Learning to Surrender

 

When the Union armies surround Vicksburg, 12-year-old Charlotte and her family find themselves living in a cave. As she discovers what it is like to lose control of her life, will her attitude toward slavery change?

Learning to Surrender is finally here. The following link takes you to the amazon.com page for the paperback, but the Kindle version can also be reached there. The book should be available online from Barnes and Noble in the near future.

LEARNING TO SURRENDER at Amazon

The title comes from a real event. When the Yankees ordered Vicksburg to surrender in May 1862, this was Colonel Autry’s reply:

Mississippians don’t know, and refuse to learn, how to surrender to an enemy. If Commodore Farragut or Brigadier General Butler can teach them then let them come and try.

It took a year, and it was General Grant who taught them, but the residents of Vicksburg did learn to surrender.

Learning to Surrender is not about battles or the fighting itself. There are plenty of other stories told from a soldier’s point of view.

Buy and read my book to discover what it was like for the residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi as they learned to surrender.

A Fiery Business

When 12-year-old Julia is sent to stay with her cousin Fannie in Chicago, neither girl likes the arrangement. Then the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 sweeps through the city and separates them. Can they survive on their own?

I am pleased to announce that I just released my third middle-grade historical novel, Inferno, which is available in paperback or on Kindle. If you or your friends have daughters or granddaughters in 3^rd through 6^th grade, please consider recommending it or buying it for them.

Anyone local to Northwest Indiana can purchase Inferno or any of my other books in person at the following events: 

• Saturday, April 23, 2022, from 12–3 p.m. at the Local Author Fair, Hammond Public Library, 564 State Street, Hammond, Indiana; and
• Saturday, May, 21, 2022, from 12 – 4 p.m. at the Creative Arts Summit, Lake County Public Library, 1919 W. 81^st Ave., Merrillville, Indiana.

If you are local, I’d love to see you at one of them.

For readers who can’t make either book signing, Inferno is available on Amazon at this link Inferno on Amazon. It will soon appear on the Barnes & Noble website, as well.

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.

__________

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

Writing from Researched Experience

 

I’m about as WASP as you can get, but the protagonist of my first middle-grade book, Desert Jewels, is not. Here’s the blurb.

Twelve-year-old Emi Katayama is half Japanese, but she is all American. Then Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, and she suddenly becomes the enemy.

So why did I write this book? The Japanese-American incarceration is a part of our history that often gets ignored, and I wanted to change that. All American children should learn the bad parts of their country’s history as well as the good ones. If our children understand the past, they are less likely to repeat it.

I could have used a white protagonist who lives outside the camp, as Kirby Larson did very effectively in the Dear America book The Fences Between Us, but I wanted to get closer than that. I did, however, give my protagonist a Swedish-American mother and placed Emi in a “white” neighborhood in Berkeley rather than in San Francisco’s Japantown. That allowed Emi to share some of my culture.

It also gave the book a different perspective than most. Even 1/16 Japanese blood was enough to send a child to the camps, and, while it was rare, there were a handful of Caucasian woman in each camp who had chosen to join their children or husbands there. None of the books I read dealt with this experience.

Still, Emi is half Japanese and I have no Japanese blood. I have also never experienced life in an internment camp. So what qualified me to write the story?

Research is key. Since I didn’t live through the experience, my research relied significantly on the voices of those Japanese Americans who had. Autobiographies, letters, newspapers, and “as told to” accounts are better than history books for learning what people actually experienced and how they reacted emotionally.

I was fortunate to have good materials available when writing Desert Jewels. Emi follows in the footsteps of Yoshiko Uchida, who lived in Berkeley, was initially incarcerated at Tanforan Assembly Center, and was then sent to Topaz (officially known as the Central Utah Relocation Center). Hers was one of several memoirs by people who traveled that same path. In addition, the camp newspapers from Tanforan and Topaz are available online. So I had a wealth of information to use when trying to create an authentic experience for the reader.

Next week I’ll talk about Creating Esther and my thought process in choosing a Native American protagonist to tell that story.

__________

Desert Jewels is available in paperback and Kindle versions from Amazon and in paperback from Barnes & Noble.

