1961: ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS by Scott O'Dell
I remember the day the Aleut ship came to our island.
When I was in college, I sang in a church choir for three semesters. It was only three semesters because I was a stinky little pissant who didn’t get along with a lot of the other choir members, and the median church choir singer does not share my sense of humor. National Catholic Reporter once ran a feature profile on my particular choir, written by Renee LaReau, following us around on tour in 20061. Here’s a passage from that piece:
“JUNE 2, SEWARD, ALASKA: We’re on the bus again for nearly three hours…tempers are short among those who are awake. Some anonymous culprit at the large-scale sleepover last night was snoring at startling volume, causing lots of sleeplessness for many during the night, embedded journalist included. (Around 3 a.m., someone who had obviously had enough jumped up in the darkness, yelled ‘Jesus Christ!’ and stomped out of the room in search of an empty classroom.)”
Anyways, that guy “who had obviously had enough” and TOOK THE LORD'S NAME IN VAIN was me, I don’t really know if I’ve changed all that much since then. Whatever. We had this adaptation of the Magnificat prayer that we would sing on tour, which included part of the Magnificat in Swahili. The piece was called “Jina La Bwana”, and from a musical perspective, it’s honestly quite lovely, our director was a very good composer, and we would often spotlight what you might call “world music” in our concerts, including a lot of African-inspired chants, drumming, and such. People liked hearing it, because it was new to them, and they didn't hear stuff like that very often in a Catholic church. Not a lot of people were doing this at the time.
But our director was also a white boomer dude who wasn’t exactly an expert on African language and culture, and now looking at this through the lens of how we view art and culture in 2022, we might be tempted to think “wow, this is just a white boomer dude writing his own African chants using a language he doesn’t speak from a country he’s never been to, that’s kind of tacky”. It didn’t help that during our tour concerts, our director would keep introducing this song as “written in the African language” (he was a good composer but his stage banter was shit), and it was performed by a choir of predominantly white, predominantly well-off college students from a university full of predominantly white, predominantly well-off people2. In 2006, audiences didn’t give this a second thought; and in fact, they thought it was pretty cool, because not a lot of people were doing this. In 2022, they might give it a second thought, and the second thought might be “okay but are these the people that should really be doing it”, thought while looking at these corn-fed tenors from Indiana bellowing “JINA LA BWANA” accompanied by goofy white dudes playing the djembe.
Again, “Jina La Bwana” is lovely, a lot of the songs I performed in that choir are lovely. But there are several of them, including “Jina La Bwana”, that I really don’t think could get written and published and performed and introduced as “Magnificat in the African language” in 2022. I thought about this a lot as I read 1961 medalist Island Of The Blue Dolphins.
My wife, who used to teach junior high Language Arts and thus has put together units on quite a few Newbery medalists herself, who has attended plenty of conferences and learned a lot about what to incorporate into a contemporary curriculum, put it this way: “No school in a blue state is ever going to teach Island Of The Blue Dolphins again. If you’re going to teach any literature about indigenous people now, you had damn sure better pick something by an indigenous person”. Here’s the author, Scott O’Dell, who created the famous survival narrative about an early nineteenth-century indigenous American teenage girl stranded by herself on an island off the coast of California:
But look, I'm not going to dismiss Island Of The Blue Dolphins out of hand; there's actually quite a bit about O'Dell's novel that would have been extremely progressive for its time, and is still pretty progressive today. O'Dell wrote a novel from the perspective of an indigenous protagonist; nobody was doing that in 1960. He made that protagonist a young woman who was not gender-coded in a stereotypically feminine way; nobody was really doing that in 1960, either. That female character makes her own way through a rough Robinson Crusoe-type survival story, by herself; guess what, nobody was doing that in 1960.
O'Dell's protagonist, the young and resilient Karana, was based on a real person who eventually went by Juana Maria, the last surviving member of the Nicoleño tribe on San Nicolas island, about 75 miles southwest of Los Angeles. Juana Maria ended up stranded alone on the island for 18 years, forced to survive on her own, before being eventually rescued by Catholic missionaries and brought to the Santa Barbara mission, where she died of dysentery after a few weeks.
In Juana Maria's story, and in O'Dell's novel, most of the Nicoleño tribe was massacred by Aleut fur trappers, and most of the rest were evacuated from the island soon after, by a missionary ship headed for mainland California, but one girl was left behind. She built her own home out of whale bones and taught herself to hunt, fish, and survive. The latter three-quarters of O'Dell's novel is the story of Karana surviving alone on the island, presented in sparse prose with no dialogue and large jumps in time between chapters.
