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  The
Sign of the Beaver:
The Problem and the Solution
by
Sanda Cohen
The Sign of the Beaver is required reading in many elementary
schools in the United States. Here is how one New Jersey teacher
incorporated the novel, one she considered problematic, into her
fifth grade curriculum.
The
Problem
For
sixty years students at a New Jersey private school studied U.S.
history using a textbook and chronological approach. They read a
chapter, answered questions listed at the end, and memorized dates
and names. The highlight of this curriculum approach culminated
in a social studies fair held at the end of the year. After writing
a research paper on a famous person in American history (not necessarily
related to the era they had studied), the students attended the
fair costumed as “their” person, acting out their historical
parts before the faculty, other students, and the parents. The students
loved the fair, and the school considered it the most successful
aspect of the social studies curriculum.
Five years ago teachers decided to rewrite the social studies curriculum
and to incorporate many of the more exciting aspects of the fair
into the daily curriculum. The fifth grade team developed an experiential,
theme-orientated, integrated curriculum, including eight field trips
and an overnight campout. Teachers selected a new and less traditional
textbook and a large selection of fiction related to American history.
The result was a new and intellectually stimulating approach to
American history. Fifth graders studied the development of the original
thirteen American colonies by focusing on the history of New Jersey.
As a member of the fifth grade team, I took part in the campout
and field trips to various colonial sites designed to help the students
understand the experience of the early colonial settlers.
After the field trips, the trouble started. The entire fifth grade
began a thematic unit based on The Sign of the Beaver, a
novel by Elizabeth George Speare that was awarded a 1983 Newbery
Honor Book by the American Library Association and the Scott O’Dell
Award for Historical Fiction. In 1989, Speare captured the Laura
Ingalls Wilder Award administered by the American Library Association.
Given every three years to an author or illustrator who has made
a lasting contribution to children’s literature, this award
honored Speare for The Sign of the Beaver as well as her
other works. Recommended for classroom use by many well-known and
well-respected publications, such as the Horn Book (1984),
Instructor (March 1990), The Web: Wonderfully Exciting
Books (Winter 1984), the novel is also on videocassette, available
through Random House Video, Newbery Video Collection. An illustrated
version of the book is meant as an enrichment program to “help
students to follow the plot, to visualize characters and setting
and to practice important listening skills.”1
The Sign of the Beaver is a story about Matt, a twelve-year
old boy who leaves Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1768 with his father,
ostensibly to build a homestead in the area of the Penobscot River
in Maine. That summer Matt’s father returned to Massachusetts
to pick up his wife, daughter, and a baby born after Matt and his
father had left for Maine. During his father’s absence Matt
was left alone in Maine and in a series of misadventures, Matt’s
rifle is stolen, his family supply of flour lost to a bear, and
his life almost ended by a swarm of bees. As a result of the adventures,
he met Saknis, an Indian belonging to an unspecified tribe, and
Saknis’ grandson, Attean.
My students began to read the book and to write reflectively about
the reading in their reading logs each night. Weekly vocabulary
lessons were based on words taken from the text. Each night I chose
a different word from the novel and the students were required to
write a paragraph using the word as it related to their own lives.
However, as we progressed in our classroom discussions, certain
elements of the story began to disturb me; I was not sure what was
nagging at me until page 74. There Attean kills a bear and tells
Matt that the work of butchering the bear is “squaw work”.
Although I read the book before it was assigned to the students,
I had never noticed the use of that word before. Now it struck me
immediately that this obviously pejorative label would require many
discussions about stereotypes and the way that stereotypes are accidentally
reinforced, sometimes by well-meaning writers, teachers, parents
and others who influence the way children view the world.
The worst was yet to come. This unit culminated with “The Sign
of the Beaver Day,” during which students were requested to
dress either as “settlers” or as “Indians.”
No guidance was given to help them dress with any authenticity.
(Although the schools library housed books that would have been
helpful, I am not sure that any student actually used them for research.)
