Morning Girl

Today we celebrate Columbus Day. Every now and then a book not only educates you but changes the way you view history. Once you have read it, you cannot see things quite the way you once did.

That is how I think about the book of the day, Michael Dorris’s Morning Girl.  Published in 1992, and now a classic, the book first came to me in galley proofs when I was editor of Horn Book Magazine. I had admired Michael Dorris for his adult writing, Yellow Raft in the Blue Water and The Broken Cord, but writing beautifully for adults does not necessarily mean  an author has something to say to children. But in this seventy-four-page novel that works for grades three through five, Dorris immediately convinced me he had something very important to say not only to children but to adults as well.

Of mixed racial background—French, Irish, and Modoc—Dorris spent time on various Native American reservations in the Pacific Northwest. With a degree from Yale, he founded the Native American Studies program at Dartmouth. While writing his own adult book on Columbus, he began to explore the history of the Taino people, the first to greet Christopher Columbus in the New World.

As a child, Dorris had found only stereotypical Indians in books; so he set out to craft a story with authentic Native American characters that children would want to read about, get to know, and grow to love. In a narrative told in two voices, readers meet both twelve-year-old Morning Girl and ten-year-old Star Boy—brother and sister. She loves the day and he, the night. In simple language, they introduce you to their universe; they revel in the natural world and all its delights. But they also face universal tragedies—their mother’s miscarriage and a tropical storm that almost destroys Star Boy.  Independent, strong, curious, devoted, these two children make ideal friends for any young reader.

In one of the most heart-wrenching epilogues in a children’s book, readers find out that Christopher Columbus once wrote, “They should be good and intelligent servants,” of the young people of the island. Within a year of Columbus’s arrival, the Taino are exterminated by the diseases carried by the Spanish troops.

Morning Girl provides a different lens for history. As the saying goes, history gets written by the winners. But in this slim book, Michael Dorris makes it possible to view events in 1492 from the point of view of the people already living in the Americas, sailing no oceans. Because Dorris accomplished his mission so brilliantly, I have not celebrated Columbus Day since I read this small gem.

Here’s a passage from Morning Girl: