She didn't write a history in which everything is unaffected by the loss of the Native Americans. She wrote a history in which she left out Native Americans but otherwise didn't make many changes. That's less a concerted effort to write them out and say they weren't important as just flip a single switch to support a single concept, namely megafauna.
... um, I can't figure out what your argument is here, honestly. Aren't those the same thing? If she removes one factor and leaves all else the same, doesn't that imply very heavily that the factor she removed is, at least by her, considered irrelevant? Either that, or it implies that she's such a poor or lazy writer she can't be bothered to do simple fact-checking for a book. Neither one of which is very complimentary to the writer, but honestly, when you've got a situation where a bunch of people are pointing out something in a book that they find offensive, those are basically the options -- that the writer is ignorant enough about the situation to have written something heavily offensive by accident, or that they don't care and/or believe what they wrote.
Clearly no one is saying that she's a terrible person, but, as a writer, she *has* caused offense to a segment of her audience (and Bujold's compounded the problem).
In terms of what she's done wrong as an author, my attitude is that she's really taken away something that's extremely important to Americana. There's this weird mutant thing in my head that I think of when I think of the history and fiction of America itself, and Native Americans are a big part of that. But them being gone does not, to me, equate with the giant blindspot that historical and educational materials have created
Well, not really a mutant thing at all, I think; I would have thought it was pretty much indisputable that the history of the Americas is intrinsically bound up with the people who were here first, who shaped the colonizers' settlement patterns and are still here in greatly reduced numbers.
Erasing them for a work of light fantasy is not, of course, an act on a par with physically wiping them off the map, or removing them from history books -- but IMHO, it's not entirely removed; it's part of the same continuum, just as the absence of black characters in leading roles on TV is part of a continuum that includes discriminatory hiring and lending practices, Jim Crow laws and so forth -- one small part (but definitely a part) of a narrative that says "We don't want you here" and "Mainstream=/=you". (The caveat here is that I'm very much a white girl, so I'm looking at this from the outside and feel a bit weird taking an expert tone on it. Of course, like most modern Americans I'm also a blend of several races and cultures if you go far enough back. I look white, culturally identify white, basically am white in every way that counts, and there is no way I can claim Native heritage without being hideously co-optive, which means it's totally irrelevant to these discussions -- but on a strictly personal level, my ~1/16 Choctaw self would not exist in Wrede's 'verse because my great-grandparents would have been on different continents, and it's hard to avoid thinking about that too.)
no subject
... um, I can't figure out what your argument is here, honestly. Aren't those the same thing? If she removes one factor and leaves all else the same, doesn't that imply very heavily that the factor she removed is, at least by her, considered irrelevant? Either that, or it implies that she's such a poor or lazy writer she can't be bothered to do simple fact-checking for a book. Neither one of which is very complimentary to the writer, but honestly, when you've got a situation where a bunch of people are pointing out something in a book that they find offensive, those are basically the options -- that the writer is ignorant enough about the situation to have written something heavily offensive by accident, or that they don't care and/or believe what they wrote.
Clearly no one is saying that she's a terrible person, but, as a writer, she *has* caused offense to a segment of her audience (and Bujold's compounded the problem).
In terms of what she's done wrong as an author, my attitude is that she's really taken away something that's extremely important to Americana. There's this weird mutant thing in my head that I think of when I think of the history and fiction of America itself, and Native Americans are a big part of that. But them being gone does not, to me, equate with the giant blindspot that historical and educational materials have created
Well, not really a mutant thing at all, I think; I would have thought it was pretty much indisputable that the history of the Americas is intrinsically bound up with the people who were here first, who shaped the colonizers' settlement patterns and are still here in greatly reduced numbers.
Erasing them for a work of light fantasy is not, of course, an act on a par with physically wiping them off the map, or removing them from history books -- but IMHO, it's not entirely removed; it's part of the same continuum, just as the absence of black characters in leading roles on TV is part of a continuum that includes discriminatory hiring and lending practices, Jim Crow laws and so forth -- one small part (but definitely a part) of a narrative that says "We don't want you here" and "Mainstream=/=you". (The caveat here is that I'm very much a white girl, so I'm looking at this from the outside and feel a bit weird taking an expert tone on it. Of course, like most modern Americans I'm also a blend of several races and cultures if you go far enough back. I look white, culturally identify white, basically am white in every way that counts, and there is no way I can claim Native heritage without being hideously co-optive, which means it's totally irrelevant to these discussions -- but on a strictly personal level, my ~1/16 Choctaw self would not exist in Wrede's 'verse because my great-grandparents would have been on different continents, and it's hard to avoid thinking about that too.)