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A review by april_does_feral_sometimes
The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter
3.0
I've read a number of reviews which seem to feel having been assigned to read this book in eighth grade somehow makes it a poisoned pill of sorts. I don't agree that if some book is required homework means the subject assigned must be crappy moralistic stuff grownups are yet again shoving down juvenile throats in a painful forced feeding. When teachers teach anti-bullying messages that we should all be kind to our classmates and stop bullying, do not most of us think, "forced" lesson or not, that bullying should be stopped?
Unjustified vilification is the first step towards bullying and this book, which is about the conflict of very different cultures, demonstrates that aspect of social ostracism and hatred of those different from our particular social milieu. Whatever mechanism which lies in our crocodile primitive brains that leads to bullying is the very same brain trait which helped the whites justify their theft of America from the Native Americans.
All cultures develop under environmental and historical circumstances. Habitual behaviors in time feel rational even when the reasons for doing something have disappeared. Such behaviors then look strange, or unnecessary to cultural outsiders who have no idea of the history behind a custom that looks loony to outsiders of the culture. Worshipping on your knees before a wooden crosspiece with a statue of a bleeding crying man punctured with stab wounds and in obvious agony pinned to the wood can look like a culture that worships torture and death and blood, but if you were raised in a Christian culture, you know people are worshipping the man, not his tortured death. Christians often celebrate by eating bread and drinking wine in church with the underlying understanding that you are simulating the eating of dead human flesh and drinking blood. An outsider might believe Christians are all happy admirers of cannibalism.
The plot of 'The Light in the Forest' involved the return of a teen white boy to his white family after having been raised with an American Indian family since he was a toddler. He could not understand anything his white family did, which indirectly highlighted the conflict between white European culture and Native American life in the early years of America. Obviously, it was the cultural environment he had learned early in life which shaped his understanding, not his racial characteristics.
The book did a fantastic job of quickly outlining all of the issues between the original Native Americans and the white Europeans. It showed how each side viewed positively their own culture and how they misunderstood the other people of a different culture. Additionally, the book not only shows the shameful treatment of the original owners of America, which grew out of white greed for Indian property, but also that the conflict included the need for controlling the resources of the land for people to survive.
Natives and Europeans alike over time found it difficult to see the other as human, but originally it began as a tragedy of misunderstood manners, similar to when Westerners casually cross their legs showing the soles of their shoes when sitting with people from the Middle East, unaware that showing the sole of your shoe to many Middle Eastern persons is a deadly insult as horrible as spitting in someone's face in the West. Without a common language or an understanding of cultural norms hatred can begin because of assumed insults. Also, with such misunderstandings, the other person can appear dangerously irrational or mental.
The specific issues of the novel was about the complex knots of misunderstood cultures and greed, and how all of us sometimes make the mistake to think cultural differences are because of skin color or physical appearance and not because of one's upbringing. The book wants to show the reader culture is not about race in fact, but about education and environment.
Obviously, gentle reader, there is a bigger discussion available to a class of eighth graders reading this book that goes beyond the issue of a kidnapped white boy raised by "Indians". However, disappointingly, many of the reviews sound as if some readers believe the book was either without modern applications ("what does the conflict between Indians and whites in 19th-century America have to do with anything now?" - a common thought. Or readers think it is simply a stupid John Wayne fiction story). The way Europeans justified the extermination of Native Americans was no different than the justifications of extermination and demonization by Germans of the Jews in World War II, the attempt to exterminate those of other faiths in the Serbian War, the genocide of other tribes in the Rwandan War and Saddam's War against the Kurds. Not only does this issue continue to plague all human thinking, it apparently is ongoing in a destructively 'minor' fashion (only in scope) in our schools for juveniles.
Why NOT read this book in the eighth grade? What kind of discussion is NOT occurring in your classroom? Some of the reviews about this book have caused me despair. Reading the book should bring out in thoughtful persons hundreds of questions about human behavior.
Unjustified vilification is the first step towards bullying and this book, which is about the conflict of very different cultures, demonstrates that aspect of social ostracism and hatred of those different from our particular social milieu. Whatever mechanism which lies in our crocodile primitive brains that leads to bullying is the very same brain trait which helped the whites justify their theft of America from the Native Americans.
All cultures develop under environmental and historical circumstances. Habitual behaviors in time feel rational even when the reasons for doing something have disappeared. Such behaviors then look strange, or unnecessary to cultural outsiders who have no idea of the history behind a custom that looks loony to outsiders of the culture. Worshipping on your knees before a wooden crosspiece with a statue of a bleeding crying man punctured with stab wounds and in obvious agony pinned to the wood can look like a culture that worships torture and death and blood, but if you were raised in a Christian culture, you know people are worshipping the man, not his tortured death. Christians often celebrate by eating bread and drinking wine in church with the underlying understanding that you are simulating the eating of dead human flesh and drinking blood. An outsider might believe Christians are all happy admirers of cannibalism.
The plot of 'The Light in the Forest' involved the return of a teen white boy to his white family after having been raised with an American Indian family since he was a toddler. He could not understand anything his white family did, which indirectly highlighted the conflict between white European culture and Native American life in the early years of America. Obviously, it was the cultural environment he had learned early in life which shaped his understanding, not his racial characteristics.
The book did a fantastic job of quickly outlining all of the issues between the original Native Americans and the white Europeans. It showed how each side viewed positively their own culture and how they misunderstood the other people of a different culture. Additionally, the book not only shows the shameful treatment of the original owners of America, which grew out of white greed for Indian property, but also that the conflict included the need for controlling the resources of the land for people to survive.
Natives and Europeans alike over time found it difficult to see the other as human, but originally it began as a tragedy of misunderstood manners, similar to when Westerners casually cross their legs showing the soles of their shoes when sitting with people from the Middle East, unaware that showing the sole of your shoe to many Middle Eastern persons is a deadly insult as horrible as spitting in someone's face in the West. Without a common language or an understanding of cultural norms hatred can begin because of assumed insults. Also, with such misunderstandings, the other person can appear dangerously irrational or mental.
The specific issues of the novel was about the complex knots of misunderstood cultures and greed, and how all of us sometimes make the mistake to think cultural differences are because of skin color or physical appearance and not because of one's upbringing. The book wants to show the reader culture is not about race in fact, but about education and environment.
Obviously, gentle reader, there is a bigger discussion available to a class of eighth graders reading this book that goes beyond the issue of a kidnapped white boy raised by "Indians". However, disappointingly, many of the reviews sound as if some readers believe the book was either without modern applications ("what does the conflict between Indians and whites in 19th-century America have to do with anything now?" - a common thought. Or readers think it is simply a stupid John Wayne fiction story). The way Europeans justified the extermination of Native Americans was no different than the justifications of extermination and demonization by Germans of the Jews in World War II, the attempt to exterminate those of other faiths in the Serbian War, the genocide of other tribes in the Rwandan War and Saddam's War against the Kurds. Not only does this issue continue to plague all human thinking, it apparently is ongoing in a destructively 'minor' fashion (only in scope) in our schools for juveniles.
Why NOT read this book in the eighth grade? What kind of discussion is NOT occurring in your classroom? Some of the reviews about this book have caused me despair. Reading the book should bring out in thoughtful persons hundreds of questions about human behavior.