Rice, Bebe Faas The Place at the Edge of the Earth Clarion, 2002 192 pages grades 5-9 Lakota

Bebe Faas Rice, author of numerous young adult mystery/ghost/horror stories including Music from the Dead and the six-title “Doomsday Mall Series,” has chosen for her latest project an Indian ghost story set at the site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879-1918) in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Whether her intention was to show middle-school readers the horrors of the Indian boarding schools or to publish yet another pulp fiction ghost story, she has created an obscene appropriation of one of the most tragic episodes in the history of the U.S. government’s attempts to “assimilate” Native children into the white mainstream.

The plot centers around two 13-year-old protagonists: a white girl dealing with teenage angst, a new stepfather, and moving with her family to historic “Fort Sayers”; and the ghost of a Lakota boy who died in the late 1800s when Fort Sayers was an Indian boarding school. The two meet in a time-warp; each appears to the other as a ghost. Jonah Flying Cloud, trapped between worlds, appeals to Jennie Muldoon to help him reach the land of his ancestors. In order to send Jonah on his journey, Jenny must dig into the unsavory past of the boarding school and its surrounding town, and bring out the truth about the “place at the edge of the earth.”

The story is told in alternating first-person narratives. This is Rice’s first mistake. Here are the rest:

People do not sing their death song unless they’re dying; to send a child away to an unknown place with a death song is the last thing a parent would do; and children do not sing “death chants,” not to show grief nor for any other reason. Those few people who, in the early days, voluntarily sent their children to Carlisle did not do so in order for them to “learn the ways of the white man”—but to learn English. This was so that the people would have some protection against the white man’s lies and chicanery. By far, the greatest number of children who ended up there were taken by force, against their parents’ will. The names that Rice has chosen for her Native characters are ridiculous. She apparently thinks they “sound Indian.” Children at that time did not refer to themselves as “Indians.” Children in boarding school did not wash their own mouths out with lye soap. Children did not cut their own hair and mutilate themselves as a sign of rebellion. Lakota people did not kick and beat their dogs. Lakota people do not look each other in the eye as a sign of telling the truth. Crazy Horse was not a chief, nor did he get his name in the way Jonah describes. Eagle feathers do not make people strong and set them free. Placing an embroidered 101st Airborne patch—the “Screaming Eagles”—on a Indian grave is not the same, nor is it better than the eagle feather that Jonah’s ghost had requested. And since an eagle feather is just a feather until it is blessed, who was supposed to have done the blessing? Akicita are not “spirit guides,” and eagles are not akicita.

Rice has lifted ideas and phrases from Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Standing Bear, Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman) and even Black Elk—without attribution. On the other hand, she uses cockamamie “Indian” metaphors such as “already his hatred of the Wasichus had set his feet on the snakepath of bitterness and violence.”

The author has her Indian characters describing Lakota ceremony and customs, some of which she made up. A 13-year-old Lakota almost-man would not be likely to know enough about the women’s moontime rituals to be able to explain them in detail in English in the 1800s. And even if he did, he certainly would not talk about them to a white person.

Part of this story is the lynching of Jonah’s friend, Swift Running River, who had killed “the chief of the school.” After a mob of townspeople string him up, Jonah hastens his death so that he can “die quickly and with honor.” The lynching is the scandal that Jenny and a friend uncover. There is no documentation that a student at Carlisle ever killed a staff member. There is no documentation that an Indian student was ever killed in this way. It would have been extremely unlikely that a Lakota youngster, for any reason, would ever hasten the death of a friend, even to ease his suffering. He would instead have stood by his friend until the end.

If Rice actually believed in a Spirit World, if she actually understood what it might be like to be trapped between worlds, she would not have been able to write so casually about this boy’s spirit seeking help in this way. The plot device of an Indian ghost seeking help from a young white person is not new in children’s literature. In this case, it becomes a misuse of tragic circumstances that would be totally beyond the powers of this teenage girl to remedy.

The effects of the damage done by Carlisle and other such institutions are being felt to this day. Rice has written this book from a point of near total ignorance of Native lifeways and cosmologies, and has even gone so far as to do so in the first person. This is unacceptable. The Place at the Edge of the Earth should never have seen publication.

—Beverly Slapin and Doris Seale


Thank-you to LaVera Rose and Barb Landis.