‘My Powerful Hair’ showcases significance of hair in Indigenous cultures
For many Indigenous cultures, hair is much more than decoration or adornment — it is a scrapbook of memories.
A new children’s book from bestselling Anishinaabe/Métis author Carole Lindstrom and Grande Ronde artist Steph Littlebird called “My Powerful Hair” is a “celebration of hair and its significance across Indigenous cultures.”
“My Powerful Hair” discusses the cultural significance and power of hair, surviving intergenerational trauma and family — issues important to Native communities across Turtle Island, including Oregon. Littlebird, whose interest in the project was partially influenced by the story’s ties to Oregon history, lends bold, bright illustrations bringing the spiritual aspects of the book to life.
The book also comes at a time of particular relevance in contemporary history, as the future of Native children hangs in the balance as the U.S. Supreme Court debates the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA.
Hair and heritage
Lindstrom’s personal experience uncovering intergenerational trauma in her family inspired the book.
“When I was a child, I wasn't allowed to have long hair because my mom said it was too wild, just a lot of bad connotations,” Lindstrom said. “I think I didn't realize until (childhood) was over that it was because my grandmother was in boarding school, and her hair was made to be short, and so my mother's was short, and my mother also cut my hair short.”
Lindstrom’s relationship to her hair, and its cultural importance, inspired the book. The main character in “My Powerful Hair” is a young Native girl who says her Nokomis, or “grandmother” in English, had short hair because hers was “taken.”
Similar to the book’s protagonist, but as an adult, Lindstrom learned U.S. government agents forcibly took her grandmother from her family as a child and placed her in an Indian boarding school, cutting her hair short.
Learning about the power of her hair, Lindstrom decided to grow hers out to reclaim her identity. Similarly, “My Powerful Hair” chronicles a child’s journey of growing her hair long and the memories her hair holds.
Personal reasons also influenced Littlebird’s work as the illustrator for the book, saying she feels honored by the opportunity to illustrate “My Powerful Hair” — the first picture book she’s illustrated — because it ties into the history of Oregon’s colonization.
“(Oregon) is home to the second Indian boarding school in the country, and it's also the longest-running boarding school because it's still ... open,” Littlebird said.
Located in Salem, Forest Grove Indian Training School operated between 1880 and 1885. Operating under the ideology of “kill the Indian, save the man,” residential boarding schools perpetuated many abuses against Native children, including forcible hair-cutting. At least 12 Native children died while attending the school.
“Hair is important culturally, and when we cut it, we do it by choice in honor of the passing of someone, but to have our hair cut by someone else, forcibly, is very traumatic,” Littlebird said.
Known today as the Chemawa Indian School, it is the nation's oldest continuously operating off-reservation boarding school. Today, it operates differently, incorporating Native culture and powwows into its curriculum.
Still, the intergenerational traumas remain.
“It's still alive; the history is still alive,” Littlebird said. “We're still grappling with it. So all of those things kind of connected for me (with the book) and feels very serendipitous.”
Littlebird’s vivid illustrations capture the interconnected nature of the world — one piece depicts a Native woman’s head as a mountaintop, her long hair flowing down the slopes as it becomes a meandering river surrounded by trees and animals.
Uplifting difference
Celebration of diversity in media is a relatively new phenomenon.
Growing up in the 1960s and early 1970s, Lindstrom says any media depiction of Native people she saw reflected stereotypes.
“(They’re) wearing buckskin clothing, or you know, riding horses with feathers and just not the people I knew,” Lindstrom said. “So it was very confusing and conflicted, ‘cause I just thought, ‘Where did everybody go? Where did we go?’”
Lindstrom’s books — part of a larger movement to publish children’s books reflecting diversity — are decidedly at odds with the media she observed as a child. Increased representation, particularly accurate representation like Lindstrom provides, offers educational and social benefits, experts say.
Jerie Blintt of The International Literacy Association, a global advocacy organization promoting reading habits and reading research, says diversity in children’s literature improves children’s confidence, promotes empathy and builds critical thinking skills.
