Mother Jones and Her Army of Mill Children by Jonah Winter

A relatively easy-to-read and poetically heightened text introduces the situation.

From the dark front cover, on which oily blobs conceal a seabird, to the rescuer’s sad face on the back, the mother-son team emphasizes the disaster. They make no such accommodations to young audiences in this disturbing book.

The Winters foretold the destructive powers of the atomic bomb allusively in The Secret Project (2017), leaving the actuality to the backmatter. Despite a cleanup, crude oil is still there. In 1977, the oil carrier Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of oil into a formerly pristine Alaskan ocean inlet, killing millions of birds, animals, and fish. Nelson (a member of the Leech Lake Band of Minnesota Chippewa) contributes soft line-and-color illustrations of the proceedings. Key words ranging from estuary to discover are printed in boldface in the narrative and defined in a closing glossary. Refreshingly, the lens Newell offers is a Native one, describing how the Wampanoag and other Native peoples received the English rather than the other way around. Short, two- to six-page chapters alternate between the story of the English settlers and exploring the complex political makeup of the region and the culture, agriculture, and technology of the Wampanoag-all before covering the evolution of the holiday. In addition to the voyage and landfall of the Mayflower, readers learn about the Doctrine of Discovery that arrogated the lands of non-Christian peoples to European settlers earlier encounters between the Indigenous peoples of the region and Europeans and the Great Dying of 1616-1619, which emptied the village of Patuxet by 1620. holiday of Thanksgiving and its origins and the history of English colonization in the territory now known as New England. A measured corrective to pervasive myths about what is often referred to as the “first Thanksgiving.”Ĭontextualizing them within a Native perspective, Newell (Passamaquoddy) touches on the all-too-familiar elements of the U.S.

Mother Jones and Her Army of Mill Children by Jonah Winter