Insider/Outsider Debate

I have sort of mixed feelings about whether or not an outsider can create an accurate account of a culture that is not their own. In the readings we did for class last week, there was a lot of talk about the need for multicultural literature to depict a culture accurately. I think it is very important for children to be able to see representations of themselves in the books they read, and it is just as important for children to see other cultures represented positively. However, the only way this can be done effectively or correctly is if the text, illustrations, language etc. is completely accurate. I think that if I were writing a text about even my own culture it may not be accurate. Therefore, I think that whether the author is an insider or an outsider to the culture they are writing about, they have to make sure they did enough and appropriate research. Still, there is always room for someone to make a mistake or offend someone else. That is where creating an accurate portrayal of a culture in a multicultural piece becomes tricky and why it is such a debatable topic.
I also went to a lecture today where a Native American woman spoke about the boarding schools. It was surprising to me that there was this tragic piece of history that I knew nothing about. I had heard of the boarding schools maybe once before the video we watched in class, where they talked about them briefly, but could not remember learning anything about them. This scares me. We talk a lot about the holocaust and other terrible things that happened to groups of people in history, but I learned nothing about the brutality that was faced by Native Americans when they were forced to leave home, separate from their loved ones, and were stripped of their identity. A lot of this mirrors the horror stories of those who suffered in concentration camps, why is it all ignored? Perhaps because it happened here. In the United States. It was not Hitler it was "Americans" who did this to them. And because of that, we do not even mention it, and instead focus on the terrible things that "other" people did. How this relates to the debate of insider and outsider, though, is that the woman who spoke said that because she was not in the boarding school herself, she could not give it justice by speaking of what she had heard. Although her mother was forced to go to one, and told her many times about all of the bad things that happened to her, she did not feel right being the one to talk about it. It affected the way her mother raised her, yet she didn't feel she was an insider. I think this speaks to the fact that even if you are of a certain culture, you have not had all of the same experiences as those who share the same culture as you. Therefore, outsiders can exist within a culture, and that reinforces the idea that it is very hard to determine what an insider really is.