“Exclusive literature results in an exclusive society, which can be dangerous not only for excluded populations but also for society as a whole,” Blintt wrote last May.
“My Powerful Hair’s” uplifting portrayal of Native cultures represents Native children in a way the books of Lindstrom’s childhood did not.
“It's wonderful for young Native children to see themselves in books, portrayed in positive ways and ways that show them as part of the community and society, as we all are,” Lindstrom said. “For non-Native children, I really hope that they see us, who we are, and what is important to us — hair.”
Hair is important in a multitude of cultures, and Littlebird said members of Black and Jewish communities have reached out with positive feedback about the new book’s messaging.
“I think that it's going to resonate with not only Native communities but other marginalized communities who have been oppressed by people in their past or are currently being oppressed,” Littlebird said.
Lindstrom’s third book centering Native children continues her work to fill an important gap in children’s literature.
Her other books, 2021 Caldecott Medal-winning “We Are Water Protectors,” and “The Gift of the Great Buffalo,” which will publish later this year, also celebrate important tenets of Indigenous cultures.
A Street Roots analysis of data from the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, or CCBC, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows children’s and young adult books by or about Native people make up a small fraction of children’s literature — but those numbers are steadily increasing.
According to CCBC data, the number of children’s books written by or about Native people increased from less than 1% of books in 2002 to 3.9% in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available.
A pivotal moment
The book's proud celebration of Native culture for children debuts at a particularly poignant time as Indian Country awaits the U.S. Supreme Court’s verdict deciding the fate of ICWA.
The U.S. government has a long history of inflicting trauma on Native children and communities by forcibly separating Native children from their families and culture: first through Indian boarding schools in the 19th and early 20th century, then later separating Native children from their parents at disproportionate rates and adopting them to white families in the 1960s and 1970s.
Lindstrom and Littlebird both highlighted the importance of their book coming at a pivotal time for the future of Native children.
“The Indian Child Welfare Act was written for the express reason to protect Indigenous children from white people because Native children in white people's care cannot be trusted,” Littlebird said.
As Street Roots reported in October, several white adoptive couples — represented by a powerful law firm with resource extraction and gambling interests — are suing to strike down ICWA. The law prioritizes keeping Native children within Native communities during the adoption and foster care processes. The plaintiffs claim ICWA discriminates against them for being white.
An unfavorable ruling for tribes could undermine tribal sovereignty and remove Native nations’ ability to intervene in adoption cases involving Native children. Before ICWA, government services took Native children from their families at highly disproportionate rates, usually placing them in non-Native adoptive and foster homes.
“Likely, SCOTUS is going to overturn (ICWA), and then Indigenous children are going to be extremely vulnerable again,” Littlebird said. “Nobody wants to have what happened in the past start happening again, and we don't want that, especially because we're working so hard to retain resiliency in our communities and reconnect with culture. Like, we don't need another thing to battle for another X amount of generations just to heal from.
“This book is touching on a lot of that — the idea of reconnection — because not all Native people are lucky enough to be born in community or be connected to the community because of what has happened through colonialism.”
Thoughtful collaboration
Littlebird and Lindstrom collaborated closely on the book’s illustrations to ensure the imagery communicated the cultural concepts in the book, particularly the spiritual importance of hair and the world's interconnectedness.
“‘Cause that's like, the core of the whole thing that kids need to get because it can help them build empathy for themselves, or their friends, for their community, and also for the land,” Littlebird said. “I feel like that's key to solving a lot of our problems from a human standpoint ... My goal was to really try and translate that, and be faithful to what (Lindstrom) was really trying to say.”
Curious readers in Portland have an opportunity to meet the author and illustrator this month.
On Sunday, March 26 from 11 a.m. to noon, Lindstrom and Littlebird will present “My Powerful Hair” at Two Rivers Bookstore, located at 8836 N Lombard St., for a book signing.
The event is free for all ages.
“I hope that children can feel their hair is important, has meaning to them, and to maybe have a different viewpoint on the hair as being something other than something that decorates or adorns our head, but it actually has the significance of a scrapbook,” Lindstrom said.
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