In which she weighs in on Thirteenth Child

[zeborah]

A few years ago, Patricia Wrede talked a fair amount on rec.arts.sf.composition about a novel she was writing, "Thirteenth Child". It had megafauna and magic in pioneer America, and sounded very cool. Here's how she described it in one discussion:

"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)."

And not one of us said, because I think none of us realised or thought: You can't eliminate a problem by pretending that it doesn't exist. So we carried on talking about renaming Europe (and, sporadically, about tomatoes) as if Native Americans didn't exist.

Cut to 2009. RaceFail happened and I read a whole lot of links. One was about how "Little House on the Prairie" glosses over the terrible way Native Americans were treated by settlers like Laura's family. Another was about how Elizabeth Knox's "Dreamhunter", set in a recognisably New Zealand analogue, had no Mäori at all.

A couple of weeks, a month? ago "Thirteenth Child" popped into my mind again. Maybe I was looking at her website. And I thought, "Oh, wait a minute. She erased all the Native Americans. That's... not so good...."

And a few days ago Jo Walton reviewed it on Tor.com, and a bunch of other people said essentially, "She what?" Discussion has ensued there and on various LJs and other blogs [Edit 11/5: Updated link]; I really recommend reading at least the Tor.com thread if you don't understand what the problem is, because there are people there who have explained it way better than I can.

So why am I writing this if I'm not going to talk about it?

1) Because... Well, I've known Pat Wrede online for years. Dear friends-list: I'm totally not bashing on her; she's a great person. I like her tremendously, respect her a huge amount, and owe her a mountain for all her writing advice. I know she didn't mean to hurt people; it was out of ignorance and thoughtlessness. But she still wrote what she wrote.

And it wasn't only her ignorance and thoughtlessness. It was mine too: if I'd known or thought, I could have said something then when there was time to fix it. It was that of all of us on rasfc. I wonder if it was indirectly because even then rasfc wasn't really a comfortable place for people who might have been more clued up and likely to notice and speak out about the problem.

People are asking, in various LJs, "How could no-one in the writing and publishing process have noticed?" And... I don't know how to answer that. And I don't like having been a part of that not-noticing, of that failure. But I have to acknowledge that I was.

2) And because (though I haven't yet, I think, seen this being said in this context) sometimes I see people saying that people who notice this kind of thing are just being oversensitive, reading too much into it, imagining it, making it up, shifting the goalposts, etc. As if the complaints are completely arbitrary.

So I want to testify that they're not made up from whole cloth - otherwise it'd be really odd that I'd come up with the same objection to a book I was predisposed to think highly of independently to a bunch of other people who came up with the same objection. They're not arbitrary. It's even possible for white people to learn how to predict them. Now if white people could just learn how to predict them in time to not publish the mistake....

(Comments are screened due to me still not having time to create a comment policy. I'm going to be asleep, and then at work, but I'll unscreen stuff as I can.)

ETA 12/5: I'm not in future going to unscreen any comments that include a strawman. In particular, comments arguing against a position that no-one has in fact promoted. If you think that what you're arguing against isn't a strawman, then please include a cite for where you got it from. Thanks!

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I have just started reading Thirteenth Child, which I bought because it had been discussed on rasfc. I'm only about a dozen pages in, but like you, I'm beginning to feel uneasy.

If it makes you feel any better about not saying anything at the time, what she has written isn't quite what I thought she was going to write. (If you see what I mean.) In other words, I thought she was intending to write a very different world, one that wouldn't bear much relation to ours at all, bar the shapes of the continents, but so far it seems very like any other "white people settling America" story, but without the inconvenient bits and with added magic.

I also have other criticisms, one of which is that there is no description at all and to be honest, it could be set anywhere. I know Patricia has always said she's not a visual reader or writer, but I've read books of hers before and not noticed, so either I've got pickier or she used to fake visual writing better. Anyway, I'm sad to say that so far I'm disappointed on several fronts, which I feel a bit bad about because I owe Pat so much, including, in a way, my current job. :(

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Remember that describing a genocide as 'inconvenient bits' is in and of itself problematic.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to add, now having read the thread at Tor, that the stuff that Glass_icarus describes in a comment is what I thought the book would be about:

one needs to first establish the possibility of survival: what to eat, how to hunt, how to build effective shelters, what to wear. The shelter problem isn't impossible to overcome, but finding and harvesting plants that are edible and not poisonous, or figuring out the most effective way to trap/hunt game and cure animal hides- without the benefit of someone's prior experience, these things take time.

