The Rough Faced Girl

As I was at the library for my Children's Literature class I stumbled across a few books of what appeared to be Native American origin. I first looked at The Rough Faced Girl by Rafe Martin and Illustrated by David Shannon. The only thing I could perceive as relating to the cosmology of the Algonquin or the Haudenosaunee (the setting of this story is on the shores of Lake Ontario) was the invisible being (either), or God in the sky in the story (Haudenosaunee). Even that though was not entirely in line with what I have found in Mark Q. Sutton's highlight of the Haudenosaunee in his book An Introduction of Native North America. 

The cosmology of the Haudenosaunee calls for people who once lived in the sky and a Chief and his daughter, Sky Woman, who eventually made the land and populated it (Sutton, 290-291). What follows is more of a line between good and evil.

We find the focus primarily on the girl who is without beauty (without external beauty that is) and scars on her face who is able to see the invisible God. Then after being able to see him she is married to him. This is a very brief summary.

This story appears to be based mainly on the story of Cinderella.  In any case my argument here is that this was probably taken as a story from Natives after it had been changed by them upon receiving it from the Europeans. According to the author of Ai-Ling Louie, the story of Cinderella actually originates thousands of years ago in China. So this story is arguably not of Native American origin.

I later found out that the story of Cinderella was indeed shared to the Native American Micmac community and later retold by Cyrus MacMillan (1882-1953). Sutton argues whether or not this story ever was even told before contact which is precisely my argument here, that it most likely was not (Stahl, 541-542).

Works cited:

Bernikow, Louise. "Cinderella. “Crosscurrents of Children’s Literature. 1.J.D. Stahl. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.133-140. Print.

Hanlon, Tina L., Keyser, Elizabeth L., and Stahl, J.D. Crosscurrents in Children’s Literature: An Anthology of Texts and Criticisms. Oxford University P, 2007. Print.

Louie, Ai-Ling. Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella Story from China. New York: The Putnam Publishing Group, 1982. Print.

Martin, Rafe. The Rough-Faced Girl. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1992. Print.