This is a short but powerful historical fiction read that shows how one 10-year-old was impacted when her tribe, the Umpqua, was terminated by the US in 1954 and struggled when relocated to Los Angeles.
Regina Petit's family lived in the Grand Ronde Tribe's reservation until they were declared "Indian no more" and terminated. Overnight, they're forced to relocate to Los Angeles. Her father enters electrical engineering classes, a government "Indian Agent" leads them to a ramshackle house on 58th street, and it breaks her mother and grandmother's hearts.
But Regina's resilient and goes to school with her little sister, making friends in the new neighborhood, but with them also experiences the vicious racism of the era and the crushed hopes and dreams of the adults in her family.
I won't spoil how it ends, but pull up a box of tissues.
Teaching Note
Although the writing is a bit below grade-level for 7th/8th grades, the book would make an excellent, quick in-class read to explore this key aspect of the 1950s Civil Rights era.
The book itself features several excellent teaching materials. There's an Umpqua Glossary at the beginning of the book, with the terms that are used in the pages. The 7-page Dictionary at the back lists many Spanish words used in the book, as well. There's an Author's Note with excellent pictures of her family's house in LA, friends, family and more, that formed the basis for the book.
The publisher, Lee & Low, also offers a free teaching guide for this book that is 20 pages and excellent. It's correlated to 6th grade ELA standards, but would make for a quick, impactful read for Civil Rights Common Core standards in 7th/ 8th grades as well.
The Teacher's Guide features a synopsis, a primer on the use of the term "Indian" which goes into more detail than the definitions at the back of the book, and offers additional resources for students and teachers to utilize.
The guide also features a short, but much-needed to help build prior knowledge for your readers, timeline of Native American Historical Periods, and focuses on the Termination and Indian Relocation Act, as well as documenting how several Presidential administrations treated Native Nations (Eisenhower, who started the Termination era, Johnson, who started the era of Indian self-determination, Nixon, and finally Reagan, who repudiated the Terminations with PL 98-365), with links to three key Presidential speeches.
In addition, there are 10 pre-reading questions for students, a primer for teachers on the use of the "N" word in the book as a racial slur (you should prepare your students for it, prior to reading, by at the very least having a discussion about it why we don't use it, ever, but why it's included in the book), and a guide to the images contained in the cover and the map at the beginning.
There are 13 over-arching questions to guide students as they read, "Setting a Purpose for Reading," content specific and academic vocabulary terms are pulled out (although not defined), and 77 reading comprehension questions. There are 9 Extension Questions and 5 Reading Response questions, for analysis after reading, and 6 ELL activities and 3 Social and Emotional Learning standard activities.
The teaching guide also offers activities that hit standards in Geography, Art / Media, and making School-Home connections.
There is also a teaching ideas post by Professor MaryAnn Cappiello for School Library Journal's "The Classroom Bookshelf" blog. The post contains a lot of additional resources / links / questions to consider, but you'll need to generate your own lesson plans, correlate them to standards and incorporate them into a novel study to complement the publisher's Teaching Guide.