I didn't expect the book to be about an already pretty settled country with towns, rapidly growing cities and railroads. It may be that I didn't read the thread thoroughly enough at the time. I often didn't have time to engage fully with rasfc if I was busy in day-to-day life, but as I said, the book isn't what I thought it was going to be.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I don't think writing about an uninhabited continent (or set of islands) is inherently racist. A lot of irrational baggage rides along inside all of us. The definition of "race" itself gets irrational fast . . .

[zeborah]

Not per se exactly, but I think writing about an uninhabited America is very problematic because it reinforces the concept that the land was empty when the settlers arrived - and apparently many people even now think "Oh, that land's empty so we can do stuff there" when uh, no, people are living there."

Ugh, I shouldn't have started writing this without being able to quote/link to the people who pointed this thing out elsewhere, because they said it better. I'll dig up links and add them as soon as I can.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Well, it's plenty easy to take land from people who are manifestly *there*, like Ireland, by defining the residents as members of a subhuman race. Postulating that "America" never was populated, or that the indigenous People suffered a pre-European plague, ranks lower in my mind.

Is writing a depopulated Europe (say, a more-effective Black Death) settled by Turks and Mongols a racist book?

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

What makes me really really sad is that there is a simple alternative to the savages/noble ecologists dilemma, and it is writing them as people. How could it not have occurred to Pat? Like you, I have an immense respect for her, and I cringe at the thought of what this could escalate into. I wasn't around rasfc then, but probably it wouldn't have occurred to me either. So I can only cringe and wail and think that I really, really wished she hadn't written it. If I didn't have personal connection with her I'd probably feel smug at how much more clued in we have become. Like this... ahiiii.

[flourish.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this! Thank you thank you thank you. I can't say "thank you" enough for being honest and fair and responding to this all in a sane way.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

I had disappeared off of rasfc by the time this discussion occurred--issues of time and comfort level with some of the stuff that was going on, so that I only popped in occasionally.

If I had been there, though, I think I would have made the point that the perceived dichotomy Pat presented of writing Native Americans, whether period or contemporary, is arguably false. There's been some excellent handling of the Native point of view in mainstream literature, primarily regional, and there are some very good sources out there. Most of the ones I'm familiar with, though, tend to lie in my part of the US--the Pacific Northwest. Craig Lesley, for example, writes about some Nez Perce in two of his books (Winterkill and another one which escapes my thoughts at the moment). Sherman Alexie (who is Native American, I'm not sure about Craig) is a superb Native writer.

As far as the lack of awareness which ended up with this book being the way it is--part of it may also arise from editors, first readers, and publishers not being in a part of the world where such a lack would have been patently obvious and slapping one in the face. Due to the treatment Native Americans have received over the years, it's easy to live in most parts of the East and Midwest without noticing such things. It's a lot harder to do here in the West, though it does happen.

(One adaptation I'd like to do would be to do a sf/fantasy variation of Andrew Garcia's Tough Trip through Paradise. Mountain man recounting the life and death of his first wife, an abandoned survivor from Joseph's last drive toward the Canadian border during WWII. For being a product of its era, it's pretty much in your face about racism, not just between whites and Natives but also between tribes. In-who-lise was little more than a slave to the Native Pend'Oreilles who took her in, and Garcia and In-who-lise ran into a lot of trouble as a mixed couple during their quest to retrace the flight route from Montana to Idaho, to find the bones of her family. Garcia reflects the casual racism and sexism of his time but he's also telling a sad and compelling story about a woman who, even many years after her death and his remarriage to a white woman, he still deeply loves.)

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I think the perceived problems is that, more likely than not, you will be writing, as protagonists, the bad guys - the people who came and took away the land from people who were already living there. So unless you change the whole settlement history and make it more cooperative (and the Indians are still likely to get screwed over), you're in danger of ignoring an elephant in the living room. (Just read the 'Little House on the Praerie' link here (http://www.oyate.org/books-to-avoid/littlehouse.html) which makes it singularily unsuitable as a beneficial comparison.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

I think the perceived problems is that, more likely than not, you will be writing, as protagonists, the bad guys - the people who came and took away the land from people who were already living there.

