Fostering Critical Literary Discussions: Analyzing the Representation of Native Americans in Children's Book Covers in Sweden and Norway

In the summer of 2023, we had the opportunity to take part in a conference on Chumash territory in California. This drew our attention to the situation of indigenous peoples, especially Native Americans, in children's literature published in our home countries, Sweden and Norway. In Sweden, a doctoral thesis (Pålsson, 2013) dealt with the subject of Swedish children's books about so-called Indians. This thesis studies the period from 1860 to 2008. Although it shows that the genre is in decline, or even that the reading of this kind of book has nearly ceased, these books have had a considerable influence on the way we see the Native Americans in Sweden and Norway. In this paper, we analyze the covers of a selection of so-called Indians books in Sweden and Norway over a period of some sixty years, up to the present day. The aim is to show the value of such an analysis for critical discussion in the classroom (Felski, 2008). As recommended in Sweden by the Swedish school curriculum Lgr22 (see also the Norwegian correspondent, LK20), “Xenophobia and intolerance must be confronted with knowledge, open discussion and active measures” and critical discussions with pupils could be such a measure. As previously shown, children's book covers studies (for ex. Axelsson & Lindgren, 2023) can be used for (eco)critical discussions in the classroom (Axelsson & Lindgren, forthcoming). In this paper, we carry out book cover analyses within the framework of race theory (see for ex. Capper, 2015) using Socio-semiotic Multimodal Analysis method (Björkvall 2009, Kress & van Leuwen 2006, Painter & Martin 2013). This analysis is followed by a discussion of how the book covers may make the children critical readers who can avoid, and prevent, racist representations of ethnic groups