Writing Characters from Other Cultures

 

The Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) has been presenting digital workshops free to members and archiving them for one month. I recently listened to “Writing Identity Elements Into Our Stories” with authors S.K. Ali, David Bowles, and Linda Sue Park. It was described as “how to accurately and respectfully write identity elements into our stories,” and I was hoping it would help with writing characters outside my culture. When I listened to it, however, the theme could be better described as “how to write a story from your own culture.”

Faithful readers of this blog know that I’ve published two middle-grade historicals outside of my culture. The first, Desert Jewels, is about a Japanese-American girl living in an internment camp during World War II. The other, Creating Esther, tells the story of a Native American girl who leaves her reservation in the later 1800s to attend a boarding school. My next two blog posts will explain why I chose to write those books and why I picked POV characters from outside my culture. But I want to direct this post to statements made during the workshop.

A preliminary comment, however. Other than in this paragraph, I won’t be using the word “race.” There is only one race—the human race—and we all share it. What we don’t all share are the various ancestries, heritages, cultural experiences, and skin colors within the human race. With that out of the way, here are my comments from the SCBWI workshop.

I really appreciated S.K. Ali’s reminder that no “culture” is unified but that practices and experiences vary widely within the larger group. Even though she grew up Muslim, she had to be sensitive to these differences when writing about her Muslim protagonist. And her insight applies no matter what group your character belongs to.

In recent years, the “Own Voices” movement has been encouraging authors from “marginalized” groups to write about characters who belong to that group. I liked the way Linda Sue Park reframed it during the workshop, saying she prefers the term “lived experience.” This better reflects S.K. Ali’s comments about the many cultures within a culture.

The one place the “lived experience” concept breaks down, however, is in historical fiction. I could use my “own voice” for writing about a German immigrant in the 1800s, but it doesn’t qualify as lived experience because my ancestors’ lives were nothing like mine. Imagine eating beans for days on end while waiting for the crops that may or may not come in, or caring for a seriously ill family member on your own because the nearest doctor was one hundred miles away and your only way to reach him required the use of a farm horse built for heavy work rather than speed. Or imagine standing in a dirty, noisy factory for twelve hours a day without any safety measures to keep you from losing an arm. The only way I can understand these experiences is through extensive research, which is also the way I learn about protagonists with a different heritage.

The third member of the panel, David Bowles, compared his audience to people sitting around a campfire. The ones in the inner circle share his heritage, and these are the ones he writes for.

I write for a different audience. I think it is important for “privileged white kids” to understand what others have gone through and may still be experiencing. I commend David Bowles for writing for the inner circle, which I probably couldn’t reach. But it’s important to write for the outer circle, too. That was how I envisioned my role when writing Desert Jewels and Creating Esther.

Next week I’ll talk more about Desert Jewels and why I chose to use a Japanese-American protagonist in that book.

__________

Desert Jewels is available from Amazon in paperback and Kindle versions at this link [The Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) has been presenting digital workshops free to members and archiving them for one month. I recently listened to “Writing Identity Elements Into Our Stories” with authors S.K. Ali, David Bowles, and Linda Sue Park. It was described as “how to accurately and respectfully write identity elements into our stories,” and I was hoping it would help with writing characters outside my culture. When I listened to it, however, the theme could be better described as “how to write a story from your own culture.”

Faithful readers of this blog know that I’ve published two middle-grade historicals outside of my culture. The first, Desert Jewels, is about a Japanese-American girl living in an internment camp during World War II. The other, Creating Esther, tells the story of a Native American girl who leaves her reservation in the later 1800s to attend a boarding school. My next two blog posts will explain why I chose to write those books and why I picked POV characters from outside my culture. But I want to direct this post to statements made during the workshop.

A preliminary comment, however. Other than in this paragraph, I won’t be using the word “race.” There is only one race—the human race—and we all share it. What we don’t all share are the various ancestries, heritages, cultural experiences, and skin colors within the human race. With that out of the way, here are my comments from the SCBWI workshop.

I really appreciated S.K. Ali’s reminder that no “culture” is unified but that practices and experiences vary widely within the larger group. Even though she grew up Muslim, she had to be sensitive to these differences when writing about her Muslim protagonist. And her insight applies no matter what group your character belongs to.

