an historical redux

[rushthatspeaks]

OK, so right now I'm waffling about whether to read Patricia Wrede's new book, The Thirteenth Child. The book takes place in an alt-North American frontier, a land in which there are still mammoths and other megafauna, and in which the North American continent was not settled by people at all until the European-equivalent folk got there; no one ever came across the Bering Land Bridge because it was blocked by magic.

Now, upon first glance at this premise, my immediate reaction is a wince and a twitch. Actually, that's my second-glance reaction, too. And most of my debate over whether to read the book is whether I have the time and energy to see whether it's possible for the worldbuilding to overcome the massive, huge, really problematic problems with that premise.

When I mentioned said premise in conversational passing today to somebody, I found myself having to explain the problems, from the core out; and I know several other people who for good and valid reasons, such as having been raised in a different country, didn't notice them.

Basically, in my opinion this premise, unless done extremely carefully and with very thorough worldbuilding-- which it is possible this book may have done; as I said, I have not yet decided whether to read it-- this contributes to the general absence, the silencing, the Othering, the general disappearing from popular culture and the self-defined mainstream of First Nations peoples.

So far I do not think I have said anything that hasn't been said on this topic before. This has been summary. What I want to explain now is why my wince and twitch were so thorough and profound and immediate. I can do this best, I think, by explaining the effects that the way First Nations in the US are treated and discussed has had on my life here, growing up in this country.

Now, I am not a member of any of the First Nations. I'm white. People who are native to this continent know far, far more about this than I do, and have to live with it in ways I know perfectly well I cannot comprehend. I can't tell you about what it's like to be part of the people damn near wiped out. I can tell you what it is like to be a person several generations on who was born to the group who did the wiping out, and who lived in an area where that had happened fairly recently.

I have been, throughout this entry, using the phrase First Nations, which is as far as I can tell a respectful term to use for these peoples. I did not hear this term until I had already graduated college. I did not hear the term Native American, except from co-religionists who were anti-racism workers, until high school. I heard Indian. No tribal distinctions really discussed.

I was born in a small town in Ohio in which, every year, for many years, there was a festival commemorating the defeat and driving from the area of the local Shawnee. With re-enactors. And anniversarial celebration.

I lived for many years near the junction of the Olentangy and Scioto rivers. Whenever I asked anyone what the names of the rivers meant, I was told 'it's an Indian name'. When I said I know that, I want to know what it means, nobody knew. Somebody may know, or they may not. The people who live there mostly don't.

All of this is when it actually came up, that there were people there before. Most of the time, the vast majority, it never did, but it shows in the following way: the land has no history.

The first time I saw a map of England with a scale marker, I was genuinely confused. How could so many things so close together all have individual names? It seemed as though every stream, road, boundary marker, every hill larger than a couple of rocks, every little clump of trees had a name that people knew and used. Not a county road number, name scrawled on a map somewhere that nobody cared about, or simple lack of name. I played in four different streams near my childhood houses, and if any of them ever had names, no one near them ever knew them. By the standards of the English map, all of them would have been actual rivers. And named.

The first time I went to Europe, the sense of history shocked and frightened me. Venice, the guide said, had been a great power for a thousand years. A thousand years? But history goes back about two hundred in the country in general, and about one hundred fifty in my town. There's a plaque on the old courthouse that says when the city was founded. Before that, well, who knows? Not me. Not my teachers. The Historical Society had a diorama of the Forest Primeval, but that was rather farther back. The idea that a person might be able to know who lived in a particular spot five hundred years ago was a part of fantasy novels to me when I was a child. It was out of Tolkien. Literally.

The older I got, the weirder it seemed. I know the colors of underwear owned by the principal mistresses of Louis XIV, a king of a country I have barely been to in a time utterly remote from my own, and I have no idea whether another human being ever lived on the spot on which I was born, and if so what they were like? How out-of-joint is that? But so it is.

And I told myself for years, well, America is a young country, it's only two centuries, the time will build up and we will accumulate these things, the names and histories, though I won't live to see it. It will be all right, this gap will eventually go away, this feeling of unrootedness, this not knowing what was here.

