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. :(

[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 . . .

[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.)

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

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

[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?

[zeborah]

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.

Why "like Ireland"? Precisely this is what happened in America; we don't need to bring any analogies into it.

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

The difference is that everybody knows that Europe and Europeans exist. They know it to the roots of their being.

But huge numbers of people don't know that Native Americans are still very much around. Kids get taught in school that they all got killed, after all:

"How come" asks one of my friends kids, "all the Indians died? Aren't we still alive?"

Also:

"Let's imagine a world without Jews" is a very different thesis than "Let's imagine a world without Englishmen" because nobody ever tried to create a world without Englishmen. (No. Hitler didn't. He wanted to conquer, not eradicate.) There's an emotional content to the first thesis that cannot be dissected out.

"Let's imagine a world without Native Americans" is exactly like that -- it is inherently a problematic thesis, because people did, in fact, in many places and at many times, try to create that world.

See also this post and Jo Walton's comment on it talking about how leaving out Native Americans is different from leaving out Ireland.

[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.

[caper-est.livejournal.com]

I found the discussion at Tor mostly... poor, especially inasfar as it came from people who proudly boasted they had not read before denouncing. Not having read Thirteenth Child myself, I shall grit my teeth and refrain from falling into their error. But since your initial post suggested a big point on which the worldbuilding would work or fail, I'll focus on that one here.

It's one of the best points that appeared in the discussion - the intractable alienness of a country which begins as real, non-fiat terra nullius, with no fellow-human who knows the land to crib from or steal from or trade with. That's hardly Little-Housing, or putting native people in as scenery or device and then shunting them aside. Surely, surely the whole device of their absence must act as one big reverse-ground highlighting: no resident cultures to befriend, fight, even see on the horizon; nothing, nothing but the endless plains and the howling winds and the monsters, and the baggage the settlers brought with them?

Does it show? Dunno. We'll see. But if Pat's world is not a real one, that is a fault irrespective of imputed social impact. Conversely, if it does carry the light of truth in it, with respect to its premise - then bad cess to any wish for its guttering for the public good.

There are numberless tales to be told. Anything against the truth of each tale is at worst a lie, at best a flaw that may break it. But the only worthwhile objection to a tale that does not tell a desired truth, is a better tale that does so. Let those who will, reply with the missing tales of Native Americans in America, or settling an empty Europe: they will stand out above less imaginative competition. I look forward to seeing them.

Pat has no hint of a duty to be amongst their authors.

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.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

But huge numbers of people don't know that Native Americans are still very much around. Kids get taught in school that they all got killed, after all.

Maybe in places other than the American West. Occasionally I will be asked by a very urban visitor if we still have to fight off Indians in rural areas.

Srsly. I am NOT joking.

[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*

[zeborah]

I found the discussion at Tor mostly... poor, especially inasfar as it came from people who proudly boasted they had not read before denouncing.

One needs to read the book to denounce the writing. If one is denouncing the premise, one needs only read the premise. The majority of people there were doing the latter; and there were plenty of people who had in fact read the book who agreed with them.

Surely, surely the whole device of their absence must act as one big reverse-ground highlighting: no resident cultures to befriend, fight, even see on the horizon; nothing, nothing but the endless plains and the howling winds and the monsters, and the baggage the settlers brought with them?

Does it show? Dunno. We'll see.

The people I've seen comment who've read the book seem more likely to say that there was in fact no 'reverse-ground highlighting': that the Native Americans' absence had no effect on the world. (This is highly problematic, not just from a plausibility point of view, but because it implies that the Native Americans in our timeline did nothing of value and so need not be valued by us; it's not a message Pat intended but that's what it says.) Other than those on the Tor.com thread who've read it, here's someone who's read it. Here's someone quoting an Amazon review by someone who's read it. In this thread below (which you wouldn't have seen before posting), piranha has read it. I can't currently find the comment by someone who'd read an ARC and not reviewed it because of the organisation-they-were-working-for's policy of mostly-positve reviews, so just trust me on that one.