Not always. For example, there's the example of the Metis and the early mountain men/fur traders. The early 19th century frontier did not necessarily look down on white/Indian intermarriage--and it was only later on, with further settlement (and, according to some, the arrival of overly prim and proper females in the second half of the 19th century) that such things were condemned. From my historical reading, I think there were several tipping points in the whole history of Native/white interactions which could have dramatically changed US history. There were always whites happy to throw over the constraints of mid-to-late 19th century white society and join Native groups--and not all of them were males. Had the Natives not suffered through outbreaks of unfamiliar diseases at the verge of white settlement, the history of North America would have been very different. Had the Natives acquired sufficient technology to match White technology, especially in the early years, the history of North America would have been very different. Had the disease transmission gone the other direction--from Native to white--things would have been very different. Had Natives and whites met each other in equal numbers, with equivalent technology--I don't think the whites would have won.

Not every white was a bad guy. The Montana Historical Society press has an excellent book out called Scottish Highlanders, Indian Peoples: Thirty Generations of a Montana Family, by James Hunter. The blurb on the back reads:

"They were Scottish Highlanders.
They became North American Indians.
They remained McDonalds."

Essentially, it's the story of a Highland Scots clansman who married into the Nimipu (Nez Perce) and how the subsequent generations chose to identify with their Indian kin rather than their white kin. Not every mountain man who took an Indian wife dumped the wife. John McLoughlin was the most prominent of those. In the early settlement days here, high-ranking Native women married white men--most famous of those being Celiast, daughter of Coboway of the Clatsops.

There were also whites who refused to war against Indians. My pioneer connections in Oregon contain one such family, who were friends with the leaders of the Modoc War--Captain Jack and Schonchin Charley. In researching these connections, I find that my male ancestors seemed to prefer going to the fort with the women rather than leading the charges to fight against the Indians. It's hard to find out more about why it was so, as those particular ancestors seem to have a stubborn insistence in remaining out of sight.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Oops. My previous message I mentioned WWII when I meant the Nez Perce War. My bad. Concert brain.

Re: In which she weighs in on Thirteenth Child

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i was still sporadically reading rasfc if no longer participating.

And not one of us said, because I think none of us realised or thought: You can't eliminate a problem by pretending that it doesn't exist. So we carried on talking about renaming Europe (and, sporadically, about tomatoes) as if Native Americans didn't exist.

i remember putting the book on my "must read" list because it sounded cool, and my list even bears the annotation that i got it from rasfc. but the book she wrote isn't the book i thought she would write. i thought it would be "settlers have to fight to build a life without native help, and OMG mammoths too". instead i got "little house on the prairie" with dangerous animals standing in for dangerous natives. erasing the native peoples is "only" the start to what's problematic about this book.

in effect it has no sensible world-building whatsoever, when i thought a large part of its attraction would be that it'd point out how incredibly much harder it would have been without native help. but even slavery was imagined away, and despite there being lip service to "aphrikans", they don't really matter. i was very disappointed all around; there really is nothing there for me but an interesting main character.

Re: In which she weighs in on Thirteenth Child

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I agree totally with what you've said about it not being the book I thought she was writing. And I don't even find the main character very interesting. :( However, I will plod on with the book, if only to be one of the few people in this debate who have actually read it!

I sort of take the point some people are making about being able to condemn the premise without having read the book, but not entirely. If Pat had written the book you and I were expecting, the premise would still sound the same, but would not really be problematical.

I thought her point was going to be that previous attempts at occupying the North American continent had failed and only in more modern times, with the aid of powerful magic and better technology were the settlers going to have any chance at all. And I expected monsters from the start and so far all I've had is boring family stuff. :(

Re: In which she weighs in on Thirteenth Child

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

the book she wrote isn't the book i thought she would write

At the time I read it I liked it a lot, and I am certain that Eff's voice alone is going to pull me into the story again, but yes, that. It turned out to be a much smaller story than I had imagined; and I think that if you are painting alternative history in very broad strokes, and changing the world in such major ways, writing a small story is... problematic in its own right.