And then, and I don't know how I came to this realization, possibly because of spending a lot of time with all those anti-racist activists, I noticed: it's not that the land has no history. It's that that history was deliberately removed, covered over, and obliterated. These streams have names. I will never know them. Someone may have lived on the spot of my childhood house. I am never going to know. No one living can tell me. And this was intentional. I was born in a town where for many years they outright celebrated the final driving away of the people who knew, which happened the year of the founding of the town. They started over, clean. America. The New-Found Land. A completely new beginning, except for the fact of everything that had already happened, but nobody was going to talk about that.

I really think the lack of history explains a lot about this country. I mean, one of the quintessential American genres of movie is the road-trip movie, where you have forced character bonding through the fact that they are forced to spend time together in a car through all those miles and miles and miles of-- empty space. You can't do this in countries where every single thing has a name. Something historical is bound to intrude on you. Something outside yourselves is liable to break in.

So, I turned to fiction, as one does, to help me understand my country's roots and lack of them, and I turned to science fiction and fantasy, because I am me. And there is some. I really kind of hate to recommend him for anything, but Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker books, and Pastwatch, are actively and complexly engaging with this. (Pastwatch in particular is an impressive guilty pleasure and cri de coeur: NO SERIOUSLY TIME MACHINE TO CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND MAKE IT ALL BETTER-- and the happy ending of that book is a bitter laugh at how much worse our version of the world is than the one they win.) And we have Judith Berman, and Molly Gloss (if you haven't read Wild Life, go now, I'll wait), and dammit why are all these writers white, again? Anyway these books helped. Not much, but they have ways of thinking about, mythologizing, understanding, beating against what we don't understand. And in other fiction, and non-fiction, I read First Nations authors, because I know I don't understand.

And then I looked at the premise of the Wrede and the thought that passed through my head, verbatim, was 'OH GOD IT'S A BOOK THAT DOESN'T REMEMBER THIS COUNTRY HAS A HISTORY OH GOD NOT ANOTHER ONE'. Because if I'm tired of that, I can't imagine how it must be for people who have to deal with this all the damn time, and with the things that can be done to you when everyone is trying to forget that you exist.

I titled this post an historical redux: the past reduced. Lessened.

It is possible that the Wrede isn't that book. I will probably read it to see whether it is. I hope it isn't. But that premise, it is not very promising.

Comments

[embryomystic.livejournal.com]

This. All of this. Thank you.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Wow, yeah.

[zdenka]

Oh. *is hit by the clue bus*

My entire life, I've noticed the same lack of depth of history in this country and on this continent. At a young age, I came to the conclusion that it meant Europe was better, because Europe had castles and knights and traditions and interesting old stuff going back centuries and centuries. And in spite of having gone to schools that paid token attention to the pre-colonial history of the Americas, and even introduced us schoolchildren to real live members of the Wampanoag tribe, I don't think I ever internalized that these were real people with real history that was as real and historical as the European stuff.

it's not that the land has no history. It's that that history was deliberately removed, covered over, and obliterated.

I should think about this, in my Copious Spare Time.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

At a young age, I came to the conclusion that it meant Europe was better, because Europe had castles and knights and traditions and interesting old stuff going back centuries and centuries.

Yeah, I spent years and years believing that quite fervently. And my current novel, the one I've been working on for basically ever, is set in Europe, in the past. Because what came out when I first came up with the story involved writing about what I know. And I know more about Europe's past than I do about America's past, or, honestly, some aspects of our present.

I have a book in me somewhere that's trying to come to grips with America. It's going to be a hard book to write.

[slashfairy.livejournal.com]

I love you for this. This is what my Native American studies prof spent a semester (a career, a lifetime) on with us; I'm old enough to have seen some of the changes, and was lucky enough to know some people who had brought their history with them through all the trials and tribulations, and STILL. To know that there's so much lost, so much deliberately torn from this land, and to know how we (America, land of the free, home of the brave) arrogantly define other people's histories, other people's lives, countries, governments... ARGH. I have no words. but you did, there, and I think you for them.

