Earlier this month, a book by a local Aquinnah Wampanoag tribal member on the history of colonization in the United States got moved from the nonfiction section of a Texas library to the fiction section.
Linda Coombs lives in Mashpee and wrote Colonization and the Wampanoag Story, which came out last year. A committee in Texas moved the book to fiction after an anonymous complaint.
Since then, the book has been moved back to the nonfiction section by local officials.
CAI’s Gilda Geist spoke with Coombs about her book and the reactions it garnered in Montgomery County, Texas and beyond.
Gilda Geist Before we get into everything that happened in Texas, can you just briefly explain your book?
Linda Coombs I was asked to write the book back in 2021, and it came out last year. The group that asked me was called Race To Dinner, and my book is part of a series for 7th grade level on racism and different cultures.
GG Can you take me back to when you first heard about what was going on in this Texas library?
LC I just got an email from a friend of mine and she'd been having an exchange with Debbie Reese, who is a Pueblo woman that has a website, American Indians in Children's Literature. And they were just having an email exchange about the fact that this had happened. I didn't even know. That's how I found out.
GG What was your reaction when you found out about it?
LC It took me a while to get all the details straight and who was doing what. Since then, people have asked me if I was shocked that this happened, that this group of people would take it upon themselves to reclassify a book.
I am not shocked. I've been doing the work I've been doing for 50 years, and in that time, it's been constant messaging that we're not real, that our oral traditions are fictional, fairy tales, this sort of thing. The only thing that was surprising was that this book was mine, and here it is in the middle of all this. And I'm shocked that people have the audacity to think that they can do something like that.
GG Since you've dedicated all these years of your life sharing information about the colonial history of the U.S. and the brutality the Wampanoag people endured, when these things happen, do you feel like it still affects you? Or do you feel like you kind of have gotten used to it? What is it like to have people deny your history so often?
LC You don't get used to it. And it just tells me how much work still needs to be done, because as long as people believe that we're fictional or any part of our culture is fictional, they're not looking at us as equal human beings.
GG Eventually, the Montgomery County Commissioners Court reversed the book review committee's decision, and then actually put the entire book review committee on hold. What was your reaction to learning that information?
LC I thought that was great. I'm not sure if the commission did that because it was the right thing to do, or if their response was coming from the pressure, because there was such an outcry behind the decision to classify the book as fiction. It was just huge—petitions and articles and all kinds of stuff. But it was just an amazing response, which was wonderful. It ended up being the right thing, because they reclassified the book as nonfiction and put it back where it was designed to be. And I see that as a very positive step.
GG After all this—I mean, I guess we don't know that it's all over, since we don't know what's going to happen with the committee next—but for now, what do you hope people in Montgomery, Texas, and people here in southeastern Massachusetts who live on the original land of the Wampanoag learn from this?
LC I wouldn't hold my response to that question just to those two locales. I would spread it evenly across the country. It's past time that this country looked at its actual history, and what it took to build America, and to quit trying to shine it up and gloss it over and whitewash it and avoid all the ugly stuff. People are thinking that they can flip a switch and alter history to the way they want. Whatever happened in history, that's what happened. That's what we have to deal with. And if it's ugly and it's hard, then the sooner we deal with it, the sooner we can resolve it.
