What might initially seem suggestions for countering the stereotypes are likely to be useless. The Guide asks, for instance, "What are the positive aspects of Navajo culture that the author suggests have been lost to us?" How are students to answer this? "Navajo culture" can hardly be said to have been dealt with positively—let alone accurately —in the book. (The book's references to the Indian world of "empty space" and Hatter's silence have more to do with the stereotypic Indian-as-a-child-of-nature image than with anything else.)

Consider the messages the book gives about Hatter's upbringing, which is one of the few things that could conceivably be considered about "Navajo culture." As a little girl, she lived with "the old woman," who was not her grandmother ("I didn't have any parents. . . The old woman used to tell me that Changing Woman had given me to her."). Before she...