Once more, with (personal) feeling

[ricardienne]

(still vaguely about this, pursuant to my last post):

The thing that I am most understanding/not understanding about this is the fact that cutting out all pre-European inhabitants of the Americas didn't register as a "major change." (Many people have explained very well in detail why this is emphatically not so).

On the one hand, I can (unfortunately) see where, from a white middle-class American perspective, this could seem like a reasonable thought process. Native American history is taught (or at least was (not) taught to me in my public school education) as an accessory to settler/explorer/colonial history. It's no excuse for not thinking, but I imagine that it is a fairly common instance of ignorance.

But personally, I don't understand the ease with which eliminating two continents' worth of civilizations and cultures and languages and people as a "non minor" bit of background could happen. Now I am a classics student and a classical musician, and in general very Euro-centric, Western-canon, dead-white-male-oriented in my interests (incl. the kind of fantasy I tend to read). I have very little knowledge or exposure to Native American cultures pre- and post-Columbian, and had much less until just this past year, in fact. I confess that it was the ancient Nahua empire, with its ruins and poetry and hierarchy and rhetorical schools and intricate beautiful language (all the things that Rome, my "home-base" empire had) that made me realize that I should know more, and should care more about knowing about the people(s) and civilizations that belong in the part of the world where I live.

What is the point of this (rambling) (I hope not-offensive) (confessional) personal narrative? We are talking about civilizations (tribes, cultures, cities, peoples, customs, traditions, myths, legends, agricultures) that are extremely rooted. They go back very far. They had long development and evolution before the Europeans showed up in the first place. They can't be plucked out of the continent on a whim. I think that this is sadly unapparent in the way that conventional U.S. education teaches about Native Americans, but it took very little knowledge to give me (a white Euro-centric classicist) an -- I don't know -- a desire to make them part of my intellectual and emotional worldview (I don't want a world without Nahuatl or Lakota or Inuktitut culture any more than I want a world without Latin or Greek). And it's sad and shocking that Patricia Wrede, even when she went about writing American fantasy, didn't have or find any such desire.

Comments

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

I think I disagree. I think a book about what 19th century America would be like if there had been no pre-European inhabitants would be interesting - just as an alternate history of Europe with no Greece or Rome would be interesting.

The problem with Thirteenth Child, as I understand it, is that it isn't that history. Instead it's a story about 19th century America with mammoths and magic (and by the way, no Indians) - that's what makes it something I have no interest in reading.

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

I agree that it is interesting as a thought experiment, and therefore as a fictional premise. But alternate history based on X not having existed is different from "everything as it was, just minus X." (This may actually be what you just said and I am not quite understanding) So, e.g. Europe between the world wars, by the way Rome never was (but all that did was to change the names of the places to eliminate the Latinity), doesn't make sense to me, and I honestly don't think that anyone would try to write it.

I also think that people wouldn't casually write out Greece or Rome (or the British Empire, or Charlemagne, or...) without thinking about the consequences because there is a certain amount of cultural affection: if you want the world to be basically the same, but with mammoths, you wouldn't want to lose them. And it's a bit saddening that there isn't that same affection for having indigenous American civilizations.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think we're more or less on the same page there - that was what I was trying to say.

[camlina.livejournal.com]

I haven't read or even heard of the book in question (though I do remember enjoying Wrede's Dealing With Dragons series when I was younger), but I just wanted to say that your posts on the subject sound eminently reasonable to me, and completely fit with my experience of education (or lack thereof) about Native American histories in the public school system.

[tif123.livejournal.com]

My initial reaction is that historical fiction set in the American West often already is written as if the Native population never existed there; in that way, Wrede hasn't exactly done anything unusual, I suppose. But it doesn't exactly make for something I'd want to read.

I'd be FAR more interested in a AltHist fantasy written about the Americas as if the conquest and colonization had never happened... What would their Indigenous societies and governments and countries look like today?

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

My initial reaction is that historical fiction set in the American West often already is written as if the Native population never existed there; in that way, Wrede hasn't exactly done anything unusual, I suppose.

Very true. And historically, it may be able to be argued (honestly I know very little about American history) that the Native populations were so little considered by settlers that American History would have marched on not very much differently than it did (the environmental effects of having/not having people for so many thousands of years don't seem like much of a problem, if you are introducing magic and animals). For me, the discomfort is much more in the assumptions that are being laid bare.

[sanguinity]

:: And historically, it may be able to be argued (honestly I know very little about American history) that the Native populations were so little considered by settlers that American History would have marched on not very much differently than it did... ::

Not so much, no. You might want to have a look through the comments to this post.

[ricardienne.livejournal.com]

Thanks for pointing me to that thread. But I still suspect that some hand-waving along the lines of "the first few expeditions and colonies were not very successful, but then they figured stuff out with their magical dowsing-for-useful-resources apparatus" or similar could remove a lot of them.

Actually, though, that thread makes me think of how implausible most purely fantasy/sci-fi "and then they discovered an uninhabited planet/continent and started settling it and finding useful things in it" scenarios are.