[askerian]

That was so well-put.

(says the french girl. >.>;; )

I hope you make another post after you've read that book.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I intend to. Don't know how long it's going to be before I read it though as I want to either read it in a bookstore or get it out of the library.

[oyceter]

Yes, this. I am now stubbornly determined to read the book and report back, but yes.

(also, I hate OSC's politics but he was my favorite author when I grew up, and Pastwatch is also a guilty pleasure for me!)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was really really sad to find out about his politics, because I grew up on the Alvin Maker books, and I really love Wyrms, and Pastwatch, and I just... yeah. Stopped reading him entirely for many years, and now I cherry-pick and buy used.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Thank you for dropping some science so eloquently.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

This is a great post.

I didn't know the history was so elided. What you're saying about the names of streams really gets through. I do feel this personally as an immigrant, I know I've talked about not knowing what the birds are saying. (There are British birds whose songs have "translations", words that go to the rhythms, the blackbird says "look at me, look at me, this is my, terri'try" and the nuthatch says "a little bit of bread and NO cheese" and the birds here say something in, probably, Mohawk.) But I thought that was mostly not growing up here. The thought nobody knows is awful.

As well as the roadtrip, I think this is partly why the great American fiction is SF, is the story of people going to another planet and meeting aliens. In Ohio you were living in the ruins of an alien civilization without noticing. John Klima, who grew up around the remains of Moundbuilder civilization said that to me.

There's really no excuse for me. I have read 1491 and I raced through Thirteenth Child going "Cool! Mammoths!" and loving the magic system.

I was trying to think about how it's different from Kay leaving Ireland out in Last Light of the Sun. I think it's because there are a zillion fantasy novels with Ireland in. If there were a zillion fantasy novels of the frontier with First Nations people, it would be fine to have one with a genuinely empty continent. But because there are so few fantasies of America, and because people leave the First Nations people out of history (much more than I had realised) it's much more problematic.

("First Nations" is the standard Canadian term, by the way. I like it too, though I try to use "Native Americans" with people from the US because I understand it's what people there prefer.)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

If there were a zillion fantasy novels of the frontier with First Nations people, it would be fine to have one with a genuinely empty continent. But because there are so few fantasies of America, and because people leave the First Nations people out of history (much more than I had realised) it's much more problematic.

Ah! Thank you!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had a very different but still really pretty terrible with the way the history of First Nations people in our area was taught in my school district (in suburban Omaha, NE). There was no reenactment, thankfully. And we were taught who had lived there before the settlers, by tribe name. Over and over again. Because of curriculum changes, the people in my class were taught about First Nations people in our area and then in the rest of North and Central America for seven years straight. First through seventh grades. (The class above us learned the American Revolution and early US for seven years; the class above them, the Civil War--because each year the new curriculum was going to be the permanent curriculum, so it didn't matter what the actual kids had been taught before because we were moving forward from here!)

And for every one of those seven years, we were taught the same handful of factoids. Seriously, every single year: "every part of the buffalo" and "migrated using travoises" and that was pretty much the local First Nations people right there. Repeated for other parts of the country and parts of other countries. Iroquois: "taught white folks to put fish in the hole where they planted corn." Aztecs: irrigation and cutting hearts out. Mayans: "don't use drugs." (Seriously. Seriously. We had entire units on Mayan civilization, and not just daily but every 10 minutes or so the teacher would bring it around to, "we think they smoked a lot of weed, and look, their civilization fell, so what does this mean, kids? It means that if you smoke pot even once AMERICA WILL FALL AND IT WILL ALL BE YOUR FAULT." The fact that someone asked what happened to the Mayans and the teacher said that some of them died and some became Mexicans and then everybody looked at Dave Martinez like, okay, now we know where the drugs are coming from--in the fourth grade--was apparently some kind of sick racist bonus.)