I am - admittedly from a position of not being directly involved (my ancestors did not get written out of this book, after all) - willing to accept the central premise as a starting point, because it could realistically be done - make it harder to reach the Americas, add magic and you've got a reverse Darwinia (anyone remember that book? but without the far-fetched explanation. But the rest - the fact that European history would have been really totally utterly different without a settled America from 1400 onward, and definitely from the 1450s - and thus history as we knew it would never have happened - *that* is something I find harder to stomach. (Plus, if America was not working as an outlet for population pressure in Asia, chances are that everybody would have pressed that much more eastward, which probably means that Middle Europeans would have been pressed more to the fringe, and the makeup of the 'Avrupeans' who set off for America would have been _different_. Should have been different. I think that, for me, is the difference between changing the course of history (the ancestors of the native Americans never left Asia) and removing them from history altogether, and I find the first a lot easier to deal with than the second. (Which does not mean I don't see the problematic.)

And once the magic barrier is broken, I would expect the West Coast to be settled from Asia, and...

I don't know how much worldbuilding Pat has done, and what is happening on the planet because we see _such_ a small portion of it through a character who is not a citizen of the world and who does not see broader perspectives, but those are issues I would like to see addressed.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

(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)

No, the BEST way would be to write the Native Americans as real people, neither savages nor gentle ecologists AND give them cool megafauna. It would have been more complex, but it would also have been a lot more interesting.

But it wouldn't have been easy.

*sigh*

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

I think another challenge is to find the sources that allow you to do this. I've slowly been building up a library of Native American writings and history, especially from the Native perspective when possible. It's doable--if you have access to the source materials. Not every region in North America has that sort of background and materials available. Here in the Pacific Northwest, I've been able to visit several Native-developed museums on the reservations--plus there's been some extensive history put out by the local and regional presses from the Indian point of view, especially the wealthy Northwest Coast tribes (look up the original meanings of what a potlatch was all about, for one). Most of the literature centers around the Nimipu (Nez Perce) and their kin; though there's some about the Kwakiutl and others of the wealthy Northwest Coast tribes.

[selidor]

Um, maybe it's my browser (Firefox)...but I noticed you keep putting Mäori, not Māori.

Thank you for making this post: I am glad this book and its reviews and the concerns people have with it were mentioned by you, since I hadn't yet seen the surrounding discussion. And I have enjoyed Patricia Wrede's previous writing.

[zeborah]

It's not your browser; I've had tremendous problems getting macrons to work on my Mac, whereas the umlaut is a couple of easy keystrokes. I've been under the impression that it would be a serviceable substitute, but if it's not I'll hack away at the macron problem again.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I gather you've already seen that I did notice the problem on rasfc and didn't speak up.

& # 2 5 7 ; should be a macron-a in html, let me try: ā

[zeborah]

I'd only had time to read your first paragraph before I ran to the bus for work; but yes, I've read it now. :-(

I'm terrible at remembering codes like that, but in a word I type so often I can at least try, and other words I can copy and paste.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

People are asking, in various LJs, "How could no-one in the writing and publishing process have noticed?" And... I don't know how to answer that.

I do. It's a very, very important dimension of exactly what white privilege means and does.

Myths have power. the myth of an "empty America" is one of them, and it's shaped our subconscious in a way to allow those myths to continue to slip by, unquestioned and unchallenged and unproblematized. That's one way institutional power gets perpetuated without overt malicious intent.

It's also one reason why telling stories is never just "fun."

[zeborah]

<nods> That is what it boils down to. I keep trying to figure out specific mechanisms and details of how it worked in this particular instance, but I think that's just my brain trying to escape the inescapable conclusion. <talks sternly to brain>

Thank you for your comment.

rasfc, Wrede, mammothfail, wondering

[skywardprodigal.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it was indirectly because even then rasfc wasn't really a comfortable place for people who might have been more clued up and likely to notice and speak out about the problem.

People are asking, in various LJs, "How could no-one in the writing and publishing process have noticed?" And... I don't know how to answer that. And I don't like having been a part of that not-noticing, of that failure. But I have to acknowledge that I was.


I think you're describing hidden, aversive, structural racism.

Thanks for making this post public. It confirms some things and over all gives me some food for thought.

Re: rasfc, Wrede, mammothfail, wondering

[zeborah]

Yeah. I guess part of my brain was trying to pick at is how could *so many* of us have not noticed. But... same answer.