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Once more, with (personal) feeling
May. 15th, 2009 01:08 pm(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.
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.
