Totem pole will not appear in future printings of Robin Talleys AS I DESCENDED On Friday, I read On Making Mistakes on Robin Talleys Tumblr page. There, she wrote: Two weeks ago, my latest book, As I Descended , was released. One week later, I received an anonymous message from a thoughtful reader who�d just started the book. This reader, who�s Indigenous, noticed that I�d used the term totem pole in chapter 1 to describe where a character stood in her school�s social hierarchy ? in the sense of the phrase �low man on the totem pole.� Talleys response to that reader was similar to the one I got from Sarah McCarry when I wrote to her about that phrase in her book (see her post), and the response I got from Ashley Hope Perez when I wrote to her about the phrase in her book (see my post). In short: they listened. Talley wrote that shed shared that readers message with her editor, Kristen Pettit at Harper Teen, and that the term will be taken out of future printings of the...