Book Review by Cate Koskey

Review of Favorite Eskimo Tales Retold
By Ethel Ross Oliver
Illustrated by Joe Senungetuk
Published 1992 by Alaska Pacific University Press
Approximate Reading Level: Upper Elementary
ISBN: 0-935094-17-2

The author of this book is a non-native lady named Ethel Ross Oliver, who has spent much of her life (since 1921) in Alaska as a school teacher, a nurse, a census worker, and a wife of a native Alaskan. The illustrator is an Inupiaq man who makes his living as an artist and lives in Anchorage.

This book is a collection of stories. Oliver writes in her preface how she came to know these stories. She recounts how, during her and her husband's many travels and interactions with native Alaskans, they took every opportunity to listen to the stories that people would tell them and gather them into their personal collection. From her descriptions of where she traveled, it seems that she would have encountered other native peoples of Alaska rather than exclusively Inupiaq, but she groups all her stories as "Eskimo" stories. She acknowledges that she heard these stories through interpreters, and that since that is the case, she takes liberty to fill out the "bare bones" English version that she has heard so that it can "meet the listening and understanding needs of stateside school children" by stating that "it was necessary to revise the stories." This is the reason she gives for labeling the stories as "retold." This also helps us to realize her intended audience for the book: elementary students outside of Alaska.

The book is comprised of 24 stories, each mostly 2-3 pages in length, and most of them about people encountering an animal or phenomenon in the natural world that they did not expect. Some of the stories seem to have a lesson at the end, and some do not. I am familiar with some of the stories, as they remind me of stories I have heard in other places, but they are more simplified than the stories I know, and they all have a kind of white-grandmother tone to them when read, rather than feeling like a native voice narrating the stories.

The characters seem overly simplified, and they speak in regular American English, though the thoughts they express are very simple and not forward-thinking in the slightest. While stories are not known for their character development in general, these characters seem especially simple and bewildered about the events that go on around them, and in this way they can be seen as fairly stereotypical, stock characters. I believe that the translation process, from indigenous language to English, and then from original version to Oliver's version, is the reason for this sense of oversimplified characters, as the vocabulary Oliver chooses to use makes the reality in the stories very black and white, right and wrong. While Oliver has asked the illustrator, Senungetuk, to include a glossary of some Inupiaq vocabulary in the back of the book so that she can use some appropriate words in her stories, she consistently uses inappropriate words such as "igloo."

I feel uncomfortable about this book. The illustrator, Senungetuk, writes in his foreword that he endorses Oliver's project as a native Alaskan because he sees her as someone who "belongs to a generation of white Alaskans who from the very start of their Alaskan journeys sided with Natives in their fight against misrepresentation and mismanagement" (7-8). He writes that he believes this book lies in the category of books that expand the reader's mind so that the native community "can be recognized as a multifaceted, multicultural work and play environment" (8). I really cannot disagree with Senungetuk more, and I wonder why he feels he can give this book so strong an endorsement. Oliver has taken stories out of context, out of their language, revised them to her liking, and done all of this without ever stating that she asked permission to use them in any way. She has tried to credit some of her sources somewhat, as she includes a map of Alaska and denotes the regions that various tales came from. Then she writes names of the storyteller or interpreters in that region that she heard the stories from as far as she can tell or remember. I do not believe that this is giving enough credit to the people from whom she "gathered" her stories.

I feel that the only use for this book in the classroom would be as a practice in critiquing inappropriate literature for use with students.

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