sami | Mammothfail: An explanation for the hard-of-thinking

I'm going to try to express this with as much clarity as possible, and to break it down as atomically as I can, because this was either inadequate, or people aren't reading it, or any of the other posts I and a zillion other people have been making about this stuff.

Let's see what's cropping up around the net.

peake: And in fact, as I understand it, Wrede did not 'erase' the Native Americans from her book, she just imagined a world in which their forebears did not cross the land bridge from Siberia, a perfectly legitimate invention since that crossing is one of the great might-have-beens of history

Your understanding, it isn't quite right.

This was, indeed, the justification Wrede employed.

Wrede: The current plan is to have the primary difference before 1492 be that the various pre-historic attempts to colonize the Americas were unsuccessful; thus, no Mayans, Incas, Aztecs, Mississippi Valley civilization, or Native Americans of any sort.... The absence of an indiginous population in the Americas is obviously going to have a significant impact on the way things develop during the exploration and colonization period, and I'm still feeling my way through how I'm going to finagle that to get to where I want. '

Which is, basically: A North America in which the threat of Indians was
replaced by the threat of un-extinct megafauna...

You'll note that she perceives Indians as a "threat"... but okay, that could be argued as being just a slight miswording, right? So as far as we've established, she is, in fact, looking at a vaguely legitimate alt-history setup. However, this quickly becomes extremely problematic:

Wrede: The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel.

As I've discussed before, this is unsupportable as alt-history now - it's just bad history. It does not stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny. So you can't legitimise Wrede's book as an alt-history explanation. To be acceptable on that basis, it would have to have at least some effort to recognise the historical impact of this kind of change, which it doesn't. The closest Wrede gets to acknowledgement of that is this:

Wrede: ...since there won't be any Native Americans to have already done a certain amount of prepping land for human occupation, nor to be exploited later.

If you cannot see the flaw in viewing the net effect of thousands of years of inhabiting the land, modifying the environment, and cultivating crops by the indigenous population as "prepping the land for human occupation", there is a serious problem, but I'll try to explain it anyway:

1) Native Americans are, in fact, humans. Therefore they weren't "prepping the land for human occupation", they were improving the conditions of the human occupation already underway.

2) Viewing it as background preparation for the arrival of humans dehumanises the population there, and reinforces the "terra nullius" view that renders acceptable the invasion and occupation of inhabited land, with the attendant attempted genocide upon the people who were already there.

3) By viewing the Indians as a "problem" to be "eliminated" so that she gets to "play with cool megafauna", she is buying into a lot of very nasty assumptions about whether the native populations had a right to exist - or at least, to continue existing once the white people had shown up and made use of what they had done up until that point.

(Anyone else: Feel free to expand upon this in comments, I find it difficult to explain things which, to me, are intuitively obvious.)

If you still think this is a "legitimate" alt-history, please read the post I linked above, wherein I explain in depth why it is historically unsupportable.

As I have said before: I'm not saying it's impossible to write speculative fantasy on these premises - what I'm saying is that you can't do it as background. If you write a people out of existence as background, rather than as the setup for an exploration of how the world is different without their influence, then you're almost guaranteed to be doing it for reasons that are entirely offensive.

Meanwhile,

kerravongenius says:

However, the general tone remains that it is racist and evil and mean of Patricia C. Wrede to write about an America with no Native Americans but it is fine and good and reasonable to write an America with no European settlers.

Why cannot our dear raceflailers understand that if someone's ethnicity is the deciding factor in how they may be treated, that is racist?

Personally, I think it is the vilest possible insult to suggest that Native Americans cannot grasp the concept of fiction. Don't the raceflailers know that there are Native American authors WRITING fiction?

Raceflailers, accept it, you're all patronising bigots, insulting the very people you pretend to defend.

And I regret that I'm writing this sitting on my bed with my laptop on a chair next to it, because I have no desk to slam my head into. *headpillow*

No-one is suggesting that anyone - Native American or otherwise - can't tell the difference between fact and fiction. What we are saying is that the inherent assumptions behind The Thirteenth Child are extremely problematic and predicated on some very skeevy race issues, that the world-building is shoddy and implicitly dismissive of all contributions by natives of the Americas to world and local history, and that these things, in fiction, do in fact need to be challenged, because ideas are meaningful, and words matter.

Are we clear now?

Mammothfail: An explanation for the hard-of-thinking

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