And what was the result of this? Some people's parents in my class looked at us and said, "They're spending all of their time learning about those Indians and don't know anything about George Washington!" But nobody in the class ahead of me had parents who said, "They're spending all of their time learning about George Washington and don't know anything else!" Because apparently the problem wasn't shallow, shoddy teaching or incredibly stupid curriculum design. It was Those Indians. And since we'd spent seven years on them and didn't seem to know much, it must be that there wasn't much to know.

Aaaaagh.

[wherdragon.livejournal.com]

The fact that someone asked what happened to the Mayans and the teacher said that some of them died and some became Mexicans and then everybody looked at Dave Martinez like, okay, now we know where the drugs are coming from--in the fourth grade--was apparently some kind of sick racist bonus.

Wow. That's awe-inspiring in the sense where awe means fear and dismay.

[eredien]

I also grew up in an area where there were a lot of streams and place-names with Native American (in this case Iroquois) names; sometimes people even knew what they meant.

In 6th grade our class was able to travel to Mohawk lands and meet with the tribal elders, and talk to them for a while.

I feel of two minds about this:
- I feel lucky because I got to do that, even once, and so many other people writing on this thread have, apparently, not.
- I feel bad about this because I feel like I only did that once and should have been doing it a lot more.

I'm not sure what to do about this. I've been feeling conflicted since that trip. Is volunteering the answer? Is trying to be more aware of this and talking about it with other people the answer? Are both, or neither? And not only about the Iroquois nation--seeing beautiful sculptures and bronzes from Benin in history textbooks, and reading that the culture died but not why or how, and not really having that connect with the advent of European exploring/colonization/slavery until about a year later, and going, "well, shit, why didn't the book talk about that? It didn't just disappear into sand, but I thought that for a whole year!"

In 4th grade we learned about the Iroquois confederacy, and then learned that basically white settlers had had carte blanche to ignore the treaties that had been made with them and settled anywhere they wanted. I felt ashamed and annoyed--you've fought with someone yet you feel it's ok to lie to them and take the place where they live?

There's a family legend that one of my great-great-great-great grandmothers, way back, was a Blackfoot woman. I want to do more geneology work to reclaim her history as much as my own...supposedly we know her husband's profession (a fur trapper) and I find it annoying that no one knows anything about this woman, not her name or what she did or why she decided to marry this fur trapper, or anything. (Another thing for my spare chunks of time, I suppose).

papersky: some of the birds in North America are supposed to say things, but I suspect most of the things they are supposed to say in English were adapted from white European settlers. I have found that if you take a lot of time to listen to the birds you can start to understand what they are saying on their own terms, not any human ones, and that can be both interesting and valuable. Crows are easier, to my mind, than many of the smaller birds; if you're interested start with them.

[shahnasa.livejournal.com]

Your post really hits at some things I'm thinking about lately.

You ask: "Is trying to be more aware of this and talking about it with other people the answer?" That's where I'm at right now. It seems to me that raising awareness and understanding is beneficial to all -isms (racism, sexism, ableism, etc.)

Good luck on your genealogy thing! I hope it turns out good for you. (Sometimes I fear that a lot of those "obscure, way-back ancestor was an Indian" stories turn out to be untrue inventions of a people who wish (for whatever reason) to identify with Native Americans, but who knows?)

What you have to say about birds...I will definitely consider that.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

I agree with your post.

It's timely right now because I'm coming out of an archaeology course where "historical archaeology" equals "white people in America" and "Native American archaeology" equals "all that other stuff". Mind you, the teacher is trying like hell to be politically correct by teaching us lots of American Indian archaeology; we did a long unit on the Wahpeton Sioux that was pretty eye-opening. But the scales are loaded against everybody who was around in pre-Columbian days, just because we still can't get rid of that stupid frelling "historical means written history means whites" pre-judgment.