After the students and faculty proceeded to the school brook, they
participated in four different activities: writing treaties, storytelling,
drawing, and games. The faculty made a great effort to be authentic
about what is was teaching, and research was done to be sure that
Indian ways were respected. But for me there was one overriding
issue: I could not allow my class to dress up as Indians without
feeling that I had done something wrong. Although I knew that in
the previous year, “The Sign of the Beaver Day” had been
a huge success, I did not believe that the students’ enjoyment
justified the blatant stereotyping of American Indians. As Robert
B. Moore and Arlene Hirschfelder state in American Indian Stereotypes
in the World of Children: A Reader and Bibliography:
Genuine
interest in the uniqueness and diversity of Native cultures
can be met by studying the cultures, without having to “play”
them. And genuine concern for the Native people can best be
met not by playing them, but by actively confronting the policies
and practices of the United States which directly oppress
Native people.2
Further:
…one
cannot become a Native American by donning feathers, fringed
buckskin , and moccasins because a Native person is not an
occupation or a role to be played. It is a state of being,
an ethnic identity. Having children dress up and play Indians
encourages them to think Native Americans are nothing more
than a playtime activity rather than an identity that is often
fraught with economic deprivation, discrimination, gross injustice
and powerlessness.3
Because
I agreed, I simply could not countenance students dressing up in
“Indian” costumes at this time or in the future. This
meant I had to change the way the unit was handled.
The
Solution
After reading and rereading The Sign of the Beaver with great
care, many more things bothered me. From the beginning, the reader
becomes persuaded that the Indians did terrible things to white
people as a matter of course. Matt thinks to himself: “His
father had been assured by the proprietors that his new settlement
would be safe. Since the last treaty with the tribes, there had
not been an attack reported in this part of Maine. Still, one could
not forget all those horrid tales.”4 As a Minnesota
League of Women Voters study points out: “A distorted image
of Indians as war-like has prevailed throughout American history.
Indians defending their lands against encroachment by European settlers
have been termed ‘blood thirsty savages’ and their victories
‘massacres.’”5 At the end of the book,
the Indian reasons for attacking settlers is explained. By then,
the message transmitted to the students cannot be reversed.
Attean’s relationship with Matt also reinforces stereotypes.
Attean is not happy to spend time with Matt but his grandfather,
Saknis, wants Attean to learn to speak and read English. However,
throughout the book Attean speaks in pidgin English, the halting
speech so often associated with American Indians, and reinforced
in too many movies to mention as well as by the Random House video
made specifically for children. Matt is clearly trying to give Attean
something of value, in this case English, in exchange for what Attean
has taught him about survival in the woods. But Attean resists.
“The only thing Matt could teach him, Attean was set against
learning. For Attean the white man’s signs of paper were piz
wat – good for nothing. Nevertheless, Matt noticed that
in spite of himself Attean had learned something from the white
boy. He was speaking the English tongue with greater ease. Perhaps
he was not aware himself how differently he spoke.6
Although Attean did not value the “white man’s language,”
the author was committed to having him learn to speak English correctly.
Speare, however, did not make him smart enough to notice the difference
in how he spoke or what he said. Further, although Matt said Attean
was speaking better English his dialogue never improved and he never
spoke proper English. Even at the end of the book, when Attean was
ready to leave Maine, he spoke to Matt in pidgin English. “What
for I read? My grandfather mighty hunter. My father mighty hunter.
They not read.”7 Matt believes that Attean does
not or cannot understand what he was trying to teach. Matt thinks
to himself, “How could you explain, Matt wondered, to someone
who just did not want to understand?”8 This writing
by Speare suggests that Attean is just not smart enough to understand.
On three separate occasions, Matt says that Attean could never understand
what Matt was trying to teach him. He could not understand the concept
of land ownership, he could not understand Robinson Crusoe, and
he could not learn to use a watch. But Matt is easily capable of
understanding the complicated ideas of land ownership form the Indian
perspective, as well as their language and customs. Once again,
Matt is represented as much smarter than Attean.
Cultural stereotyping emerged again in Chapter 14 when Attean and
Matt exchanged stories about religion. Matt told the story of Noah
and the flood, and Attean told the story of the Beaver people, the
story of Gluskabe and an Indian flood. Matt, who refused to accept
this Beaver story as unique, could not understand how Attean could
know about Noah and the Flood.
At the end of the story, Saknis and Attean leave the area and invite
Matt, whose parents had not yet returned, to join them. Matt says
that he prefers to wait for his parents but somehow the reader is
left with the feeling that Matt is committed to the lifestyle he
knows—as opposed to the Indian way of life.
