Texas condemned for placing book on colonization in library’s fiction section

Anti-censorship advocates have joined book publisher Penguin Random House in condemning a Texas county that reclassified an account of European settlers’ colonization of Indigenous Americans as fiction.

The furor in Montgomery county – near Houston – follows the decision by a citizens review panel, at the behest of rightwing activists, to place Colonization and the Wampanoag Story by Linda Coombs in the fiction section of children’s libraries.

The book aims to present young readers with a historic look from the perspective of Native people of the colonization of New England, according to PEN America, the nonprofit advocacy group for free expression in literature.

It was published in September 2023 as one of five titles in Penguin Random House’s Race to the Truth series of similarly themed stories intended for middle grades. Other books include Slavery and the African American Story by Patricia Williams Dockery and This Land by Ashley Fairbanks.

“To claim this book is fiction dismisses our perspective and history,” said a statement from Debbie Reese, founder of American Indians in Children’s Literature.

“Books like Colonization and the Wampanoag Story are important to Native kids because they affirm our existence as Native people in the present day. But they’re also for non-Native kids, because those kids are being shaped by the information in books. This country is better off if we all know history in a more informed way.”

The Houston Public Library, Austin Public Library, Fort Worth Public Library and the Library of Congress all recognize it as a work of nonfiction, according to the San Antonio Current newspaper.

The decision to reclassify the book was made without the input of any librarian, the Current reported. It sparked outrage when the citizens review panel approved the reclassification after a challenge in September by a resident of the east Texas county.

Montgomery officials, following a national trend, bowed to pressure from conservatives to set up a mechanism to ban books certain members of the public found objectionable. According to the Texas Freedom to Read Project, the committee was originally intended to be empowered to assess books considered to be “sexually explicit”, but it has extended its purview.

The project, after filing a public information request to learn which books had been challenged, launched a petition that has so far amassed more than 34,000 signatures demanding commissioners reinstate the book “to its rightful home in the juvenile nonfiction collection of the Montgomery county memorial public library”.

“As Texas parents, we object to the actions taken by the citizens review committee to reclassify a nonfiction book to fiction,” Anne Russey, the group’s co-founder, said.

“If this decision is allowed to stand, what will stop the elected officials, or their politically appointed surrogates, from reclassifying other nonfiction books that contain perspectives, facts, or ideas they don’t like or disagree with?”

The Montgomery commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to PEN America, Texas is second in the nation in book banning, with 1,567 titles removed between July 2021 and December 2023. Only Florida, with 5,107, has banned more.

A member of the Texas Indigenous Council, Antonio Diaz, told the Current that the state had a long history of “whitewashing” Indigenous history.

“While it’s upsetting that any government entity would allow individuals to exercise such a bigoted, biased policy, it’s not a surprise in Texas,” he said. “Racism abounds.”