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

[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.