If you were looking at this with a critical eye, you might call this a strong feminist narrative, given its unusual female protagonist and the traditionally male tasks she takes on to survive. There's even a passage where Karana hesitates before fashioning a spear, as she's internalized her people's law against women creating weapons:
"As I lay there I wondered what would happen to me if I went against the law of our tribe which forbade the making of weapons by women - if I did not think of it at all and made those things which I must have to protect myself. Would the four winds blow in from the four directions of the world and smother me as I made the weapons? Or would the earth tremble, as many said, and bury me beneath its falling rocks? Or, as others said, would the sea rise over the island in a terrible flood? Would the weapons break in my hands at the moment when my life was in danger, which is what my father had said? I thought about these things for two days and on the third night when the wild dogs returned to the rock, I made up my mind that no matter what befell me I would make the weapons.”
You might even call it an ecological or conservationist narrative, as Karana eventually learns more about the fauna around her and eventually swears off killing animals to feed herself; O'Dell was partly inspired to write a novel about a girl living in harmony with the animals around her after witnessing an act of animal cruelty. Karana grows to love a family of otters swimming near her home, and after seeing how the mother cares for her young, she eventually makes up her mind:
“After that summer, after being friends with Won-a-nee and her young, I never killed another otter. I had an otter cape for my shoulders, which I used until it wore out, but never again did I make a new one. Nor did I ever kill another cormorant for its beautiful feathers, though they have long, thin necks and make ugly sounds when they talk to each other. Nor did I kill seals for their sinews, using instead kelp to bind the things that needed it. Nor did I kill another wild dog, nor did I try to spear another sea elephant. Ulape would have laughed at me, and others would have laughed, too - my father most of all. Yet this is the way I felt about the animals who had become my friends and those who were not, but in time could be…animals and birds are like people, too, though they do not talk the same or do the same things. Without them the earth would be an unhappy place.”
Again, there weren’t a lot of stories like this in 1960, and O’Dell’s novel was ahead of its time in a lot of ways; there's a reason that this is one of the more famous Newbery winners in history. But you could also call the novel a "vanishing Indian" story, a term used by Carole Goldberg at UCLA; Island Of The Blue Dolphins is a novel that starts with a lot of indigenous characters, and ends with only one, and the reasons behind the "disappearance" of an entire people are not really explored in depth, certainly not with any real analysis of the cruelty that was part of the European settlement of the Americas. A common critique of narratives like this one is that they all contain the implied historical narrative "once long ago there were these Indian people, and they're not really around anymore, but that's just for normal and good reasons related to the passage of time and definitely not because we killed all of them". Further, Karana is "rescued" and brought to a California mission, which meant she would have witnessed plenty of violently enforced conversion and corporal punishment - living at the missions wasn't exactly slavery, but it definitely wasn't freedom3 - and the real Karana died seven weeks after getting there.
So there's a lot going on when you read this novel. There's plenty that works, and then there are major blind spots that would be critically important to understanding who Karana was - and again, she was a real person - and why she ended up in these circumstances. By the standards of 2022, O'Dell wouldn't have been the right guy to tell this story, and if you were to teach it to a class today, you'd need a whole lot of supplemental materials to add more historical context. If you read it for pleasure, you could potentially enjoy it as a straight woman-versus-nature survival story. But for me, the survival story is the least interesting part of the novel.
Look, I like dialogue. This story can still appeal to readers, but reading long descriptions of a woman building her whale-bone house in near-silence is kind of a slog for me. And it was disappointing to have to slog through that, because I do think the first quarter of O'Dell's novel, describing the events before Karana gets marooned, is riveting, because it’s focused on the conflict between the Nicoleño tribe and the Aleut fur trappers. Most interestingly, this part of the book even stays ahead of the “vanishing Indian story” criticism, because, yeah, it is pretty clear who the bad guys are, and who ends up suffering as a result of their greed. The Aleut captain tries to bargain with the chief - Karana’s father - and assures him that this time will be different than the last disastrous hunt:
“‘You remember another hunt,’ Captain Orlov said…’this time you will need to do nothing. My men will hunt and we will divide the catch. One part for you, to be paid in goods, and two parts for us’.
‘The parts must be equal,’ my father said.
Captain Orlov gazed off toward the sea. ‘We can talk of that later when my supplies are safe ashore,’ he replied.”
I think it’s pretty obvious from this exchange, on page 6 of the novel, what’s going to happen and who’s going to get screwed over. And it does happen and they do get screwed over, and massacred. Had this novel been written today, the author might have spent more time on that part of the story more. Or, the author might have built out details of Karana's arrival at the Santa Barbara mission and the complicated relationship between the missionaries and the indigenous Californians, which would have also hit the same beats we see in other Newbery medalists: fish-out-of-water story, complex issue viewed through a child's eyes, and the like. There's a lot in O'Dell's novel, a lot of big ideas hanging there in the silence and time jumps. But there's a good chance it will be remembered for what isn't there.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1954 medalist, …And Now Miguel by Joseph Krumgold.
At the time of this writing, it does not look like NCR still has their pre-2008 archives up online. I happen to still have a print copy of this particular issue, from 7/28/2006.
And then we made everything way worse by violating the worldwide cultural boycott to record in Johannesburg after our messy divorce from Carrie Fisher.