MISSION
Manzanita Books will engage young people with West Coast and California history, highlighting under-represented stories through colorfully-illustrated texts. Centering #ownvoices, Manzanita’s books will honestly face our complicated history. Different groups of people have been, and continue to be, a part of this land — like the native manzanita plant — the seeds, shoots, roots, and flowers. Manzanita Books will explore this history, centering indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian American, LGBQT+, and disabled people’s stories, but also looking frankly at the place of Whiteness in the state’s establishment.
When we walk on ground knowing what happened in the past, we have a personal connection to that place, those people, and their stories. They become OUR stories. It is time to look more honestly and openly at this history, so that we can organize collectively to build towards a better future.
When we walk on ground knowing what happened in the past, we have a personal connection to that place, those people, and their stories. They become OUR stories. It is time to look more honestly and openly at this history, so that we can organize collectively to build towards a better future.
Books will be written by people whose lived experience connects to the story. If authors aren’t children’s writers, books can be co-written by Laura Atkins as took place with the Fighting for Justice series. The goal is to publish first books in August 2020.
proposed titles
William Byron Rumford
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background
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How can we study the influx of people during the Gold Rush without centering the existence and rights of 300,000 indigenous people who inhabited this land for over ten thousand years — a number that dropped to 35,000 by 1860? How might we see immigration differently if we learned that Mexican-Americans lived in what we currently call California before most other immigrant groups, including European Americans, and that the California constitution was written bilingually in English and Spanish? Manzanita Books aims to address the many gaps in how we tell these and other stories for upper elementary, middle school and high school-aged young people.
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Too often we learn history from an East Coast perspective: the Mayflower and the “Founding Fathers.” But California and the West Coast have our own stories to tell. We can empower young people to look back honestly at the past, recognizing who had power, why, and what they did with it. This will help them to understand current circumstances, and how we got here. We will highlight stories of resistance and resilience, and how communities survived and flourished in the face of attempts at disempowerment and erasure. Learning these stories can empower today's young people to be engaged members of their communities.
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