Native people, if we are encountered at all, are encountered during childhood. From the dull art of crafting Thanksgiving turkeys out of handprints to the bad politics of making headdresses out of turkey feathers, the point of contact between Indians and non-Indians begins and ends (for the most part) in grade school. It could be said that the primary place where Natives continue to exist for most Americans is in childhood imagination. It is no accident that Peter Pan’s tribe of Lost Boys who refuse to grow up, refuse to grow up with Indians as allies and enemies. Michael Chabon, writing in 2009, amplified the relationship among childhood, Indians, the past and the imagination. “When I was growing up,” he writes, “our house backed onto woods, a thin two-acre remnant of a once-mighty wilderness. … There were no Indians in those woods, but there had been once. We learned about them in school. Patuxent Indians, they’d been called. Swift, straight-shooting, silent as deer. Gone but for their lovely place names: Patapsco, Wicomico, Patuxent.”

Chabon’s elegy for the death of childhood and the imagination highlights a disturbing premise: Indians, like childhood, like vivid imagination, are necessarily and only of the past. So it is with great enthusiasm and joy that I greet the recent wave of contemporary, vibrant, diverse children’s picture books mostly by and all about Native people.