Lynn Reid Banks and the controversy surrounding the Indian in the closet

The book, to Banks’ surprise, was a huge success, selling some 15 million copies and prompting The New York Times to name it a “Best Book of the Year.” As the author later said: “One night, I was told on a long-distance phone call that the paperback rights to (the book) had fetched a large sum at auction, so I thought, Maybe they know something I don’t know — and they did! It took off, winning awards, And I made my fortune.”

Although, in her estimation, he was only “good” in Britain, he won many prestigious awards in America. Banks herself was no more a withering violet when it came to self-advertising than she was about creating imaginary worlds. As her former editor, Vanessa Hamilton, so eloquently put it: “Lynn is passionate about dealmaking and marketing… She has a strong attitude toward kids and knows what keeps them entertained.”

So it may have been a surprise to her that the wave of approval she was riding on subsided in the early 1990s. In 1991, two members of the American Library Association, Naomi Caldwell Wood and Lisa A. Mitten, argued that “The Indian in the Closet” should be criticized rather than celebrated, arguing that it promoted “horrible stereotypes of Native Americans” and that “Banks had created her ‘Indian’ character from a mixed bag of harmful clichés so common among British authors.”

Far from being seen as a naive character to whom Little Bear taught valuable lessons, Omri was now seen as a white supremacist in training, a miniature patriarch whose attitude toward Native Americans was not much better than that of nineteenth-century colonists.^y a century. Even a Native American librarian, Doris Seale, wrote in 1992: “My heart aches for a Native child who was unfortunate enough to find and read these books. How could she, reading this, not be harmed? How could a white child Fail to believe that he is so much higher than the bloodthirsty, inhuman-like monsters depicted here?