"Aboriginal Australian and Canadian First Nations Children's Literature" (Essay‪)‬

Children's literature is one of the most complex and challenging fields of literary studies. It is also one of the most underrated. Scholar and children's writer Peter Hunt has described it as "an amorphous, ambiguous creature; its relationship to its audience is difficult; its relationship to the rest of literature, problematic" (Literature 1). Scholars and critics of children's literature have certainly had to wrestle with fundamental issues of classification and evaluation. Yet as we know, it is one of the most powerful and, for some adults, even threatening forms of literature. After all, it is a very effective form of social engineering (e.g., on issues of racialization in children's literature see King and Streamas). If adults are to better understand the way it operates then it is apparent that we need to reconsider the processes of writing and reading, as Emer O'Sullivan, Peter Hunt, Clare Bradford, and Jon Stott, for example, have suggested. A further dimension is required when the text reaches across cultures (on characteristics of national narration in children's literature, see, e.g., Blazic). Of the multitude of subgenres collected together under the label of children's literature, from babies' concept books to formula fiction, I focus in my article on the Indigenous picture book genre as a problematic yet fruitful meeting place of oral and written traditions. There exists a wide variety of picture books, some of which bear only a passing resemblance to each other. In the midst of them are the problematic picture books which defy easy categorization as they cater to both child and adult readers (on this, see, e.g., Wolf and DePasquale 88). Here we find an overlap with another burgeoning area, Indigenous literature. This all-too-general label includes a multitude of works from diverse genres for both adult and child readers. But, as the Chippewa writer Kateri Damm suggests, "any one solitary label distorts the multiplicity by suggesting that there is a cohesive, unitary basis of commonality among those so labelled" (13). Not surprisingly, Indigenous literature is an area which challenges such categorization (see Moses and Goldie xix-xxix; Harjo and Bird 19-31). My present discussion, however, is limited to children's picture books by Indigenous authors from Canada and Australia, whose aim is to educate the reader into the teller's own cultural experience (the distinction between lexical designations of the Indigenous population of Australia and Canada is of note: while the Indigenous peoples of Canada are acknowledged as First Nations, this is not yet so in Australia, where they continue to be "Aboriginal"). Inuit traditional storyteller and writer Michael Kusugak, Nyoongar traditional storyteller and writer Lorna Little, and Wunambal elder Daisy Utemorrah are cases in point. All appeal to Indigenous and non-Indigenous child and adult readerships and in this way challenge two often-held assumptions of Western literature: that the picture book genre is necessarily the domain of children and that traditional Indigenous stories are similarly best-suited to children. Indigenous children's picture books, it is thus assumed, must be a childish affair. Perhaps because many Indigenous writers seek to simplify aspects of their stories for young readers, too often the literary and socio-cultural value of their works goes unrecognized.