[assume-a-virtue.livejournal.com]

just because we still can't get rid of that stupid frelling "historical means written history means whites" pre-judgment

I don't know if it's that, exactly. I think it's more like the winners write the history -- so since the Europeans of the time thought that these people didn't matter, they didn't give a damn what happened. Like how you don't hear much about the Trail of Tears, or (where I was in school) any Native Americans / First Nations / American Indians east of the Mississippi.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

This is a really beautiful post. I especially like your points wrt naming since that's often so important in fantasy.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

You'd probably want to avoid Turtledove's A Different Flesh (http://www.amazon.com/Different-Flesh/dp/0671876228). It's arguably hard SF/alternate history with the premise that Homo erectus came across the land bridge but it the disappeared blocking Homo sapiens. So the conquistadors find a land inhabited by subhumans incapable of speech. It's a set of reasonably enjoyable what-if's on what that would mean for various turning points in history if you take it at face value but as a metaphor it's horrifying.

In fairness to Turtledove I think he probably was oblivious to the metaphorical interpretation. He hasn't followed this up with more books unlike his typical multivolume series.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Oh my that does indeed sound like a book I do not want to read. Maybe he stopped because somebody told him?

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the worldbuilding issues alone -- I mean, I could kind of see it if the point were to show what a "pristine" North American landscape would really have looked like (i.e., no earth-moving, no forest-management, no corn), but even that's an attempt to portray presence via absence, which is a really hard and confusing task. And that's not even getting into the people, that's just the landscape.

So yeah. There are ways in which I could squint and hope that it might work. But I share your lack of optimism.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I look at the premise and I go okay, this needs a truly incredible amount of extremely careful and self-conscious worldbuilding. Which... well, early reports have not indicated such.

[kate_nepveu]

Very nicely put, thanks.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Nice, thoughtful post.

I grew up not far from where you grew up, approximately your lifetime ago. What I knew about the Shawnee and the Delaware was that they were gone, leaving their names behind, and that those weren't really their names, anyway. In my town, Dublin, Ohio, there were two big rocks, one commemmorating Chief Leatherlips and the other possibly having something to do with Chief Leatherlips; there is now a really cool sculture of Chief Leatherlips made from river rock, demonstrating that Chief Leatherlips continues to be the only Native American whose name is known in Dublin (and again, that wasn't really his name).

The Wikipedia article about the Olentangy River points out that Ohio legislators tried to give native names back to the rivers as early as 1833, but the work of killing and banishing Native Americans had been so thorough that many rivers were given names that had belonged to other rivers, including the Olentangy, whose name belonged to Big Darby Creek.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I did not know that about the Olentangy. That's awful.

I grew up in Blue Jacket country, which has the added faily disadvantage of coming with a What These People Need Is A Honky factor. *sigh* Seriously, the local legends about Blue Jacket were basically: eeevil Indians capture white child and raise him, white child on account of being inherently virtuous/awesome becomes A Better War Leader Than They Could Have Had On Their Own, Indians start winning battle victories solely because they are led by this white guy, but cannot keep winning because after all he is only one white guy and he is Tragically Misled into fighting His Own True People, final defeat of Indians. Every damn year. I note upon websearching that the reenactors shut down for several years in the early '00s, have tried to reinvent themselves as politically correct and pretty clearly failed, and are now trying to be a summer Shakespeare program instead.

[shahnasa.livejournal.com]

Very enjoyable post, and I agree very much.

Incidentally, there's a mini-series on PBS right now called We Shall Remain (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/weshallremain/) that is working on the premise that, dammit, Indian history is American history, and Americans should know it! I've been watching it, and recommend it.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I am glad to hear about that; thank you for the rec.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Wow, you are totally right. That's disturbing. My privilege and I were over here going, "Wow, cool AU! So no Spanish setting themselves up as aristocrats, no enormous stacks of already-refined gold, maybe no Great Plains..." and basically thinking that it showed how important American Indians were... because I wasn't paying enough attention to the history of pretending they were never here anyway. I guess I still want to read it, but I'll do so a lot more mindfully now. Thanks.

cool AU -- or not

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i've read it, and i warn you -- IMO it's not even particularly good if one ignores how problematic removing american indians from any AU of america is. it felt culturally totally flat to me.

[melannen.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. This is the post I wish I had written in response to "Thirteenth Child".