In recent years, the “Own Voices” movement has been encouraging authors from “marginalized” groups to write about characters who belong to that group. I liked the way Linda Sue Park reframed it during the workshop, saying she prefers the term “lived experience.” This better reflects S.K. Ali’s comments about the many cultures within a culture.

The one place the “lived experience” concept breaks down, however, is in historical fiction. I could use my “own voice” for writing about a German immigrant in the 1800s, but it doesn’t qualify as lived experience because my ancestors’ lives were nothing like mine. Imagine eating beans for days on end while waiting for the crops that may or may not come in, or caring for a seriously ill family member on your own because the nearest doctor was one hundred miles away and your only way to reach him required the use of a farm horse built for heavy work rather than speed. Or imagine standing in a dirty, noisy factory for twelve hours a day without any safety measures to keep you from losing an arm. The only way I can understand these experiences is through extensive research, which is also the way I learn about protagonists with a different heritage.

The third member of the panel, David Bowles, compared his audience to people sitting around a campfire. The ones in the inner circle share his heritage, and these are the ones he writes for.

I write for a different audience. I think it is important for “privileged white kids” to understand what others have gone through and may still be experiencing. I commend David Bowles for writing for the inner circle, which I probably couldn’t reach. But it’s important to write for the outer circle, too. That was how I envisioned my role when writing Desert Jewels and Creating Esther.

Next week I’ll talk more about Desert Jewels and why I chose to use a Japanese-American protagonist in that book.

__________

Desert Jewels is available in paperback and Kindle versions from Amazon and in paperback from Barnes & Noble.

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

Writing Outside Your Culture: Dealing with Religion

Creating Esther is written for a secular audience, but religion was a part of both the Native American culture and the white culture that officials tried to implant at boarding schools. So some mention was necessary for authenticity.

Yes, some Native Americans were Christians by then, but it was still an anomaly. And the boarding schools did not understand how to integrate Christianity into the local culture. Since I wanted to show a realistic picture of what it would be like for most of the children attending the Indian boarding schools in 1895 and 1896, I had to include the conflict between Ojibwe religious beliefs and Christianity as taught by the boarding schools. My challenge was to be sensitive to Native American religious practices while remaining true to my Christian beliefs.

In the end, I decided to show the conflict between the two without resolving it. Here is a passage from the protagonist’s first boarding school Christmas:

“What is Christmas?” Ishkode asked Mrs. Hansen. “Everyone talks about it coming next week, but what is it?”

“It’s the day Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus.”

Even though Ishkode had been attending chapel every Sunday for three months, she still didn’t understand who Jesus was. Sometimes he sounded like Wenebojo, who was born of a human mother and a spirit father. But she had asked a minister after chapel one day, and he said Wenebojo was not Jesus.

Now Ishkode rubbed her forehead. It was too confusing.

Actually, the book even shows the negatives about how the boarding schools practiced and taught Christianity. The Christianity I found in my research is not the Christianity I find in my Bible. I’m sure many of the teachers and administrators were sincere, but they were also misguided.

Boarding school staff tried to convert the Native American students by forcing religion on them. That approach doesn’t work in life, and it doesn’t work for fiction writers, either.

So use a soft touch when writing about religion.

__________

I took the photo at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways at Mount Pleasant, Michigan while on my 2015 research trip.

__________

This post is a revision of the December 22, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Language Issues

The characters in Creating Esther speak two languages, which makes the work harder for me as the author. At the beginning of the book, Ishkode understands some English but speaks and thinks in Ojibwe. Once she reaches the boarding school, she still thinks in Ojibwe but is forbidden to speak it. So how do I distinguish between the different languages without confusing my readers?

The second issue is how to write the dialogue and text when Ishkode and her friends speak or write English. At a conference I attended several years ago, a speaker said that broken English and grammar errors tell the reader that the character is unintelligent, even when that is neither the reality (to the extent fiction reflects reality) nor the message the author intended to convey. The speaker said the better option is to keep the character’s English sentence structure and vocabulary simple at first and to make them more complicated as the character learns the language. Good advice, and something I may not have thought of on my own.

