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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y R E V I E W
Fall 2023
WHOZ YA
PEOPLE?: by Brittany D. Hunt
Musings from the Author on Her Lumbee Children’s Book with art by Bea Brayboy
As a kid, I remember being transported through the wardrobe to Narnia, and from Platform 9 ¾ to Hogwarts, and into the dystopian future through books like The Giver. Books provided a portal to new worlds and alternative realms that fascinated me. These worlds and realms, however, were often unequivocally white, and I rarely if ever had books that reflected my own life experience as an Indigenous girl. Throughout school, the books assigned told of Gatsby or Raskolnikov or Valjean, and I was captivated and enraptured by these tales. But again, time after time, book after book reflected experiences foreign to me in most ways, while my white peers relished unknowingly in the simplicity of representation. Of being the forever main character. This problem followed from K-12 to undergrad, to grad school, and to my PhD program in 2019 when I signed up for a multicultural children’s literature class. As a part of the requirements of the course, we had to buy several children’s books to read and
discuss in class. The books were generally diverse, reflecting the experiences or histories of Black, LGBTQ+, and Latinx communities, to name a few; all of these books were by members of the community they represented. There was also one book whose name I have purposefully forgotten that was meant to reflect Indigenous people. This book was written by a white author. It featured pictures of teepees, buffalo, and other imagery considered stereotypically Native. How could a multicultural children’s literature course assign a book about Indigeneity that was written by a non-Indigenous person? Wasn’t the point of the class to be more representative of the experiences of diverse people and of the perspectives of diverse authors? Why was the only non-BIPOC author chosen for the course the author of the Indigenous-themed book? I was not shocked that this professor had made this choice since he had made several uninformed comments about Indigenous people in past classes, but I was disappointed that he didn’t take the time to choose a children’s book by an Indigenous author, especially when this is not difficult to do. I made sure to voice my concerns in front of the entire class and I refused to read the book. Later in the course, we were assigned with writing our own children’s book. This task felt so monumental to me – to not only correct the ignorance of my professor, but to correct a lifelong journey of exclusion of Indigenous perspectives from books and media in general. I knew that this was not just a class assignment for me, but an opportunity to create something for my com-
BRITTANY D. HUNT is an Assistant Professor of Education at Virginia Tech and the owner of Indigenous Ed., LLC, co-host of the podcast The Red Justice Project, and the author of the Lumbee children’s book Whoz Ya People?. She is a graduate of Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, and UNC Charlotte.
BEA BRAYBOY, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is the illustrator for Hunt’s Whoz Ya People, and the illustration here is from this book. She earned a BA in Spanish from UNC Pembroke and taught Spanish in North Carolina and South Carolina public schools for thirty-six years before retiring.