I don't think that eliminating a variable from an alt history story (no matter how less or more alt history it is since people are arguing about that now) says that said variable wasn't important.
But taking that variable, eliminating it, and then writing a history in which everything is pretty much unaffected except for the addition of some Cool Stuff(TM) -- that's exactly what it says. And that's exactly what she seems to have done, in total defiance of actual history.
At the risk of Godwining myself, her history is as egregiously wrong as if she'd eliminated Germany and Japan completely from an alt-history and then written a book set in the 1980s that had everything we've got, including WWII, neo-Nazis, the atomic bomb, and the present-day map of the world, except with France's borders extended to encompass the area where Germany now sits.
But this only covers the "totally wrong" part of her alt-history and not the "massively skeevy" part, because there actually was a concerted campaign throughout the last few hundred years of American history (the 19th century in particular) to "remove" inconvenient Native Americans from getting in the way of colonial "progress". There is still a very strong tendency in the history that all our schoolchildren learn to downplay their accomplishments and portray history as having started in the Americas when Columbus landed -- or, in North America, when the Pilgrims set up a town on the coast. We learn far more about the political interactions of France and England than we do about the politics of the Wampanoag and the Abenaki, even though the latter were just as important to the present-day shape of the U.S. (and no less fascinating).
So, against the backdrop of a world in which there's a centuries-old and in some ways ongoing effort to wipe out an entire branch of humanity and scrub them from history, a white writer writes a book in which history conveniently did it for us, and the world is a better place for it. (It's full of mammoths! And magic! Squee!) And the subtler implication is that the contributions of the Americas to both American settlement and to world culture just don't matter, that you can yank out all the assistance that enabled the early colonists to make it through the winter (rather than failing as the Norse settlements did), that you can remove the potato or corn or tobacco, and still have a political landscape that looks pretty similar to what we've got, except without the unpleasantness. (No slave trade, for example, even though cheap/forced labor was hugely integral to building the present-day picture of our society.)
I have not read the book; I'm relying on reviews and accounts from people who have read it to build up a picture of what its politics look like (much as one does when viewing the past).
It's not so much that you couldn't do it as a what-if; it's a combination of the issue that the concept itself is so tremendously loaded that it deserves to be handled fairly, and the fact that she's not done that -- she's just used it as a springboard for a "whee! cool!" world that isn't realistically drawn from our own.
no subject
But taking that variable, eliminating it, and then writing a history in which everything is pretty much unaffected except for the addition of some Cool Stuff(TM) -- that's exactly what it says. And that's exactly what she seems to have done, in total defiance of actual history.
At the risk of Godwining myself, her history is as egregiously wrong as if she'd eliminated Germany and Japan completely from an alt-history and then written a book set in the 1980s that had everything we've got, including WWII, neo-Nazis, the atomic bomb, and the present-day map of the world, except with France's borders extended to encompass the area where Germany now sits.
But this only covers the "totally wrong" part of her alt-history and not the "massively skeevy" part, because there actually was a concerted campaign throughout the last few hundred years of American history (the 19th century in particular) to "remove" inconvenient Native Americans from getting in the way of colonial "progress". There is still a very strong tendency in the history that all our schoolchildren learn to downplay their accomplishments and portray history as having started in the Americas when Columbus landed -- or, in North America, when the Pilgrims set up a town on the coast. We learn far more about the political interactions of France and England than we do about the politics of the Wampanoag and the Abenaki, even though the latter were just as important to the present-day shape of the U.S. (and no less fascinating).
So, against the backdrop of a world in which there's a centuries-old and in some ways ongoing effort to wipe out an entire branch of humanity and scrub them from history, a white writer writes a book in which history conveniently did it for us, and the world is a better place for it. (It's full of mammoths! And magic! Squee!) And the subtler implication is that the contributions of the Americas to both American settlement and to world culture just don't matter, that you can yank out all the assistance that enabled the early colonists to make it through the winter (rather than failing as the Norse settlements did), that you can remove the potato or corn or tobacco, and still have a political landscape that looks pretty similar to what we've got, except without the unpleasantness. (No slave trade, for example, even though cheap/forced labor was hugely integral to building the present-day picture of our society.)
I have not read the book; I'm relying on reviews and accounts from people who have read it to build up a picture of what its politics look like (much as one does when viewing the past).
It's not so much that you couldn't do it as a what-if; it's a combination of the issue that the concept itself is so tremendously loaded that it deserves to be handled fairly, and the fact that she's not done that -- she's just used it as a springboard for a "whee! cool!" world that isn't realistically drawn from our own.