I bought a number of books to help me bridge these language barriers, including two scholarly studies on how students acquired English language skills in the boarding schools, two basic books on Native American sign language (which I ended up not using), and two Ojibwe dictionaries. But although they gave me some help, I had to figure it out myself.

So what did I do?

I made Ishkode a quick learner who had been attending the reservation day school for several years before the story opens, which allowed me to start her with a basic command of English. Since all of Ishkode’s narrative thoughts would be in Ojibwe,however, they could be more complex than if they were in English. So although I had to simplify the dialogue, I didn’t have to simplify the narrative.

I still needed to signal which language my characters were speaking when there was dialogue. I solved that problem by specifically stating when people were speaking English in Part I (on the reservation) and Part II (travelling to the boarding school), which tells the reader that the rest of the dialogue was spoken in Ojibwe. I reversed the process for Part III (at the boarding school), which mentions when people are speaking Ojibwe. And yes, Ishkode and her friends do defy the ban on speaking Ojibwe.

As far as I can tell, I succeeded in distinguishing between the languages without confusing my readers. My beta readers all followed the story, and none of them mentioned any problems with how I handled the language issues.

But it wasn’t an easy puzzle to solve.

__________

This post is a revision of the November 24, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Naming Fictional Locations

I got spoiled when writing my first middle grade historical novel, Desert Jewels, which follows a Japanese American girl living in California during World War II. There were plenty of good memoirs with detailed accounts of what happened to the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast during this relatively short period. More importantly, several of them traveled from Berkeley, California to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California to the Topaz War Relocation Center in the Utah desert as my characters did. So it was easy to set my story in real places and know that I would have all but a few minor facts correct.

I couldn’t do that with Creating Esther. The story is set in 1895, but the first off-reservation boarding school opened in 1879 and some existed until the late 1900s. The history goes back even farther when on-reservation boarding schools are included. That’s a very long period, and things change over time. Most of the memoirs I have are from the mid-20^th century, and they give little insight into the boarding school world of 1895. And although I have some earlier memoirs, those are short on details. I couldn’t find enough information to set my story in any particular school during the relevant time period without the risk that someone would find significant factual errors.

That means I had to create a fictional school using what is universal and making up details consistent with the ones in the memoirs. So that’s what I did.

But creating a fictional school meant I needed to make up a name, too.

The last three words in Dewmist Indian Boarding School were easy to come up with since that is what all of them were called. Well, some included “Industrial” after “Indian,” but the name is long enough without that. The challenge was to come up with something creative and unique for the first part of the name.

I discarded a few choices before deciding to play with the letters in the word “Midwest,” which is where my school is located. First, I tried reversing it, but Tsewdim isn’t easy to say or remember. So I switched the first two letters of that attempt and came up with Stewdim. But that didn’t seem very memorable, either. And Westmid is too obvious.

In the end, it came down to two choices: Mistdew and Dewmist. I chose Dewmist because it flows together better. As you can see, I simply rearranged a word and got a name.

But maybe you want a more fanciful explanation. Here’s one that I came up with after the fact. Dew and mist are temporary, dissolving when the sun comes out. The acculturation process at these boarding schools was also temporary, dissolving when the students went back to their reservations. Actually, some attributes stayed with them, but the schools couldn’t beat the Native American culture out of their residents.

And that’s a good thing.

__________

The picture shows the East Building of the Shawnee Indian Mission boarding school in Fairway, Kansas, which Roland and I saw on vacation in 2013. The building is typical of the dormitory and school buildings at the various Midwest boarding schools.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Naming Characters

As mentioned in previous posts, the main character in Creating Esther is an Ojibwe girl who goes to an Indian boarding school in 1895. The practice was to “civilize” the students by giving each of them a traditionally white name. So I had to find two names for my protagonist—an Ojibwe name and a “white” one.

One way that superintendents and teachers chose white names was to compile a list from the Bible and assign the next one. Running through some Biblical names in my head, I settled on “Esther” because it just sounded right. But there was another reason, as well. By the end of the book, my protagonist has made some decisions that put her on the path to saving her people, which is what the original Esther did. My Esther will do it less dramatically and as one of many forces, but the concept works.

