Parvana, the main character of The Breadwinner, is an eleven-year-old girl who must dress as a boy in order to work after the Taliban arrests her father. (Courtesy Groundwood Books)

In Deborah Ellis's children's novel The Breadwinner, an Afghan girl ventures out into the Taliban-controlled city of Kabul dressed as a boy to provide for her family. In The Shepherd's Granddaughter, by Anne Laurel Carter, a Palestinian girl's family farm is bulldozed by Israeli soldiers. Both novels were published by the Canadian children's press Groundwood Books, which strives to publish works by Canadian authors "who through circumstance have been marginalized and whose contribution to our society is not always visible." Both novels have won praise, if not from highbrow literary critics, then from readers around the world. However, the authors of these books do not come from Palestine or Afghanistan. Ellis and Carter are white Canadians. The sharp contrast between these authors' backgrounds and those of the characters whose stories they tell lies at the heart of the furiously debated issue of cultural appropriation in the publishing world.

Minority communities like the First Nations, Chinese, and Japanese experienced oppression at the hands of the Canadian government when European settlers seized Native land and claimed it for their own in the 17th century, and later, when Canada exploited Asian immigrants for cheap labor in the 1800s. In more recent years, Filipinos, Indians, Jamaicans, Pakistanis, Ukrainians, Africans, and countless others immigrated to Canada and have their own stories to tell. Canada's population today is a far cry from the mainly white Anglo-Saxon audience that enjoyed the quintessentially Canadian Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908.

Yet throughout the last century, authors of minority backgrounds have argued that their voices and stories were usurped by "inauthentic" white authors while they themselves were barred from the publishing industry because of their non-whiteness. Well into the 1970s, the only books published about minority experiences were written by white authors.

Enraged racial action groups and minority authors engaged in a hostile and personal debate over this issue through the 1970s and '80s. According to Patsy Aldana, the publisher at Groundwood Books, the discussion called into question the nature of authorship itself. "On the one side were writers saying, 'What right do you have to tell my story? You don't know and can never know what it means to be me.' On the other side were writers saying, 'I am a writer. The very essence of my work is to imagine what it is like to be someone else. You cannot tell me what to write.'"

For Aldana, the central issue was not theft of ideas, but the lack of recognition of minority authors and their own stories. She had always maintained that as soon as minority authors gained proper respect in the publishing world, all authorswould be free to write what they wanted.

Today, some publishing houses have minority-oriented imprints, branches with separate brand names that publish books for or by a specific group. Others devote themselves entirely to books by authors of a specific background. Mainstream publishers focus on profit, achieved by "reliable name recognition, not novelty," explained young adult literature author Marc Aronson. When a mainstream house considers a book by a white author on a minority topic, a feeling of "nervousness" remains, with anxious houses "wanting to be sure an author or artist has it right if she or he is writing from an ethnic point of view not his or her own," said Aronson.

In Groundwood's philosophy, "it's the point of view that matters," according to publisher Aldana. The author's background comes second. For Ellis, writing is an integral part of speaking up for child victims of war. What matters most is that "a new voice, in the best writing possible" answers the needs of a new, broadened world of children's books.

Ariel Baker-Gibbs is a junior English major in Trumbull College. She has interned at Groundwood Books for the past two summers.

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