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The Lost Children: The Boys Who Were Neglected

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"The Lost Children: The Boys Who Were Neglected" is a sacred Blackfoot Indian myth retold and illustrated by Paul Goble that serves as a timeless reminder about the dangers of neglecting children. It is, we are told, "a story about the world which is above our world," that was told in the dark in the old days. The premise is that children are given to us by the Great Spirit as God's greatest gift, but sometimes we forget this important point and are not kind to them, which is what happened when the people did not look after six little children.

These were six brothers who had been orphaned. They slept and ate in different places each day and their only clothes were those that people had discarded. Their only friends were the camp dogs. But the other children threw stones as them and chased them away (Goble paints the other children and the adults of the camp as silhouettes of color the first time we see them; they do not get to be represented as being human because their actions make them less than that). The six brothers were so sad at their treatment that they did not wish to be people any longer and debated what they should be instead: flowers, stones, waters, or tress. But in the end they decide to be stars and are welcomed into the Sun Man's tipi.

This story explains the origin of the Pleiades stars, which are called the Bunched Stars by the Blackfoot. In his Author's Note Goble explains that many of the North American peoples had a similar story about how the Pleiades were once children who went to the Sky World because people did not like looking at them. As always Goble's paintings are a marvelous evocation of the artwork down by the Plains tribes in the 19th century. All of the tipis (niitoyis) illustrated in "The Lost Children" are from the Blackfoot nation, copied from photographs Goble had taken over twenty years in Montana and Alberta. The book ends with a note about the tipis in which Goble explains the symbolism of what we see on them. Goble might be best known for his humorous stories about Iktomi the trickster, but these more serious myths from the Plains Indians are even better.