Pat has no hint of a duty to be amongst their authors.

Duty can be taken in many ways, but all in all I don't think anyone has said that she has. However, Pat herself said that she wanted to avoid two problematic situations, and I don't believe it was her intent to replace them with a third problematic situation. So, whatever her duty is or is not, she failed in her intent.

[zeborah]

I read in a comment thread somewhere that there differences in ...awareness? stereotypes? that kind of thing ... between West, East, and some other area I now forget.

So yeah. Um. Ow.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Regional differences and awarenesses in the US can be stunningly weird, and you're right--stereotypes change drastically depending upon the point of origin of the person holding them.

Some of this also breaks down to urban vs rural.

As for the other area--Midwest?

[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]

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.

[(Anonymous)]

One needs to read the book to denounce the writing. If one is denouncing the premise, one needs only read the premise.

This is true. The notion that there are premises which must not by any means be explored, their higher-order implications being politically objectionable, does not fill me with enthusiasm.

The agreement from readers is more interesting. I note the agreement on this seems to come with quite marked mutual political agreement in general, though, so it brings less information than I could have hoped. I'll have to read it myself - and wait for a broader spectrum of comments to roll in.

the Native Americans' absence had no effect on the world. (This is highly problematic, not just from a plausibility point of view, but because it implies that the Native Americans in our timeline did nothing of value and so need not be valued by us

Not to me, it doesn't. The intrinsic value of lives and actions has nothing to do with whether they benefited me, or left monuments behind. The alternative implication seems to be that their value was merely instrumental, which is clearly right out of court. I'll object to the plausibility of the scenario, if null-effect is what I draw from it - not to its notion that the alt-Native Americans have got along with their own agendas in North Asia, failing to consult the future Euro-settlers' interests at all.

Actually, the whole alt-history-with-familiarity trope seems susceptible to critiques such as yours, and I may take this idea and shake it about a bit on my own turf presently.

[holyschist.livejournal.com]

Wrede is a pretty successful author; I'm pretty sure she had the access and the research budget to do the research--if she wanted to. And I don't think writing out Native Americans entirely would have been a good solution (much less the "best") even if she didn't have the resources available.

(It would have been a different story, but if she'd gone for Paleoindians-adventuring-with-mammoths, that might have been an easier research job and less likely to offend groups today. But then there wouldn't have been a white protagonist.)

[zeborah]

This is true. The notion that there are premises which must not by any means be explored, their higher-order implications being politically objectionable, does not fill me with enthusiasm.

In discussions like this, it's very easy for conversations to get sidetracked, and for what people say to be forgotten while what other people think they have said lives on.

It is particularly hurtful for this to happen to people who are pointing out that the realities of their people and culture have been forgotten while stereotypes and prejudices live on.

If, then, you want to say that there's an idea you don't like, can you please make sure that someone has actually proposed that idea, and preferably link to it so we can see its original phrasing for ourselves, rather than risk turning the conversation into a game of Telephone?

Because, while someone may have proposed this notion towards which you are unenthusiastic, I haven't actually seen it myself until you phrased it above.

[zeborah]

Are there any particular books/other resources that you would recommend, particularly which would be accessible via Amazon?

(I'm asking not so much for myself, because I'm trying to educate myself more on Mäori at the moment, but for any other readers who'd be interested; so if that's too speculative a request for you, never mind!)

[zeborah]

(continued, after a pause to have dinner and read more related links)

In specific, what people have been saying includes things like:

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.

and:

Okay, I think an author should be able to tell the story they want to tell. I really do but, sheesh, why does it always have to make me either a magical creature, an exotic savage or erase me from history altogether?

and:

That's not to say that the idea "What if America had been empty when the Europeans got there?" isn't a legitimate one to write on--it is. Apparently, you can even write some damn good fiction on it. But then, you're not writing of America any more, are you? It's not the Matter of America any longer. You're writing something else. So, for the sake of common decency, have the respect to make it be some place else, too, would you? I mean, at least that way, your readers won't have to trip over the bones of all those erased Indians.