Choosing a Protagonist from Another Culture

 

Last week I explained why I chose a Japanese-American protagonist for my first middle-grade historical novel. But that protagonist was half Caucasian and grew up in a white neighborhood with a culture not that different from mine, as contrasted to the protagonist in my second middle-grade book.

Here is the blurb for Creating Esther.

Twelve-year-old Ishkode loves here life on an Ojibwe reservation, but it is 1895 and the old ways are disappearing. Can a boarding school education help her fight back, or will it destroy everything she believes in?

Using a Native American protagonist was not an easy decision. I had no experience with the culture or reservation life, and I knew it would be a struggle to create an authentic character. But I wanted to tell the tragic story of how the boarding schools “civilized” the Indians, and no other perspective seemed to work.

I mentioned in the last post that Kirby Larson used a white protagonist in his book about the Japanese-American incarceration and did it very well. Fortunately, there were a number of people like his protagonist and her father who sensed the injustice and sympathized with the Japanese-Americans.

That wasn’t true for the Native-American boarding school experience. Memoirs written by white teachers capture a very different feeling than the ones written by Native Americans. Even those teachers who truly cared about the children had the mistaken belief that they were doing what was best for them by taking away their culture and making them “white.” So even though I could have put a white teacher’s daughter among the Native American students, it would have been unrealistic to give her the necessary understanding of and sympathy for her classmates’ plight.

Creating Esther was a very hard book to write because of my Native American protagonist, but I felt I had no choice. After extensive research, I did the best I could, and I believe I was successful. If not, I apologize.

But sometimes you have to take the risk.

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Creating Esther is available in paperback and Kindle versions from Amazon and in paperback from Barnes & Noble.