And - the Ohio River Valley is fairly dear to my heart; half my family still lives in the Miami area. I am -- not shocked, because I know better by now, but deeply saddened that you learned so little about the people who were there before the Whites.

Actually, just this winter (to bring it back around!) I was trying to write a story based on Carolyn Stevermer's Magic books (she's one of Wrede's co-writers, if you don't know the name), and I wanted, so badly, to talk about the ways of the West that get mentioned and then ignored so obviously in the books. So I basically dragged my mom, sister, and archeologist aunt on the Grand Tour of southern Ohio archeology sites over Christmas.

If you haven't visited the sites in your area, you really, really should. It'll be depressing, because there's a point in the tour where your vision shifts and you suddenly realize, by god, the Scioto River Valley was *urbanized* before the White Man Came; there were hundred-mile-long limited access highways and huge cities and mines and factories and every White town in the valley is built on the remains of an Indian one. Ruins that the Whites decided couldn't possibly have been created by the Indians and then just plowed under. Story Mound in Chillicothe - the only remaining bit of the Indian city that once covered more square miles than the modern city, squeezed on a half-sized lot between two townhouses, surrounded by chain-link fencing, with one faded and graffitoed sign marking what it is was.

I mean, everywhere in the US the hidden history is there, but in that part of Ohio, you can't look anywhere and not see it, once you've learned to stop not seeing.

So - yeah, next time you're there, take a day and visit Circleville and Chillicothe/Mound City and Newark and Fort Ancient and SunWatch and Leo and Serpent Mound and all the other silent, unmarked town squares and vacant lots that are actually the remains of a metropolis. It's all there, right under your feet.

[kate_nepveu]

Carolyn Stevermer's Magic books

Do you mean _River Rats_? Or am I missing a book of hers? As far as I was aware, her solo works were either imaginary-world (_The Serpent's Egg_) or set in Ruritanian Europe (_A College of Magics_, _When the King Comes Home_, _A Scholar of Magics_--which does have an American character).

[seishonagon.livejournal.com]

Oh, God, this. This.

Do you mind if I link to this post?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Go right ahead.

[navrins]

Very interesting ideas, and obviously a lot of truth to it although most of it had never occurred to me. You've caused me to start thinking about whether I actually care about any of this (going off on some tangents about my own personal history, with which I will not derail your post). I may still decide that I don't, in fact, care very much about it, but if so, it'll be a conscious choice with the awareness that there's an alternative, rather than simply never having thought about it. And that's good.

It's not that the land has no history. It's that that history was deliberately removed, covered over, and obliterated.

Thanks.

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

*hearts you for incredible post*

Would friend you if we were not already friended.

Goes to link specially!

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Here from ithiliana. Nicely put, and thank you.

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

It may just be that I'm doped up on painkillers, and thinking fuzzily -- and I promise no malicious intent in asking this -- but what I'm picking up from the discussion of Thirteenth Child is that it is unacceptable to write an AU in which America was not settled by humans until the Europeans came; and that it is unacceptable because insulting to Native Americans / First Peoples in reality.

Am I misunderstanding the argument? And if not, is there any way in which a novel with this premise could be written acceptably?

[sanguinity]

It is unacceptable not just because it is insulting (which it is), but also because there is an actual origin myth for the United States that says North America was "an empty land" "just waiting to be used." Additionally, the origin myth goes, even if the genocide really did happen, it wasn't integral to who/what the country has since become. The premise of the book boosts the signal strength of that origin myth.

The reason this origin myth continues to matter, btw, is that it is used to justify a wide assortment of current injustices against contemporary American Indian communities and individuals.

So, yes, it is the interactions between the premises and reality that are disturbing here, but it goes beyond "just" being an insulting interaction.

[sanguinity]

Yes. Very much yes.

Unfortunately, the usual thing that follows the realization that this land is very old, and has old history, is widescale wtf cultural appropriation. So that's a thing to be very careful of when one is saying, "Gee, there are old stories about that hillock over there!"

But even with that caveat: yes.