A Texas county reversed its decision to place Colonization and the Wampanoag Story, a children’s history book about the Native American experience, in the fiction category at local libraries.
The decision drew the ire of the world’s largest publishers, literary freedom groups and many community members.
The Texas community of Montgomery county, near Houston, reclassified the book after creating a citizen review committee, making the committee’s meetings secret and removing librarians from deliberations – changes driven by a conservative Christian group.
“The recent decision by commissioner-appointed committee members has outraged not just our community, but the country as a whole,” said Teresa Kenney, a Montgomery county resident and founder of the Village Books store, at a recent meeting of county leaders.
“Nowhere in the approved policy is it under the committee’s purview to determine whose history is fact or fiction,” she added.
Texas is second in the nation in banning books, with more than 1,500 titles removed from 2021 to 2023, according to PEN America, a literary freedom non-profit. Only Florida has banned more, with 5,100 titles removed.
“To claim this book is fiction dismisses our perspective and history,” Debbie Reese, founder of American Indians in Children’s Literature, said in a statement at the time the book’s reclassification came to light.
“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,” Reese said.
The decision to reclassify the book became public in mid-October, after open records requests by free speech advocates revealed the history book had been re-shelved to the fiction section.
One of the leading voices for challenging books, a mother named Michele Nuckolls who homeschools her children, told commissioners at the meeting recent changes were a success.
“The new policy is working,” Nuckolls said at a commission meeting in mid-October, according to the Houston Press. “Citizens act as a jury appointed by each of you [the commissioners] to review the books and review placement based on community values.”
Nuckolls helped found Two Moms and Some Books, a self-described Christian conservative group. Nuckolls is also a frequent attendee of local school board meetings, the Press said, despite not having children in the district.
The group advocates for books, primarily those about sexuality and transgender identity, to be moved to more “restrictive” adult sections of the library and for more Christian titles to be added to shelves.
In addition to putting a “stay” on all decisions of the citizens review committee, county commission members in Montgomery said they would create another committee to review library rules, including those around the citizen review committee. The new committee is expected to be made up of county staff members and to be advised by the county attorney, according to Lonestar Live.
