Indian Manifesto by Vine Deloria, Jr. showed up in book stores. I cannot describe to anyone how that made me feel. I wanted to tell everyone around that I knew him. A real Indian author. When you're young and proud of who you are its important to see and read pride reflected back to you. The easiest way this can happen is for us to write our own books.

Go to any book store and look at the Native American section. The majority of books you will find are historical books about the 1800's written by a non-Indian who is interpreting this information from a Euro-American point of view. As Indian people we complain that the people in Congress don't understand us and we have to re-educate them each legislative session. Well if they have only read about a people who existed in the 1800's do you blame them for not knowing who we are.

How do others educate these same individuals? They do it through the use of the pen. Thomas Bacon said "the pen is mightier then the sword". So how do we go about educating Congress? We hire – high cost non-Indian lobbyist to do this for us. This is not a very cost effective way of educating – we have to return and do the same every thing when someone new is elected. I'm sure the lobbyist loves the opportunities but this is not a real effective way. I'm sure there are tribes who have written there story and are effective using the pen – but they are not the norm.

Each year thousands of books appear on the book shelves and if there is one book by an American Indian I would be surprised. So why are we not taking up the challenge and using the pen to educate? I asked one of our leaders several years back - why more of our educated Indians were not writing books. He didn't have an answer. Well I challenged him to write – here was a man who was incredibly talented, was involved in some of the most important legislative activities, highly innovative and he had not written a book. This would be an outrage in the non-Indian world were every one and his uncle or auntie would be rushing to there publisher to get a million plus to write what they knew or didn't know, or point fingers and those who they say knew and failed to act.

So I have an idea. Let us say to our national Indian leaders that they will be required to write a book after they have been around for four or more years or they need to leave the stage and quite telling us what to do. This will put them in a spot if they want to stay they have to create. We could identify ghost writers who will be available to anyone who needs one. Maybe we can set up a non-profit to do this.

But the second question is who will publish these great books. Well, we know we can't depend on the large publishing houses. So my next suggestion will be to have several of the big casino tribes to get together and start a publishing company. This way we can have are frybread and eat it too. Let's get started! I can think of a number of Indian Leaders that need to stand up and produce…. This is our children's legacy that needs to be captured by us and not interpreted for us. Jodi Rave is standing up and being creative and she has my admiration for this.