Coming up with an Ojibwe name was more challenging. I started by going to one of those baby naming websites and looking for Ojibwe girls’ names. I liked “Keezheekoni” because it supposedly means “burning fire,” and my protagonist has a fiery temperament. Unfortunately, based on the sources I found, it appears to be hard to pronounce.

There was an even bigger problem. While most of the baby name sources list it as a Chippewa name, a couple list it as Cheyenne. Worse, I couldn’t find any of its roots in either A Dictionary of the Ojibway Language by Frederic Baraga or A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe by John D. Nichols and Earl Nyholm. So even though I liked the look and the purported meaning of “Keezheekoni,” I ended up rejecting it.

But the meaning worked well for my story, so I checked both dictionaries for the Ojibwe word for “fire.” Father Baraga’s dictionary listed “ishkote,” while the more modern one used “ishkode.” One letter different, but which is correct?

They probably both are. Ojibwe was originally a spoken language with no written equivalent, and the people who tried to write it down used various spellings. In Red World and White: Memories of a Chippewa Boyhood, author John Rogers says that his new baby brother was named Ahmeek, meaning beaver. But the Concise Dictionary spells beaver a-m-i-k.

In the end, I decided to go with the more modern spelling and name my protagonist Ishkode.

I used a similar process for naming my secondary Ojibwe characters, leafing through the dictionaries to find words that had suitable meanings while being relatively easy to pronounce. For example, the antagonist is named “Waagosh,” which means “fox,” and Ishkode’s older sister is “Opichi,” which means “robin.” I relied on those same dictionaries for the words Ishkode uses for her parents and grandparents.

Notice the emphasis on the word “relatively” above. Because the names come from another language, none of the pronunciation is easy. But I wanted to be as authentic as possible, which ruled out using English words, like naming a character “White Feather.” So I put a pronunciation guide at the beginning of the book, and hopefully it’s close enough.

Because even character names should be as realistic as possible.

__________

This post is an expansion of the October 27, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Writing Outside Your Culture: The Importance of Group Names

When writing outside your race or culture, it is particularly important to avoid labels that unintentionally disparage the race or cultural group.

My second middle-grade historical novel, Creating Esther, is about an Ojibwe girl who goes to an Indian boarding school at the end of the 19^th Century. My first dilemma was whether to use “Indian” or “Native American.” I didn’t want to offend anyone by using the word “Indian,” but that was what Native Americans were called at the time of my story, and every boarding school had “Indian” in its name. For historical purposes, that was the best choice. But was it acceptable?

One of the stops on my 2015 research trip in 2015 was at the Grand Portage National Monument, where the exhibits in the Heritage Center answered my question about using the term “Indian.” A sign near the entrance stated:

Although the term “Native Americans” was once considered more acceptable than “Indians,” today most Indian people in the United States—including Grand Portage—refer to themselves and their families as just that: “Indians.” In the exhibits here in the Heritage Center we have used “Indians” or “Native people” more or less interchangeably.

My second question was what to call the tribe itself. The legal name is Chippewa, and that is the name I was familiar with when growing up in Chippewa County, Michigan. But most tribes call themselves Ojibwe (or Ojibwa or Ojibway). Then there is Anishinaabe, which is the older version. Again, I’ll let the exhibit at Grand Portage provide the answer, which you can read in the photo at the head of this post.

Based on those exhibits, I ended up using “Indian” and “Ojibwe.”

When writing historical fiction outside your culture, it is important to balance historical accuracy with sensitivity to the group’s feelings. Sometimes history has to win out, but think carefully about your choice.

And sometimes it’s as easy as asking.

__________

The photo shows a sign in the exhibit area at Grand Portage National Monument in Grand Portage, Minnesota.

__________

This post was repurposed from the July 28, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Researching CREATING ESTHER, Part II

My research for writing Creating Esther wasn’t limited to documents. I also dragged Roland along on a trip through Ojibwe country in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to visit museums and reservations and the shells of former Indian boarding schools.

