The Anti-Racist Indian in the Cupboard

Unlocking the Real Story

If I had a dime for each time the terms “racist,” “stereotypes” and “negative images”  have been applied to this staggeringly anti-racist tale, I’d be rich. The book is not a model of accuracy. But inaccuracy is not automatically racist, and the so-called inaccuracies are less glaring than many assert. Did we really expect the British author, Lynn Reid Banks, to know, in pre-Internet 1980, the preferred term for the ethnicity of the book’s tiny hero? It’s not “Iroquois;” it’s “Haudenosaunee.” (But when I look at bookstores in native American museums, I find many titles with “Iroquois”) She gets a lot of other stuff right. The child Omri, whose relationship with the Indian develops from misunderstanding to deep friendship, is schooled by the Indian to understand that Iroquois lived in longhouses, not teepees. Banks invents language for an American cowboy, a British Tommy and an American Indian. All three have been pigeonholed as stereotypes, but true stereotypes bore readers. The absence of individual characteristics, charms, foibles—what constitutes personality—make any reader worth her salt close a book. Fortunately, all characters in this winning tale are bursting with personality.