During the school year when we began to plan “The Sign of the
Beaver Day.” We decided that the day would focus on what the
lessons of this novel meant to the students. Because it is clear
Speare created two unlikely friends who influenced one another,
I set out to create the same scenario. Each student was told to
plan to teach something he/she knew to another student. The students
were broken into groups and each was assigned a partner. The students
were not allowed to pick their own partners and the teachers made
sure that each student was assigned a partner that he/she would
not have chosen.
When the students came to my room. I began a lesson based on the
meaning of friendship. I asked the students to tell me what qualities
they felt a friend should have. After listing the traits on the
board they voted and picked truthfulness and loyalty as the most
important qualities. Then they were asked if they believe they had
those same qualities to offer in friendship. The question surprised
them. They were much more comfortable describing how someone else
should behave as a friend rather than talking about whether they
offered the same qualities. But the ensuing discussion was powerful.
When a student tried to go back to the book in order to keep the
discussion on a less personal level I redirected the conversations
back to their feelings. I wanted them to internalize the lesson
about friendship. I did not want them to think only about the relationship
of two fictional characters who lived long ago. I wanted the story
about two unlikely friends to have real meaning in their daily lives.
They had plenty of interesting things to teach each other. One student
taught another to play a tune on the piano, one shared his camera
and took pictures around the school, one student taught another
to weave a bracelet out of thread, one taught calligraphy, one taught
clay modeling, one taught cartooning, one taught a card game, and
one taught another how to play mancali (a complicated game
played with marbles). To my astonishment the students thought of
many things a teacher would not have imagined. They were interested
and involved because they were all doing something they were good
at and enjoyed. When the time allotted for this activity came to
an end, the students all seemed sorry that the experience was over.
Most chose to have lunch with their partners. Although I did not
assume that permanent new friendships were formed that day, I do
think that many of the students discerned interesting and wonderful
qualities in peers they previously din not know well. Perhaps in
the future they will be more likely to let new people in their lives.
The students enjoyed the day just as much as if they had dressed
up and pretended to be either “settlers” or Indians. They
learned a lot about friendship in a couple of hours without pretending
to write “peace treaties” or to make up fake Indian legends.
Additionally, the lessons were learned without any child pretending
he/she could “speak Indian.” The students, (who seemed
to have forgotten about Attean and Matt), were far more interested
in what they had taught to their partners or what they had learned
from theirs.
Hopefully the students have learned to make a connection between
the concept of friendship expressed in The Sign of the Beaver
and their own lives.
1 Pamphlet published by American School Publishers, Random
House Newbery Video Collection, 1988.
2 Robert B. Moore and Arlene B. Hirschfelder, “Feathers,
Tomahawks and Tipis: A Study of Stereotyped ‘Indian Imagery
in Children’s Picture Books, in American Indian Stereotypes
in the World of Children: A Reader and Bibliography, ed. Arlene
B. Hirschfelder (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1982), p.
73.
3 Arlene B. Hirschfelder, “Toys with Indian Imagery,”
in American Indian Stereotypes in the World of Children: A Reader
and Bibliography, ed. Arlene B. Hirschfelder (Metuchen, NJ:
Scarecrow Press, Inc., p. 171.
4 Elizabeth George Speare, The Sign of the Beaver
(New York: Dell Publishing, 1984), P. 9
5 League of Women Voters, “Children’s Impressions
of American Indians: A Survey of Suburban Kindergarten and Fifth
Grade Children: Conclusions, in American Indian Stereotypes in
the World of Children: A Reader and Bibliography, ed. Arlene
B. Hirschfelder (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1982), p.
9.
6 Speare, Sign, pp. 66, 67
7 Speare, Sign, p. 116
8 Speare, Sign, pp. 66The preceding article was
reproduced from American Indian Stereotypes in the World of Children:
A Reader and Bibliography, second edition, Arlene B. Hirschfelder,
Paulette Fairbanks Molin and Yvonne Wakim, ed. The Scarecrow Press,
Inc., Maryland, 1999. Please visit The Scarecrow Press at: http://www.scarecrowpress.com/.
Permission
to reproduce this copyrighted article was granted by The Scarecrow
Press, Inc., March 2003.
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