It isn’t always possible to take research trips to the sites in our fiction, but it has always been worthwhile for me when I had the opportunity. And this one kept me from falling into the pitfalls created by regional differences.

I already knew, of course, that different tribes had different customs and ways of life. But I didn’t know that a few hundred miles could make a difference within a tribe.

The main elements of Ojibwe life and history were the same at each location. Every exhibit we saw referred to the Ojibwes’ seasonal way of life: collecting maple syrup in the spring, fishing and berrying and planting gardens in the summer, harvesting wild rice in the fall, and hunting in the winter. (Actually, fishing and hunting took place all year long, but they were more predominant at those times.) Families moved from one place to another for these seasonal activities but tended to return to the same spot every spring, every summer, every fall, and every winter. In all regions, the members of the tribe also had the same clan system (although not always the same clans) and the same teachings passed down through their oral history.

But they didn’t all live in the same type of birch-bark housing.

Before we left, I thought all of the earlier Ojibwe lived in birch-bark wigwams with the rounded shape shown in the museum exhibit above. On the research trip, I learned that the construction materials varied somewhat depending on the season. Woven birch-bark mats covered the frame in the hot summer months, which allowed the wall coverings to be raised so that air could circulate through the lower part of the frame. In the winter, the walls were insulated with moss and the floors used a radiant heating system.

All of that was helpful new information, and none of it surprised me.

What did surprise me was that some Ojibwe used a birch-bark teepee during the winter. We saw no evidence of this in Michigan or Wisconsin, where winter dwellings were built using the wigwam shape. But that changed when we got to Minnesota. A guide at the Mille Lacs Indian Museum told us that the teepee shape keeps the dwelling warmer. (Since heat rises, the smaller air space near the ceiling would keep more of the heat down by the floor.) During the warmer months, there were no regional differences—all dwellings were built as wigwams. But the winter shape seems to have been modified as members of the tribe moved farther west and closer to the plains Indians, who lived in animal skin teepees.

I’m very glad I took that trip and learned about Ojibwe regional differences. They don’t show up in the book because I kept the settings in Wisconsin and Michigan. But without location research, I could have gotten it wrong.

And I’d rather be true to the culture.

__________

I took the first picture at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabek Culture and Lifeways at Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and the second at Grand Portage National Monument in Grand Portage, Minnesota.

__________

This post was repurposed from the September 22, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Researching CREATING ESTHER, Part I

My research for any historical novel begins with reading as many first-person accounts as I can. This is especially important when writing outside my culture, as is the case with my newly released middle-grade historical novel. Memoirs are usually the best source, although diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper stories are also good.

As I said in my last post, Creating Esther is about an Ojibwe girl who goes to an Indian boarding school at the end of the 19^th Century. There are plenty of memoirs about the Native American boarding school experience, but few come from the right perspective. Most took place several decades later, when the students knew what to expect. Others came from the male perspective or that of a white teacher.

The three most helpful memoirs were (1) three essays by Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin), which can be found in her American Indian Stories; (2) No Turning Back: A Hopi Woman’s Struggle to Live in Two Worlds by Polingaysi Qoyawayma (Elizabeth Q. White); and (3) Red World and White: Memories of a Chippewa Boyhood by John Rogers (Chief Snow Cloud). The Zitkala-Sa essays tell about her experiences as a Native American student and teacher shortly before the time of my story, but they are short on details. No Turning Back begins at about the right time and provides a few more specifics, but it spans a number of years and is written by a woman from a different tribe than my protagonist. Red World and White gives a reasonably detailed look at Ojibwe (Chippewa) reservation life around the right time but gives little information about the male author’s boarding school experience.

I also read a number of academic books about the Native American boarding school experience or the Ojibwe tribe. Putting all this information together with what I learned from location research, I believe I have portrayed an accurate picture for my readers. But it wasn’t easy.

Next month I’ll talk about the location research that helped me understand the broader picture.

__________

The photo at the head of this post shows one of the abandoned buildings from the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School. I took the picture on my research trip in 2015. And before you ask, I wasn’t intentionally trying to make it look old. Somehow I set my camera to grayscale and didn’t notice it until later.

__________

This post was repurposed from the August 25, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.