ricardienne: (tacitus)
(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.
ricardienne: (library)
So I have been thinking a lot about MammothFail (short version: Patricia Wrede writes a fantasy YA about settlers in the magical American West -- having eliminated the Native Americans altogether. People, naturally, find this problematic. Lois McMaster Bujold says some very stupid things on the internet...)

Anyway, having read lots of analysis and quotes from the link above, these are my two (quasi-original, or at least I haven't seen them completely put out this way) thoughts:

(1) Wrede's decision to write about a magical America sans indigenous people has nothing to do with how "hard" it would be to write Native Americans in a non-offensive way. It has everything to do with how impossible it would be to write the whites in a non-completely-unsympathetic way. We don't think about it, and our (or at least my) history books are all about the heroic and intrepid pioneers, (and I grew up on the Little House books too) but settling the West (or any of the Americas, really) was imperialism. It was moving onto land already occupied by a civilization, and is not separable from the displacement and extermination of that civilization.

I hadn't really thought about that until this internetsplosion. I think that it is generally recognized that one cannot talk about e.g. the antebellum South unproblematically. The hoopskirts and rolling hills and peach orchards may be very nice, but it is not possible to write a novel about the planter class and their lives with their slaves in the background and not have it be read either as racist or as a indictment of the society with a dark and ironic undercurrent or something.

The same should be true of the pioneer novel, really. And in this respect, Wrede's choice to eliminate the "problem" is trying to have your cake and eat it, too. Or more bluntly: to avoid white guilt while still having her settlers-in-the-west story.

(2) One of the things that has come up in many of the posts and discussions I've read the last few days is the prevalence of the pioneer narrative in, esp. science fiction. That may be the expression of the human desire for the frontier or whatever, but it's also the ideal, unmessy colonization narrative: wide-open spaces with no strings attached in the form of people already living there. (Ironic that LMB's first Vorkosigan novel is set on exactly such a planet: unpeopled and ready to be contested by "advanced" galactic civilizations?) It's certainly much more squicky when done an alternate-earth, where the peoples who are getting eliminated to make it easier for the Europeans are precisely those whom the Europeans really did try to eliminate in order to make it easier for themselves. But how much of this more general fantasy/sci-fi plot is essentially doing the same thing in a less obviously bad way?

Also, I really hate to bring this up, because LMB is one of my favorite authors, in spite of her rather unadvised comments recently, and because I particularly like her Chalion books, but her fantasy is a pretty obvious earth-analogue that also functions by removing the inconvenient and guilt-inducing parts of history: a transparently Reconquest Spain where the fake!Moors are conveniently barbarous and imperialist and the *fake!Jews are conveniently not there? There is something a little bit weird about fantasizing Isabella and Ferdinand and then removing the problematic aspects of their careers.

Profile

ricardienne: (Default)
sigaloenta

October 2023

S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
15 161718192021
22232425262728
293031    

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 6th, 2025 12:30 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios